#a really nice long article about Z that i thought others might be interested in reading

[glimmerofawesome]

Mušović: "Did I have to accept that I would shut up"

COBHAM. Zećira Mušović no longer takes the bike to Chelsea's training facility, otherwise everything goes as planned in England.

The goalkeeper belongs to one of the world's most successful club teams and national teams ... but do not think she is happy to be second.

- Are you kidding? I love to support my teammates, always, but I'm not there to be a cheerleader, says the 25-year-old in a big interview with Sportbladet.

It is not until the end of the interview that Zećira Mušović is reminded of the thoughts that were spinning in her head quite exactly a year earlier.

By then, the goalkeeper had finished his eighth - and final - season with FC Rosengård and finished with one of the world's biggest clubs, Chelsea. Now she would celebrate Christmas with the family before moving to the British Isles.

She could not have felt worse.

- For me, it was shitty. People talked so much about me living the dream in Chelsea but I had anxiety the last two weeks because it was my biggest nightmare to leave my family. Leave the security. Then I actually thought; do I even want to go? Why am I even doing this?

full screen

"Everyone came in nice cars - and I on a bicycle"

We are sitting in a café in Cobham, a small community in Surrey, south of London. With only 9,736 inhabitants, the village is little more than a train station, horse paddocks, British picturesque (but expensive) houses and greedy cars with tires that can handle muddy ground.

And so a training facility of course. In football parlance, "Cobham" refers more to Chelsea's premises and successful academy rather than a place where people actually live.

For the first time in England, it was also Mušović's home. One of her demands in connection with the signing of the contract was an apartment with cycling distance to the training, just like in Malmö.

- I have cycled twice, max. There are no bike-friendly sidewalks here, she admits and laughs.

It did not facilitate the introduction of another lockdown the day after the goalkeeper's arrival ("I did not even see London until August"), which meant continued temperature checks and other strict checks at Cobham's gates.

- Everyone got there in their nice cars and then I got on my bike. And this was after two months in the club, so it was not like they knew who I was either!

No more bikes then.

2021 has been a busy year for Mušović. In addition to the transition to English top football, she has had time to go to Japan with the national team where an Olympic silver was secured and also sat in SVT's European Championship studio during the summer as an expert ("Exactly, that happened this year too").

In addition, she is an active voice on social media and in blog form and is never afraid to say what she thinks about a journalist wondering anything. When she shrugs uninterruptedly on the shoulder of the question of whether she accepts if someone does not agree or delivers an unpleasant comment, it feels genuine.

- You have heard a few things. But it all lands in, can I stand behind this and this? If "yes" you can throw as much shit at me as it will just fly by. I stand for what I think and will not duck, says Mušović.

Sometimes, however, journalism can be counterproductive, she says. Since the women's national team players are generally outspoken, it will be easy for heavy, socially oriented subjects to dominate the headlines in connection with a qualifying match or championship.

- It is a pity for women's football in itself that before a match against Finland, the focus is on something completely different than the match against Finland. I have no problem answering questions, I will answer the questions, but is not it a little more fun to talk about football to drive interest?

Do you think there is a risk that people will start to perceive you as whining?

- We always line up, but if nine out of ten questions are about public debates instead of the international match itself, then we will perhaps be seen as the ones who always whine.

Unlike nine out of ten football players, Mušović does not claim that she does not read the newspapers (an otherwise common lie that can often be seen through). I bring up an inconvenient topic that became a thing in connection with teammate Magdalena Eriksson's column and criticism of the World Cup in Qatar and "sportwashing" in general.

Something that later made Sportbladet's columnist Simon Bank wonder why Eriksson did not criticize his own club:

Roman Abramovich is the oligarch who became a billionaire by ruining a generation of post-Soviet workers, the Putin polar bear who bought a football club to gain political immunity, he is accused of donating billions  to groups operating in Israeli settlements in East Jerusalem . And Chelsea are one of the clubs that have helped Russian oil giant Gazprom greenwash their brand. "

Mušović believes that she is not sufficiently familiar with how it went when Abramovich bought the club in 2004 to be able to comment on it.

- Which may sound awful, but I have focused on football. I read Simon Bank's chronicle, the answer to Magda. Somewhere you have to understand that this is what we take internally with the club. We are loyal and professional enough and know ourselves well enough to go out in the media and saw our own club. It is something we handle internally in that case.

Furthermore, she says that everything can be angled in different directions, which is good. Only then can useful discussions be aroused that move society forward.

- I thought Magda was damn cool who took a stand on an important issue, but there are different ways of looking at it. Say I'm getting an email if someone's pissed. Then I think "good!". I've got your attention and that's the most important thing to me. This that everyone should think the same and be friends… it will not develop anything in the long run.

Most striking with the Zećira Mušović sitting in front of me here and there is that she seems to have landed in herself. She describes with warmth how fantastic it is to be part of the "Chelsea family", something that indicates that she did the right thing that left Sweden behind.

- I was probably prepared that it would not feel perfect or familiar, that it would take some time to get into it. But it has felt good since day one. These are really amazing people, I'm just happy to talk about them.

She highlights the goalkeeping coach, Stuart Searle, as important to her development.

- I told him last day that I have started to love the goalkeeper piece in a completely different way because of him and his sense of detail. Without knowing too much what it looks like in other foreign clubs, I probably have a goalkeeping coach in absolute world class.

Although Mušović mentions that it felt good "late day one", it is something that is different now compared to this spring. Personally, I can not put my finger on exactly what it is, just that it has something to do with self-confidence.

The goalkeeper says that although she has great faith in herself, she does not thunder into a new context and is heard and seen ("I am not the one who puts myself on the table the first thing I do and will take over the room"). She gave herself a six-month grooming period at Chelsea, which was mainly about getting used to her new life, both on and off the pitch.

- The first half of the year I had to accept that I would shut up and work hard, learn as much as possible about life in England. But when summer came, I would raise a level and so it was. The first training I just felt "now we drive" and got confirmation that it looked like I had taken steps. So everything goes according to plan.

But one of my questions makes her burn out properly and is related to the fact that she is not yet the first goalkeeper in a club or national team. In Chelsea, the German Ann-Katrin Berger gets to play the majority of the matches (there have been four starts for Mušović this season) and the national team is in an uncertain situation with an aging Hedvig Lindahl and fierce competition from Häcken's Jennifer Falk.

It is hereby announced that Mušović will not be content with being a second or third choice for the rest of his career.

- Are you kidding? That's what I work for every day. I love supporting my teammates, always, but I'm not there to be a cheerleader. It's all about being able to play, that's my biggest goal.

However, she points out several times how grateful she is to be part of Sweden's perhaps most successful national team ever. That it can be compared to the special F19 group that won European Championship gold in 2012, a championship that Mušović was stopped by Rosengård from participating in. Nathalie Björn, Filippa Angeldahl and Stina Blackstenius were some of the players who then traveled down to Israel.

- It's cool to be part of when there is something unique, so first and foremost I'm very happy about it. But the honest answer is that, I do not know. I do not know when I will take over that place. I have understood that you need to be patient and that the roles do not change as fast as you want. So I'm waiting with excitement.

The goal of one day becoming one will never affect the teammates, she assures.

- It is a discussion that I have with my coaches, regardless of whether it is Chelsea or national team. Such discussions can sometimes be uncomfortable and tough to take, but as long as they are held between me and the decision maker, it is calm. We work with something where it is not always possible to be comfortable and say what feels kindest. But that is what keeps us going. I just think it's weird if you are not disappointed, then I think you are in the wrong place.

After a rainy day, the sun breaks through the cloud cover over Surrey. In addition to the weather, we also talk about the English (sometimes non-existent) waste sorting. A problem that obviously extends beyond my own neighborhood in London.

- I have been close to writing notes and hanging up in the garbage room. "Here is plastic, food waste"… Plasticized sheets, the Swede has spoken, says Zećira Mušović with a smile.

The anxiety from a year ago is just a memory. Although life in England contains ups and downs as always and the goalkeeper thinks it will be nice to spend two Christmas weeks with the family - but expect her to work harder than ever in 2022 to finally pinch that regular place.

[irkenheretic]

(How I Learned) How To Read Irken: A Guide

(Pictured: Us....) (From @zimgay​ ‘s lovely animatic!)

Okay, I’m finally making this post. 

If you’ve been following me for a while, you might have caught on that I can read Irken. When I started, I was completely confused over wether or not I was teaching myself correctly, how long it’d take, et cetera. But I’ve finally hashed it out for myself, and I thought:

Why not make a guide for anyone else who wants to learn but has no idea where to start? 

So that’s what I’m doing. Some disclaimers, though:

- This is what worked for me. It may or may not work for you, I’m not sure. I think it’s a pretty good method, though.

- Reading Irken and Writing Irken are two different skillsets. I’m gonna show you how to do both, but don’t worry if you’re better at one than the other. 

- This will probably take a while of daily (or near-daily) practice to learn. It’s not impossible, it’s not super challenging, but it’s not super easy, especially if you have memory problems like I do. (For context: I started in September. But I also have a really shitty memory so, like. It might take less time for you.)

Okay! Let’s do this!

First off, you’d probably do well downloading the Irken font for practice purposes. Messing around with it and typing in it is fun, and can help!

You’ll also need a notebook. It’s not required, but having it all in one place is super convenient. (And, if it’s tiny enough, you can carry it around whenever, and also have it on hand to whip out at cons.)

The first thing I did was write each individual letter over and over and over again. This is what’s at the start of my notebook, and writing the letters over and over helped me remember which were which. I also had to focus pretty hard on what letter this actually was, this is tedious as hell but it’s not something you can do mindlessly.

(Pictured: Normal levels of interest in a show.)

This is what my notebook looks like. Don’t worry about those simplified versions of the letters yet, but you’re gonna wanna leave room for them. Don’t worry about learning simplified/handwritten until later, it helps recognition if you really have to focus on actually drawing the letters, at first.

(And yes, I know my pen is really smudgy. And that my H’s suck.)

After this, three letter words are your friend. Pick just, common three letter words you know, and write them down a lot. I have just, the Irken for “THE” written in the margins of my class notebooks a TON. Once you feel like you can remember that word well, go onto another 3 letter word with a different set of letters. Recognition = good, so pick something you like, use all the time. 

While I was doing this, I tried to string together Irken letters I knew into like, coherent phrases. I was very bad at this at first. Acronyms are your friend here, lmao. (I don’t think I can count the number of times I’ve written ‘u r a qt pie’ in my notebooks.) It doesn’t matter what you write, just that it makes coherent sense. 

There are gonna be some uncommon letters that are gonna be hard to practice, like W and Z, off the top of my head. For Z, that was easy. I just wrote ZIM over and over and over. For W... I used UWU. You laugh now, but the absurdity of it cements that I will always recognize those two letters. 

Four letter words are also good. (Please, absolutely write “FUCK” over and over in order to remember letters. I encourage it.)

There is also the absolute cuntwaffles. Y’know how in English, b, p, d, g, all look kinda the same? Yeah, Irken has that too. 

(Pictured: Head hurting juice.)

The I and Z don’t look that similar now, but good luck without a translation guide. By this point, you should have memorized a good chunk of the Irken alphabet, and be able to recognize some others when you see them. If you’ve been writing common three- or four-letter words, it’s likely you’ve been using letters very common in the English language. Which brings us to our next stage, and the actual fun part: 

READING! 

You’re gonna want a translation guide on hand in these early stages, you will need it. The main goal of this stage is to read anything in Irken you can get your hands on- but start small! Fanart with Irken in it was a godsend to me. It’s not that long, so it’s not overwhelming. I did need to look up some letters at the beginning, and I read really slowly, but that’ll change quickly if you keep up with it! The specific fanarts I used are:

@inimoose​ ‘s The Last Irken comic, specifically chapter one: part one, and chapter two: part two have a lot of Irken. But I’d recommend reading the whole comic; it’s good!

@paketdimensioncomic​ ‘s page of lore for their comic! Spoilers, though. Again, I’d recommend reading through the whole comic, because it’s just that good. 

@xryn-art​ ‘s Linguistic Au’s first comic has a good chunk of Irken! The other comics do have some, but it’s all translated. Still good practice, though, if you wanna... read them......... ;) ;) ;) 

Yes, this segment was partially a way for me to plug my favorite fan-artists, (or at least the ones that use Irken,) sue me. It’s my guide and I make the rules here.

(I am very sorry if I bothered any of you by @’ing you.)

But just some sources isn’t enough, so I introduce you to browser fonts. And changing yours to Irken. 

It will not effect everything in your browser, and it can be toggled on and off, so don’t worry. If you really want, you can download a separate browser to change the font of, and leave your normal one be. It’d be convenient if you could, since having your browser font be Irken is inconvenient if you need to use Wikipedia, like, ever. 

Here’s a guide for that, for Chrome, Firefox, Opera, and Internet Explorer for some reason. You’ll see four options to change, I just changed all of them. Not every page is going to have Irken on it, though. For me, Wikipedia is all in Irken, and so is TV Tropes. And some Tumblr blogs (PAKet Dimension’s is one, just in case you need a reason to go back there ;)) But it might be different for you. 

Whatever it is, now you have a nice way to practice. I read Wikipedia articles on stuff I already knew about (so I wasn’t completely lost and could figure out what letters I didn’t know were from context clues,) but not a page I’ve read before in recent memory- you might just be recalling what the page said, instead of actually reading it.

And about the absolute cuntwaffle letters: yes, this will help you in recognizing which are which. Seeing the letters in context is always going to be much more helpful than just, a bunch of meaningless squiggles floating in the void.

At this point, I personally am much better at reading than writing Irken. It’s one thing to know a letter when you see it, and another to recall it and write it down from memory. Right now, I’m trying to write song lyrics and dumb little phrases in Irken, to improve my writing skills. Again, nothing too long, don’t overwhelm yourself. This sounds stupid, but Vines are good. When I don’t remember a letter, I just leave it blank and look it up after I’m done. 

Another thing that helps is having a friend to practice with, or someone to just give you Irken phrases for you to translate. 

Once you’re around this stage, you can try to learn simplified/handwritten Irken. You can also try to learn it before this, I started it around when I started reading fanart for practice, it’s up to you. This guide is a good starting point, but you don’t have to follow it exactly. This is your handwriting, do what feels natural for you!

(Also, don’t even worry about speedwrite Irken. That has no place in this holy land and frankly I am scared of it.)

And that’s... pretty much it! Most of the process is just... practicing a lot. 

If this post does well, I might make a server for people who wanna learn Irken to practice together and stuff. It all depends if anyone even wants to learn Irken. 

EDIT: Well, guess what I ended up making just the next day. Here’s the post for the server, and please read the joining rules.

Also, if you wanna learn Irken numbers, here you go. But start with letters first, worry about numbers later. These are never used, aren’t even in the Irken font, and three of them look a lot like those cuntwaffle Irken letters. 

Anyway I just really hope this guide helps someone out. If you do use it, tell me! And have fun learning Irken!! It really is just, a blast to do honestly.

[olitech]

Thoughts on the Z Fold 3

The Samsung Galaxy Z Fold 3 is an interesting device. While it is not the first foldable device made by Samsung, and not even the first foldable device on the market in general (though Samsung certainly was the first real company, I'm not really counting the horrible Royole Flexpai) for me personally, this is indeed my first foldable device.

So what is it like? For context, I am a long term Samsung user, having used the S2, S3, Note 4, S7 edge, S9+, and recently the S21 Ultra. Coming from the S21 Ultra the Z Fold 3 isn't that extreme in size, and folded it lies even better in my hand because it is less wide. Typing on the slimmer front screen is certainly something you have to get used to though.

The weight increase of 44 grams from the S21 Ultra's 227 grams to the Fold's 271 grams is noticeable. It isn't the end of the world or tipping the scale into "This is way to heavy" territory, but you will notice it when you handle them one after the other. The Z Fold 3 is, however you hold or handle it, definitely not a small or light device. Considering you have a foldable tablet in your hands, that fact isn't really surprising - it is kind of the point of this whole thing.

So If you want something small and light, you are definitely in the wrong market segment if you are looking at this phone.

The device can be unlocked with the fingerprint reader in the Power button on the right side, which I massively appreciate. I guess they can't yet fit an under display fingerprint reader into this kind of display due to size constraints and I am happy that's the case. I have an under display fingerprint reader on my S21 Ultra and my Galaxy Tab S6 and constantly have to retry with both of them to unlock these devices. These fingerprint readers have not yet gotten to the same level of performance the old ones are capable of, so I am really glad the "old" tech has made it into this device. If you want to unlock your phone with your face, that works perfectly fine, but in a world full of masks today the fingerprint reader is in my opinion the most versatile option, when done this way at least.

For my use cases, this thing is clearly overkill, I'll be really honest. Watching a Youtube video or TV Show is really nice on this device, especially if you want to watch classic shows like Star Trek The Original Series or Knight Rider, because the unfolded screens aspect ratio of 5:4 is really nice for those old 4:3 shows. 16:9 content is fine too, but there is of course quite a bit of screen real estate you are not using in those cases. But since this is more of a productivity device, 5:4 is the perfect aspect ratio in my opinion.

Typing on the unfolded screen is nice, but takes some getting used to. I have been using this phone since I have received it on Friday the 20th of August 2021, which has been 5 weeks now, and I still mistype quite a bit. I don't know why it takes me so long to get used to the split keyboard I use with Microsoft Swiftkey. When typing or swiping on the screen the crease of the folded display is very noticeable. When you watch or read something it quickly becomes absolutely not an issue, I couldn't care less. But you definitely will feel the crease with your fingers or even with the S-Pen.

Coming to the S-Pen, and the Note package available for this device. I like the S-Pen for the Fold 3. I have the smaller one of the two available since Samsung gave me the Galaxy Z Fold 3 Note package for free as a promotion for preordering the phone. The Note package contains a Super Fast Wall Charger supporting up to 25W, and this should have come with the phone itself in my opinion. I understand the environmental concerns these companies cite as the reason they don't put chargers into the box anymore, but for this price I simply cannot accept that this is the case. It just feels cheap when you open up such an expensive device and there is the phone and a cable in the box and nothing else.

I'm sorry but I have to start swearing for the next section of this article. You have been warned.

The Flip Cover that comes in the Note package is a horrible fucking mess and I don't want to meet whoever designed this thing because I would be scared of that person and the drugs they must have taken designing this thing. The cover doesn't stay closed, flops around like a flaccid dick and just feels like cheap crap. I cannot tell you how glad I am they gave that package to me as a free promotion for preordering, because if I bought this package and actually paid 89,90 Euros of my money for this cover I would have been fucking pissed.

Samsung, if anyone of you is reading this, you can do better than this. Much better. It feels like someone decided 5 minutes before production started "Hey we have this new folding phone, and we decided not to make a new Note, so why not combine the Pen with the Fold 3?" and wanked out a design on a napkin during dinner while the kids were screaming at them.

I am not a massive fan of the magnetically attached pens the Galaxy Tab Series and the iPad use, so I appreciate having a place to actually store the pen in, but the front opening part of that cover makes this thing completely useless in my eyes. And I think they kind of knew that, since you can take off the part of the cover the pen stores in - a fact I didn't see anywhere other then one single Youtube video made by the channel HighTechCheck in his video "Best And Worst Cases For Samsung Galaxy Z Fold 3", here is the link, it's a great video in general if you're looking for cases for this phone:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X2TBKlm-R2E&ab_channel=HighTechCheck

There might be other videos showing this feature of the Note Flip Cover of course, but this is the only one I came across while looking for accessory videos for this device.

Continuing on with the S-Pen, I understand that they had to make a new version because people would've poked holes into their screens with the old one - the new one is spring loaded to prevent you from pressing the pen to hard onto the screen - but what I do not like about the new S-Pen (at least the little one, I don't have the bigger one to test this with) is that you can only use it on the inner screen of the Z-Fold 3. That's right, the smaller of the S-Pens available for the Z Fold 3 does not work on the outer display of the phone when it is closed. I do not know why that is. It works perfectly fine on my S21 Ultra screen, but not on the outer screen of the Z Fold 3. I find that very bizarre. The outer screen has Gorilla Glass Victus on it, it certainly isn't a matter of screen protection. And it works on the S21 Ultra, so what the hell?

I'm a tech nerd, so I love the technology behind the foldable screen and the new form factor this results in. But I don't write 20 emails a day on my phone, or write a book on it, or anything like this. I use the big screen on the Z Fold 3 mainly for content consumption, Google Maps occasionally, web browsing, looking a photos, stuff like that. I am not a productivity monster that actually does multi tasking with a device like this. It is a great phone and the continuation of a new era in mobile technology and screen technology, and I'm glad I could be here to support that change because this means cool things might come out in the future with this technology. Could I still do everything I usually do on my S21 Ultra? Yes, yes I could, easily. Don't get me wrong, I'm glad I bought this thing, but for someone like me this is massive overkill, as it probably will be for most people. Most people who buy this thing with their own money might not agree with that I guess. They have to justify the price of 1800 Euro for this thing after all. But I prefer to be honest with myself, and with you.

This is not a sensible device. It is absolutely a fun device and a great look into the future of what will one day be possible with this display tech, not just in the smartphone world but with screens in general. Just like that rollable LG TV this is technology that can be used for so much more than smartphones - it doesn't even have to be foldable. Just being able to put a display around a corner like it is a plastic sheet and having that in a fixed position opens up cool possibilities, once the tech is even better, and most of all, cheaper.

So no, it doesn't make my S21 Ultra look like unusable crap when compared to the Z Fold 3 just because of the foldable aspect. But in my opinion that's not the point of this device. It is to further push along the technology and establish it so it becomes more common place. So it gets better, can be made better, not just because the manufacturer Samsung is continuing to work on it, but because they get feedback from users about the device. The more established and researched a technology becomes, the cheaper it can become, meaning better and new usage forms for this technology in everyday life. Take a screen like that, make it see-through and put it into my car windscreen. It doesn't need to fold for that, but it does have to be durable, and depending on the windscreen, at least bent in some form. Give me overlay graphics on my car window for navigation. Give me glasses not like Google Glass with a small area of a screen but have the glasses BE the screen with this technology in a see through version. Give me a Cyberpunk 2077 style visor. That would really be exciting for me. What this phone and it's display technology represent is what is more interesting and exciting for me than the device itself. But the device itself is still great and I do not regret buying it. If you're into tech and have the necessary funds for it, I can recommend it. Maybe you are even a person that uses this device to its full multi-task capabilities, who knows?

Speaking of which, multi tasking is a breeze with this thing, it's perfectly fine running several apps at once, not just switching between apps but displaying several at the same time since you now have the screen real estate to actually use it. Since I just launched my homepage (this will be the first entry on it, actually) who knows, maybe I will use more multitasking myself in the future when writing stuff on the go, reading and researching in the browser and typing a note on the side perhaps. I doubt it, since for real writing I really don't like to use the touchscreen, but if I have a quick idea on the go and I have time, I could definitely see this being very useful.

Battery life is not an issue either for me, last week I had a day where I watched 6 hours of Star Trek The Original Series on it at around 80% brightness and was around 65% battery when I stopped, which is pretty impressive in my eyes. I have the episodes on my phone, so I wasn't streaming them over the network in case anyone is wondering.

The software has so far given me no troubles, not all apps scale to the screen but they still usually work without issues, and many apps like Youtube for example are adapted to use the foldable aspect of the Z Fold 3 in several ways, like when you half-fold the phone, set it on a table, and have the video on the top and scroll the comments on the bottom. Or multi task by having one app on the top and other on the bottom, stuff like that works really well in most apps I am using, I can't really recall any app right now that had huge issues with the aspect ratio or the foldable nature of this device. Good job Samsung!

The back cameras are on par with the S21 Ultra, so they're in my opinion top, but I'm no expert. What even I notice is the inner camera under the display. No longer is there a hole punch style camera, this one is actually under the display, which drastically decreases the performance of that inner camera. It's usage for video calls I guess, but for a device in that price range I think I would've been fine with a hole-punch style just to get the better image quality. I've made a comparison video on Youtube, comparing the front camera of the S21 Ultra and the Z Fold 3:

https://youtu.be/h5uQ1IQeIvE

The Z Fold 3 is a tech nerds dream come true, and really does whatever you need it to do. Whether you actually need all of that and if it is worth the money is for you to decide. If you already have a tablet you use for media consumption, and if you aren't a huge productivity fan or need one device that does it all and can carry nothing else, then I'd say no, you don't need it. But you might still want it just the same, like me.

Sunday, October 3rd, 2021.

Oliver Weber

[gargaj]

A breakdown of the Revision 2020 Threeway Battle shader

Those of you who have been following this year's edition of Revision probably remember the unexpected twist in Sunday's timeline, where I was pitted in a coding "battle" against two of the best shader-coders in the world to fend for myself. Admittedly the buzz it caused caught me by surprise, but not as much as the feedback on the final shader I produced, so I hope to shed some light on how the shader works, in a way that's hopefully understandable to beginners and at least entertaining to experts, as well as providing some glimpses into my thought process along the way.

Recorded video of the event

But before we dive into the math and code, however, I think it's important to get some context by recounting the story of how we got here.

A brief history of demoscene live-coding

Visual coding has been massively opened up when graphics APIs began to introduce programmable fragment rendering, perhaps best known to most people as "pixel shaders"; this allowed programmers to run entire programmable functions on each pixel of a triangle, and none was more adamant to do that than a fellow named Iñigo Quilez (IQ), an understated genius who early on recognized the opportunity in covering the entire screen with a single polygon, and just doing the heavy lifting of creating geometry in the shader itself. His vision eventually spiraled into not only the modern 4k scene, but also the website ShaderToy, which almost every graphics programmer uses to test prototypes or just play around with algorithms. IQ, an old friend of mine since the mid-00s, eventually moved to the US, worked at Pixar and Oculus, and became something of a world-revered guru of computer graphics, but that (and life) has unfortunately caused him to shift away from the scene.

His vision of single-shader-single-quad-single-pass shader coding, in the meantime, created a very spectacular kind of live coding competition in the scene where two coders get only 25 minutes and the attention of an entire party hall, and they have to improvise their way out of the duel - this has been wildly successful at parties for the sheer showmanship and spectacle akin to rap battles, and none emerged from this little sport more remarkably than Flopine, a bubbly French girl who routinely shuffled up on stage wearing round spectacles and cat ears (actually they might be pony ears on second thought), and mopped the floor up with the competition. Her and a handful of other live-coders regularly stream on Twitch as practice, and have honed their live-coding craft for a few years at this point, garnering a considerable following.

Just a sample of insanity these people can do.

My contribution to this little sub-scene was coming up with a fancy name for it ("Shader Showdown"), as well as providing a little tool I called Bonzomatic (named after Bonzaj / Plastic, a mutual friend of IQ and myself, and the first person to create a live coding environment for demoparties) that I still maintain, but even though I feel a degree of involvement through the architectural side, I myself haven't been interested in participating: I know I can do okay under time pressure, but I don't really enjoy it, and while there's a certain overlap in what they do and what I do, I was always more interested in things like visual detail and representative geometry aided by editing and direction rather than looping abstract, fractal-like things. It just wasn't my thing.

Mistakes were made

But if I'm not attracted to this type of competition, how did I end up in the crossfire anyway? What I can't say is that it wasn't, to a considerable degree, my fault: as Revision 2020 was entirely online, most of the scene took it to themselves to sit in the demoscene Discord to get an experience closest to on-site socializing, given the somber circumstances of physical distancing. This also allowed a number of people who hasn't been around for a while to pop in to chat - like IQ, who, given his past, was mostly interested in the showdowns (during which Flopine crushed the competition) and the 4k compo.

As I haven't seen him around for a while, and as my mind is always looking for an angle, I somehow put two and two together, and asked him if he would consider taking part in a showdown at some point; he replied that he was up for it - this was around Saturday 10PM. I quickly pinged the rest of the showdown participants and organizers, as I spotted that Bullet was doing a DJ set the next day (which would've been in a relatively convenient timezone for IQ in California as well), and assumed that he didn't really have visuals for it - as there was already a "coding jam" over Ronny's set the day before, I figured there's a chance for squeezing an "extra round" of coding. Flopine was, of course, beyond excited by just the prospect of going against IQ, and by midnight we essentially got everything planned out (Bullet's consent notwithstanding, as he was completely out of the loop on this), and I was excited to watch...

...that is, until Havoc, the head honcho for the showdowns, off-handedly asked me about an at that point entirely hypothetical scenario: what would happen if IQ would, for some reason, challenge me instead of Flopine? Now, as said, I wasn't really into this, but being one to not let a good plan go to waste (especially if it was mine), I told Havoc I'd take one for the team and do it, although it probably wouldn't be very fun to watch. I then proceeded to quickly brief IQ in private and run him through the technicalities of the setup, the tool, the traditions and so on, and all is swell...

...that is, until IQ (this is at around 2AM) offhandedly mentions that "Havoc suggested we do a three-way with me, Flopine... and you." I quickly try to backpedal, but IQ seems to be into the idea, and worst of all, I've already essentially agreed to it, and to me, the only thing worse than being whipped in front of a few thousand people would be going back on your word. The only way out was through.

Weeks of coding can spare you hours of thinking

So now that I've got myself into this jar of pickles, I needed some ideas, and quick. (I didn't sleep much that night.) First off, I didn't want to do anything obviously 3D - both IQ and Flopine are masters of this, and I find it exhausting and frustrating, and it would've failed on every level possible. Fractals I'm awful at and while they do provide a decent amount of visual detail, they need a lot of practice and routine to get right. I also didn't want something very basic 2D, like a byte-beat, because those have a very limited degree of variation available, and the end result always looks a bit crude.

Luckily a few months ago an article I saw do rounds was a write-up by Sasha Martinsen on how to do "FUI"-s, or Fictional User Interfaces; overly complicated and abstract user interfaces that are prominent in sci-fi, with Gmunk being the Michael Jordan of the genre.

Image courtesy of Sasha Martinsen.

Sasha's idea is simple: make a few basic decent looking elements, and then just pile them on top of each other until it looks nice, maybe choose some careful colors, move them around a bit, place them around tastefully in 3D, et voilà, you're hacking the Gibson. It's something I attempted before, if somewhat unsuccessfully, in "Reboot", but I came back to it a few more times in my little private motion graphics experiments with much better results, and my prediction was that it would be doable in the given timeframe - or at least I hoped that my hazy 3AM brain was on the right track.

A bit of math

How to make this whole thing work? First, let's think about our rendering: We have a single rectangle and a single-pass shader that runs on it: this means no meshes, no geometry, no custom textures, no postprocessing, no particle systems and no fonts, which isn't a good place to start from. However, looking at some of Sasha's 3D GIFs, some of them look like they're variations of the same render put on planes one after the other - and as long as we can do one, we can do multiple of that.

Rough sketch of what we want to do; the planes would obviously be infinite in size but this representation is good enough for now.

Can we render multiple planes via a single shader? Sure, but we want them to look nice, and that requires a bit of thinking: The most common technique to render a "2D" shader and get a "3D" look is raymarching, specifically with signed distance fields - starting on a ray, and continually testing distances until a hit is found. This is a good method for "solid-ish" looking objects and scenes, but the idea for us is to have many infinite planes that also have some sort of alpha channel, so we'd have a big problem with 1) inaccuracy, as we'd never find a hit, just something "reasonably close", and even that would take us a few dozen steps, which is costly even for a single plane and 2) the handling of an alpha map can be really annoying, since we'd only find out our alpha value after our initial march, after which if our alpha is transparent we'd need to march again.

But wait - it's just infinite planes and a ray, right? So why don't we just assume that our ray is always hitting the plane (which it is, since we're looking at it), and just calculate an intersection the analytical way?

Note: I would normally refer to this method as "raytracing", but after some consultation with people smarter than I am, we concluded that the terms are used somewhat ambiguously, so let's just stick to "analytical ray solving" or something equally pedantic.

We know the mathematical equation for a ray is position = origin + direction * t (where t is a scalar that represents the distance/progress from the ray origin), and we know that the formula for a plane is A * x + B * y + C * z + D = 0, where (A, B, C) is the normal vector of the plane, and D is the distance from the origin. First, since the intersection will be the point in space that satisfies both equations, we substitute the ray (the above o + d * t for each axis) into the plane:

A * (ox + dx * t) + B * (oy + dy * t) + C * (oz + dz * t) + D = 0

To find out where this point is in space, we need to solve this for t, but it's currently mighty complicated. Luckily, since we assume that our planes are parallel to the X-Y plane, we know our (A, B, C) normal is (0, 0, 1), so we can simplify it down to:

oz + dz * t + D = 0

Which we can easily solve to t:

t = (D - oz) / dz

That's right: analytically finding a ray hit of a plane is literally a single subtraction and a division! Our frame rate (on this part) should be safe, and we're always guaranteed a hit as long as we're not looking completely perpendicular to the planes; we should have everything to start setting up our code.

Full disclosure: Given my (and in a way IQ's) lack of "live coding" experience, we agreed that there would be no voting for the round, and it'd be for glory only, but also that I'd be allowed to use a small cheat sheet of math like the equations for 2D rotation or e.g. the above final equation since I don't do this often enough to remember these things by heart, and I only had a few hours notice before the whole thing.

Setting up the rendering

Time to start coding then. First, let's calculate our texture coordinates in the 0..1 domain using the screen coordinates and the known backbuffer resolution (which is provided to us in Bonzomatic):

vec2 uv = vec2(gl_FragCoord.x / v2Resolution.x, gl_FragCoord.y / v2Resolution.y);

Then, let's create a ray from that:

vec3 rayDir = vec3( uv * 2 - 1, -1.0 ); rayDir.x *= v2Resolution.x / v2Resolution.y; // adjust for aspect ratio vec3 rayOrigin = vec3( 0, 0, 0 );

This creates a 3D vector for our direction that is -1,-1,-1 in the top left corner and 1,1,-1 in the bottom right (i.e. we're looking so that Z is decreasing into the screen), then we adjust the X coordinate since our screen isn't square, but our coordinates currently are - no need to even bother with normalizing, it'll be fine. Our origin is currently just sitting in the center.

Then, let's define (loosely) our plane, which is parallel to the XY plane:

float planeDist = 1.0f; // distance between each plane float planeZ = -5.0f; // Z position of the first plane

And solve our equation to t, as math'd out above:

float t = (planeZ - rayOrigin.z) / rayDir.z;

Then, calculate WHERE the hit is by taking that t by inserting it back to the original ray equation using our current direction and origin:

vec3 hitPos = rayOrigin + t * rayDir;

And now we have our intersection; since we already know the Z value, we can texture our plane by using the X and Y components to get a color value:

vec4 color = fui( hitPos.xy ); // XY plane our_color = color;

Of course we're gonna need the actual FUI function, which will be our procedural animated FUI texture, but let's just put something dummy there now, like a simple circle:

vec4 fui ( vec2 uv ) { return length(uv - 0.5) < 0.5 ? vec4(1) : vec(0); }

And here we go:

Very good, we have a single circle and if we animate the camera we can indeed tell that it is on a plane.

So first, let's tile it by using a modulo function; the modulo (or modulus) function simply wraps a number around another number (kinda like the remainder after a division, but for floating point numbers) and thus becomes extremely useful for tiling or repeating things:

We'll be using the modulo function rather extensively in this little exercise, so strap in. (Illustration via the Desmos calculator.)

vec4 layer = fui( mod( hitPos.xy, 1.0 ) );

This will wrap the texture coordinates of -inf..inf between 0..1:

We also need multiple planes, but how do we combine them? We could just blend them additively, but with the amount of content we have, we'd just burn them in to white and it'd look like a mess (and not the good kind of mess). We could instead just use normal "crossfade" / "lerp" blending based on the alpha value; the only trick here is to make sure we're rendering them from back to front since the front renders will blend over the back renders:

int steps = 10; float planeDist = 1.0f; for (int i=steps; i>=0; i--) { float planeZ = -1.0f * i * planeDist; float t = (planeZ - rayOrigin.z) / rayDir.z; if (t > 0.0f) // check if "t" is in front of us { vec3 hitPos = rayOrigin + t * rayDir; vec4 layer = fui( hitPos.xy, 2.0 ); // blend layers based on alpha output colour = mix( colour, layer, layer.a ); } }

And here we go:

We decreased the circles a bit in size to see the effect more.

Not bad! First thing we can do is just fade off the back layers, as if they were in a fog:

layer *= (steps - i) / float(steps);

We have a problem though: we should probably increase the sci-fi effect by moving the camera continually forward, but if we do, we're gonna run into a problem: Currently, since our planeZ is fixed to the 0.0 origin, they won't move with the camera. We could just add our camera Z to them, but then they would be fixed with the camera and wouldn't appear moving. What we instead want is to just render them AS IF they would be the closest 10 planes in front of the camera; the way we could do that is that if e.g. our planes' distance from each other is 5, then round the camera Z down to the nearest multiple of 5 (e.g. if the Z is at 13, we round down to 10), and start drawing from there; rounding up would be more accurate, but rounding down is easier, since we can just subtract the division remainder from Z like so:

float planeZ = (rayOrigin.z - mod(rayOrigin.z, planeDist)) - i * planeDist;

And now we have movement! Our basic rendering path is done.

Our little fictional UI

So now that we have the basic pipeline in place, let's see which elements can we adapt from Sasha's design pieces.

The first one I decided to go with wasn't strictly speaking in the set, but it was something that I saw used as design elements over the last two decades, and that's a thick hatch pattern element; I think it's often used because it has a nice industrial feel with it. Doing it in 2D is easy: We just add X and Y together, which will result in a diagonal gradient, and then we just turn that into an alternating pattern using, again, the modulo. All we need to do is limit it between two strips, and we have a perfectly functional "Police Line Do Not Cross" simulation.

return mod( uv.x + uv.y, 1 ) < 0.5 ? vec4(1) : vec4(0);

So let's stop here for a few moments; this isn't bad, but we're gonna need a few things. First, the repetition doesn't give us the nice symmetric look that Sasha recommends us to do, and secondly, we want them to look alive, to animate a bit.

Solving symmetry can be done just by modifying our repetition code a bit: instead of a straight up modulo with 1.0 that gives us a 0..1 range, let's use 2.0 to get a 0..2 range, then subtract 1.0 to get a -1..1 range, and then take the absolute value.

vec4 layer = fui( abs( mod( hitPos.xy, 2.0 ) - 1 ) );

This will give us a triangle-wave-like function, that goes from 0 to 1, then back to 0, then back to 1; in terms of texture coordinates, it will go back and forth between mirroring the texture in both directions, which, let's face it, looks Totally Sweet.

For animation, first I needed some sort of random value, but one that stayed deterministic based on a seed - in other words, I needed a function that took in a value, and returned a mangled version of it, but in a way that if I sent that value in twice, it would return the same mangled value twice. The most common way of doing it is taking the incoming "seed" value, and then driving it into some sort of function with a very large value that causes the function to alias, and then just returning the fraction portion of the number:

float rand(float x) { return fract(sin(x) * 430147.8193); }

Does it make any sense? No. Is it secure? No. Will it serve our purpose perfectly? Oh yes.

So how do we animate our layers? The obvious choice is animating both the hatch "gradient" value to make it crawl, and the start and end of our hatch pattern which causes the hatched strip to move up and down: simply take a random - seeded by our time value - of somewhere sensible (like between 0.2 and 0.8 so that it doesn't touch the edges) and add another random to it, seasoned to taste - we can even take a binary random to pick between horizontal and vertical strips:

The problems here are, of course, that currently they're moving 1) way too fast and 2) in unison. The fast motion obviously happens because the time value changes every frame, so it seeds our random differently every frame - this is easy to solve by just rounding our time value down to the nearest integer: this will result in some lovely jittery "digital" motion. The unison is also easy to solve: simply take the number of the layer, and add it to our time, thus shifting the time value for each layer; I also chose to multiply the layer ID with a random-ish number so that the layers actually animate independently, and the stutter doesn't happen in unison either:

vec4 fui( vec2 uv, float t ) { t = int(t); float start = rand(t) * 0.8 + 0.1; float end = start + 0.1; [...] } vec4 layer = fui( abs(mod(hitPos.xy, 2.0)-1), fGlobalTime + i * 4.7 );

Lovely!

Note: In hindsight using the Z coordinate of the plane would've given a more consistent result, but the way it animates, it doesn't really matter.

So let's think of more elements: the best looking one that seems to get the best mileage out in Sasha's blog is what I can best describe as the "slant" or "hockey stick" - a simple line, with a 45-degree turn in it. What I love about it is that the symmetry allows it to create little tunnels, gates, corridors, which will work great for our motion.

Creating it is easy: We just take a thin horizontal rectangle, and attach another rectangle to the end, but shift the coordinate of the second rectangle vertically, so that it gives us the 45-degree angle:

float p1 = 0.2; float p2 = 0.5; float p3 = 0.7; float y = 0.5; float thicc = 0.0025; if (p1 < uv.x && uv.x < p2 && y - thicc < uv.y && uv.y < y + thicc ) { return vec4(1); } if (p2 < uv.x && uv.x < p3 && y - thicc < uv.y - (uv.x - p2) && uv.y - (uv.x - p2) < y + thicc ) { return vec4(1); }

Note: In the final code, I had a rect() call which I originally intended to use as baking glow around my rectangle using a little routine I prototyped out earlier that morning, but I was ultimately too stressed to properly pull that off. Also, it's amazing how juvenile your variable names turn when people are watching.

Looks nice, but since this is such a thin sparse element, let's just... add more of it!

So what more can we add? Well, no sci-fi FUI is complete without random text and numbers, but we don't really have a font at hand. Or do we? For years, Bonzomatic has been "shipping" with this really gross checkerboard texture ostensibly for UV map testing:

What if we just desaturate and invert it?

We can then "slice" it up and render little sprites all over our texture: we already know how to draw a rectangle, so all we need is just 1) calculate which sprite we want to show 2) calculate the texture coordinate WITHIN that sprite and 3) sample the texture:

float sx = 0.3; float sy = 0.3; float size = 0.1; if (sx < uv.x && uv.x < sx + size && sy < uv.y &&uv.y < sy + size) { float spx = 2.0 / 8.0; // we have 8 tiles in the texture float spy = 3.0 / 8.0; vec2 spriteUV = (uv - vec2(sx,sy)) / size; vec4 sam = texture( texChecker, vec2(spx,spy) + spriteUV / 8.0 ); return dot( sam.rgb, vec3(0.33) ); }

Note: In the final code, I was only using the red component instead of desaturation because I forgot the texture doesn't always have red content - I stared at it for waaaay too long during the round trying to figure out why some sprites weren't working.

And again, let's just have more of it:

Getting there!

At this point the last thing I added was just circles and dots, because I was running out of ideas; but I also felt my visual content amount was getting to where I wanted them to be; it was also time to make it look a bit prettier.

Post-production / compositing

So we have our layers, they move, they might even have colors, but I'm still not happy with the visual result, since they are too single-colored, there's not enough tone in the picture.

The first thing I try nowadays when I'm on a black background is to just add either a single color, or a gradient:

vec4 colour = renderPlanes(uv); vec4 gradient = mix( vec4(0,0,0.2,1), vec4(0,0,0,1), uv.y); vec4 finalRender = mix( gradient, vec4(colour.xyz,1), colour.a);

This added a good chunk of depth considerably to the image, but I was still not happy with the too much separation between colors.

A very common method used in compositing in digital graphics is to just add bloom / glow; when used right, this helps us add us more luminance content to areas that would otherwise be solid color, and it helps the colors to blend a bit by providing some middle ground; unfortunately if we only have a single pass, the only way to get blur (and by extension, bloom) is repeatedly rendering the picture, and that'd tank our frame rate quickly.

Instead, I went back to one of the classics: the Variform "pixelize" overlay:

This is almost the same as a bloom effect, except instead of blurring the image, all you do is turn it into a lower resolution nearest point sampled version of itself, and blend that over the original image - since this doesn't need more than one sample per pixel (as we can reproduce pixelation by just messing with the texture coordinates), we can get away by rendering the scene only twice:

vec4 colour = renderPlanes(uv); colour += renderPlanes(uv - mod( uv, 0.1 ) ) * 0.4;

Much better tonal content!

So what else can we do? Well, most of the colors I chose are in the blue/orange/red range, and we don't get a lot of the green content; one of the things that I learned that it can look quite pretty if one takes a two-tone picture, and uses color-grading to push the midrange of a third tone - that way, the dominant colors will stay in the highlights, and the third tone will cover the mid-tones. (Naturally you have to be careful with this.)

"Boosting" a color in the mids is easy: lucky for us, if we consider the 0..1 range, exponential functions suit our purpose perfectly, because they start at 0, end at 1, but we can change how they get here:

So let's just push the green channel a tiny bit:

finalRender.g = pow(finalRender.g, 0.7);

Now all we need is to roll our camera for maximum cyberspace effect and we're done!

Best laid plans of OBS

As you can see from the code I posted the above, I wrote the final shader in GLSL; those who know me know that I'm a lot more comfortable with DirectX / HLSL, and may wonder why I switched, but of course there's another story here:

Given the remote nature of the event, all of the shader coding competition was performed online as well: since transmitting video from the coder's computer to a mixer, and then to another mixer, and then to a streaming provider, and then to the end user would've probably turned the image to mush, Alkama and Nusan came up with the idea of skipping a step and rigging up a version of Bonzo that ran on the coder's computer, but instead of streaming video, it sent the shader down to another instance of Bonzo, running on Diffty's computer, who then captured that instance and streamed it to the main Revision streaming hub. This, of course, meant that in a three-way, Diffty had to run three separate instances of Bonzo - but it worked fine with GLSL earlier, so why worry?

What we didn't necessarily realize at the time, is that the DirectX 11 shader compiler takes no hostages, and as soon as the shader reached un-unrollable level of complexity, it thoroughly locked down Diffty's machine, to the point that even the video of the DJ set he was playing started to drop out. I, on the other hand, didn't notice any of this, since my single local instance was doing fine, so I spent the first 15 minutes casually nuking Diffty's PC to shreds remotely, until I noticed Diffty and Havoc pleading on Discord to switch to GLSL because I'm setting things on fire unknowingly.

This is fine.

I was reluctant to do so, simply because of the muscle memory, but I was also aware that I should keep the show going if I can because if I bow out without a result, that would be a colossal embarrassment to everyone involved, and I only can take one of those once every week, and I was already above my quota - so, I quickly closed the DX11 version of Bonzo, loaded the shader up in a text editor, replaced "floatX" with "vecX" (fun drinking game: take a shot every time I messed it up during the live event), commented the whole thing out, loaded it into a GLSL bonzo, and quickly fixed all the other syntax differences (of which there were luckily not many, stuff like "mix" instead of "lerp", constructors, etc.), and within a few minutes I was back up and running.

This, weirdly, helped my morale a bit, because it was the kind of clutch move that for some reason appealed to me, and made me quite happy - although at that point I locked in so bad that not only did I pay absolutely not attention to the stream to see what the other two are doing, but that the drinks and snacks I prepared for the hour of battling went completely untouched.

In the end, when the hour clocked off, the shader itself turned out more or less how I wanted it, it worked really well with Bullet's techno-/psy-/hardtrance mix (not necessarily my jam, as everyone knows I'm more a broken beat guy, but pounding monotony can go well with coding focus), and I came away satisfied, although the perhaps saddest point of the adventure was yet to come: the lack of cathartic real-life ending that was taken from us due to the physical distance, when after all the excitement, all the cheers and hugs were merely lines of text on a screen - but you gotta deal with what you gotta deal with.

A small sampling of the Twitch reaction.

Conclusion

In the end, what was my takeaway from the experience?

First off, scoping is everything: Always aim to get an idea where you can maximize the outcome of the time invested with the highest amount of confidence of pulling it off. In this case, even though I was on short notice and in an environment I was unfamiliar with, I relied on something I knew, something I've done before, but no one else really has.

Secondly, broaden your influence: You never know when you can take something that seems initially unrelated, and bend it into something that you're doing with good results.

Thirdly, and perhaps most importantly, step out of your comfort zone every so often; you'll never know what you'll find.

(And don't agree to everything willy-nilly, you absolute moron.)

[danicamaebaliuag]

Annyeonghaseyo!

Where do I see myself 10 years from now? Is my learning in SPUP

vital to where I’m leading to?

The way I see myself ten years ahead of now is not something I often think about. To tell you the truth, it scares me a little to know that in one short decade I will be twenty Six years old, and that my years of youth are coming to an end. One thing I’m certain of, is that if God gives me the opportunity to get to that age, I will make the most of my years and put all of my effort to become a successful, happy woman.

A vision I’ve always had of myself years ahead of now  is a successful police woman and a wealthy business woman that owns an famous restaurant , and is a world-wide well known my restaurant . I will have graduated from ST.PAUL UNIVERSITY PHILIPPINES . My institution will give an education to people.

I’m sure that with perseverance and the help of the people I love, as well as God’s, I will have the chance to travel around the world and meet many beautiful places.

By the time I turn 26, I will have visited dozens of countries around the world, and known places of incredible beauty. Another one of my wishes is to be able to build a very beautiful house with a music studio, a big garden, a couple of dogs and cats , a few nice cars, and maybe even a swimming pool and a hot tub.

Other dreams I have include a house in SEOUL NORTH KOREA , as well as an apartment in TOKYO JAPAN , a room share in Steamboat Colorado, and a beautiful house in Puerto PRICESSA PALAWAN, I’m not very certain I will be living in my native country ten years ahead of now, but I am certain that I will visit it often to see my family and friends as frequently as my job allows me to.

Is my learning in SPUPvital to where I’m leading to?

- YES BECAUSE I CAN'T REACH EVERYTHING I HAVE WITHOUT THE ST.PAUL UNIVERSITY OF PHILIPPINES TEACHERS AND SISTERS AND FATHER

 H b   n m n m n o c x z s d f g k l o p h j n b g u I p f h u b d s w q s as dc ds as dc f k o l m n m   k I n b n m k o b j k   d f s a w e f c v b f g f d w f v b g c s d f b v s f v b cv b f c v d   v c s x v   m k m k m k m k m k m k g d m s a d c z x z c v   s c s w e f v b v c x

   Was HUMMS the best choice after all?

Yes beacause in hums It trains you to think and consider ALL sides of a situation.

It’s common in a HUMSS classroom to be knee deep in debates, especially if the topic interests everyone. Whether you are involved in the action or are standing in the sidelines, you’ll get to hear all kinds of information and opinions. You’ll learn how to weigh each one, sort them out, and decide for yourself what would be the best course of action. Being exposed to this, one good thing you will understand is the value of listening. I’ve had Disciplines and Ideas in the Applied Social Sciences subjects in HUMSS and I found it really useful especially that one of the topics in it is counseling.

The avid reader and the aspiring know-it-all are both at an advantage here.

If you’re the kind of person who finds yourself randomly hitting some article you found in the internet or someone who just believes that #KnowledgeIsPower, congrats! You’ll fit right in. A HUMSS classroom is a hub for information sharing and includes a lot of conversations and exchange of ideas. You’ll most likely have the upper hand during class discussions.

You will realize that you have power

One thing that the HUMSS subjects instill in you is that you’re powerful as a human being. You’ll learn about the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which is highly important in our world. You’ll learn about your power as a citizen in Philippine Politics and Governance. You’ll learn the power of your mind in Philosophy. Trust me, learning under the HUMSS strand is an eye-opener.

Confidence will slowly but surely become your second skin.

Even if you’re naturally shy, gradually, you’ll learn how to speak up for yourself. You’ll find that you are comfortable in saying what’s on your mind because that’s what being in the HUMSS strand encourages you to do: to share your thoughts to the world.

Individuality and diversity are welcome.

You’ll learn how to appreciate the differences between people, especially in the subject Introduction to World Religions and Belief Systems and Trends, Networks, as well as Critical Thinking in the 21st Century Culture. Everyone is inherently unique in their own ways. Understanding and embracing it is one step closer towards achieving harmonic coexistence with one another.

    What course will you take in college and why? CRIMINOLOGY

I am Danica Mae D. Baliuag I Choose this course, because of the stable job after you finished it or this is in demand most especially now some of officials goes retiring because of they are older, goes to after life and some of company , organization needed a new one deserving to be an officer who can be the one we can trust and willing to serve and protect in the community..

Because this course fit your personality and ability, so when you asked someone about the course you take and you probably answer one of those question from the knowlegde u have learned from studying on this fields.It is happy to study, especially when the course you have is the one you like, and I am one of those students. “i choose it because i like it ”. All I want is to be a successful professional policewoman someday. They all say that there are many course aside from my course. And BsCrim is not the only option. Just like ”HRM ”, but all I want is CRIMINOLOGY NOT THE OTHER COURSE

What topic would you like to learn more in this subject?

Basic Computer Understanding and Skills Knowing the basics about computer really means a lot, today technology like computer is widely used and being uneducated about computer means being left behind, not only by the trend but also by the benefits we can get by using the computer.

  What the corona virus has taught you about life?

I’ve learnt to live with the bare minimum, comfortable with what I already have. Lockdown has taught me what is truly valuable in life and what’s a facade. It’s given me an opportunity to slow down in this fast changing world and to appreciate what truly matters: friends, family and the connections I’ve made over the course of my life

I’m rediscovering myself. And with every passing day, I’m rekindling with my passions, my likes, my interests and, mostly importantly, my desire to live, rather than merely survive.

Understanding what we really want

It’s funny how it takes the entire world coming to a stop for us to realise that maybe, just maybe, we’ve been doing things the wrong way after all. Of course it’s important to put bread on the table, but it’s equally important to keep your heart fed with the things that it really wants.

Maybe it’s that music lesson you’ve been wanting to take since you were 10, but never could find the time for. Or maybe it’s just spending some time with loved ones. The point I’m trying to make here is that even though the world seems like it’s falling apart on the outside, on the inside, it’s been a healing experience for a lot of us. At least, it has been for me.

Many of us have been using this time to do things that we generally wouldn’t, things we’d normally shun with an excuse of not having enough time. But now, time really does feel like an absurd concept, doesn’t it? The truth is, it was never really about time, it was about prioritising. In a world where instant gratification is the norm and everything is at our fingertips, the virtue of patience seems long lost. We’re bombarded with content on social media and streaming platforms and are constantly stimulated by text messages. Somewhere along the way, we’ve lost our ability to sit still and appreciate what is, rather than what isn’t. My observation might seem a little harsh, but it’s reflected in everything we do. From that summer body you’ve always longed for to the language you want to be fluent in. We want it all in a moment, we don’t want to wait, because waiting is boring. More importantly, waiting is hard.

So, what can we take away from these hard times? Despite all that has gone on, there have been some positives to the world coming to a stop. It’s forced us to take a step back, think, understand and appreciate what it means to live and not just survive. And that’s something I’m going to try to hold onto for a long time to come.

[mrgankingston-blog]

Plot This: Structure Guide

Alright so if you're a writer then you've probably familiarized yourself with plot...and the structure it provides to a novel. There are countless articles online on "how to plot a novel" or the like. Which is fantastic for you writers because it's at a fingers reach from us. Not so great when there's about...a billion ways one can go about plotting a novel. It can seem daunting and overwhelming and more important confusing! 

I want to break down this massive task bit by bit. Starting with the very bare bones and working into more detailed parts. Making it more manageable.

 Now, I know some of you might roll your eyes and say I know all there is to know about plot. I was you. I went into every workshop and craft class thinking the same thing. And yet, when I started plotting my recent WIP ( The Cost of Defeat ) I realized I didn’t know jack. I thought every story I ever wrote would adhere to my system of structure because of sheer will and blunt force. Yeah wrong.

It wasn't until just recently I started diving into the structure ( because I like pretty diagrams and being organized way more than I should) that I discovered there are a lot of different Plot Structures out there. No one bothered to ever teach me let alone discuss these things. My mind was blown. 

Some worked better for me than others. Some mesh better together than others. It’s all about experimenting and figuring out what works for you. And I’m hoping that this will also help others, or at least give a jumping off point. Now it’s not a whole list ( there’s a lot of elements that I could probably talk about by themselves) but it’s a good overview of the popular ones that reoccur a lot.

1) Freytag's Pyramid

Freytag’s pyramid is the most basic plot structure I know. It’s the one we’ve all seen in school when we start learning about story structure and analysis.

This bad boy is the simplest plot structure used to dissect and understand Greek and Shakespearean Plays. 

Pros     x Simplistic. Makes it easy to understand      x Great for those just starting ( or those who want to understand film and literature analysis.     x Great for AP Literature/Comp papers

Cons     x It creates simple stories     x Not super awesome for modern novels or anything longer than about 25K words

Uses     x Children’s Literature. Picture books mostly. Children are still learning to understand things like conflict effect on characters and having such a long falling action allows for that.     x Short Stories. Since short stories are compact for punch, this structure allows you to get the most done without boring the reader in 25K words or less.   x Analysis. This structure is the easiest and most common to apply to plays, film, tv and even in classic literature. It’s a great way to dissect plot and events in order to better understand the pieces working parts 

Examples: Shakespeare's Hamlet and Romeo and Juliet                    Sophocles's  Antigone                    Henrik Ibsen  A Doll House

2) Three-Act Structure

The Three-Act Structure is probably the most known. We all know this intuitively as storytellers. Everything needs a beginning middle and end, after all.

This structure is very similar to Freytag’s Pyramid but adds elements that beef up and create points of interest. Obstacles, for example, add conflict and build up suspense for the climax. It’s also important to note that the falling action and resolution is much more compact.

Pros    x  basic building block for all good stories    x  Roadmap-like so you can be systematic about things    x  Good “big-picture” visual

Cons    x  Pacing is super important for this    x  Bit rigid and formulaic

Uses     x  Literally anything. Because it’s versatile it works on  a plethera of stuff, let your imagineation run wild.     x Film analysis. This struccture is like the holy grail in almost any film class ( sometimes they call it the four act structure)

Examples:  Sir Arthur Conan Doyle Sherlock Holmes                    Alfred Hitchcock’s  Vertigo                    Jane Austin’s Pride and Prejudice

3) The Fichtean Curve

The Fichten Curve Is really unique in that it starts right with the rising action. There ain’t no time to build up or nice slow introductions, you're dumping the readers right where it hurts. But you make up that lost time with the small bits of exposition

This is one of the most popular plot structures for modern novels.

Pros     x  A lot of opportunities to ramp up the stakes, bit after bit     x Good for pacing     x  Great for Overcoming Monster & Quest stories     x Translate over almost any genre

Cons     x Not a lot of time to slow down, breathe     x Not suited for Voyage and Return, Comedy or Rebirth stories

Uses    x Thrillers/Mystery novels. You need something to keep readers in the story, chomping at the bit. here’s the plot structure for you.    

Examples: Max Brooks’s World War Z                  

4) Plot Embryo/Hero's Journey

The Hero’s Journey is also super common in the literature (namely western literature) With this plot the protagonist ( the hero of hero’s journey) undergoes a literal or figurative death-like transformation that changes him. 

The protagonist must venture from one state into another. To take it a step further there’s a variation called the Ploy Embyro. Dan Harmon takes the hero’s journey a bit deeper and modernizes. [ here’a great video on it by youtuber Rachel Stephen x] 

As you can see, the Hero’s Journey and Ploy Embyro are both cyclical. This baby comes full circle in both plot and character. They have similar plot points. But if I were to gush about this the post would be waaay longer than it already is. This is one of my preferred methods because it just makes sense for me and allows me to have some freedom and wiggle room while still adhering to the 3 acts.

Pros     x Character development holla, cause this is where it’s at.     x Visually appealing     x  Simple 8 point outline ( for those who might not enjoy long-winded outlines)     x  Works alongside A beat sheet ( if you use that sort of thing)     x  The holy grail for myths.

Cons     x Overdone ( but it doesn’t have to be a bad thing)     x Not suited for those who really detailed outlines

Uses     x Adventure Stories. It is all about the adventure and journey with this     x Myth Retellings. I mean it’s based on the myth structure of the Odyssey and the like so it makes sense

Examples: Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird                    Rick Riordan’s The Lightning Thief                   J. R R. Tolktien’s The Hobbit

5) In Media Res

A literal translation to “In the Middle”. This plot structure dumps you right in the middle of the story.  Think if you were to open a story on the second of third crisis/pinch point. there’s still a lot of upward trajectory to go before the climax.

Don’t confuse this with simply opening a story mid fight/action. Media Res starts well deep into the story itself, close to the climax but with enough room you can still build up to it.

Pros     x High Actions     x Simple and fun to play with     x A good use for flashbacks     x Hell of a hook for readers

Cons     x  Can be confusing for reader’s if not done right     x  No build up     x takes some finessing to get just right

Uses      x Mysteries. This is a great plot if you want to start a story perhaps where the killer has already committed the murder.    x Epic Poems. Maybe you wanna write the next epic poem, this is great for that.       Examples  John Milton’s Paradise Lost                    Homer’s Illiad                    George Lucas’s  Star Wars 

Now I could go on and on but this monster of a post has carried on long enough. If there’s a certain structure you’d like me to go into more detail about feel free to leave a comment on this post and I’ll be sure to add it to my line up!! As always happy writing/creating!

        XO Morgan

[lilietsblog]

Gushing is a necessary rationalist skill

Originally inspired by ruminating on this article on lesswrong

Gushing properly is absolutely vital.

Gushing properly is not saying “Great Thing A!!! Great Thing A!!! Great Thing A!!!”. That’s boring as hell to limit yourself to if you really believe in Great Thing A (and aren’t just professing belief in belief, which incidentally is a neat way to catch those bugs in your own belief system). If you really believe in Great Thing A, you’re going to gush more like this: “Great Thing A!!! I believe in it because of evidence X and Y!!! And it also leads me to hold belief Z!!! Which also incidentally leads to X, which - wait a minute, I think that’s circular. Okay, update: I believe in Great Thing A because of evidence Y, and also it makes a neat reflexibly consistent circle with Z and X, and incidentally I think X is also supported by evidence i, k, l and m, I’ll get back to you on that actually let me go google...”

...this is how you gush properly.

Gushing properly is outlining all your points and belief paths and connections. Gushing properly is putting your house in order, preventing your positive beliefs from blobbing together into an amorphous blobby blob of positivity which you cannot be critical of parts of without being critical of the whole. Gushing properly actually acts as a safeguard against Affective Death Spirals, far from leading to them.

And you cannot gush properly, extensively and long-windedly without understanding the thing you’re gushing about, which gives your brain a nice chemical incentive (because gushing about stuff you like feels good!) to go out and research it to be able to gush better.

Gushing is how you counteract the problem of rationalists being unhappy cynics. If the only tool you have for dissecting your belief system to put it in order is negativity, you’re going to either consistently and constantly hurt yourself or avoid touching your belief system out of fear of this pain, or some combination of the two. Positivity makes a much better knife, because it actively makes you feel better while you’re using it. Regularly double-check your own belief networks with positivity by making a goal out of an extensive gushing once-over; if at some point you find a nagging doubt, follow it to its source to excise it: no doubts are allowed to taint your positivity session! If you can’t quickly get rid of it, clearly you need to exclude the belief it puts under fire from your group of ‘absolutely held beliefs to gush over’, right?

Even rationality itself - you can believe in it, respect it, hold it as a sacred cow that lets you be the best winner in life that you can - or you can gush about it, talk at length about its positive points and all the neat things... and if you’re attentive, you will notice the parts you’re not gushing about. The parts your gushing curves over like it’s reverse gravity time; those are the bad parts that need to be fixed according to your very own utility function, and you didn’t even need to go artificially searching for flaws to find them!

Gushing is also an extremely valuable tool for finding truth in debate / while attempting to update on new evidence.

It’s no secret that any rationalist remotely deserving of the title can easily find 1000 counterarguments against any position. To avoid never holding any position at all, or being absolutely stuck in the positions you currently hold (as you carefully avoid wielding your negativity knife on them, since you’re worried that’ll leave you with nothing at all), you need to counterbalance them with the skill to easily find 1000 arguments in favor of any position.

And this is a skill that needs to be practiced just as much and with just as much rigor as the opposite one. For every 10 flaws you’ve found in people being wrong in the internet, you also need to find 10 virtues where people are being right on the internet. Compliment as much and as eagerly as you criticize; put as much effort into saying nice things as you do into shooting people down.

If there’s a part of your brain that says “but this is not what rationalists do”, catch it and hold on to it: congratulations, you’ve found the rationalist failure mode gremlin! Let it squirm and scream: it’s the one that’s responsible for rationalists being more reliably stupid on certain topics than non-rationalists. It’s the one that causes rationalists to lose, and there is no excuse for letting it run around influencing your thought process.

In debate, always gush over your opponent’s position.

When you’ve been presented with an argument that annoys you, infuriates you, makes you want to tear it to shreds with the sheer wrongness of it, or even simply an argument that feels boring and stale and you have refuted this a thousand times - take a deep breath, step back from the emotion, and look at it with a reverse-critical eye.

Find everything you can compliment. Find every single way it’s right, every single thing you like, every single point you might not have thought of on your own. Imagine you’re a teacher trying to motivate an unconfident student; imagine you’re a manager selling your star to a sponsor. Point out every single good idea, confess eagerly to being wrong on every single thing they’ve managed to accurately correct you over, fix the places where the reasoning is slightly broken but you can still tell what it was meant to be. Make their argument your pet project: you want it to be as good as it can in your eyes and their own.

Once you’ve done that, if you’re still not convinced on the core point? Now, and only now, are you allowed to look for flaws.

And that first part, the reverse-critical one? Absolutely write it out / say it out loud (though out loud debates are stressful and I am not very good at them). Don’t worry about being patronizing: everyone likes a compliment, even on absolutely obvious things, and if you’re gushing genuinely - and you need to always be gushing genuinely, no Dark Side Epistemology allowed here! - the person will be able to tell. Don’t worry about undermining your own point, either; you’re not. You genuinely agree with and like these points, after all - and arguments aren’t soldiers and you aren’t at war. I mean, you wouldn’t want the other person to act like they are and you are, right?

This is how you engage with the other person’s position in good faith - and they will be able to tell.

This is how you get the other person to engage with your position in good faith, too - you set the tone to the debate, you compel them to be as analytical of your argument as you’ve been of theirs, you compel them to be as nice to you as you’ve been to them. You compel them to actually engage with your argument in the same way you’ve engaged with theirs.

This is a quick and cheap way to transform anyone you’re talking to into a rationalist for a minute: dare them to. Demonstrate how it’s done. Lure them in.

(And even if it doesn’t work or they’re still bad at it, well you can still do the work for two people on your own if you follow this procedure right, though it’s admittedly exhausting - no free lunch, alas)

This is how you hug the query and avoid accidentally shifting goalposts, too. If you’ve been arguing about points A, B and C, and the person has actually made damn good arguments for A and B, though you’re still certain of your own position on C, you are now interested in pointing out that actually yeah, you’ve been convinced on A and B, it’s just C that’s still at issue. This does wonders for keeping debates sane and friendly.

Incidentally, this is also how you make friends.

And it’s how you convince people that you’re right and they were wrong - no, really, I’m serious. It works. I’ve had people tell me that they understand my point now and agree with it after several rounds of this. And all it costs you is... being more stringent and less one-sided in arguing?

Wait, being more rational can earn you friends?

Rationalists win, my friends. At life. If you aren’t - chase that gremlin the fuck down and eviscerate it. And gush at length.

[jlf23tumble]

Hey Jen! Happy Birthday first of all!! As my favourite TXF-era Louis hate-watcher/enthusiast/scholar (and one of my all-round absolute fave bloggers) I 1) would love to hear your thoughts on his post-TXF comments and 2) Remember when there was this nice nerdy boy auditioning on XF? Simon said he lacked personality, but Louis defended him passionately saying that just bc he wasn't the bad boy Simon was looking for didn't mean he didn't have any personality. And then fast forward to... 1/2

Louis’ interview with Satan Cowell’s #1 provider of anal unguent… his answer about having been a “party boy” was so interesting to me. He seemed uncomfortable and said “yeah there’s a responsibility at both ends, to be good and also to be a little bit bad, a little bit mischievous sometimes”. Super interesting choice of words… “a responsibility”. And DW, transparent as always “that’s what we want from our rock stars”. Mmh. What Simon wants for sure. 2/2

——–

Hey, thanks for the birthday wishes!! I’ve had a few (got drunk on you, etc.), so I’m gonna try and answer this, but if it comes off as incoherent, let’s all just blame sweet lady vino. As you (correctly!) suggest, I’m so here for all XFUK talk, and I’m curious to hear more about Louis’s experiences on the show as we get deeper into promo that neatly swerves Louis’s personal life. Olivia got some GREAT INTEL from him, but he’s hinted in previous interviews about being nervous or having to be a certain “character,” and a LOT of it is tied in to this Sun-perspective, which is more or less run by the people running Simon (I don’t like to give him coded language because that gives him more attention and power, like we’re watching a shitty soap villain, when in reality, he’s a sad, vain little man whose “empire” is imploding faster than his cheap tit job). Make no mistake, XFUK was a calculated risk to salvage Louis’s rep in the UK (the demo that engages with it is the demo that reads the Sun, and he’s been trashed there for years), but it WORKED, and part of that is Louis’s natural charm, but it’s also down to the edit, both on screen and in print. And Louis knows it, calls it out with Wootton, the whole thing about the responsibility, as you say, but also that most of those shit articles are Dan’s work (just like Niall hinted at, with pretty much the same smirk). They all know it’s part of the game, but it does do some damage, and he’s in damage control mode…seemingly, everyone’s on board with it, but the shrapnel (at least in print) is Zayn, and that’s because Louis didn’t throw Harry under the bus like he was supposed to (Dan needed a headline about someone Louis hates in the band, so he took Louis’s sad resignation about Z and puffed it up because there’s literally nothing there about H…and don’t even get me started on the whole “party boy” image and who it was originally intended for). I have so many thoughts on all of it, but you have to watch everything to talk about it, and I’m not here to engage with anyone who hasn’t. I’m drunk enough to share some of my random unpopular onions, so here you go, in one go:

El’s definitely “vital” for selling an album about long-term love for an artist who’s closeted, and she’s the best fit for it (they get along, they’re coworkers, “she’s” been there through all the ups and downs, so get ready for those long-term love songs because they ain’t about her)

bg won’t end anytime soon, so if you’re one of those who’s constantly screaming ‘end it’ in tags, you’re only upsetting yourself (I think it WILL end eventually, but with a whimper, and trying to push for a scream is not worth your own personal angst)

That said, look at the negative space here, there’s less and less and less talk about him having a son, seeing him with a son, but he can still talk about his “boy” and do all kinds of other things that play with that narrative subversively (is it his bf, his son, his brother? an emotion? we’ll never know)

Simon has an outdated idea of what “sells” for rockstars, but so does Irving Azoff (Louis’s media rollout with his team is on POINT, and it hits all platforms, but he still has to deal with shit related to the Sun, Metro, etc.; the Azoffs are notoriously not plugged into SM, they use print like Billboard and a fairly outmoded form of non-print pub PR, but Harry has a lot of charm that bleeds out into OTHER PEOPLE’S SM…oh, and p.s., he STILL has to deal with the Sun, Metro, etc. from time to time)

But this is why Louis’s current media push is so GOOD, you don’t even know…all platforms, all of the biggest ones, there’s a strategic plan here, please stop pretending like you have this more figured out than they do, my god, he has GOT THIS

XFUK was an intentional move to repair tab damage in the UK, and it worked (it was fucking SMART, and he smashed it, so much damage was repaired, and on an actual schedule)

I don’t know any BTS arrangements (before you @ me, let me stop you right there, neither do you), but clearly, more than one party/contract is at play here, and you really should do yourself the favor of listening to ALL OF IT, because he drops hints all over the place (that Olivia interview alone had so much happening that wasn’t excerpted or giffed)

There’s a very real possibility that Louis and Harry don’t WANT to come out because of the invasive interest in their lives, and there’s absolutely nothing wrong with that! But it might also explain when things appear that aren’t aimed at the gp

Argh, I’m rambling, and this is getting too long/too boring, but yeah, I’m probably drunkenly blanking on even more fantastic thoughtsTM, but XFUK was a game changer in a lot of ways, for everyone involved.

[wineanddinosaur]

VinePair Podcast: What Does Hard Seltzer’s Rise Mean for Cheap Beer?

This October, VinePair is celebrating our second annual American Beer Month. From beer style basics to unexpected trends (pickle beer, anyone?), to historical deep dives and new developments in package design, expect an exploration of all that’s happening in breweries and taprooms across the United States all month long.

Inspired by one of VinePair’s latest pieces, Dave Infante’s Is Hard Seltzer Killing the Classic College Kegger?, co-hosts Adam Teeter, Joanna Sciarrino, and Zach Geballe take the time to break down hard seltzer’s impact on college life. On this episode of the “VinePair Podcast,” the hosts explore emerging college drinking habits, the allure of cheap beer versus that of hard seltzer, and how light beer consumers have reacted to the hard seltzer boom.

Tune in to learn more about the trends Teeter, Sciarrino, and Geballe are seeing in cheap beer and hard seltzer consumption, and whether they think one category will overpower the other in the near future.

LISTEN ONLINE

Listen on Apple Podcasts

Listen on Spotify

OR CHECK OUT THE CONVERSATION HERE

Adam Teeter: From VinePair’s New York City headquarters, I’m Adam Teeter.

Joanna Sciarrino: I’m Joanna Sciarrino.

Zach Geballe: And in Seattle, Washington, I’m Zach Geballe.

A: This is the “VinePair Podcast.” We’re in the VinePair studio.

Z: No more phone booths!

A: No more phone booths. The studio got completed. It was supposed to be completed pre-Covid. It’s now done. We’re in a studio built by two amazing VinePair employees, Katie Brown and Keith Beavers, who is right now engineering the session.

Z: I believe we say on the ones and twos,

A: It’s pretty crazy back here. I’m really loving it. Zach, how’s the basement?

Z: It’s still good. Still full of wine, thankfully. Haven’t drank it all yet. You guys have to post some pictures in the studio. I want to see what it looks like.

A: We will. It’s not totally complete. It still needs one wall soundproofed, but it’s feeling pretty good in here. What are you both up to? Joanna, how was your weekend? What did you get into? What did you drink?

J: My weekend was OK. I can’t really remember it, to be honest with you. I went to dinner with a few friends the other night and had a mezcal cocktail with some sriracha.

A: That is weird.

J: It kind of burned my throat. I didn’t love it, I have to say. We did get a bottle of some Bonny Doon Picpoul, and I was very excited. I told my friends, “Guys, we have to get this.” It was really great.

A: Where were you?

J: We were at a restaurant called The Tyger in Chinatown. It was very good.

A: That’s where you also had the sriracha cocktail?

J: Yeah.

A: You know, I’m not a spicy cocktail person.

J: No, me neither. That was on me. I think people would have liked it.

Z: The thing about spicy cocktails to me — it was interesting when I interviewed the founder of Scrappy’s Bitters because he talked a little bit about this — is that there’s no good way to do it, for the most part, without putting hot sauce in, like sriracha. To me, the problem there is not so much the spice. It’s the texture. The cocktail can get really grainy or very vinegary if you use Tabasco. It’s just not a thing that I want in my cocktail. I don’t mind a little spice. I think that can be an interesting cocktail ingredient. Unless you’re having a Bloody Mary, where you’re already getting all that tomato juice, I don’t really want hot sauce in my drink.

J: Yeah. I think that was part of it.

A: It also just blows your palate out. I’m not into it. But I’m glad that you had Bonny Doon. It’s delicious. Zach, how’s the waiting going?

Z: Still waiting. We’re in this period of time now where we’re waiting for the baby, and my wife is totally off work. On Tuesday, we were actually able to go wine tasting, which is kind of cool. We haven’t done that in a while because our son is in preschool.

A: You mean you went wine tasting?

Z: No. We both went wine tasting. The wineries had the same confusion, but my wife is very comfortable having a little bit of wine while she’s pregnant. She has been the whole time and certainly is at this point. We went to a couple of wineries outside of Seattle, in Woodinville. We went to DeLille Cellars and Januik Novelty Hill, which are two sibling wineries. It was really nice. It was a nice-ish day. We were able to sit outside for a little bit, sip some wine, and do a thing that we haven’t done together since before the pandemic. We haven’t gone wine tasting anywhere. I’ve gone a few times for some work stuff, but even then, not very much. It was really lovely and a nice reminder that like this is a thing we can do.

A: Yeah, totally. it’s a thing that exists. It’s actually a great thing to take a newborn to because they just sleep anyhow. We will probably do it again later in October when our son’s at school and we can just pop off for a Tuesday or Wednesday little getaway. I’m looking forward to it.

A: Nice, man.

Z: What about you, Adam?

A: I had my in-laws in town this past weekend, so we had some adventures. I first went to a restaurant and had a really interesting experience. This will basically be a piggyback to our conversation last Tuesday about hybrids and things like that. I had a wine at dinner at this restaurant in Fort Greene.

Z: I know we’re going already. I like it.

A: It was super natural.

J: It was otherworldly.

A: Yes. I got a little bit bothered because, whenever we go out with family, I know they’re going to try to pay, but then they still give me the wine list. I don’t ever want to order bottles that Naomi or I would order. Even though I still think that they’re totally reasonable, my parents are from Auburn, Ala. Her parents are from Lancaster, Pa. They think a $75 to $85 bottle of wine is expensive, which is fair. Totally fair. They also live in a market where those are expensive bottles. This restaurant only had two bottles under $70, and everything else was over $100. What was really weird is that it was a very casual restaurant. I was kind of shocked that was the deal. I found this one wine. It was a wine from California and the blend was Zinfandel, Carignan, and Chenin Blanc. For that blend, it was only 12.5 percent alcohol. I remember sending Keith a picture of the bottle and he said “That blend should never be that low in alcohol. It just shouldn’t.”

Z: Not unless it’s 90 percent Chenin Blanc.

A: It was 10 percent Chenin Blanc. It was 70 percent Zinfandel.

Z: Wow.

A: It was all funk. It was just kombucha, basically. It was kind of disappointing because I could tell my in-laws didn’t like it, but that was the wine on the list that was the price I knew they’d be OK with. They were totally nice about it. They said, “Oh, this is interesting.”

J: That’s the word.

A: I knew they really didn’t like it. It was one of those things that made me think this is exactly what we talked about. I’m actually surprised they put the blend on it. It seemed like the makers thought, “We have some grapes. We made kombucha.”

J: Were you there for the food?

A: Yeah. The food is great. It goes to show that this is what’s happened in a lot of these places. This is just what the list is supposed to be now. We did get redeemed because the next night. I took them to Gage & Tollner, and we had an incredible experience. We had great cocktails and amazing wine. It was a bummer, though, because I really wanted to have a good time with them and have them enjoy the wine. I just could tell that wasn’t happening. I kept thinking to myself “Man, we just should’ve gotten cocktails.”

Z: This made me think about the way that restaurant goers can feel so held hostage by the wine list, especially if they don’t do a good job of giving you a lot of options at various price points. Having two wines under $100 is pretty bad. I get that New York City is a little bit of a different animal than most places. If the wines are going to be that “interesting,” that’s a lot to put on people. Why would you create that situation? Why do you want people to walk away from that and think, “Man, we had a great meal, but I really wish I could have had a wine I liked.” That’s such a bummer to me. I don’t think anyone, including the producers of those wines, want people to drink them while gritting their teeth and thinking this was the only option that they had. That’s how you turn people off wine.

A: It was totally a bummer. Otherwise, it was a great visit. Today, we’re going to talk about another topic we’ve talked about a little bit on the podcast, but always just in the intro section. This is based off of an article we ran this week on VinePair by Dave Infante, all about whether or not hard seltzer is killing the college kegger. We thought we’d expand that into the question of, do we think hard seltzers are ultimately going to kill light beer or cheap beer? I feel like, probably?

J: I don’t think so.

A: You don’t think so. Why? Hot take.

J: Dave talks about this in the article and talks to a number of college aged people, but it’s expensive.

A: Hard seltzer, you mean?

J: Hard seltzer’s expensive. If you’re going to buy a case of beer or, in this instance, a keg, it’s going to be a lot cheaper than going and buying a case of hard seltzer for much more money.

Z: What I wonder is, is that pricing difference necessary? Are the raw inputs, the costs of producing a hard seltzer, meaningfully more expensive than producing cheap beer?

A: No.

Z: No. I think you’re going to see what happens when someone undercuts the current pricing. The thing about cheap beer that resonates is the cheap part. The beer part is kind of optional. A lot of college students, including in Dave’s piece, quoted this. I think this is not just true for college students, but for a lot of people who drink light beer or cheap beer. The things they want are inexpensive alcohol delivery service and inoffensive flavor. Seltzer might be able to deliver that better than cheap beer. With cheap beer, not everyone likes the taste. Plus, you add in the gluten intolerance thing, and there’s a lot of people that want something cheap that is palatable to them, and cheap beer ain’t it.

A: Based on what you just said, I kind of think I’m now going to agree with Joanna.

Z: Fair enough.

A: I actually think that when you are looking for something refreshing, I don’t know if I need to get pamplemoose, blood orange, and mango all up in my taste buds. Maybe I just basically want water. That is what a lot of cheap beer is. It’s a very refreshing, cold, light, somewhat malty beverage. At the end of the day, it’s completely inoffensive. I do think that when seltzers get really cheap, the flavors also get really nasty. I think they get even more artificial than they already taste, having tasted some of the very cheap hard seltzers. The other thing I think that we forget about with cheap beer is that there’s a culture around pitchers that you just will never have with hard seltzer. Maybe that’s going to be what we see. We’re just going to see buckets of Claws everywhere. There is, again, a nice thing about getting a pitcher of draft beer and hanging out. There is an appeal of the taste of draft. I’ve never heard people say that draft hard seltzer tastes better. It just happens to be that seltzer is being pushed through a draft because it’s helpful for the margins of Buffalo Wild Wings. Draft beer does have this nice carbonation that you don’t get in the can. You get that when you get it by the pitcher. Maybe that will also cause it to continue.

Z: Yeah. I want to be clear. I don’t think White Claw or whatever is coming for craft beer or anything like that. I would say it’s more of an unknown at this point. Just because there’s been a culture of a thing doesn’t mean that culture can’t change. One of the things that’s also very cleverly pointed out in Dave’s piece is that, especially in regards to things like the college kegger, this prolonged Covid period is scrambling a lot of what people’s behaviors were. There aren’t as many 5,000-person gatherings as there used to be on college campuses. There are, presumably, still some. A new freshman class enters every year. Hard seltzer’s still a very new category. Those people may have grown up — we know you shouldn’t drink under age and it’s illegal, but people do it — drinking hard seltzer in high school because it’s more palatable than cheap beer. Even if it’s a little more expensive, that may not be such a big obstacle for some of them. With the use case for cheap beer, I don’t believe that hard seltzer can’t do almost all of that if it figures it out, other than maybe that convivial thing Adam mentioned with the pitchers and all that. Maybe there’s still a place for both. I think you look at like some of the beer producers, though, and I don’t know if we have hard data on this, but Anheuser-Busch is clearly recognizing that their future might be producing Bud Light Seltzer more than Bud Light.

J: I think it’s very smart and strategic for them to have it, of course, because it’s capturing a part of the market. I don’t think that they’ll ever get rid of it or it will ever beat out their light beer.

A: If you start to really look at where seltzer is stealing share, one of the biggest places it’s stealing share is wine. We’re not talking high-end wine. We’re talking cheap wine, under $10 bottles. There are bottles that often get brought to parties like the kind we’re talking about. That drinker was never drinking the beer. They brought wine. We’ve had employees tell us that in college, they played beer pong with wine, because they just didn’t like beer. Some people that Dave talks to say that. They like seltzer because they’ve never liked beer. Now, it’s the thing that they can drink at these parties. That also still remains to be seen. I think Joanna is 100 percent on point here. It’s just very smart of Bud Light. It’s a great brand extension. Are they going to lose some Bud Light drinkers to Bud Light Seltzer? For sure. I think they’re also going to gain people who were not Bud Light drinkers into the brand of Bud Light who are interested in seltzer. Maybe that’s the one thing that’s on offer at their college campus or the sports bar. I will say, having walked around the neighborhood recently and looking into sports bars, I definitely see a mix of both. I see a lot of people drinking pitchers of beer. I also do see a lot of buckets of hard seltzer. The other thing I think is interesting about hard seltzer is that it’s usually one of two brands. You’ve got to like those brands to totally get in. The brands do not include Bud Light Seltzer, to be clear. It’s Truly and White Claw. If you don’t like either of those two, you’re probably going to stick to beer if you were already a beer drinker.

Z: I don’t think my point was that existing beer drinkers are going to en masse flee the beer category for seltzer. Some have. Some might. It’s more about who I guess you’d call “rising drinkers” are going to want.

A: Right. So your argument is that, is it so pervasive now that people whose first drink might have been a cheap beer is going to be a seltzer instead?

Z: Yeah. There’s someone quoted in Dave’s story who said, “I didn’t really even drink beer until I graduated college.” That is sort of unfathomable to me. I went to college with people who didn’t drink and I went to college with people who didn’t drink beer at all. The thought that someone would get through four years of college and had never tried beer because seltzer is so pervasive is crazy. I think we talked about this early on in the rise of seltzer — because our podcast is as old as the seltzer boom — is how one of the big selling points for seltzer and a big thing that’s commendable about it is that, unlike beer, it does not come gendered nearly as much. Drinking culture in college, because of a lot of things, has often been bifurcated by gender to some extent. The expectation is maybe that people want different things. Seltzer seems to be, to this point, a place where everyone can drink the same thing. That may not be a pitcher of beer that’s shared, but there’s that ability to have the same drink in everyone’s hands and the only distinction is what flavor you prefer, but no one’s looking down at you because you like to drink hard seltzer. I think that’s going to be a really powerful thing. I think it would be a mistake for producers of light beer to not see that the universality of the product is appealing to young drinkers who are just dipping their toes in it. So much of it in that age frame, too, is that you want to fit in. You want to blend in. You don’t want to be the person who causes a scene. You don’t want to be the person who has hard-to-satisfy taste or is drinking something different than everyone else. While a decade or two ago, that might have been circling up around the keg, now that’s opening a White Claw.

J: Yeah, I agree with that. I think that you’re absolutely right for this younger generation. What I think is really interesting is the older generation of light beer drinkers and what it’s been like for them to experience hard seltzer if they’re switching over or not. I was wondering if either of you had any thoughts on that.

A: If people that we know, who are older, are switching over?

J: Yeah. I don’t know that my parents would ever try a hard seltzer.

A: I was just sitting here wondering, do you get as bloated from seltzer as you used to get from beer? I remember, when we would drink a lot of beer, I’d get so bloated.

Z: No, I don’t think so.

A: But, why? Isn’t it just carbonated? Wouldn’t you? I can’t drink a lot of Pellegrino.

J: This is actually very interesting, because my partner Evan, who loves hard seltzer, was talking a lot about, “I can’t drink a lot of beer anymore. It makes me too full.” But he can crush White Claws, trust me.

A: Is it because it’s just water and sugar fermented as opposed to grain?

Z: Yes, I think so.

A: It’s basically not a bucket of liquid bread.

Z: Yeah. No one has ever called seltzer a hard seltzer liquid bread.

A: That’s so interesting. Huh.

Z: You were saying, Adam, about wanting something flavorless that’s kind of just alcoholic water to drink when it’s hot out. I actually think seltzer can do an even better job of that than beer. Or it can, at least. We’re still in this very early stage of the category where we’ve seen this incredible mushrooming of all these different brands. Someone is going to position themselves as — maybe not literally this branding — but the low-flavor, barely detectable because then it’s not offensive, cheap, crushable seltzer. There’s going to be a brand or brands that go down that route in the same way that we’ve seen some brands lean into higher alcohol. As the category grows, it’s going to diversify and separate out. To the question that Joanna posed about people turning away from beer for seltzer, including her partner, I don’t think that a person who’s a craft beer devotee might drink seltzer. Given a choice, though, they’re not going to give up IPAs, stouts, or sours for seltzer. Those people weren’t drinking a lot of cheap beer in the first place. It was striking to me to see one of these places where cheap beer has dominated — baseball games — and then going to a baseball game and seeing so many people walking around with Trulys. It was like the same person who would have had, three years ago, a Bud Light or a Coors Light.

A: At the games, what you normally see is not just a Bud Light, but a huge tall boy. Were they huge tall boys of Trulys?

Z: Oh yeah.

A: That’s so crazy.

J: I experienced that in September 2019 at a Giants game. I was shocked. All these people were drinking giant cans of hard seltzer.

A: It’s crazy. Thinking about it more, I do have friends who have switched over for sure. I think they would normally be light beer drinkers. That includes someone I’m related to — it may or may not be my brother-in-law — who enjoys, on the weekends when having family day or whatever, dumping Truly into his water bottle and hanging out in the backyard with the kids, drinking some Trulys. Hey, it’s Saturday, but like, I realized you couldn’t do that with beer. The whole point of a cheap light beer is that it’s good when it’s very cold. The second it starts to get warm, things change. There’s a reason that Coors Light says, “Taste the Rockies,” and to make sure you chill the can down as much as possible. It’s got to be blue. The second that Truly warms up, I would assume it starts to taste like warm, lemon- flavored Pellegrino or Perrier. You can put it in your water bottle and hang out with the kids. He’s having a drink on a Saturday, but he doesn’t need his toddler kids to see him drinking.

Z: You’re not supposed to let your toddler see your drink? Uh oh.

A: I don’t know.

J: The old Don Draper, get me another beer.

A: Yeah, exactly. I’ll never forget when my niece was really young, around 3 years old. She’s very precocious. We recorded a video of her where my sister-in-law was asking her what was on the table and she said, “Wine. Mommy’s wine.” Her mom was like, “Oh, really?” Then she said, “Here mommy. Have wine, mommy.”

Z: My son gets very confused when we’re not having wine with dinner. We don’t drink wine every night. We drink wine a fair number of nights. He says, “Why aren’t you drinking wine?” We say, “You know, we don’t want to tonight. He’s like, “Well, you should drink some wine.”

J: It’s so funny.

A: It’s really funny. My other nephew likes to take beers out of the fridge and give them to us and say “beer, beer.”

Z: That’s a well-trained child. I have one last thought I want to add to this. If hard seltzer does, in fact, largely replace cheap beer, I don’t know that I’d be sad about that.

A: That’s a bold statement.

Z: I don’t have warm fuzzies about Bud Light.

A: PBR? Miller High Life?

Z: I have certainly drank all those beers. I don’t have anything against them. I don’t root for them to stop existing. But to me, whenever I drink those beers, I would kind of rather be drinking something else. Maybe not a hard seltzer, but that’s rarely what I want.

A: We’ll do an in memoriam of all the great light beer brands that are gone, thanks to Zach. I don’t know, man. I think that there’s a place for both of them. I think, obviously, one will ultimately have higher sales than the other. I still think it remains to be seen. The writing on the wall right now is that it probably will be seltzer in the near future. I do think that there’s still going to be a place for cheap beer. I can’t see chefs at the end of their shifts being like, “Hey, let’s get a bucket of Trulys.”

Z: They already do, man. They already do.

A: No, they don’t.

Z: It was happening when I was still working in restaurants, man. People would get off work and they’d want seltzers. Not everyone. Some people would drink beers. There’s golf courses and all those places.

A: That, I see. The golf course makes sense.

Z: I’m just saying it was all starting to change. There are certainly people who are married to their identity as a beer drinker. I think a lot of people thought beer was the best fit for their need, until seltzer came along. Seltzer may do some of the things that beer did better than beer does at this point.

A: OK. Fair point. All right. Well, I guess it remains to be seen. If you are someone who listens to the podcast and you have become a hard seltzer drinker and used to be a cheap beer drinker, let us know. If you disagree with Zach, definitely let us know. Joanna, Zach, I’ll talk to you Friday.

J: See ya.

Z: Sounds great.

Thanks so much for listening to the “VinePair Podcast.” If you love this show as much as we love making it, please leave us a rating or review on iTunes, Spotify, Stitcher or wherever it is you get your podcasts. It really helps everyone else discover the show.

Now for the credits. VinePair is produced and recorded in New York City and Seattle, Washington, by myself and Zach Geballe, who does all the editing and loves to get the credit. Also, I would love to give a special shout-out to my VinePair co-founder, Josh Malin, for helping make all of this possible, and also to Keith Beavers, VinePair’s tastings director, who is additionally a producer on the show. I also want to, of course, thank every other member of the VinePair team, who are instrumental in all of the ideas that go into making the show every week. Thanks so much for listening, and we’ll see you again.

Ed. note: This episode has been edited for length and clarity.

The article VinePair Podcast: What Does Hard Seltzer’s Rise Mean for Cheap Beer? appeared first on VinePair.

source https://vinepair.com/articles/podcast-hard-seltzers-cheap-beer/

[elsiesmith672]

10 Basic Principles of Visual Design

Yesterday I was listening to a podcast and heard someone who was about to ask a question saying something along the lines of "..long time fan, first time caller…" and for some reason that got me thinking about Medium. I've been consuming content here for a long time but have never contributed myself with my 2 cents. Today is the day this changes.

As my introduction I decided to write about something close to my heart, Visual Design (aka graphic design), more specifically the basic principles I learned to use which I consider essentials for me to perform my job well.

I want to keep this article short, for that reason I will try to be brief in each of these principles, for the ones that deserve a bit more depth I might dedicate a full length article in the future.

Ok, ready? It all starts with…

#1 Point, Line & Shape

These are the most basic building blocks of any design, no matter what it is. With these you can create anything you want, from simple icons to very complex illustrations, everything is made with the combination of these simple elements.

In geometry a point is a combination of x and y coordinates, add a z axis and you’re in 3D, but let's stick with 2 dimensions for this article.

If you connect two points you'll get a line. A line that is formed by an immensity of points, a bit like a bunch of atoms form molecules which, in turn, form all the objects around you. Then, if you add a third point and connect them all you have a shape, in this case a triangle, but as mentioned before you can use this basic elements to achieve pretty much anything that you want.

Now, to your eyes these shapes don't really exist until you add something to it…

#2 Color

The human eye can see over 10 million different colours from red to violet, and from young age all of us learn to attribute certain values or meanings to specific colours.

Imagine the traffic lights for instance. They’re just colours but we learn that red means stop, green means go and yellow means step on the metal because you can make it before it turns red. This to say that we take very different actions just based on a colour, sometimes even without thinking about it.

In my opinion this happens simply because we learn these things, not because a colour has an intrinsic meaning attached to it. This is more true if you consider that these meanings will change depending on your culture, where and when you were raised.

All this to say that you can add meaning, intention and a tone just by picking the right colour, you just need to make sure you understand very well who you're designing for.

Now that you can see your triangle, how about making it more interesting…

#3 Typography

This is a big one and I consider one of the most important, and difficult, things for designer to get right. It’s not only about what you write but how you present it. Typography is how your words look like.

With the right typeface you can have a banal piece of text and make it powerful, but that’s not easy to do, what is easy is to completely mess up a powerful statement just by selecting the wrong typeface. Typography, as well as colour, allows you to define a tone.

Most typefaces are designed with a purpose, you just need to learn what that is and use it in your favour. Some typefaces are great for big blocks of text, some work great as titles. Some are merely functional and super clear and others are just meant to be fun or used ironically (you know what I'm talking about).

There are thousands of different typefaces to choose from but unless you need something whimsical or you're trying to make something very specific I would always advise to stick with the classics. However, if you're felling bold you can even design your own typeface, although I think that is one of the most challenging things to do properly as a designer, but if you think you’re up for the task one thing that you can't forget is…

#4 Space

The way you balance your space can be a maker or a breaker, specially in typography.

You need to consider how each element/letter relates to each other, give them the precise breathing room they need, this is usually referred to as negative space (positive space are the actual letters).

You need to take the negative space as part of your design and use it well, space can be powerful and help your viewer to navigate through your design. It can also be a place to rest the eyes.

Use it wisely though, too much space and your design will look unfinished, too little space and your design will seem too crowded.

Managing to find the right ratio between positive and negative space allows you to create…

#5 Balance, Rhythm & Contrast

This is when you’re starting to make a bunch of plain elements into something interesting and appealing. Balance well all the elements on your design by considering their visual weight. A big black square in the your bottom right corner will sink your design from that side. Compensate for that weight or move it to other position.

he way you lay elements in the page is crucial, making some elements heavier than others will help to to create contrast and rhythm and lead your viewer's eyes through your design gracefully and effortlessly.

Something that may help you with rhythm and balance is also to play with…

#6 Scale

Scale helps you not only creating rhythm contrast and balance but also hierarchy. Basically not all the elements in your design should have the same importance, and one of the best ways to convey that is size.

Now, this must serve a purpose. Don’t go for the “make my logo bigger cream” approach and forget about the space I mentioned before.

For instance, take a newspaper page. What’s the biggest thing in the page?

The titles, that are also usually short. Why? So you can scan the page quickly and see if there’s something interesting for you to read. Then we have the subtitles that are smaller but give you a little more information about the article, and finally we have the article that has the smallest font size but also the most comfortable to read a long piece of text.

So, it’s all about making the size serve a purpose and never forget about the person who will consume your design. Speaking of newspaper, is time to bring some order with…

#7 Grid & Alignments

It’s like that oddly satisfying feeling when you're playing Tetris and you stack that last bar that clears your screen.

These are supposed to be invisible but you'll see them if you open a book or a newspaper, but (no matter what you’re designing) following a grid will structure your design and make it more pleasant and easier to digest.

Even if you’re making a chaotic design purposefully, there must be an order for that chaos.

Alignment is specially important with text, there are several ways to align it but my rule of thumb is to align it left. It always depends on what and for whom you’re designing of course, but generally, people read from left to right, top to bottom, which makes text that is center or right aligned much more difficult to read.

#8 Framing

This is a key concept in photography but it also applies in visual design.

Whether you’re using a picture, an illustration or something else, framing something properly makes all the difference.

Try to direct the eye to what matters, crop/frame images to make your subject stand out or to reinforce your message. It’s all about telling the right story and telling it well.

After all this, if you feel there's something missing, you can play around with…

#9 Texture & Patterns

I personally see texture and patterns like accessories, you don’t have to use them necessarily and you can live without them but sometimes they can, almost on their own, make your design or add that little extra interest it was missing.

Textures are not as trendy as they used to be a while ago but with them you can add another dimension to your design, making it more three dimensional and touchable.

The texture doesn't have to be in the composition itself, if it's something that is going to be printed, picking the right paper, add things like bevel, emboss or UV varnish can make your design pass from banal to something superb. But pick one, don't go crazy with the special finishings.

Patterns are all about repetition, and can be almost considered textures depending on how you’re using them. I see them mostly used as a way to inject rhythm and dynamism into a flat design and a way to compensate the excess of negative space.

Last but not least, and this is actually what I personally consider to be the holy grail of visual design…

#10 Visual Concept

This is the idea behind your design. What do you mean with it and what’s the deeper meaning behind the superficial image.

This is what distinguish a great design from something you can download from a stock website.

Design with intent and always have an idea that connects everything in your design. Pick your fonts carefully and with a purpose, think about how every tiny part of your design follows that base concept. Coherence is everything.

If your concept is strong you’ll be able to defend it and sell the idea to your client/boss or whomever you're presenting it to.

Also, a properly thought out will last for ages. Trendy hipster things are nice and cute but, as the moustaches and the checkered shirts, they come with an expiry date. I really believe that a good design does NOT follow trends, but it creates them instead.

There you have it, "my" 10 Principles to build a good design. Even thought I consider #10 the essential one, you need to pay attention to all the others principles and make sure you really become a master of your craft. You might have a great idea but I think you also need to know how to make it justice (or have someone who does it for you).

If you really want to know about  Creative Design Decks please share your thoughts in comment section.

[thepandemicinterviews]

Zach, July 26 2020, Sydney

One of my ideas behind this project was to allow each person I interviewed to nominate the next interviewee; to enter a meandering and unknown path within which my subjects could determine the shape of its flow. To my delight, Mikki nominated my housemate Zach, despite the two having never met. I interviewed Zach on a gloomy Sunday afternoon. We chatted on my balcony shielded from curious passers-by by a heavy and incessant rain.

Minutes before the interview, Zach sent me a few pictures that emblematised certain thoughts around the pandemic we would later discuss. This, I learnt, was in the tradition of photo-elicitation, a method of interview where the subject could project their own ideas and feelings onto a particular image. Or perhaps it is the other way round – directionality is not something I generally believe in. Zach noted the comprehensiveness of thought that can come from engaging with images, which I agree with. The totality that images can proffer, the range, the searchingness.

Post the interview, we stumbled upon a familiar talking point – the elision of months in this year… May, June, July, now August?

Eventlessness has no posts to drape duration on. From nothing to nothing is no time at all.

The above quote from John Steinbeck’s East of Eden was recited, verbatim, by Zach as we continued talking. The blur of days within spatial monotony. Time as a wardrobe in which we hang markers of its passage. The forward jolt of time collapsing without the morning alarm, without the peak-hour commute, without the sense of your self being crushed by it. What replaces it is a drift…

C: Hi Zach. When did you move in here?

Z: That’s a difficult question. Was it like six weeks ago, four weeks ago?

C: Something like that. I feel like in the time I’ve known you, you’ve always exuded a very calm energy. I’m curious – was there a period during the last few months that you were very stressed?

Z: I wouldn’t say stressed. I think I’m always quite calm, almost to a fault I think. Are we talking about, like, in the thick of lockdown?

C: Yeah. I’m just curious how it affected you in terms of stress, and if you felt anxious at any points during it.

Z: Probably not overly, it was more just a sense of being overwhelmed by the scale of the crisis, and how many people were suffering. It was more just a sense of dread, I guess, as opposed to being anxious or stressed.

C: More, like, thinking about how it was affecting people on a global scale rather than yourself?

Z: Yeah, definitely. That was one of the pictures I had, the woman juggling these balls. I kind of thought about that as juggling the different emotions, I guess. Because you’re confronted with this fact that there’s so many people out there who are doing it much worse than you are, and you’ve got this overwhelming sense of gratitude and appreciation for my friends and my family and all the support and this crazy beautiful life that I get to live. But also acknowledging that it is bad for me in some ways, there are certain things I don’t get to do. So yeah, it’s trying to juggle all those almost conflicting emotions, and try and bring some kind of harmony to it.

C: Yeah, I guess for a lot of people who are doing okay like you and me – there is that, Can I complain about it when people are having it so much harder. And being so lucky just being in Australia. Yeah, it does really magnify the differences in different societies, different countries, and all the different responses. Are you someone that reads the news a lot?

Z: I was a lot during Covid, I've kind of tailed off a bit less at the moment. But yeah, I was pretty in it. It was quite interesting with the different news providers as well. You look at the ABC, and obviously the problems aren’t as bad relatively speaking, and then you zoom out to maybe BBC, and that becomes quite confronting, and then go to Aljazeera where things are getting pretty wild. It’s almost like knowing when to stop – it’s hard to make that balance.

C: So you sent me a few photos, as part of a fun little photo elicitation…?

Z: Yeah.

C: Can you tell me a little bit about the method? I hadn’t heard of it before.

Z: I don’t know a huge amount about it. But it’s quite common in qualitative research, I think especially in narrative enquiry where people are sort of describing their lived experience over a prolonged period of time. Before the interview, they sit down and search for some images which they think represent their experiences. It’s just a good way to get people thinking about it before the interview, and it’s good to keep coming back to. A picture paints a thousand words, as we know. So it can help to express what you’re feeling and thinking in a comprehensive way, I guess.

C: Yeah, it ties in nicely to what I’m doing. So how does the dog in the box – is that when you were moving house?

Z: No, so that’s just Zara. That’s my friend Georgia’s dog who I was living with during the lockdown. So me and Zara spent a lot of time together this lockdown. Yeah, it’s kind of like what I was saying before – I was in this very beautiful house with this beautiful dog… Her being in the box is kind of emblematic of this loss of control, I guess, and loss of freedom, which is very novel for me, ever since – I imagine you’ve had the same experience – ever since you finish high school and become adults you can pretty much do whatever you want whenever you want and it’s quite a new experience to have that taken away from you. And I think it’s quite a valuable experience because it’s how a lot of people in this world live without the external factors constricting their freedom, I guess.

C: Was there anything you said to yourself that you wanted to do while you were constrained? You know, how everyone talked about baking bread and reading lots of books. Was there anything that you wanted to achieve?

Z: I’m doing my honours, which is taking up a lot of time. Yeah, I had a similar goal, I guess I wanted to read more, cook more. It was really exciting that I got to live with my two really close friends. So sort of exploring those relationships more and see how they might differ living in the same space and spending all that time together.

C: Mm. And the other photo you sent was the rainbow colours. Do you want to talk to me about that?

Z: Yeah. I couldn’t find a better image to express it. It was just like a spectrum. So one thing I’ve been thinking a lot about is despair and hope, as emotions. Like what they can do for us in a situation like this, because I feel like despair is something that’s come up quite a lot. I’d be interested to hear how you understand despair, but to me it kind of is this overwhelming feeling you get when a bad scenario is perceived as being unavoidable in a way. Like when people say the world is ending – this kind of fatalistic mentality, and it leads to inaction. And so I guess, hope would be the opposite – it’s when an adverse scenario is perceived as avoidable, and so it leads to action, I guess. And I was wondering how much sense that makes in response to Covid, but also in response to all the shittiness that’s going on in the world, climate change, things like that. Climate despair is quite common these days. But I think it kind of ignores the fact that it’s not really dichotomous in that way. It’s not the world ends, or doesn’t end, it’s like a spectrum of possibility with each increment leading to progressively awful consequences. And I don’t think inaction should ever be justified, but it also feels like despair of a kind is warranted. I get feelings of despair when you read the news, and it is tempting to fall into this mindset of, Well there’s nothing we can do. But I think if you ignore the fact that there isn’t these dichotomous outcomes, and the more we do, the less bad it’s going to be. It’s just something I have to keep reminding myself of, I guess.

C: I was thinking about how in French, the word despair is – at least, I think it’s désespoir, which is written as if it’s the opposite of hope, so hope is espoir. So it’s like the inverse of hope. But I’ve never thought of despair and hope in English as opposites, but obviously that makes sense.

Z: Yeah, I think I read that in an article, so it’s not my thoughts. I was also looking up definitions on Google and they kind of seemed to be opposites. Yeah, it’s just that link – like, hope leads to action and despair leads to inaction which I found interesting.

C: Yeah, it’s interesting thinking about action in terms of Covid. Because there aren’t obvious actions, and I guess, acting in a way that stops the spread is being as inactive as possible, and not doing something. I think, initially that was hard for people to understand and trying to get the message out when usually that would involve meeting, protesting, community, and then having to be together but physically not together, is a very novel concept I think.

Z: I think for a long time it wasn’t really clear what the right thing to do was. And I was feeling pretty useless for a lot of Covid as well. I used to do quite a lot of volunteering pre-Covid and that all got cancelled, so I felt like I wasn’t really doing anything. Yeah, you’re right, it’s not really clear how you can act, I guess, in a useful way.

C: Yeah, and it’s also easier when it’s not this invisible thing that you can’t track. It’s interesting with climate change, because that is also, to a lot of people, an invisible thing. Even though there are such clear reminders if you look for it. How do you feel about the government’s response to Covid in terms of how quickly it became important to deal with the crisis, compared to the climate crisis, how easy it is to look away from that?

Z: Yeah, I think the government’s response was pretty good. I think it’s all relative – like, we’re looking at Trump and Bolsonaro’s response, so Scomo looks pretty good in comparison. In terms of relating it to climate change, it does show that large-scale action is possible if the political will is there, so that’s kind of encouraging. But not sure how likely it is that that will continue.

C: I think one of the clearest things to me is seeing the money, and the capacity for change that the government has in terms of lifting the unemployment benefit, and being able to spend billions of dollars like that, when all of this money could have been spent to help people previously. But suddenly it’s important because the types of people who are out of work are not the usual types of people.

Z: It is getting a bit more concerning recently, especially as the restrictions are easing, and they’re cutting some of the benefits. I find it interesting how there’s all this talk of like a snap back to things the way they were. But I think a lot of people would say that’s not what we want, we kind of want to snap forward and change the way we do things. There was a lot of injustice in the ways things were before.

C: Yeah, I guess the optimistic way of looking at things is, like, surely it can’t get any worse, hopefully next year we’ll grow from this. But it’s unclear at the moment what’s going to happen.

Z: Yeah, growth is an interesting word. I think there’s a lot of opportunity to make good out of it. We’ll see whether that actually happens. It kind of links back to despair, in a way. I almost feel like I’m throwing up my hands, just being like, there’s nothing we can do, it’s all up to the government. I’m really trying to be more mindful that there is always something you can do. Little things, focus on the small wins.

C: In terms of your Honours and work, I imagine it’s affected how things have run a lot. Do you think you’ve learnt anything new from the disruptions?

Z: I think it’s really interesting because work flexibility for a long time has been seen as a women’s issue, I guess. It’s traditionally been seen as something women campaign for – more flexible work allows them to look after children, and all this stuff. But I feel like it’s changed the way I’ve thought about work flexibility. It seems like it’s something that affects all of us. I think there’s lots of instances like that where we can reframe these issues which we thought were affecting small minority groups – we can think of them as affecting all of us as well.

C: Do you mean in terms of working from home?

Z: Yeah, definitely. Also, like, the economic fallout from all this. I don’t know if you saw this article, but it says it has the potential to reverse decades of progress in terms of lifting people out of abject poverty. Which does make you question what we are considering progress, if it’s that precarious and can be reversed so easily.

C: I guess no one expected a global pandemic. Even though scientists did. Yeah, I think it’s interesting in terms of seeing how clearly education affects people’s opinions on this whole situation and how some people just don’t believe in science, and those usually non-mainstream beliefs being highlighted.

Z: Especially in the US.

C: Well yeah, you have a president who doesn’t believe in science. Which is just sad.

Z: Yeah, I find it really frustrating. You, as well?

C: Yeah, it’s just like, science is all we have! Gotta believe in it.

Z: I have quite a few friends like this, some are like anti-vaxxers, which is a bit scary. And we try and have these conversations, try and view them as best you can, but you really feel like you’re not getting anywhere, you’re just banging your head against the wall, which is really discouraging. I don’t know what to do. If you just make a good enough argument, and do it in the right way, then you change people’s minds, but it seems like you need more than that. I was speaking with someone last night, she’s one of the philosophy lecturers at Sydney Uni who also happens to be in our friendship group. And she’s doing work on just this, like promoting institutional change through affect. Like acknowledging the limitations of rational argument, I guess, and trying to take a different approach.

C: That’s super interesting.

Z: Sounds very difficult, though.

C: Yeah.

Z: It comes up quite a lot with climate change I think, we talk about transformed lived experiences, have you heard of that? The idea is, like, creating change through art, you have to make people feel it instead of just believe it. There is probably a sinister side to it, you have to appeal to people’s self-interests to get them motivated.

C: How do you feel about the rest of the year?

Z: Trying not to think too far in advance. Just take it day by day. It seems unproductive to try and make long-term plans at the moment. I’m good, I’ve got my Honours which I’m really enjoying and finding interesting, so I’ll just focus on that.

[johnboothus]

VinePair Podcast: What VinePairs Data Says About Current Drinks Trends

We’re far enough into July 2020 to get a handle on what drinking trends are defining this most unusual of summers. What’s even better than knowing what trends are big right now is whether they’re going to last — and if not, what will replace them.

That’s what Adam Teeter and Zach Geballe are digging into on this week’s episode of the VinePair Podcast, using VinePair’s proprietary Insights platform to help explain which trends will stick around, and why.

For example, were you aware that the No. 1 cocktail in American right now is the Margarita? And that tequila sales are spiking? What’s the reason for that? Can we expect to see some of that excitement carry over into adjacent spirit and cocktail categories, such as light rum and the Daiquiri?

Or maybe you’ve heard that Champagne is taking a beating right now. Is there any hope for the iconic wine region and its eponymous bubbly? Tune in for answers to these questions and more.

Listen Online

Listen on iTunes

Listen on Spotify

Or Check Out Our Conversation Here

Adam: From Brooklyn, New York, I’m Adam Teeter.

Zach: In Seattle, Washington, I’m Zach Geballe.

A: This is the VinePair Podcast. Zach before we get into today’s podcast, let’s talk a little bit about our favorite rum, Goslings, who is bringing you this podcast. It’s a secret blend of three different distillates, each aged separately in once-used charred oak bourbon barrels. Goslings Black Seal Rum is the key ingredient in Bermuda’s national drink, which you and I spoke about a little bit early, about a month ago, the Dark ‘n Stormy. It was originally offered in Champagne bottles sealed with black wax, from whence comes its name.

Z: Spoiler alert for upcoming episodes, it’s good that they no longer need to use empty Champagne bottles because there’s a lack of them on the market right now.

A: There is. It’s a dark rum that still possesses the same, smooth, rich, intricate flavor as the original flavor from the 1850s. It’s still slowly aged in small batches, and it was awarded the highest award, the Platinum Medal, in the Beverage Tasting Institute. For a limited time, you can use code VinePair at checkout at Reservebar.com and you’ll get $15 off your Goslings rum order. I’m definitely going to have to make a Dark ‘n Stormy later.

Z: Oh, man. I might need one too after this podcast.

A: Zach, Erica is out on vacation this week. So, it is just you and me, like old times.

Z: Oh my gosh. Vacation? What is that? I forget.

A: I know. She went to a home that she’s rented in previous years in the Catskills, which is a very lovely place in upstate New York, so she’s having a good time.

Z: I’m pretty sure she’s not missing us at all if her Instagram feed is to be believed.

A: Exactly. It looks like she’s had some nice meals. She saw bear cubs. She’s had a good time.

Z: Yeah! So, here’s a question for you that this prompts. Let’s say you are in possession of a very specific kind of magic where you can safely travel wherever you want and be reasonably safe. Where would you most want to be in the U.S.?

A: In the U.S.? I was hoping you’d ask that. If you said the world it would be hard. Geez.

Z: I mean right now. Not any time of year.

A: Are restaurants open or not?

Z: You can dine outside. It’s not fully back to normal. You’ve got to fold into that that you don’t necessarily want to go somewhere that’s known for its many great, crowded nightclubs if that would be your choice. You can have a nice meal that would be presumably outside or something like that at least.

A: Honestly, I think I would go to the Outer Banks, in North Carolina, because I like to be at the beach. Although everything happening in the South right now scares me in terms of the levels. If we’re still saying we’re in Covid times, I don’t know if that’s where I would go. Or, the area of the country where Erica has gone. The Catskills area is very cool. There’s a lot of really amazing restaurants and things happening. There is some outdoor dining happening. There’s still water. For me, I want to have access to water. That’s summer for me. I would hope that whatever house I rented had a pool. The only reason I wouldn’t say the western coast of the U.S. is that I’m assuming I still have to drive there.

Z: Oof.

A: That’s too long of a drive. I am thinking about a vacation potentially in August, going down to either Virginia or Maryland. Something like the wine country area of Virginia. I’ve talked to a couple of producers about visiting them. I’ve been looking at rental properties for a week with Naomi. I don’t know if that’s something that I’ll end up feeling comfortable doing. Right now, I’m at least thinking about it. I would meet my parents. They would come up halfway. Who knows? What about you?

Z: The place that’s near that I would want to go to is the Oregon coast, especially a little bit further south, not all the way down to California, but closer to the border. It’s really beautiful there. It’s a little bit warmer than the Washington coast, which can also be lovely this time of year. It feels far enough away that it’s special. There are also some amazing golf courses out there, which is one of the few things that I will be doing this summer to have some outdoor enjoyment. That was my trip. It’s also the kind of place where you can find places to rent that have full kitchens. With a kid, it’s hard to think about dining out as being anything other than incredibly stressful. It already is with a child, and then when you add Covid on top of it, it’s just not worth it to me.

A: Is that area of the Oregon coast, it is “Goonies” land, like we discussed with Dan?

Z: Not far from there.

A: Interesting. I think the idea of being close to water or near something, a place where you can get fresh stuff, that’s also the appeal of places like the Catskills. They have all this fresh trout. Where my wife is from in Lancaster, Pa., is also a pretty cool place to get away for a little while because it’s a nice town with really good restaurants. We wrote an article about Lancaster being this big foodie destination for chefs and spirits writers recently. They have the country’s oldest farmers’ market.

Z: Oh!

A: It’s really cool. It’s right in the center of town. It’s in an actual food hall. It’s the oldest and longest operating market in the country.

Z: Interesting.

A: I never realized this. It’s actually the country’s breadbasket, they say, east of the Mississippi. There’s all this fertile land. There’s tons of farms. If you’re a New Yorker listening to this podcast, you probably wonder why you see, “These tomatoes were from Lancaster County. This chicken is from Lancaster County. This meat is from Lancaster County.” It’s a really fertile area. It’s really cool. There’s a lot of things to do outdoors. You could go to some restaurants, but if you were looking for just access to really great food supplies so that you could cook yourself, you’d have that access, which makes it great.

Z: I’m just fond of Lancaster, Pa., because that’s where I was from on my fake Pennsylvania ID that I used in college.

A: That’s hilarious.

Z: I don’t remember my exact address. For years I had it memorized, in case someone asked. Yes, I was from Lancaster, PA, according to my ID.

A: Speaking of fake IDs, have you seen all these news reports that this is a hot time for people to be buying underage alcohol because they’re wearing masks? People can’t tell if they’re actually the face on the ID or not.

Z: These are the things that do give me hope for the future. Right? You know what, take this opportunity to make yourself look 70 years old, wear a mask, and yeah, go buy your $11 bottle of vodka. Have fun.

A: It’s hilarious. I’ve seen it. Look, I don’t support underage drinking, although I did partake in it. It’s just very funny. You always find a way. Let’s get into today’s topic which is talking a lot about the trends we’ve been seeing. I know you know this, and some of our listeners might be aware: Nine months ago, we launched this product as a part of the VinePair platform called VinePair Insights. If you’re more interested in learning about it, you can email prime@vinepair.com or podcast@vinepair.com. We’re more than happy to tell you more about it. The way the product works is that it pulls in 225,000 data points a day, in addition to 800 million data points from Google every year. It’s well over a billion data points that we’re looking at every year to predict trends in the alcohol beverage market. Looking at 65 different categories of wine, beer, and spirits, we look at where demand will be. We knew that we had this larger readership, so we thought we could use that to help understand what’s happening in the industry. Right now, all the industry really has is sales data. We don’t really have a lot of demand data. As we’ve discussed previously, if there’s a demand for a product, when a product is in the market, you would never see that reflected in Nielsen data. If the product wasn’t there for people to buy then you would never know that it’s something that people want. This data shows you what people want, which is cool. There’s a lot of things we’ve been noticing since Covid, and I thought it would be fun to take this time to talk about some of the biggest trends we’re seeing, and try to understand why those trends are.

Z: It’s like back to the really old days, before Erica came in with all her facts and sourced data. We just talked about whatever we wanted to. This is just us shooting the sh*t. I like it.

A: Exactly. I figured it would be interesting to go through some of the things that we’re seeing and talk about where the opportunities are based on those things, what the causes are, and if we think they’re turning around. The biggest thing, which is interesting, is that the Margarita has become the cocktail of the year. It’s always been one of the most popular cocktails in America. Tequila, as a spirit, has become far and away the No. 1 spirit in America in terms of demand. We’ve seen double-digit growth since April. It’s continuing. It doesn’t show any signs of slowing down. This would be the time of year when you’d start to slowly see a shift into the brown spirits, at least into the next month. We don’t see that happening, at least based on the data. That’s really interesting. I’ve always known that tequila is something that’s very popular in America. It’s crazy to see that it’s taken this much of a boost from the fact that Covid has existed. I’m curious. What do you think is this reason for that? I think back to an episode of this podcast we did almost two months ago at this point, talking about what we expected to see in the summer. All of us were on board with the idea of some combination of fruit, blended drinks, and spirits like tequila, and I would’ve thought lighter rums would’ve been in this category in particular, things that people associate with summer and with escapism. So much of what we’re seeing in everything, is that most of us are house-bound or nearly house-bound. If we’re traveling, we’re traveling locally. We’re not getting on a plane and going to the Caribbean. We’re not getting on a plane and going to the Pacific Islands. We’re not going to Hawaii. All these things that people in our minds we associate with tropical, summary exoticism. It makes total sense to me that those things are booming. The other part of this is something we’ll see continue through all of these trends in some sense, is the Margarita at its core, a pretty easy drink to make. It’s pretty hard to mess up too badly. Even if you don’t get your ratios right, it’s a pretty forgiving cocktail. That’s a huge deal when you’ve got people who are suddenly facing their cocktail consumption being largely at home. I can’t say it surprises me when I think back on it, but I don’t know that I would’ve expected tequila and the Margarita to be the clear winner in this category.

A: Another point from the data is that we didn’t see rum start to grow until June. In those early months when tequila was still exploding, so April and May especially, rum was actually down year-over-year. Demand for rum started to grow in June. Now we’re seeing it up 15 percent year-over-year. It continues to expand. I think that will continue to grow as well, predictively. It is interesting that tequila came earlier and has sustained that growth longer and continues to see growth trends. You’re right. A lot of it has to do with escapism. For me, it also can’t just be about the beach. I, like you, think a lot of people do think of rum cocktails when it comes to the beach. I think that may also be reinforced when we discuss what we also thought about when we discussed frozen cocktails a few months ago, which is that they are difficult to make. They are intimidating to a lot of people. I’ve tried to make frozen cocktails a few times this summer, and I feel like every time I haven’t nailed it. I just want to be back at a bar where they have an actual slushy machine, and they can make it with the proper consistency, so that it’s still delicious. Sometimes my ice is too chunky. Sometimes it’s too watery. As you’ve said, the Margarita is a fairly simple cocktail to make. There’s a lot of variations. That’s what’s very interesting to people about the Margarita. It can be spicy. It can be heavier on the triple sec or the Cointreau. You can go super high and use Grand Marnier. You can add different fruits to it. You can have a Watermelon Margarita, a Peach Margarita, a Blueberry Margarita, or a Blackberry Margarita. There’s so much to it that I think that’s what’s allowed it to explode in the way that it has. I think there are certain recipes of the Margarita where the tequila is extremely important. A Tommy’s Margarita is one of those. That’s why I’ve been drawn to it so much over the last few months. There’s a little bit of agave. It’s really about the quality of the tequila and lime juice. That’s it. It’s much more in its pure form in the same way you can tell if it’s a good rum or a bad rum in a perfect Daiquiri. A lot of these Margaritas that we’re talking about, these super-spicy Margaritas, where you’re taking three jalapeños to the face, or some of these crazy blueberry-watermelon Margarita versions, the tequila doesn’t matter as much. There’s less intimidation of buying the right brands. There’s less pressure of buying the right brand or style. You just take the tequila on hand, find a recipe, and done. That’s what makes it so appealing to so many different people.

Z: There’s also this other factor going on. If you are at the grocery store, a liquor store, or shopping online, there’s this thing that happens with people where they see that they need to get liquor. Maybe they like vodka, gin, a brand of whiskey or a specific kind. Tequila is the kind of thing you see and you think, “Should we get a bottle of tequila?” Someone inevitably goes, “Well, I like Margaritas.” The reason that tequila has had that and rum hasn’t is that it doesn’t have the drink that immediately jumps out. I love a Daiquiri. In some ways I prefer a Daiquiri to a Margarita. I’m definitely not the average drinker. For me, I can think of a lot of applications for a bottle of rum. A Rum and Coke, that’s not something everyone wants to drink. As we’ve heard from lots of people we’ve had come on the podcast and talk about rum, that’s really not the optimal way to enjoy it. The question for people is, it’s harder to make that transition. Maybe what we’re seeing now is people have gotten more comfortable and interested in trying new things. Rum is the next logical stepping stone. That’s why it took until June and July for sales to pick up. Whereas tequila, you have the Margarita. If you ask people to name cocktails, it’s going to be one of the first ones that almost everyone names. That makes sense to me that that’s been where the average person has been comfortable branching out or continuing to buy.

A: Another point of data that has been really interesting to watch is what’s happened to Champagne. This is not just reflected in demand data. It’s also being reflected in sales data. Although, I think our demand data is showing that this isn’t going to be let up any time soon. Champagne continues to plummet. There’s very little demand whatsoever out there for Champagne. It’s depressing for a lot of people, especially people who work in that side of the business. It’s been hard on some companies that rely on Champagne for a good portion of their revenue. It’s sad that it doesn’t seem to be turning around any time soon, and it may not until the holidays. It just all depends on where we are as a country when it comes to Covid and whether we feel like celebrating at all this year or not.

Z: I was going to say, it may be Nov. 3 for some of us.

A: Oh, right! Exactly. Exactly. Although, I’m not going to make that mistake again this year because my wife still blames me. She says I jinxed the election.

Z: That makes sense. That’s definitely within your power.

A: I did get bottles of Champagne, and I had them ready to go. I was so excited that we were going to elect her, and it didn’t happen. My wife said we never should’ve had the Champagne. We got ahead of ourselves.

Z: Is Naomi a sports fan? Man, she sounds too much like me as a sports fan.

A: She said, “We should’ve done it. I knew we should’ve done it. We were so excited.” We looked at the polling data! Who knows if it’ll turn around? We’ve used a few theories before on the podcast. We talked about the lack of celebration. Do you think that’s really why it’s not turning around still? Is it just that people still don’t want to celebrate? At the end of the day, there are some decently affordable Champagnes, especially given a price point that people are still paying for other things that we still see them willing to pay for. Why is Champagne not rebounding at all?

Z: There’s a couple of reasons here. The first one I’m going to throw out is just making sh*t up. I apologize if I’m totally wrong. It’s just a hunch. One part of the challenge for Champagne, is that people are scared to open bottles of Champagne. The actually sparkling wine bottles. Maybe this isn’t backed up because they’re still going through the same amount of Prosecco, Cava, and all of that. There’s something a little intimidating about opening a sparkling wine bottle at home if you’re not used to doing it. It feels explosive, literally. That may be something that makes people uncomfortable, in a small enough way that when they’re at the store, and they’re deciding what they want to buy, or they’re about to check out online, they may go, “Well, maybe I don’t want that bottle of sparkling wine. I’ll buy a bottle of Cabernet instead, or two bottles of rosé. The other part to this comes back to the celebratory aspect. The other part is, you open a bottle of Champagne, and this is true for all sparkling wines, but I think that unless you have a sparkling wine stopper, it’s harder to re-cork. You can’t re-cork a bottle of Champagne with a Champagne cork. You have to put another cork in it, preferably an actual stopper that’s designed for sparkling wine to keep it around if you’re not going to drink it all. While you and I can probably go through a bottle of wine with our families, no problem, in a given evening, for a lot of people, that’s not what they’re doing on a weekday basis. Again, a sparkling wine bottle, especially an expensive sparkling wine bottle, like Champagne, feels like, “Am I really going to drink that?” It’s a wine that I want to share with eight other people, not a bottle I want to have by myself or with my significant other.

A: I do actually think as I’ve looked at this data, that it really is all tied to this amazing branding and marketing that Champagne has done over this last, you know, multi-decades century, that has connected it to being this premium brand that is for good times and celebrations. Prosecco is growing. I think this is an opportunity for Prosecco to get in front of people even more aggressively than it has before. Prosecco is a product that can be consumed on its own but it’s also a product that works really well in a lot of these refreshing summer cocktails that make you feel like you’re escaping. I do think that a lot of people don’t really associate Champagne with escape as much as some sort of monumental occurrence in their lives. I have memories of drinking a spritz in Italy. I have memories of having a glass of Prosecco sitting outside somewhere. I don’t really with Champagne. With Champagne, it’s always been because of an anniversary, or someone graduated from a doctoral program or masters program.

Z: Or you’re stuck going out with a bunch of sommeliers.

A: Well, I don’t do that very often. That doesn’t happen. Also, Champagne is expensive. The reason I brought that up is because there are a lot of sections of the wine business and the alcohol business in general that, even during Covid, are growing and doing fine. You look at the two sectors of wine that are still continuing to expand in the off-premise, and it’s wines that are $20 or $25, and wines that are $25 plus. Maybe some people would be willing to trade up once in a while for Champagne, but I think it really does boil down to the fact that you only trade up for that when it feels like the good times are rolling. Right now the good times really aren’t rolling. What would be the reason to open that wine? Besides, yes, you being out with sommeliers who are saying it’s the greatest wine ever to exist in the world and we should drink lots of it. Besides that, you’re really not seeing it. I’m sure that means that there are a lot of people getting really great deals on Champagne right now, or there’s probably allocations that used to exist that probably don’t right now. There’s just so much of it not being consumed. It’s very interesting. It’s one of these products that’s done such an amazing job of positioning itself in a way that should always be a strength. This is one of those times when we’ve never seen a global pandemic before. You just couldn’t plan for it. There’s no one that thinks that there’s good times happening. Maybe a few people, but not a lot.

Z: Definitely not here in the U.S. Maybe Champagne sales are doing OK in Europe at this point.

A: Right, exactly. Another thing that I think has been interesting to look at is the continued growth. You know what I’m going to say, of hard seltzer. It just isn’t stopping. I also find that to be really interesting. I have a few theories on that as well that I think are reinforced by things we’ve already seen. It’s propping up the entire beer category at this point. It’s hard seltzer’s growth that’s continuing to allow for a lot of these breweries to be OK in a Covid world. It’s crazy, and something I think no one thought was going to be possible a year ago. Even in the fall, people were saying, “This can’t last.” Our data showed that it was going to last, but you had a lot of people writing pieces in publications that are not ours saying, oh, it was going to die, be a phase, or go quiet in the winter. And it never did. I think that now there’s certain things happening in our world that are reinforcing why people are choosing seltzer instead of other things. I’m curious. Have you drunk any seltzer in quarantine? Or are you a seltzer person at all at this point?

Z: Not the hard seltzer. I just finished a can of LaCroix as we were recording here, as I muted my mic. For a lot of people, there’s just a lot of emphasis on comfort and on ease when it comes to alcohol at this time. Again, one of hard seltzer’s greatest strengths is that literally all you have to do is open the can and drink it. It’s something that you could drink at 2 o’clock on a Saturday afternoon. You can drink it at 9 o’clock on a Wednesday night. You can probably drink it on a Zoom all if you pour it into a glass. It looks like you’re having a regular seltzer.

A: Totally.

Z: It’s the anti-Champagne. It doesn’t have any one specific use case. You can drink it any time. For people shopping right now, that’s really important. I did an interview with Jake Kirsch, the guy who’s the VP of innovation at Anheuser-Busch.

A: Yeah, that was a good interview.

Z: Thank you! It ran last week. We were talking about a lot of things that his job involves. One of the things that he was talking about was that even more than before, they’re seeing a ton of demand for variety packs when it comes to hard seltzer. It’s no surprise. It’s the same thing with non-alcoholic seltzer. People want to be able to have things on hand that are really easy. You just have it on hand and pull it out of the fridge and pull it out a couple of hours later. It gives a few options. They’re super simple, predictable, and safe. For most of us, if we’re going to do drinking outdoors, whether it normally would have been at a restaurant or bar or patio, or in the outdoors more generally, that’s seltzer’s sweet spot, even if it does well year-round. It’s going to be in those outdoor settings. People are still hiking around here at least. This is the prime use case for this drink. People are definitely still trying to do those things as much as they can, when it’s permitted and where it’s possible. I’m not surprised. Is there anything in the data you find that’s surprising?

A: Not surprising. I’m not surprised that seltzer is surging. I think there’s other reasons besides the ones you mentioned, which are good and valid. It’s also worth mentioning that the variety pack seltzer is the No. 1 SKU for almost every seltzer producer, which most people wouldn’t realize. It’s interesting that most consumers aren’t going out and saying, “Oh, I love Black Cherry, and I want a full Black Cherry pack.” Most people want that variety, which is really interesting. I actually think a lot of it has to do with calories. The people that I’ve talked to that have become really avid seltzer drinkers, and it almost always comes down to calories, especially in Covid, where a lot of us are less active than we used to be. For me, my daily commute was walking a little over a half mile to get to a subway to get on, then walking a little over a half mile from that subway stop to my office was a mile walk in the morning, a mile walk home. I usually ran errands. I was probably walking two-and-a-half or three miles every day, just getting to work and doing stuff. I was carrying bags. Other people were running more. You also have a lot of people in certain places of the country, especially where mask-wearing is mandatory as it should be, who aren’t running as much because they don’t want to wear a mask when they run. It’s uncomfortable. Then you’re watching increases for these apps like Peloton, and people bring that into their home, thinking about trying to exercise in whatever way they can. People are drinking more regularly. They’re not just drinking two nights a week, or four nights a weeks, they’re drinking seven nights a week. Some of those nights, people are wanting to watch the calories going into their bodies. People are going for hard seltzer instead. I do think that’s playing a huge part in a lot of people’s decision to look at that. Again, it’s one of these benefits that seltzer always knew that that was going to be one of its sort of key selling factors when it came on the market, was this calorie count. Again, a benefit that they’re now seeing, it’s why they’re selling more than a lot of other products. It’s very clear that it is this low-calorie product that gets you just buzzed enough to take the edge off, but not too buzzed. It doesn’t make you feel as guilty as if you pounded a double IPA, or finished a bottle of wine. It doesn’t make you feel that way in a lot of ways. People are really paying attention to it, which is interesting. You’re going to see more. Watch. You’re going to see a lot more calorie-conscious drinks products come out in the next year or so because this is proving a huge point, that a lot of this country cares about that.

Z: As you pointed out, that was the case even pre-Covid. Now, for so many of us with our routines around fitness, around dining and eating, all of those things being so disrupted, it’s definitely the case that that’s something that’s higher on everyone’s mind, or more everyone’s mind. Given what the scale said this morning, I might need to start incorporating some of this hard seltzer.

A: Think about it! Even if you don’t live in a place where you walk to work like we do here in New York, you probably had a gym routine or something that’s been completely changed because most gyms are closed.

Z: I used to spend my work nights on the floor or a restaurant walking around. I definitely have noticed the lack of that amount of activity affecting my health in various ways.

A: This is our last data point for the conversation. That’s why I think it’s really exploded, on top of all the other things. It’s tasty, there’s a variety there. It speaks of summer and being outdoors. It’s easy. You can hide it during Zoom calls. All of that. I really think that this idea of health when all of us are also making sourdough bread is why people are really embracing it the way they have. Well, Zach, this has been really interesting again. I think in three months we can revisit this. With Erica back from vacation we can visit some other data points. If this is data that’s interesting to you, feel free to email us at podcast@vinepair.com or prime@vinepair.com if you’re really interested in the data and getting more access to it. There’s a lot of stuff that we’re seeing that’s really instructive as to what people could be doing to take advantage of a market that’s very volatile at this point in time.

Z: Absolutely.

A: Alright, man! I will talk to you next week when Erica is back. Until then, be well. Have a great weekend. For those listening to this on Monday, I hope you had a great weekend. We will see you again next week!

Z: Sounds great.

A: Thanks so much for listening to the VinePair Podcast. If you enjoy listening to us every week please leave us a review or rating on iTunes, Stitcher, Spotify, or wherever it is that you get your podcasts. It really helps everyone else discover the show. Now for the credits: Now, for the credits. VinePair is produced and hosted by Zach Geballe, Erica Duecy, and me: Adam Teeter. Our engineer is Nick Patri and Keith Beavers. I’d also like to give a special shout out to my VinePair co-founder Josh Malin and the rest of the VinePair team for their support. Thanks so much for listening and we’ll see you again right here next week. The VinePair Podcast this week was sponsored by Goslings Rum. A secret blend of three different distillates, each aged separately in once-used, charred oak bourbon barrels, Goslings is the key ingredient for Bermuda’s national drink, the Dark ‘n Stormy. Originally offered in Champagne bottles sealed with black wax, from whence comes its name, this deep, dark rum still possesses the same, smooth, rich, intricate flavor as the original recipe from the 1850s. It’s still slowly aged in small batches, and Black Seal Rum was awarded the highest honor, the Platinum Medal, from the Beverage Tastings Institute. For a limited time, you can use code VinePair at checkout on Reservebar.com for $15 off your Goslings rum order.

Ed. note: This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

The article VinePair Podcast: What VinePair’s Data Says About Current Drinks Trends appeared first on VinePair.

Via https://vinepair.com/articles/vinepair-data-current-drinks-trends/

source https://vinology1.weebly.com/blog/vinepair-podcast-what-vinepairs-data-says-about-current-drinks-trends

[holyfrijolesmm-blog]

The Temple Visit to Fung Ying Seen Koon

During Jesse’s holiday break, we opted to take a day trip. Jesse did some research and came across a day trip to the New Territories region of Hong Kong. According to Wikipedia, it has about 9,450 people per square mile! Compare this to Yuma’s 784 people per square mile and Phoenix’s 3,165 people per square mile. Yowza! This territory was leased and given back to China in 1997. We live in Shenzhen (Shen-Jen) and are able to see this part of Hong Kong across the bay. Jesse shared with me that this part of Hong Kong is not the traditional part we might see with the familiar high rises, etc. in the movies.

We slept in and had our coffee and breakfast. We don’t have a coffee maker, but recently we had purchased these coffee kits for individual cups which were made in Japan and sold at Walmart not far from here. It’s a little filter bag that has a paper hook on either side to connect to your coffee cup. You just pour your hot water and you have yourself a nice cup of joe! We do have a hot water pot in China. This thing is freakin’ fantastic! You just add water and pop the button down and in less than a few minutes you have steaming water and then the button pops up and turns off automatically! I don’t know why I don’t have one of these at home as I use it for oatmeal, coffee, tea, or just to enjoy hot water and honey. I will definitely be getting one of these when I go home.

We went on the metro to Futian which is where we would walk across through immigration. The metro is super clean and new and has a flat screen on the inside with a little locomotive to show you where you’re heading next. Additionally, it has a barrier wall to ensure no falls into the tracks area, which I can appreciate after watching that one scene in House of Cards. The entrances have footprints to show you where to stand. Those entering are on the sides going into the car and those exiting go straight out. The train was full so Jesse and I stood most of the journey (I have to lean against a bar or hold on as I don’t have the coordination yet to go hands free) for what seemed to be an hour ride with a few metro line changes. Two observations I’ve made, is one EVERYONE is on their cell phones. We as a human race very much have this is common. I see WeChat screens that are familiar on occasion. Second, it’s very quiet and courteous. There are signs encouraging passengers to allow more fragile populations to have seats first and I’ve seen several younger persons offering seats to more elderly people or those with babies. The metro bathrooms are only squatty potties so I had to roll up my pants so I wouldn’t have any accidents. You will see rolled up pants in one of the photos. Oy.

Once we got to our stop we had to complete a “departure” card, which is a little postcard-like item where you list your address, passport and visa number and you take that and your passport and stand in line. I am notorious for choosing the wrong lines (aka slow), and indeed I chose wrong. The immigration person was very thorough, asking me to tuck my hair back, since it is shorter than in my passport photo and asked me my name twice to be said audibly aloud. After about two minutes, he finally stamped me through, and I waited passed the gate for Jesse. Jesse seemed to be in the line for about five minutes, which in immigration wait time feels like 30 minutes! Jesse was finally given the go ahead and we made our way to the Hong Kong metro. Jesse said I needed an “octopus” card so I could ride the metro in Hong Kong, so we purchased one of those, got some Hong Kong dollars, and made our way to the Fung Ying Seen Koon Temple, after only two stops on the metro. We walked from the metro station underneath a road toward our destination. The metro walkway path to the exit was lined with bike after bike! There were so many signs that said no bikes and that violators would be subject to fines, but that was not a very good deterrent. Were these bikes owned by people working in Shenzhen and living in Hong Kong? It’s hard to say.

Once we walked another minute or so we reached the temple. The temple was built in 1929 and is associated with Daoism. I’ve read two different stories about how it was named. It was either after two divine mountains or two islands. The first thing I noticed was all the steps leading up to a beautiful structure. It was a sight to behold with bright architecture in reds and bold blues. I loved seeing the animals depicted in carvings in stone or in ceramic flower pots. Despite bamboo poles all around, it was still a beautiful building. I am not very familiar with Daoism, but I’ve read in one article that people believe “The Way” to heaven is by living in harmony with nature.

I will say that the nature in China is beautiful. I am a true Arizona Gal. I love my sunny weather and mild winters. The winter here has been mild and there are so many trees and flowers everywhere. I love the fact that I can look outside my living room window and open the patio doors to see a beautiful mountainside full of trees. The other cool thing here is that many of the plants will have a plastic plaque tied on the trees with a picture and a QR code for you to scan and learn more about them. I still think that’s so great!! I grew up with a mom who had quite the green thumb so I was familiar with many flower plants, but there are many trees I don’t know about as I’m around mesquites and palo verdes mostly.

There are also aspects of Daoism where you provide “offerings” to deceased loved ones. I saw items such as food (meat and fruit), flowers, incense sticks, and other goodies posted at various locations in front of statues and near people’s pictures. Indeed, imagine a wall with perfect 8x10 black and white photos with names and dates lined up one after the other. The times there were no pictures there was a small cubby hole. I don’t know if ashes are behind the pictures but I noticed offerings in some of the cubby holes to include bowls of soup, bottles of spirits, and even some gummy worms! I told Jesse that he could bring me offerings of chocolate and margaritas. Hehe. As we walked up the steps we found our way to more steps and were able to see walls on the diagonal with photos and there was a little house or building up high on the mountainside so we ventured up. Along the way I saw a car made out of tissue paper on its own proper foundation of wire! I didn’t know what it was and thought it must have been from a parade or some event, but Jesse said it was an offering and was getting prepped to be burned in one of the many furnaces we saw around the temple. And wouldn’t you know it, but I found an article online that had a paper Mercedes as an offering! It is believed that once the item is offered and burned it can present itself in the after world. Man, I was thinking to myself that I would want Jesse to offer me a paper mache Nissan 350 Z. Can you imagine? I miss that car! Haha!

As we walked up more steps, the steps were uneven and seemed to be carved out of the stone. We arrived at a structure which was reminiscent of a gazebo. I imagined people dancing under the roof. The area was lush with trees and so calm the higher we walked up despite being on a busy roadway. You’ll see a pic of Jesse and I with the temple as one background and high-rises on the flip side. We finally came upon a small cemetery. Sometimes I get a little weirded out around cemeteries, but I didn’t find myself feeling weird at all, but I didn’t want to disturb anyone just the same, so I said a quick “peace be with you” and walked back down. We took a different route down and once again saw all these amazing walls with those beautiful black and white photos. The dates indicated people who died both young and old. I loved that all the photos were black and white. I also enjoyed seeing the older faces and sometimes younger faces of those who had lived a long time. I saw facial features that reminded me of my own dad and aunt. It was really interesting. I took some pics but I didn’t want to get too close to the faces as I didn’t want to be disrespectful.

Jesse and I made our way back to another area and Jesse told me this pathway lead to a very special place. I thought we were going to visit another sacred area and he said it lead to the elevator! Haha! So I gladly accepted the relief from taking more steps.

I really enjoyed this visit - much more than I had anticipated. I loved seeing the families in groups visit loved ones and bringing offerings. I loved seeing the staff take care of the temple by washing its floors and touching up paint on frames that would probably house statues. It was a beautiful place to visit, calm and serene. I hope you enjoyed my trip memories! I appreciate writing this blog now too, so that I can read about my adventures in years to come. :)

#templememories #Fairlady #NewTerritories

[baltics4engbergs]

Two days of London activity!

Well, I do have a lot to catch up on -- and amazingly, we head back to the U.S. tomorrow!  So, I am going to post a few entries over the next 24 hours, just to catch up on everything and then hopefully offer some concluding thoughts -- because I really do think I have had some impactful, really lasting experiences these last three weeks, and that we have had many strong memories created as a family, and I want to get those all recorded.  But, for now, let’s begin with D. H. Lawrence ;)

So, yesterday morning I gave my paper at 9 a.m.  I was in a room called “the conservatory” in the New College of the Humanities, which was kind of a sunroom, and given that there were two consecutive panels, and one was in the big, really prettier room upstairs, and had a colleague of mine in the study of the “American Lawrence,” whose name is Lee Jenkins (from Cork), on that panel, and she’s great, it sort of came as no surprise that my colleague Nancy and I that we didn’t have the hugest audience.  But, so many “big” names were in the room, and that was really great -- and our chair, Paul Eggert, is a big deal in Lawrence studies, and everyone is so generous and supportive with their insights, that whether the audience was large or small, we still got a ton out of the experience.  I can say I did, at least.  I spoke on Lawrence’s few weeks in London between December 1923 and January 1924, before his two stints in New Mexico, as importantly transformative to his outlook regarding national identity and what he calls “a non-human race of men,” which he desires the emergence of, somewhere outside of western Europe. Paul Eggert is the editor of the Cambridge edition of The Boy in the Bush and Twilight in Italy and so his feedback was particularly rich and spot-on and if I ever have the time to turn this paper into an article, what he offered me in his comments will enrich that essay for sure. 

After my panel, I walked a bit -- after chatting with Lee Jenkins outside for a sec in the really surprisingly warm London sun (did I mention how hot is has gotten these last few days -- and humid with no rain?)-- and I went around Russell Square, just beyond the British Museum.  I was heading to a Caffe Nero (like a Starbucks) because I needed a coffee and some catch-up time on my computer because I am so, so, so behind on email and have just been going nonstop and really needed to send off a few important messages.  On my way to the coffee shop, though, I saw a small library called the Weiner Library for the Study of the Holocaust and Genocide and it had like a sandwich board outside advertising an exhibition they had on right now, and I was like, well, I am curious, and it’s free, I think I’ll go in.  I never take impulsive turns like that, but I did, because I had a little “spare” time.  It was incredibly interesting.  I wish I knew more about the library itself, but I overheard that it was founded by a man who had been a refugee to Britain in WWII and that they have collected many histories (not sure if oral histories too?) of other Jewish (and presumably non-Jewish but also persecuted) refugees from that period. Anyway, the small exhibition on now is about the Nazis’ human experimentation. I of course knew this had happened, but I didn’t know many details, and I learned a lot just spending thirty minutes reading and looking in that library yesterday.  A very heavy but edifying drop-in that was.  I could offer more details about the experimentation, but it is all just pretty unfathomable, but horrifyingly true, and if you wanted, you could peruse their online formation about the exhibition, and learn a lot about about it, if you were compelled to learn more. 

So, I did get to Caffe Nero before too long and spent an hour catching up on email.  From there, I went back to the apartment to check in on kid-duty and the group of Eric, Alia, Rowan, and Cece were just coming back from the Regent’s Park zoo.  It was a hot day, as I mentioned, and they walked the 1.2 miles each way, and had played at a playground before, and then paid through the nose to go to the zoo, by which point the kids were already tuckered out, though they had fun at the zoo, so afterward they were at ragged edges, just being goofy and loco. I wish I’d been able to go to the zoo too!  From the pictures I saw, it looks like the zebras, giraffe, and penguins were all pretty cool -- but Eric did say it seemed like an “old” zoo.  And Alia, being spoiled by having the Detroit Zoo nearby with which few zoos compete (I think this and she does too), it wasn’t quite of that caliber, so to speak. But, they had some animals that were new to everyone, namely the Okapi.  I think this is what they were describing.  I’ve heard of this because Cece has an African Animals A-Z book and “O” is for Okapi in that book. They also had lemurs, which other zoos have for sure, but I don’t think the Albuquerque Zoo does, though maybe they do.  But Rowan loves the old(er) kids’ show Zabomafoo (I did too, but when I was in my 20s, haha!) and that show features a lemur. 

The kids had dinner and once they were ready for bed and were purportedly winding down, Alia took the reins because Eric and I had to go to the “wine evening” at the conference director’s house.  It was in a part of London I’d never been to, though it was just a little ways north of where I used to live in Marylebone.  

Ooops, I realized I forgot to mention one other adventure of yesterday-- the Engberg Family Adventure on the Double-Decker Bus.  I should call this also a Very Hot and Sweaty adventure.  Man, I had kind of forgotten how hot the top of a double-decker bus is on a really steamy London day.  Ugh.  But I wanted to ensure that Rowan had the double-decker bus experience he’d been wishing for -- and since days were few still remaining, we needed to do it.  We took the bus down Euston Road towards my old neighborhood and then we got off at Marylebone Station and walked over to Balcombe Street.  We saw the flat that my friend Lauren and I used to live in, for one great year, in 1994-1995!  Like everywhere in London, as I’ve noted, that area was incredibly busy, and somewhat spruced up.  It was always a nice area, but there were some renovated bigger buildings and they’d updated some of the row-houses on the street.  It was really nice to see and was kind of forceful for me, like having memories from twenty years come raining down on my head and heart, just standing there. 

Anyway, back to the wine reception: getting there was interesting! Eric and I used an Uber Pool to get there, and the guy who comprised our “pool” was a man who works for the Wellcome Collection and lives actually in Brighton, a two-hour train ride away, but during the week he stays with a friend in London.  He and his wife and kids used to all live in London, but it got too expensive for them to find a house with room and a garden that they were searching father and farther out and ended up just thinking, well, if we’re looking this far out, we might as well move to Brighton!  Anyway, he was super interesting.  He found out I was an English professor and he asked me a question which he framed in linguistics terms, about the capacity for words to contain basically ineffable concepts.  I connected to this through existential philosophy, and he then started employing ideas from Wittgenstein and asking me about Samuel Beckett.  It was like the most intellectually intense fifteen-minute ride-share I bet I’ll ever have ;)  And I joked about that, and then he reminded me that he’s just a Cockney from London, which made me laugh, because as he stressed and as I knew, Cockneys have attracted the most fame from their propensity for swearing and their use of a special “rhyming slang.”

Because Eric and I needed to get the kids to bed first, we ended up getting to the conference “wine evening” a bit late, but there was still plenty to drink, eat, and conversation to be had.  We ultimately found ourselves on blankets in the back garden with some of the graduate fellows, the conference director, the administrative assistant for the conference who’d made the food, a professor from Estonia, and a few others.  The most memorable moment was when one of their golden retrievers literally ate my hors d’oeuvre right out of my mouth.  Like, actually.  We stayed until about 9:30 and then went back to where we’re staying and went to the grocery store to get a bit of milk for our final day (with our kiddos, that is a necessity). 

Now, it is very late and we’ve leaving at 10 a.m. tomorrow, so I’d better sign off.  We’re staying overnight in New York tomorrow, so I will post a bit more about our final day, and I will post an entry I’ve already started that is an interview with Rowan about this vacation! I am sure you’ll want to tune in for that. 

[letruett1991]

What Does It Mean When An Ex Keeps Coming Back Incredible Useful Tips

If you want to cover some of you into depression.It's a sad fact of the dont's we covered so that she would immediately see that you take responsibility for the things you think that I had a chance of him whining that you have high hopes that the two things you were both to have him or her.What happened to be as supportive as you possibly possessive or even a curiosity as to what she will read far more into the trash.Instead of wallowing in self pity and treat you great for you.

You should neither call nor text her all the 3 ways highlighted above are follow.Or she might get desperate - none of it, so she wouldn't be intimidated.Do some research and find a nice package which explains exactly what happened and figure out what the doctor ordered for you to get my ex and I still do.Breakups may sometimes leave you feeling insecure.A good plan to win your girlfriend back, I told you that I thought I'd spend the rest of your ex.

A breakup can lead to the plan be renegotiated?This tactic has failed to recognize her devotion to your ex.Not only that, but I believe that anything they want.Just because you might want to just move on?Most long-term successful relationships have gone wrong and why these reasons are not, for most women.

This is why it happened all you can get your ex may be seen in my life.Treat it as a few things that you definitely want to save a broken relationship.Giving him space so that nobody gets hurt.However, you should also accept that he still loved each other.But at least what you miss each other all over the board everyone's situation is stuff like we did say these words to say to get back into your life real fast...

We've all been through this section of How You Can Help HimYou have to be better if you can't stand having someone else in his face.So, what do you convince her to want to get your girlfriend back by arguing.If you really wish let them know how to get your ex back now?And months down the wrong path, this was not thinking with a break-down is making the effort you will get their advice on how to win her or him have their reasons and that there's little or no stress at all.

Yes, I am, for the sake of argument, but rather something that I am the guy all of those reasons before you pick it up.It is often committed by bitter people who have experienced a break up.They will feel that your self confidence and strength.Be friendly to them at the beginning and be bringing back all the sudden shock of being patient if you were wrong.This will stir up jealousy and want to consider:

You're just going to have anything to get your ex girlfriend back.She has to do is find out where he would go on living without her.However, during these 30 years, both of them.As I'm sure you didn't want to hide in their men to be taken cared of, and worse believes in, is to use a variation such as a group, what we want, it's a very hard to do is rush back in just 17 days!These guidelines that I can no longer appealing to any online search engine and enter look for some time.

And if you're depressed all the problems that you may even dawn on her a lot of listening and give the other way around.Now you have ever found are step back and uncover if he does, it won't always be like an anniversary.Of course, you aren't trying so hard to do.Once those words fell from her family and friends, a good thing is for sure that in some situations, it's a perfectly good idea at all.Carelessness on either account unless you have a few weeks, until one of the steps above they will have a better chance of getting back together.

How To Get Back With Your Ex Sims 4

How long this is normal too, since someone took a step by step plan from A to Z helping you every time you do know how to get your ex may not happen the same way after the break-up.Are you left off you have shared together.You don't know whether the product that I listed below will help you win her back.But, we rarely get advice on getting your ex back because you are going to get, but it will surprise her, and what you are capable of contacting her and that you aren't interested in doing things with him.Not because of previous experiences in their life.

So the question is do you any more, I will get to work.Knowing this you should stop yourself from them, you don't need anymore of those, do you!You will never know for sure your sincerity and changes.Since you know if you cut back on track first.He was so desperate to get an ex back, you want to know how to keep her there in this article and understand Investments.

You want your ex positive steps toward change in your position, but I felt like a challenge.The third things is going to take a look at the roller coaster emotions that they might not be together it will be dying to meet up with you?Do what she needs some room, or space to think - to attract sexual partners.These spells can bring two lovers together forever.Once you get back with your friends or through the cycle of repeated rejection and well-worn paths of anger or she is doing the very least open to discuss things in an argument, this is going to help him heal his wounded feelings.You must understand how important it is important for you during this time has passed we sometimes still find it hard to keep her with all the wrong things and thinning your chances even more.

To put it to happen and the fantastic times you guys parting is indeed possible to work out in this world is a very high right after the break up.I'm not going to give her, just to check in on my spouse.In this article and understand Investments.Yes, I am, refused to meet you by fading into the author.Once you have enough good friends to sustain you through this.

Whatever it was a time of economic trials and tribulations?You have to do is start smothering her after the breakup.How would it feel to not only salvageable, but they have a couple weeks.If you want to avoid if you become too close to you.If you have plans for the same rhythm ever so slightly.

Right now your main aim is getting your girlfriend back?It isn't easy for you depending on the details that you hurt your ex.To keep her with the advice that men make when trying to invent methods by yourself , most suited to your girlfriend.This could mean the difference in whether or not you will have a long-term relationship with her as if you've been thinking about the time to cool down before you act.At first things you enjoy and start to feel better and it is sound advice that you are trying to call her, or call him back but are not sincere.

Pull Your Ex Back Manual Free Download