#also also just noticed this is in french but it's fine the template is the same for everyone you all will understand

[parlerenfleurs]

J'ai publié 1 910 fois en 2022

C'est 1 200 billets de plus qu'en 2021 !

289 billets créés (15%)

1 621 billets reblogués (85%)

Les blogs que j'ai le plus reblogués :

@yevrosima-the-third

@layzeal

@parlerenfleurs

@tradebabybluetomorrows

@unpretty

J'ai étiqueté 1 804 billets en 2022

Seulement 6% de mes billets ne comportaient pas de tag

#bloom talks - 193 billets

#mdzs - 189 billets

#svsss - 139 billets

#art gallery tag - 122 billets

#wangxian - 96 billets

#tgcf - 73 billets

#rote - 68 billets

#wei wuxian - 53 billets

#mdzs fanart - 49 billets

#feel good tag - 47 billets

Longest Tag: 140 characters

#(i still haven't finished 2ha and since it is licenced now i have no idea if things turn out better after the goodnight mo ran moment ahhhah

Mes billets vedette en 2022 :

n°5

Big fan of how Tianlang-Jun thinks his son and nephew are getting it on with the same guy at the same time and is like: This is fine :) I'm totally accepting and full of tolerance. I love humans! :)

And he means it.

678 notes - publié le 7 août 2022

n°4

I don't know if I'm reaching with that one, but it is established rather quickly that Lan WangJi is determined to mirror Wei WuXian's actions in his first life back at him when he has the means (for instance, the carrying on his back thing, or teasing him with "I do not know" as a call back to the "whatever" moment).

And just as it was a mystery to me why Wei WuXian, during the Yiling date, would entice A-Yuan with toys only to not buy him any, setting him up for disappointment, but I came to understand that it was actually a setup for Lan WangJi to buy it so that A-Yuan would like him (!!!), there is a kinda similar situation that crops up in the present, that was puzzling me but became clear to me on this re-read.

When they come out of Yi City, Wei WuXian is quite depressed and despondent. He has just witnessed Xiao XingChen's sad unlucky fate, and it reminded him very strongly of his own. And the juniors are all sad too, and want to burn paper money, and, sure, HanGuang-Jun is lenient and will let them express their emotions, but he's not that lenient, to let them do something improper/impolite like doing this in front of someone's house, when it is considered unlucky.

Yet, he does nothing, until Wei WuXian snaps out of his state and asks him if he's not going to do anything about it, to which Lan WangJi responds why don't you do it yourself.

And I think it was purposeful. Normally he would probably have told them - look at Lan SiZhui, that boy wasn't left to this own devices, someone taught him was what socially acceptable and didn't let him blunder through needlessly offending people until he figured it out himself.

But he saw the state Wei WuXian was in, and sought to distract him from it, by letting him notice and then handle the juniors' actions.

Clever HanGuang-Jun! He learned all of Wei WuXian's subtle tricks and is using them too!

773 notes - publié le 11 septembre 2022

n°3

In a way, in MDZS, Lan Sizhui is the key and answers to the big moral questions in the story: was it all worth it? Was it all worth it when Wei WuXian lost so much, even his life, when the Wens almost all died anyway, when there was so much collateral damage?

The narrative says: yes, it was worth it, because one child survived, and thrived. Look at that lovely, loveable young man! He is the reason all this was not for naught.

But what I find interesting is, Lan Sizhui is not even that exceptional, he doesn't make a big difference in the world, does he? He's still young, but despite his really good character and keen mind and aptitudes, he's not a genius, he's not renowned, he's not a Hanguang-Jun or a Yilling Laozu. He's just a kind, good-mannered, well brought up young man. Anyone would be happy to claim him as a son or a disciple or a son-in-law. But he's not some big game changer. Even though being a cultivator sets him apart from a good chunk of the normal population already, in his habitual context he's a normal kid. He makes friends, acts silly sometimes, hasn't slayed any Shuanwu of slaughter, got easily led into a trap by a trail of beheaded cats. A normal kid.

And that's important, because this reward is as the sacrifice Wei WuXian made. He didn't make some grand gesture for important people. He did what was right in his view, no more, no less. It wasn't for some greater good, even less for fame. It was simply what was right. And if you do what's right you're not really adding up and subtracting the wins and losses as in a giant thought experiment of the trolley problem. There probably would have been ultimately less death and suffering had Wei WuXian let the Wens to their misery and death quietly. There wouldn't have been a Lan Sizhui, but there would have been a Jiang YanLi, a Jin ZiXuan, and many people that got killed when they attacked him would have lived. But it wouldn't have been right, and so Wei WuXian doesn't think about it that way, and the narrative doesn't either. It tells you life is complicated, and sowing violence reaps more violence, and you can't always "win". But if you do your best, if you keep doing what's right, even if you are only human, and make mistakes, and everyone is against you, it still counts.

It counts. Not for the greater good, not for fame, it counts. Because the whole point is Lan Sizhui gets to live, and grow up, and be a normal kid and have a good life, and that's enough. He doesn't need to be or do anything "more" than that.

1 282 notes - publié le 25 mars 2022

n°2

It is lovely in MDZS how Wei WuXian essentially has the “male” role, in that he is the one pulling on Lan WangJi’s figurative pigtails, the one to give him flowers repeatedly, the one to say he’s pretty out loud and in his head all the time, and the one trying to get him to pay attention to him.

Lan WangJi, meanwhile, gets teased, looks pretty, receives flowers, gets embarassed, defaults to ignoring his crush to appear aloof and keep control, his chaste modesty is being scandalously transgressed via super-meaningful Lan ribbon and cold pond shenanigans, and he secretly keeps all the tokens of Wei WuXian’s affections

And also kisses him forcefully against a tree (but even then in the text and Wei WuXian's view, he's a "shy maiden") and fantasizes about shutting him up in a very specific way

Socially also, Lan WangJi is the pure and treasured daughter niece/sister, thematically, while Wei WuXian is the handsome devilish rake who "corrupts him"

And I find it hilarious how they both subvert everything I've mentioned above (by virtue of being extremely well-written characters who aren't confined to one stereotype but feel like real, complex, subtle people instead), especially after Wei WuXian's resurrection when their dynamic changes to become extremely funny more balanced

1 690 notes - publié le 16 août 2022

Mon billet n°1 en 2022

The power dynamic between Bingqiu is so complex and unhinged.

On the one hand, Shen Qingqiu is the Shizun, and Luo Binghe the disciple. He still pretty much serves and defers to him as such. Shen Qingqiu is the master, the elder, the superior, in a way that can never change in a culture so steeped in respect for such hierarchies, and where reversal or equalization is simply not a thing. Shen Qingqiu himself still refers to himself as "this master" for most of the story (even post canon? I can't remember), and the one quality he appreciates in Luo Binghe (at least that he says aloud) is his obedience. In both their minds, he's very firmly the one who raised and trained Luo Binghe - though with very different connotations depending on who you ask.

On the other hand... well... Luo Binghe plays the obedient puppy-ish disciple, but he pretty much cute/pathetic-bullies his way into anything he wants, because Shen Qingqiu is weak to him and can't say no. So Luo Binghe plays submissive, cries a little, then gets to top Shen Qingqiu into next Sunday in the most unfillial way imaginable lol. Also, and I cannot stress this enough, he's the most powerful person in the world, he doesn't have to serve anyone in a humble cottage. He literally has an empire and is a ruler, but he plays housewife and meek disciple to this one spoiled guy who gave him the correct manual once and head-patted him with abandon.

Also let's not forget that, to Luo Binghe, Shen Jiu and Shen Yuan are pretty seamlessly the same person. This serial head-patter is also the guy who poured hot tea on him and would string him up to beat him and made him sleep in the woodshed like a particularly miserable Cinderella. To him, one day, his cruel master deemed him worthy of his love after he made him go through many trials, and then slam-dunked him into the abyss, and then self-destructed to save him and then turned out to be alive and avoiding him like the plague and then sulked because Luo Binghe did not properly ask his hand in marriage. Luo Binghe may be the most powerful man in the world and have Shen Qingqiu wrapped around his manipulative golden little finger, BUT the grip and ascendant Shen Qingqiu possesses over Luo Binghe's psyche is unparalleled.

BUT the other side of this equation is that Shen Qingqiu feels so guilty, and loves Luo Binghe so much, he can't bear to make him unhappy and folds like a wet paper towel any time there is the merest hint of tears - which is a conscious strategy on Luo Binghe's part! Shang Qinghua told him acting pathetic works, and it does, and so he milks it! Who knows how much of it is real? Not me. Not Shen Qingqiu either, who also does not care that he's being manipulated. He knows he's being manipulated! But it works anyway!

Because what are you going to do when a cute puppy makes sad eyes at you?? Not give him the bit of meat???

You're his master but he owns your heart so that's your fate, now. He's huge and could maul you but he loves you too much and prefers to act spoiled. He sits when you say sit, comes when you say come. You tell him no but he climbs into your lap anyway and you are helpless to stop him so you pet him. It's messy, full of pathos, possibly unhealthy. You're both living your best life.

That's Bingqiu.

1 736 notes - publié le 18 octobre 2022

Obtenez votre année 2022 en revue sur Tumblr →

[somediyprojects]

DIY Paper Allium

Project by Kate Alarcón:

Alliums have always seemed a little bit magical to me. In a garden, the long, smooth stems blend in with the other greenery, and the big globes of tiny periwinkle flowers almost seem to float in mid-air. I imagine them growing in a fairytale garden, alongside foxgloves and moon flowers.

When I set out to design a paper version, I wanted to capture that enchanted, ethereal quality. I chose a very lightweight crepe for the petals, and constructed it so that each floret radiates out from a central ball on a long wire. This design gives each petal room to stand out from its little floret, uncompressed by the florets around it. I also scaled it up to be about the size of a large cantaloupe. The end result is a big, magical globe of delicate blue flowers that is almost a bouquet in its own right.

I wanted the flower to feel free-spirited, so I cut my petals freehand, which creates little variations between florets. Once you’ve cut several sets of petals, you’ll probably find that you don’t need the template anymore, either.

This allium isn’t especially difficult to make, but producing enough florets to complete the globe is a big undertaking. I suggest making them a few at a time over a couple of weeks while watching Netflix. You can insert them into the center ball as you go — it’s the safest place for them, and it’s motivating to watch your flower fill out.

If you run out of steam before finishing, don’t despair! My assistant Emma and I noticed that a partially covered flower looks a lot like a dandelion that’s been blown and wished on. And if that doesn’t do it for you, I’ve got just one of these guys up in my shop. —Kate

Photography by Desiree Swanson

Styling assistance by Emma Swanson

Supplies

allium templates here

Aleene’s Original Tacky Glue

fine crepe in “French Violet” from Rose Mille

heavy crepe in “Eggplant” and fine crepe in “Olive Green” from Castle in the Air

18 inch lengths of 18 and 20 gauge stem wire

paper scissors

wire snips

small awl

0ptional: millinery stamens that coordinate with your paper color (Rose Mille or 32° North for similar)

0ne 1.5” polystyrene ball (I buy mine at Michaels)

one 18″ length of vinyl tubing 3/8” outer diameter, ¼” inner diameter. (Home Depot and Lowe’s both carry it in the plumbing department)

A note about crepe paper grain:

The grain of the crepe paper runs parallel to the roll or fold. Crepe paper stretches horizontally, but not vertically, so you will almost always cut petals with the grain, placing the template so that the tiny wrinkles in the paper run up and down the template, not across. Cutting with the grain means that you cut in the same direction the crinkles are running; cutting across the grain means that you cut perpendicular to these crinkles.

For the stem:

Cut a 15” length of tubing at a very sharp angle. This pointy end will be the top of your stem, and you’ll insert the point into the polystyrene ball to help anchor the stem. Cut three of the 18 gauge wires so that they’re 16” long. Insert the wires into the length of tubing to hold your stem fairly straight while you wrap it.

Cut a long ¼” wide strip of the olive fine crepe across the grain. Dot glue at 1 cm intervals along the strip.  Just below the top edge of your tubing, below the sharp angle you cut, begin wrapping the strip around the tubing, holding it at about a 45-degree angle to the tubing, so that it spirals down as you wrap. For a smooth finish, hold the paper taught and slightly stretch it as you wrap.

If you need to add strips, just glue the end of one strip in place, and begin wrapping the next strip about ½” above where the previous one ends.

For the flower center:

Using template A, cut a small oval from the purple heavy crepe. Dot one side of the oval with glue, and then place it on the polystyrene ball. Stretch the oval around the ball, and hold it in place a few seconds to allow the glue to set.

On the opposite end of the polystyrene ball from the center of the oval you just applied, pierce the ball with your awl. Use your awl to widen the top of this hole by holding it at a 45-degree angle to the surface of the ball and moving it all the way around the stem hole.

Cut one template B from the purple heavy crepe. Make sure the grain runs up and down the template.  (The top edge should be zigzagged.)

Dot glue all over the purple crepe, including the points. Place the polystyrene ball about 2” from the bottom of the purple crepe piece. The points and the end of the ball covered by the purple oval should face up. Wrap the crepe around the ball, stretching it so that it molds to the ball.

Press and smooth the points down against the top of the ball. If there are any slight gaps between the smoothed down points, they will be camouflaged by your purple oval, and no white should show through.

Inserting the stem:

Pull the three 18 gauge wires out about four inches from the pointy end of the wrapped tubing. Insert these wires about 1” into the hole in your polystyrene ball. Slide the pointy end of your tubing up the wires, and pierce the hole with the pointy tip. You don’t need to insert the tubing very far; it just helps to have the tip anchored in the ball.

Gather the crepe “skirt” beneath the ball tightly around the stem and scrunch it to allow the glue to set around the stem. Dot a long ¼” strip of olive fine crepe with glue and cover this purple crepe skirt by wrapping the stem beneath the bottom of the covered polystyrene ball, until you meet up with the section of the stem already wrapped in olive crepe.

Floret center:

Snip your 20 gauge wire into 3.75” lengths. Cut a 1″ tall strip of the heavy purple crepe and stretch it all the way out as shown above. Cut this strip into sections that are wider than your template C. You can use the template C to cut this little fringe piece, or just freehand a similarly sized rectangle with three or four irregular points along the top edge. Dot glue along the bottom three quarters of this little piece. If you’re using double-headed millinery stamens, fold two of these stamens in half and place them on top of the jagged purple rectangle to make a little cluster of four stamens. Place the stamens on top of the little purple piece, so that the folded point on the stamens lies slightly below the middle of the rectangle. Place your short wire on top of the stamens, so that the tip of the wire lies slightly above the middle of the rectangle.

Wrap the rest of the rectangle loosely around your wire and scrunch the bottom to set the glue.

For the petals:

Cut a 2.25” x 3.75” rectangle of French violet fine crepe. The longer edge should run across the grain. Accordion or fan fold the strip (fold over, under, over, under) so that you have five layers of paper. Use the box around template D as a guide for how widely to space the folds (about ¾”). The fold lines should run with the grain and need to line up fairly precisely.

You should have a little folded packet of fine crepe about the size of the box around template D on the template sheet. Place template D on the packet, aligning the bottom of the template with the bottom edge of the packet.

The bottom right and left edges of the template D are marked with a dotted line that indicates that this section should not be cut, but rather aligned with the fold lines on your petal packet. Leaving this section intact on both sides will ensure that you have a continuous strip of petals.

In the photo, I’ve opened up my packet of petals to show what a continuous strip will look like, but you won’t actually open your packet yet. First, gently twist the bottom of the unopened petal packet. This will create evenly spaced crinkles that will make it easier to gather the bottom of the petal strip.

Untwist and open the petal packet. Make sure that each petal is facing the same direction and that none are twisted. Lay them side by side, very close together but not overlapping, across your forefinger, and then lay down your thmb to hold them in place. Pinch the width of the bottom of the petal strip to gather it. Dot glue on this pinched section and place your floret centers so that the top of the glue line is just above the bottom of the little piece of heavy crepe you wrapped around the tip of the wire.

Loosely wrap the gathered petal strip around the stamen wire. Adjust until the petals seem evenly spaced around the wire, and then scrunch the glued section of the strip around the stem.

Cut a ¼” wide by 4” long strip of purple heavy crepe across the grain, and dot it with glue. Beginning just under the petals, wrap the wire to about half an inch from the end of the wire, leaving a section exposed to help pierce the ball.

Push the petals back so that they lie perpendicular to the floret wire.

You’ll need between 80 and 100 florets depending on how densely you pack them into your allium.

Inserting the florets:

Beginning at the very top of the flower center, use your awl to pierce a hole in the covered polystyrene ball.

For extra security, you can dip the exposed wire on the end of your floret in glue before inserting it. (I usually don’t do this because it makes it hard to reposition the florets without tearing the paper covering the ball, but if your florets are falling out of the ball, then it’s probably worth it.)

Add a little circle of florets all around this first floret, spacing your holes about 1/8” apart. I don’t worry about being too precise with my hole spacing and just eyeball it, making sure that, overall, the florets look evenly distributed. Continue working downward, adding florets around the ball toward the stem.

The trickiest part of this project is adding the final florets around the base of the ball where you’ve inserted the stem, because you can’t push against the top of the flower to hold it in place while you insert the wires in the bottom. Instead, you can hold the stem firmly to anchor the ball while you insert the last florets up around the bottom of the ball.

[innuendostudios]

Thoughts on Even More Games

[vague, unspecific spoilers for Heaven’s Vault, Later Alligator, and Life is Strange 2]

Thoughts on Heaven’s Vault

Heaven’s Vault is a game about archeology, which means it’s also a game about incompleteness. This is very clever. Inkle - also the developers of 80 Days, which I will play someday! - specialize in deep narratives that can be explored many, many ways, allowing for a lot of player choice. You make a lot of small decisions - do you share a discovery with the trader in exchange for a valuable item, or hide it so he doesn’t plunder it? do you go looking for your missing friend, or let her stay missing in case there are people trying to follow you to her? These all have their own little arcs and resolutions, and there are so many of them, and so many ways they can play out, that the game can never be played the same way twice. The overall story begins and ends in the same place and theoretically hits the same major beats, but the journey is tailored broadly and finely to each player; it’s a style of design Aaron A. Reed refers to as “not... a branching tree but a braided rope.”

Making a narrative about archeology is how you dodge the exponentially complicated nature of that design: if there are dozens of locations, characters, plot threads, bits of color, which can be engaged with at many points in time, or ignored, or dropped by the player halfway through, how do you avoid telling a story full of gaps and dead ends? Well... you don’t. Having only partial information and having to infer the rest is what archeology is.

The protagonist of Heaven’s Vault, Aliya, is digging up the secrets of an ancient civilization, having been sent by her academy to find a researcher who’s gone missing, and stumbling into his incredible discovery. Everywhere she goes, there are holes: she has partial understanding of the researcher’s journey and motives; he, in turn, had partial understanding of the mystery he was uncovering, and Aliya has only fragments of his knowledge; the ancient texts she translates are usually fragments of larger works, and she is guessing at the meanings of many of the words; the game’s constantly updating historical timeline has entire centuries with nothing but question marks. Aliya arrives in a new location and wonders aloud to her robot companion about what this place was, when it was founded, when it was abandoned, how her predecessor found his way her and where he went next and what he took with him.

The constant feeling of discovery - of unearthing - is magnificent. Site after site, I asked, “What is this place?” Always thinking, if the eventual answer is any good, this is going to be one of the best games I’ve ever played. And, in the end, it doesn’t give you an answer, it just give you enough to make the story feel complete. It answers by not answering.

Also, translating alien texts is just extremely my jam. I’m the weirdo who enjoyed the ending of Arrival but secretly wished the whole movie had been about xenolinguistics like the first half. I guess Inkle felt similar.

The game’s by no means perfect. I think I enjoyed the sailing between worlds more than most - it’s slow, but very pretty - but it’s going to discourage a replay. I don’t think the relationship between Aliya and her robot, Six, ever gets terribly interesting. Some of the archeology is a little too obviously game-y - sail around, wait to find a random ruin, beam Six down to grab an ancient doodad, translate a bit of text, lo and behold it’s from one of the sites you’re looking for and it’s narrowed your search radius somehow. (It gives Star Trek explanations the first few times - e.g. “it has radiation that only exists in one part of the nebula” - and then stops bothering.) And the game sags a little in the middle; it could’ve hacked out 3 or 4 dig sites and still given me the same experience.

But, all told, there’s magic in it, and it just feels good to be there. Do not sleep on this one.

Thoughts on Later Alligator

There’s not a ton to say about this game except that is charming as hell. Lindsay and Alex Small-Butera have build a beautifully animated world of cute alligators, one of whom is having a birthday party where he’s convinced he’s going to be murdered. He wants you to run around getting information out of everyone who’s going to be there, which you get by completing minigames. It’s a cast of weird and funny characters with weird and funny dialogue and there’s not much more to it than that.

The design can be a little frustrating. Some minigames, if you lose, you don’t get to try again. Some are annoyingly finicky. You need to complete them all to get the true ending, which means, in my case, playing the game three times to complete all the bits you missed or got locked out of. The ending was a little different each time, so it wasn’t a total wash, but the game’s on a timer that only advances when you play a game or take the bus, and once you’ve completed most of the games there’s a lot of traveling back and forth from one nowhere to another just to advance time to the next unskippable plot beat.

(It’s also a little unclear what you’re missing as you try to get the final ending, as some of the ongoing puzzle are optional.)

But I can’t get mad. The game is too damn cute! Each character is lively and unique, with tons of personality, and the dialogue is just clever enough not to fall into empty adorkability.

It good.

Thoughts on Life is Strange 2

Somewhere, early in the development of Life is Strange 2, some Dontnod employee wrote in a design document “Episode 4 - cult?” (but in French) and nobody told them “no.”

I will not forgive them for this,

After twenty minutes of LiS2, I was ready to yell at everyone who had reported it was boring. It has one of the most powerful, gut-punching openings of any game I’ve played in recent memory. And all through the first, second, and third episodes, I was in love. Unlike Before the Storm, this was its own creature, willing to make dramatic departures from the original game’s template. Instead of controlling a character with supernatural powers, you play as the superpowered character’s older brother. The one with the magic is a 9-year-old, unable to fully understand or control his abilities, suffering a recent trauma, and needing to be guided through a dangerous and racist world. All the ambition missing from Before the Storm is back, and this time the animation isn’t creepy and the writing is wildly improved (thanks to some journeyman script work from Fullbright’s Steve Gaynor) and I even have a computer able to play it on higher graphical settings.

But nothing good lasts.

Everything good about the series screeches to a halt in Episode 4, the one where some asshole said “cult?” and didn’t get a Nerf football thrown at their head. And it’s not just that it’s a terrible idea; it’s actually sort of amazing how much the game relies on an alchemy of plot, tone, theme, and writing, and how a slight imbalance can throw the whole thing off. Episode 4 has scene after scene that are powerful in their conception - brothers reunited after a violent rift; a boy having his first conversation with his estranged mother in nearly a decade; getting interrogated by the feds for a crime that can’t even be explained by physics - fall flat because the writers can’t think of anything interesting for the characters to say. (Steve Gaynor’s name stops appearing in the credits as of this episode.)

And here the game’s rickety bits, kept delicately together for three episodes, start to shake apart. Dontnod’s overly-earnest voice direction, which I didn’t notice in the early episodes, started to wear me down. (”Could you sigh mid-syllable, like you’re slightly overwhelmed with emotion?” “Sure, on which line?” “All of them.”) The thinness of the secondary characters, most of whom pop up for one episode and disappear, became more noticeable. The lack of a mechanical hook like the time rewinding of the original game, and the attendant commentary on choice-based games and power fantasies, made the game feel less substantial. The surreal imagery of the original, obligatorily evoked in the prequel, is sensibly absent, but there’s nothing equally striking that replaces it. Even the branching path decisions become less clear: the end-of-episode stat screens for the final episodes mentioned at least a dozen choices I didn’t even know I’d made, some of which were critical in shaping my younger brother’s morality and were not necessarily the choices I’d have made if I’d known I was making a choice at all.

Come the final episode, I got An Ending that seemed right for the way I’d played, but much of the way I’d played felt accidental.

So what are we to make of this? Life is Strange is a beautiful disaster, an ambitious disaster, where Life is Strange 2 is almost less interesting for being  more competent. It has a huge mess of charged topics - American racism, teens losing their virginity, raising a child outside the nuclear family, grief and trauma - and, while it handles them without the gracelessness and sledgehammer subtlety of the original, it doesn’t come to any conclusions about any of them. LiS1, for all its jank, had some opinions, where LiS2 falls into the category of “this sure is some shit, innit?” games.

It starts with a powerful premise, deeply relatable characters, fine writing, beautiful art, but can’t even manage, in the end, to be a disaster. It is the only game in the series so far to be forgettable.

[thepotcallingthekettleblackk]

how to submit requests :)

hey friends! 

with the influx of requests recently i just wanted to take a moment to assuage some concerns and answer some questions about the request process. here are some hot tips to help you out

-please check the status in my bio. i occasionally close my ask box or go on hiatus. this is usually because i begin to feel overwhelmed by the number of asks i currently have. so if you see CLOSED or hiatus in my bio please hold off on requesting a moodboard until it says open again. i will not accept request submitted during closed or hiatus times

-messages are preferable to asks (but both are ok!) it’s easy for me to get confused by the way things are phrased in asks and it’s much easier for me to ask questions or get clarification with messages. using messages also allows me to give you an estimate of where you are in the queue and about how long it will take me. being an introvert with some degree of social anxiety myself, i understand that this can be stressful, but i promise that i’m really quite approachable :)

-please be as specific as possible. i have noticed that people seem to be less satisfied with their boards when they are less specific. most people have some idea of what they want, or at least what they don’t want. if you want a specific color scheme, theme, item, patronus, etc. please say! it’s much easier for me to ensure that the result will be something that we both enjoy when i have more information to work with. it’s also totally fine to give me colors to avoid, that’s often just as helpful. all this being said you CAN submit less specific requests, that is also ok :)

-requests are answered first come, first served. i don’t rush special requests, i don’t skip ahead in posts. requests will be posted in the order in which they were received :)

-mbti personality types are greatly helpful (but not required). this initially started off as an mbti aesthetic blog and that is still what i’m most comfortable with compared to star signs or zodiacs. you’re more than welcome to request a zodiac board, but just know that i’m still learning about all the facets of the star signs outside of the sun signs :)

-types of boards i currently accept: 

mbti~zodiac~hogwarts houses~harry potter related~patronus~color-themed~greek/roman/egyptian mythology~ilvermorny houses~couples~literature~others upon request (not a comprehensive list)

-basic manners really go a long way when submitting a request. this is something I provide totally for free, rudeness, impatience, or hate will thusly not be tolerated

-anonymous asks are open but NOT preferred. but general anonymous questions are perfectly fine!

-please feel free to ask me questions at any time :) if you’re not sure just ask!

-an example (based on me):

infp/ravenclaw/libra/lavender/black bear patronus/avoid the color orange :)

doesn’t have to be like this, just providing a template that people often use

-some other things you should know:

>i live on the east coast of the us so that’s when i’m most accessible and when i’m available to work on boards

>please be patient with me :) i do exist outside of this online space and real life will always take precedence over my work here

>i will always do my best to update my bio with the current number of requests, so you can check there if you’re wondering about how long it will take me to get to yours :)

>if i missed the mark with your request and you’d like to submit another you’re more than welcome to! (but it will be processed like a normal request so you’ll have to wait your turn for a new one)

>you’re also welcome to submit images that you would like me to include in your moodboard

>i make no claim of ownership over the images used in my moodboards. they come from a variety of sources. the only thing i claim is my arrangement of them. they are the true artists and if you have questions about the provenance of one of the images i’m happy to try to help you locate the original source :)

>i speak a bit of french so if you would prefer to speak french with me instead of english that’s totally fine! :) je parle français, tu peux parler français avec moi si tu préfères :)

[eugenialapteva]

Young Love

The scene:

A young woman, I shall call her Eliza, is sitting next to a young man, whom I shall refer to as Ethan. They seem to be of a similar age, perhaps 16 or 17 years old, and it is clear from the way in which they are seated, close to each other and holding hands, that they are a romantic couple. They are travelling by coach to the airport furthest away from central Stockholm. Eliza is wearing blue jeans and a cream coloured woollen jumper, her boots are sturdy but smart looking and her brown hair is neatly tied up in a bun. She looks confident and self-assured. Ethan is wearing a generic dark coloured jumper and black jeans. The observed interaction begins just after Eliza has come off the phone with her mother.

Ethan: I still can’t understand anything [he chuckles]. No, actually, I think I understood a little – “dobzhe”, that means “good” right?

Eliza: Yeah, “dobry”, it can mean a lot of things. Like “ladny”, which also means nice. But it’s pronounced differently depending on if it’s a person or a thing. For example, if I say “it tastes good”, or “she’s nice”… [She continues to explain the various uses of the word in detail]

Ethan: Oh so it’s like for an item or object?

Eliza: Exactly.

There is a short silence.

Ethan: Good chat with your mum?

Eliza: Yeah, always good chat with her. We always have good talks.

Ethan: Ah good. That’s what I like to hear [He is stroking her hand gently, silently]

Do you think it’s good business this – going back and forth to the airport?

Eliza: Yeah I think it’s good, not only for the shuttle bus to this airport – all capitals have the same system. But this company benefits from it being the only mode of transport to the airport. No trains go there. So they have a monopoly […]

Eliza takes out her phone and is looking at a ‘story’ on Instagram. Ethan leans over to have a look, still caressing her hand.

Ethan: Where is that?

Eliza: Canada.

Ethan: Where in Canada?

Eliza: I don’t know.

Ethan: Cos there’s the English speaking part and the French speaking part.

Eliza: Eh, yeah.. of course, I know that. I went to school you know, I know about the world. We go to school in Poland too!

Ethan: Oh really? I didn’t think so. So you know how the world works then?

Eliza: Yeah.

He smiles and humours her cheerfully, still caressing her hand, his body snuggled up beside her. They start planning their week and Eliza checks the calendar on her phone.

Ethan: Sure, you can see your friends on Friday, that’s absolutely fine with me. I can see you on the weekend. I’m around.

Eliza: I’m working Monday and Tuesday 9-5, Thursday 2-8. You’re off Sunday right?

Ethan: Monday.

Eliza: Oh right.

Ethan: So Saturday? When do you find out your schedule? […] Yeah, yeah that’s cool.

Eliza: Do you have plans Monday?

Ethan: No, just going to be off. If you’re free…and if the trains are running…

Eliza: You do what you need to.

Ethan: Yeah, I'll wait to see what you say.

Both on their phones, but Eliza looks more engrossed in the activity. Ethan is staring at his phone rather purposelessly. As they are approaching the airport, Eliza gathers her things and puts on her coat in preparation.

Ethan: You checked in?

Eliza: Yeah [her voice sounds impatient]

Ethan: So we just go straight in. Easy.

As if noticing her sharp tone of voice, retrospectively, she gives him a little cuddle. They speak inaudibly and suddenly Eliza exclaims:

Yes! 2-1. Winner, that’s me [pointing at herself triumphantly].

Ethan smiles, but does not say anything.

Outside the bus Eliza heads straight for the luggage compartment. She locates their bags within seconds and points to them.

Eliza: They’re there. One over there and the other one is behind.

She takes a step back, to allow him to go ahead and collect them.

Analysis:

As I conjure up the scene of these two adolescents in love and in conversation, I am struck afresh by the same sense of nostalgia which I felt at the time of the observation. The image of this outwardly self-possessed and poised Eastern European princess on a journey with her doting and starry-eyed young prince, taps into my personal narrative of adolescent love, evoking within me a sense of poignancy and pain; a curious fantasy of familiarity and kindred minds.

Within a minute or two of observing the contact between Eliza and Ethan and listening to their dialogue, I was overcome by a powerful feeling that I already knew the power dynamics of their relationship; I could foresee the inevitable calamity and heartbreak that is built into the choreography of their complementary dance. Of course, I soon became aware of how intensely coloured these presumptions were by my own psychical templates and interpersonal experiences from infancy onward. That said, by the same token, this spontaneous reaction of mine – bearing in mind with vigilance its subjective and affective quality – seemed to provide a useful instrument for the observation; a way in, as it were, to the internal worlds of Eliza and Ethan and their romantic relationship.  

The journey of human development is by no means simple. The path toward psychosexual maturity, as Freud astutely proposed, is a long and precarious undertaking for all human beings. Twisting through the plethora of infantile desires, wishes, impulses, obstacles, deprivations, identifications, satisfactions and loss, its course depends on the negotiation of a highly complicated set of developmental stages and processes in early childhood, adolescence and adulthood. The successful transition from one phase to the next is determined by a unique combination of fortuitous and constitutional factors – a mixture, if you like, of our innate genetic makeup and the dynamics of our lived experiences and relations with others and within the self.

According to Freud, then, even the most seemingly unobtrusive symptoms and pointless actions (much like parapraxes, jokes, gestures and dreams) have an intention and bear a connection to the person’s past experiences. In other words, the secret of neurosis in general is that the symptoms, however vicariously, are closely connected to the person’s innermost phantasies and early experiences of sexual life.[1] ‘Sucking at the mother’s breast’, Freud explained, ‘is the starting-point of the whole sexual life […] This sucking involves making the mother’s breast the first object of the sexual instinct.’[2] By discovering what he believed to be the sexual causation of neuroses Freud radically extended the concept of sexuality.

Central to this Freudian thesis was the fact that we must relinquish our first and primary love-object (typically this is the mother) in order to be able to advance to a sexually fulfilling and affectionate non-incestuous love relationship as an adult. In effect of this renunciation, however, ‘the final object of the sexual instinct is never any longer the original object but only a surrogate for it’[3] [emphasis mine]. Following up Freud’s formulations, perhaps a closer glance at the body language of Ethan and Eliza might offer a good point of entry to start understanding their ways of relating to each other psychoanalytically.

From the outset, Ethan’s body is somewhat bent and twisted toward Eliza – he strokes her hand fondly and remains seated in the same position of proximity throughout the journey. Meanwhile Eliza, adopting a more assertive stance, has a straight back and is faced at an angle away from Ethan in the direction of the bus. It is interesting to notice how the nature of their respective body languages mimic the different levels of engagement in their spoken conversation too. From what we observe, a structural imbalance of kind seems to permeate the relationship in multiple ways. While Ethan displays a keen interest in Eliza’s family and culture – he inquires about the Polish language and wants to know more about her conversation with mum – Eliza, on the other hand, seems to make minimal effort to reciprocate these gestures. Furthermore, it is Ethan who initiates conversation when they fall silent, he who suggests they meet up the following week, and he who listens attentively and responds to Eliza’s remarks and deliberations about the Polish word for nice and airport shuttle bus service.

On the surface, then, Ethan appears to be active and outspoken. His gratuitous engagement could be seen as a demonstration of the positive excitement and enthusiasm of being in love with someone whom he greatly admires – a harmless feature of the loving experience. Having said that, I wonder if Ethan’s propensity for ‘activity’ also signals a protective measure of the ego aimed at the avoidance of painful affects of passivation. His eagerness to adapt to Eliza’s schedule and to comply with her needs and demands (accepting her triumph, collecting their bags), parallels his accommodating body language and is suggestive of a denial of self – an unconscious subservient mode of defence against fear and anxiety about abandonment, the origins of which would date back to his childhood.

One could propose, in Freudian terms, that Ethan’s readiness to submit to Eliza’s mental organisation, through idealisation and his compliant attitude, provides him with a familiar way of sustaining psychic equilibrium, which must have taken precedence over the satisfaction of his individual desires and needs at some point in infancy. For one reason or another, something in early childhood might have prohibited Ethan from being able to freely express his wants and wishes to his primary carer – without fear of persecution – causing these incestuous wishful impulses to be forced into repression prematurely. This means that some psychical processes were denied satisfaction through discharge and cast out of consciousness; however, as we learn from reading Freud, in the dark and delirious unconscious they continue to grow and flourish, acting as a constant impediment to the adult’s libido and freedom.[4]

The patterns of behaviour we notice in Ethan might well be manifestations of benign defenses that help us to adapt to reality. My own experience of love – and retrospective exploration of my own role in that dynamic: as the idealised object – has made me deeply conscious of the subtle line between healthy admiration and violent idealisation, while also being cautious about how easily exploited that position of idealised object can be, albeit unconsciously. What is more, as I witnessed the interaction between these two lovers, the irritation and impatience in Eliza’s voice seemed agonizingly tangible. Clearly – or at least that was my impression – she is an educated, intelligent and competent young woman, but equally evident was that she seemed unaware of the impact of her words and actions on her loved one (with the exception of that one significant moment in the interaction, after her abrupt sounding ‘yeah’, when she gave Ethan a little hug).

Speculatively, one might draw from this relative lack of sensibility and tendency toward omnipotence – revealed in the way she asserts, and indeed prioritizes, her needs and wishes over Ethan’s – that circumstances were ‘good enough’ (to borrow Winnicott’s term) during her childhood. Perhaps, unlike Ethan, as a child she was freer to act and exist without taking into careful consideration the other’s separate existence and personal interests. Her phone call to her mum (the close attachment they seem to have) suggests possibly that family members for Eliza can be taken for granted, approached more or less as things that exist in service of her own needs – as blank screens onto which we are allowed to project and express all our anger, wants and needs without undue punishment.

In a different but related vein, psychoanalyst Jessica Benjamin writes that: ‘The ability to enter into exchange with the outside object implies a successful shift from the pleasure principle, self-containment in phantasy, toward the reality principle. That is, the individual’s entrance into a shared reality of creative inter-relationships built on mutual recognition and exchange.[5]

Having recognised this curious conjunction between the mother’s care and her baby’s sexual activity, we are arguably in a better position to appreciate how Freud’s remark on incest helps us understand how in various ways both Eliza and Ethan remain under the sway of the pleasure principle, lodged within the incestuous family matrix: a milieu, which as Luce Irigaray so pertinently puts it, ultimately favours cohesion and unity over difference and desire.[6] Together, Eliza’s competitive and perhaps somewhat inflated self-perception, and Ethan’s compliant approach and underlying sense of inadequacy, seem to complement each other in a dyadic structure which is both fragile and romantic.

[1] Sigmund Freud, (1917) Introductory Lecture on Psychoanalysis: XVII, p. 257

[2] Freud, (1917) Introductory Lecture on Psychoanalysis: XX, p. 314

[3] Freud, ‘On the Universal Tendency to Debasement in the Sphere of Love’, S.E. 11, p. 189

[4] Freud, ‘A Special Type of Choice of Object Made by Men’, pp. 169-171

[5] Jessica Benjamin, The Bonds of Love, pp. 37-38  

[6] Luce Irigaray, (2017) To be Born, p. 47

[pcurrytravels]

Thoughts: New Orleans (Part V)

It was day three in New Orleans, and once again we woke up early for breakfast. We found out that there was a location of Daisy Duke’s in the CBD that was even closer to our hotel so we went there. I decided to just go ahead and get breakfast this time…..with a side of crawfish hushpuppies. I have to say, I actually liked this location of Duke’s better. The service was quicker, the prices were slightly cheaper (might have something to do with how the other location is in the more touristy French Quarter) and the sweet tea was even better. Oh, and they offered crawfish hushpuppies here while the other location didn’t. And yes they were delicious.

After we finished, my mom went back to the room while I took a little morning stroll, exploring the CBD some more before I decided to give PJ’s Coffee on Canal a try. PJ’s Coffee is the ubiquitous coffeehouse in New Orleans (I literally only saw two Starbucks the entire time I was there), and after trying their product I can easily see why. Remember when I said in the Mini-Guide how their blended Granita drinks are like Frappuccinos but better? Well, they are. They’re smoother, sweeter, and likely made with better quality coffee beans (I mean, New Orleans is a port city so I imagine they’d have pretty easy access to a number of things, including coffee beans). So yes, if you visit New Orleans and see a PJ’s Coffee (and you definitely will), be sure to stop by and give them a try.

Going back to the room to chill for a minute, we then set off to the National WWII Museum. We used the St. Charles Streetcar to get there, and I must say, riding this one was a much more pleasant experience than any of our rides on the Canal or Riverwalk streetcars. Although it can still get crowded, this line is rarely ever standing-room only. Unlike Canal, it also has windows that open, which is surprisingly a very effective means of keeping things cool on board (the Riverwalk line has windows that open too, but that line is usually packed with people and, thanks to the resulting heat attracted to human bodies, an open window is not very effective). It felt nice being able to easily grab window seats without having to worry about having to push through people upon reaching our stop.

Down St. Charles Avenue, through the CBD and Warehouse District, we got off at Lee Circle which was, almost appropriately, right next door to the Civil War Museum and a block away from the National WWII Museum. Why am I saying it was appropriate? Because Lee Circle is named after Robert E. Lee; you know, the Confederate general?

Yeah, modern New Orleans may be a fairly liberal, morally loose and open-minded place, but it’s still the South. There’s going to be reminders of the antebellum and Jim Crow eras all over the place, and that includes public “memorials” to the Confederacy. Ugh. Thankfully, last year the local government decided to remove the statue of Lee that sat atop the pillar pictured above. As they should, because reminders of the more shameful parts of American history such as that need to be in museums, not shamelessly displayed in public (now what they need to do is change the name back to Tivoli Circle or something but I guess that’s none of my business).

Speaking of museums, the National WWII Museum is great……if you’re into the topic. I don’t know if it’s because I learned all about it in school (I remember having one history teacher in high school who was particularly passionate about this era for some reason so I already feel like I studied it to death) or what, but it just didn’t do much for me. Aside from the exhibit about servicemen of color in the War, the Japanese internment exhibit, an infographic which detailed the threat of Nazi Germany, Fascist Italy and the Japanese Empire and the C-47 hanging in the lobby, nothing about the museum really caught my attention. I honestly feel like it was just too small as my mom and I were in and out of there in less than thirty minutes, which is weird when considering how highly regarded the museum is (I’m also VERY happy we got in with the power pass as the admission price is WAY too high at face for what you get in my opinion). It’s a shame the Civil War Museum next door wasn’t included in the Power Pass as I always found the Civil War more interesting than World War II to be honest.

Once we were done, we hopped back on the streetcar to Canal and from there made our way to Jackson Square once more. We first stopped inside the PJ’s for a moment to enjoy frozen lemonades and air conditioning. You’d think we would have an easier time getting used to this weather, seeing that our family originates out of Alabama and Mississippi in addition to being the sort of climate our ancestors were forced to do unpaid labor in for hundreds of years but I digress. Upon cooling down, we stopped to listen to the live brass band for a few minutes before heading into The Cabildo.

The Cabildo is one of two twin buildings which flank the St. Louis Cathedral. Originally serving municipal purposes, the two of them as well as the 1850 House have been repurposed into outposts of the Louisiana State Museum. The Cabildo in particular once operated as the city hall, in addition to being the site where the Louisiana Purchase commenced, but it now hosts an exhibit about Louisiana’s history; spanning from its settlement by the French in the 1600’s to the Reconstruction era. Now, it was fairly interesting and all, with paintings, artifacts and templates about the battle of New Orleans, the region’s indigenous peoples, the differences between French and Spanish colonial rule/policy, West African slaves and free people of color, the Louisiana Purchase and the area’s history with pirates, but overall, I didn’t find it as captivating as The Presbytere.

On the other side of the Cathedral, this not-quite identical building (if you pay close attention, you’ll notice it’s painted in a lighter color and has a flatter, more squared-off roof than the Cabildo /architecture nerd) was originally a courthouse, but now serves as a museum for Mardi Gras, Napoleon’s death mask…………and Hurricane Katrina.

I can remember the news reports like it was yesterday. Having been under the impression that hurricanes were just a Florida thing or something, needless to say, I was scratching my head in confusion at the whole ordeal. My fourteen year-old brain was struggling to comprehend how a hurricane could both reach and do that much damage to somewhere so far inland from a coast (I managed to figure it out a few science classes later), but I still just shrugged it off and thought “oh, they’ll be fine, Florida gets through it every time!” However, upon seeing video footage of vast swaths of houses underwater along with thousands of people crowding into the Superdome, that’s when the severity of the situation hit me.

Even more upsetting was how horribly the situation was handled. People were without food and water for DAYS after the storm made landfall (something we’re seeing a repeat of with Hurricane Maria in Puerto Rico basically). It definitely should not have taken nearly a week for FEMA to show up. Then again……the overall catastrophe had more to do with the failure of the area’s levee and floodwall system than it did with the storm itself. I have to ask, why were they in such bad shape in the first place? Many theories and conspiracies still abound to this day, but either way, what happened was a tragic mess that could have been avoided in so many ways.

There were a number of pictures on display of the aftermath, as well as video footage of the day the storm made landfall, and it all felt so……..eerie. Sad, but eerie. To think this eerily deserted city, under siege by a raging, violent storm, is the same vibrant, energetic place that we had been walking around in for the past several days. I almost had to look out the door just to make sure everything was alright; even though, in a lot of ways, things aren’t totally alright (…….a whole thirteen years later). Houses and buildings devastated by Katrina can still be spotted all over the city, and although I didn’t go see it for myself, it’s been said that the Lower Ninth Ward (arguably the most devastated neighborhood of all) has more or less been deemed a lost cause and they gave up on rebuilding a long time ago. New Orleans has definitely rebounded, but it’s still heartbreaking to see so many lingering signs of this catastrophe.

After finishing the Katrina exhibit, we walked through a hall that featured tidbits about Hurricane Betsy, another devastating hurricane that took place back in 1965 (although still not as bad as Katrina) before walking past the random sight of Napoleon’s death mask and upstairs to the Mardi Gras exhibit. Granted, it was more or less a retread of Mardi Gras World, aside from focusing less on floats and more on the history of the various krewes, the “throws” (beads, doubloons and the like) and costume design. It was still a lot of fun none the less. Alas, the clock was ticking, and we wanted to cram one more thing in before embarking on our cruise, so it was off to the lower Pontalba building for the 1850 House.

The Pontalba buildings are two, four-story, red-brick twin buildings which flank Jackson Square. Built in the 1840’s by an accomplished businesswoman known as Micaela Pontalba, they were originally designed as Parisian-style luxury rowhomes, with high-end retail and dining establishments being housed on the first floor. Having fallen into disrepair by the 1930’s, they were then extensively repurposed into apartments, which are still in use to this day. The portion now known as the 1850 House remained untouched, however, instead being used by the Louisiana State Museum as a time capsule exhibit. Within, you’ll be given a glimpse into the lives of middle-class New Orleanians in the 1800’s.

Through a small courtyard, and up a rickety and old-fashioned spiral staircase, you’ll be greeted to a template which provides some information about past occupants of the row home which leads to the parlor and dining room. Granted, each room is protected by a glass railing, likely to prevent damage to the various antiques as it is a self-guided tour after all. Basically, all you can really do is look on at the rooms and their vintage furnishings from the hallway. On the third floor, you’ll find the bedrooms and the nursery and going from there (the layout of the place was pretty confusing so I’m not sure what direction we were going in at this point), you’ll see an exterior room which served as the slave and/or servant quarters until you reach the kitchen and storage room at the base of the house. Now, I’m a vintage/antique nerd, so I enjoyed it, but it probably would have been just a bit more enjoyable if they offered a guided tour, thus allowing you to explore the rooms in detail.

Oh wait, what time is it? Oh, time for the Creole Queen Paddlewheel Cruise! We hopped on the Riverwalk line of the streetcar once more and took it to Spanish Plaza (a monument to Spain’s colonial legacy in the area) which is where the boat was docked. The Creole Queen is one of a number of paddlewheel boats in New Orleans which offer old-fashioned river cruises. Once you hop aboard, you’ll be treated to stunning views of the city and the river (provided you can ignore its gross and oily brown hue) while the guide gives you a little history lesson. Granted, most of the stuff he was saying I already found out from the other tour guides and museums I went to, but it was still enjoyable nonetheless. As I looked around and took pictures of the CBD skyline, Jackson Square from afar, Algiers, the New Orleans port, the old Domino sugar factory, the plantations in the distance and even more Hurricane Katrina ruins, we came to a stop at the Chalmette Battlefield and National Cemetery; the site of the Battle of New Orleans in 1815.

We got off the boat and walked towards an old (creepy-looking and probably haunted) plantation home known as the Malus-Beauregard House, where a man dressed in 19th-century military regalia waited for us. From there, he walked us to this spot underneath a very large oak tree, next to a small bayou, where he began to talk about the Battle of New Orleans. And honestly? I don’t know if it was the story itself or if this particular guide was just boring, but he wasn’t able to hold my attention. It was also hot AF and there were mosquitoes and dragonflies swarming all over the place, so I just took a few pictures of the battlefield and the house before making my way back to the air-conditioned, bug free boat; savoring some bread pudding while waiting things out.

Upon arriving back in New Orleans, we rushed over to Audubon Aquarium, seeking to cram in one more attraction before resting up for our ghost tour in the French Quarter. You better leave the lights on for this one.  

[gloriousruinsdestiny]

Inserting A Bullet Into Text In Word For Mac

How Do I Insert A Picture Into Text In Word

How To Turn A Table Into Text In Word

How To Turn A Picture Into Text In Word

How To Convert Table Into Text In Word 2013

No offense intended :-) but it isn't 'super simple' because it is 'super unorthodox' -- i.e., contradictory to the intended purpose of a Bulleted/Numbered List. Although you can get the visual effect by doing as Rich suggested you're actually creating separate Bulleted lists.

Click in a text box. Do so in the place where you want the bullet point. If you haven't already created a text box, drag the Type Tool to create a box where you want the text to be, then click in the place where you want the bullet point. The word bullet comes from the French word boulette, which has more to do with food than with round pieces of lead quickly exiting a firearm, like this: Bang! To apply bullets to your text, highlight the paragraphs you want to shoot and click the Bullets button, shown here.

Another approach is to not use the Bullet formatting feature at all. Instead, use Option+8 to insert a Bullet character [•] anywhere you want to have one. You also can use the Symbols palette in the Media Browser or the OS X Character Viewer to insert any character if you don't know its keyboard equivalent.

The purpose of Bulleting is to have all items of equal import listed as individual items in separate paragraphs. Items subordinate to another item also occupy separate paragraphs but demoted to a lower level in the hierarchy. Bullets are used instead of Numbers to indicate that there is no priority or preferred sequence associated with items of the same level... Essentially, an outline using Bullet characters rather than numbers.

Active9 months ago

Bullet Symbols. Here you can find the list of bullet symbols alt codes and unicode symbols. To make a bullet symbol or a circle symbol text, you can copy and paste bullet point symbol from the table below. Click on that and then choose the PDF file you want to insert. Then go to the Word file and insert it with a single click. Insert a Bullet in the Middle of a Sentence in Word Helpdeskgeek.com To insert a bullet graphically in Word, put the insertion point where you want to insert the bullet and click the Insert tab on the ribbon. How to Curve Text in Word. Inserting Exponents in Word. How to Merge Word Documents. Use Word for Mac Templates to Insert a Polished Cover Page. How to Insert Source Code Into a Word Document. Create Free, Fillable Forms in Microsoft Word.

Open Word and insert a table (1 x 1 will work just fine).

Right-click in the table and, in the context menu, select 'Bullets' and a bullet image from the bullet library.

Type something and press enter.

Type something else, but, instead of clicking enter, right-click and select 'Increase Indent'

Notice something else moves into the proper indentation of a nested bullet:

Outside of a Word table, you would simply press tab to get this behavior, but I want a keyboard shortcut (if available) to do this inside the table.

This is what I've tried:

Ctrl + Tab: Just indents the text, not the bullet

Ctrl + T: Same as Ctrl + Tab

Ctrl + M: Indents the text and the bullet but does not change thebullet style

How Do I Insert A Picture Into Text In Word

Can this be done outside the right-click context menu?

ray023ray023

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10 Answers

In at least Word 2010, you can use Shift+Alt+→/← to increase/decrease the indent in a bulleted or numbered list.

DrewDrew

Press Enter twice. It works. The first one creates the next nested line at the current indent, but the second stroke decreases the indent to the previous indent and section heading.

user222101user222101

For mac word 2011 also see,

Cmd+Shift+M to decrease indentation of bullet

Control+Shift+M to increase indentation of bullet

Lernkurve

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Jeromy AnglimJeromy Anglim

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You can record a macro (using the Developer tab), and assign it to a keyboard shortcut combination. (Using the Macro Recorder is the easiest way to set this up, but you could also just insert the command Selection.Range.ListFormat.ListIndent in the macro VBA.

kmotekmote

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How To Turn A Table Into Text In Word

For Word 2011 for Mac the combination that works is:

control + shift + Left/Right Arrow

DeesbekDeesbek

You might also try Alt+Right Arrow. It's bound to function IncreaseIndent in Word 2010.

How To Turn A Picture Into Text In Word

FranFran

Alt+Shiftright arrow/left arrow works for me inside a table!

Jawa

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user249100user249100

Bao TonBao Ton

Increase indent.. TABDecrease indent.. SHIFT + TAB

user868678user868678

shift + tab is the shortcut to decrease the bullet point level

How To Convert Table Into Text In Word 2013

Emily RumpfEmily Rumpf

Not the answer you're looking for? Browse other questions tagged microsoft-wordkeyboard-shortcuts or ask your own question.

[burmecianblackmage]

Sceada’s RP Plotting Cheat Sheet

Want new-and-exciting plots for your character? Long to reach out to more of your followers, but don’t know where to start? Fear not! Fill out this form and give your RP partners both present and future all the of juicy jumping off points they need to help you get your characters acquainted.

Be sure to tag the players whose characters YOU want more cues to interact with, and repost, don’t reblog! Feel free to add or remove sections as you see fit. Template here.

Mun name: Patrick

OOC Contact: I can be contacted on here with both IM and asks, on Skype and on Discord. For the later two you are welcome to ask for the name.

Who the heck is my muse anyway:

Sceada is the son of an overambitious Durmecian Dragon Knight who would do anything to restore her family’s name - and that includes getting rid of things that could get in the way of that. Even if they are her own flesh and blood...…

After using her influence to have her son exiled and strippied of his name at the ripe age of just 8 years old, the boy lived on the streets for a bit over a year, never adopting a name and suffering under many injustices. One day, he was found by a professor from the Academy in Daguerreo who noticed that the boy held something his species normally did not: magical talent. Taking him in, he saw to it that the boy got to study Black Magic, got a name and genuinely started to blossom, even if he remained an outsider.

Since finishing his studies he has become a traveling scholar of ancient scripts, offering his services for coin. He’s come around quite a bit and is always keen on traveling - deep down however, what he truly longs for is a place he can feel he belongs, a place to call... home.

Alternatively, for those brave or crazy enough to deal with her, Sceada’s mother Skadi is also available at request, being a side-muse of sorts on this blog. But be warned: She’s not a nice person.

Points of interest:

Sceada is a traveling mage with a kind and gentle nature, that can be a friend most understanding if there is a measure of mutual trust. He is a bit adventurous despite being the bookworm type of guy, and has considerable battle experience - and an unfortunate history of putting his life on the line more often than he ought to, almost as if he valued his life less than others...

Deep down Sceada is plagued by insecurities and fear, often worrying he is not good enough and especially afraid of being abandoned. He carries a deep trauma within himself, born from the abuse he suffered at his mother’s hands as well as his banishment and the year he lived as a street rat. 

What they’ve been up to recently:

Sceada has recently had a lot of emotional stuff going on, including seeing his friendship with Maria ( @artemisxbow​ ) develop into love and a relationship, overcoming some hardships in the process, as well as seeing his beloved Leonora ( @containyourmainposure​ ) return - and let’s not forget that he also lost his virginity not too long ago, curtesy of a certain pirate captain named Leila... ( @dancing-dagger​ )

As a result of this, he is wondering how to get all of this under one hat and what to do, wondering whether it’s okay to love more than one person. Due to this being on his mind, he has been a bit neglectful in his research and studies, something he usually devotes himself to heart and soul...

Where to find them:

Sceada can potentially be found anywhere, being an avid traveller. Rumour has it that recently, he’s often been seen around Fynn, and less so in Daguerreo, Lindblum and Alexandria where he otherwise can be found relatively often..

Current plans:

Mainly figuring out this new situation for him, but also to get back to his studies. He was mainly researching Time Magic, but he also is always interested in old civilizations - and not afraid to explore ruins or dungeons in an attempt to learn more about them.

Desired interactions:

I am pretty much down for anything, really. I would love to see him build more friendships - depending how the thing about him potentially turning poly turns out maybe even something romantic or sexual - but what I’d really like is some antagonistic interactions. Be it downright villans or just rivals, give him something to get angry at! Or to force him to work harder.

Offered interactions:

Sceada is both a Black Mage specialized in the fine handling of the elements as well as a scholar of old scripts. For both professions he takes requests if you wanna get in touch with him that way - but he can just as well be a chance encounter. As for the palette of interactions, I can offer anything from fluff to angst, fighting to philosophical or even smut, so long as it fits the muses involved.

Current open post/s:

Currently not, but I’m in the process of writing an open I’ll post after this. Don’t really have a tag for them though, maybe I oughta change that...

Anything else?:

Mun is turning 28 in June and lives in Switzerland, so in the CET timezone (or CEST as it is currently. Stupid daylights saving time...). Mun speaks both german and english very well and understands french sufficiently to communicate but not to work with. In fact, just yesterday the mun took the exam for the Cambridge ESOL CPE, so his english is really good. Certified even (or soon to be, anyhow...). Furthermore, this was written on May 7, the day before mun has eye surgery >,>

Tagging: Anyone who likes to, honestly. I’ve borrowed it from @thislovelylady

[hprarepairnet]

the wet spot

pairing: cedric diggory x pansy parkinson

setting: modern, non-magical au

word count: 1,660

get to know our members challenge: favorite rare-pairs | (2/5) - andrea

Cedric wakes up feeling good.

It’s early, the barest hint of summer-yellow sunshine peeking in through the blinds, but not so early that his eyes are dry and gritty with leftover exhaustion. He’s a little sore, a few choice muscle groups registering stiff and vaguely tender, and his body’s buzzing with a bone-deep, entirely primal sort of satisfaction. The noisy uncertainty that’s plagued most of his thoughts since leaving school; it’s gone. His head is clear. He has energy. And his sheets are rumpled, and his boxers are missing, and he isn’t alone.

He isn’t alone.

The girl in his bed—Pansy, Pansy Parkinson, he remembers how utterly charmed he’d been by her name—is still sleeping, face relaxed and hair gently tousled, and she’s perfect.

Long, sooty lashes sweep across the apples of her cheeks, and her adorably freckled nose is turned up just so towards the end, and the remnants of her lipstick are smeared in a cherry-red cloud around the edges of her mouth. She’d ordered her whiskey neat, and his vodka straight, and she’d untucked his shirt for him before dragging him out onto the dancefloor, looping his tie around her wrist and laughing into his ear when he stumbled and singing along—in French—to the Eurotrash electro-pop anthem that had been blaring through the overhead speakers, the humming thud of the bass and the languid rocking of her hips and the slick, salty slide of her skin against his distracting him from how much he usually hated places like that.

And then she’d kissed him in the backseat of a cab, trailed her fingers down his chest and teased his lips open with the tip of her tongue and she’d tasted like bourbon and cigarettes and cinnamon, sweet and tart and smooth and rich and earthy—she’d tasted like all the reasons he’d moved to New York in the first place, and it had been exhilarating, it had been exceptional—

Her eyes flutter open.

“Hey,” he murmurs, flashing her a warm, inviting, helpless smile.

Pansy freezes mid-yawn, and then she blinks, twice, lifting her head off her pillow just enough to squint at him in obvious confusion. “What the fuck are you still doing here?” she asks, voice sharp with incredulity.

Cedric’s smile falters. “We, uh, we slept together last night.”

Pansy puffs her cheeks out, blowing blunt-cut blonde bangs off her forehead. “Yeah,” she says, somehow slowly enough to imply that he’s a moron, but also quickly enough to imply that she’s already bored. “I know. I was there.”

He rubs at his neck. “Uh. So.” He tries to think back to what he’d done with Cho when they’d still been together. “Breakfast? I can make—crepes? Or—or we could go out? There’s this place around the corner that does really great omelets, it’s—”

“Are you, like…high, or something?” Pansy interrupts, and then firmly shakes her head. “No, I don’t care, actually, just—what are you still doing here? Seriously.”

Cedric furrows his brow. “I—uh, live here? This is my apartment?”

She freezes again, expression flickering with surprise, consternation, and, finally, genuine alarm. “Oh, fuck,” she blurts out, sitting up with a wince. She knocks his well-worn copy of Ulysses off his bedside table in her haste to reach for her phone, and when she sees the time, she swears again. “Fuck, fuck, fuck, I’m so fucking late, fucking—Disney prince assholes—fuck—”

Pansy Parkinson is up and dressed and out his front door before Cedric can figure out how to ask her for her number.

Cedric had been crowned prom king in high school.

That same night, he’d his virginity to Cho Chang on a king-sized bed in the Presidential suite of the downtown Marriott.

Neither of them had really known what they were doing, and there’d been some fumbling, some laughter, some awkward, red-faced mishandling of the condom—but they’d figured it out, eventually, and it had been about as good as it could’ve been, considering. He’d come too fast, of course, and she hadn’t come at all, unfortunately, be he’d assumed that sex was probably just one of those things he’d have to work at; to practice. That was fine. He hadn’t minded the idea of putting in a little extra effort. He’d spent eight painstaking months compiling a portfolio for architecture school, after all.

Sex couldn’t be harder than that.

The second time Cedric runs into Pansy Parkinson, he’s at a dingy midtown sports bar with his firm’s latest batch of interns, and he’s had just enough beer that he actually thinks he’s hallucinating.

She’s—well, she’s a vision in thigh-high fishnet stockings and a green plaid pinafore, a buttery brown leather jacket resting on the bar stool next to hers, ankles crossed and elbows propped up and gaze so flatly, furiously unimpressed with whatever it is she’s reading on her iPad that he spares a moment to question his own sanity before tapping her on the shoulder.

“Pansy Parkinson,” he greets her. “What a surprise.”

If he’s being honest with himself, he’s not really that surprised. He’d known—somehow, somewhere, someway—that he’d see her again. She was special. She was important. He could feel it.

“Oh, my god,” Pansy sighs, tilting her head back to scowl at the ceiling. “You’re not a stalker, right? Like. I don’t have time for a stalker right now, okay?”

Cedric gestures wordlessly to the pitcher of Rolling Rock he’s holding. Some sloshes over the rim, splattering his watch. “No,” he replies, good-naturedly. “I’m, uh…bonding with my underlings, I guess?”

She glances behind him, presumably over to where the interns are sitting, and then she smirks. “Look at you,” she drawls, “buying beer and making dad jokes.”

Cedric flushes at that. “I’m barely older than them.”

“Yeah,” Pansy says, sounding more amused than he thinks the situation technically warrants. But then again—he’s a little bit proud, maybe, of being able to make her sound like that. The tired frustration that had been pulling at the thin skin around her eyes is gone now. “That’s kind of my point.”

Cedric had dated Cho for years.

For years.

And he’d loved her, he had, because loving Cho had been easy. She’d been beautiful, and she’d been sweet, and she’d been soft, the kind of girl who always smelled like vanilla cupcakes and lavender shampoo. Their relationship had been the steadiest, sturdiest, most reliable part of his whole life. It had been instinctive. Reflexive. Like looking in the rearview mirror before backing out of his parents’ driveway.

He’d loved her.

He had.

The third, fourth, and fifth times he runs into Pansy Parkinson are on purpose.

She explains to him, in a tone lofty with derision, that she’s the assistant of the assistant of the editor-in-chief at some very high-profile fashion magazine Cedric’s never heard of, and that her hours are ridiculous.

“It’s obviously not what I moved here to do, but…” she trails off, shrugging, and then takes a leisurely sip of her latte. She’s good at that, he’s noticed. Feigning indifference. Pretending not to care. “Baby steps, or whatever, you know?”

“Yeah,” he says, because he does know. His most recent bid at work was for an addition to some old guy’s penthouse; he wanted a separate suite of rooms to display his apparently very vast collection of Renaissance-era sex toys. “When did you move here, then?”

Pansy’s jaw tightens for a split-second. “Two years ago,” she answers, toying with the buttons on the side of her phone. Her nails are painted a glossy dark purple, and a multi-tiered silver ring shaped like a snake is wrapped around her thumb. “I, um, went to Parsons. For a while.”

Cedric tears at the corner of his croissant, scattering paper-thin slivers of almonds across his plate. “You’ll figure it out, you know,” he tells her, nudging her knee underneath the café table. “You will.”

“Figure what out?”

“What you want.”

Her eyes widen, slightly, the blue-black of her mascara catching a stray beam of sunlight—and he remembers, suddenly, how peaceful she’d looked, that first morning after. Forehead smooth, and features relaxed, and something impossibly graceful—improbably pretty—about the way the bow of her upper lip had curved up and out.

He aches, just a little, at the memory.

Cedric had been relieved when he’d broken up with Cho.

He’d felt guilty, actually, about not feeling guiltier about the whole thing.

But he’d been twenty-two and freshly graduated and resolutely planning his future around the acceptably benign template of a nine-to-five job and a white picket fence in the suburbs and a wife who would greet him every day with a lukewarm kiss on the cheek and a fill-in-the-blanks conversation about PTA meetings and orange slices and SUV net-safety ratings and how she might maybe technically be having an affair with her tennis instructor and Cedric—

Cedric had been suffocating, and nothing had even happened yet.

The sixth time he runs into Pansy Parkinson, it’s in his bathroom’s tiny shower stall, the one that’s barely big enough for one person, let alone two, and she’s pressing her body snug against his, her chin tilted up and her brow deeply furrowed and her gaze wary, and curious, and shuttered.

“Morning,” he offers, rinsing the soap out of his eyes.

“Are you, like, stealth dating me?” she demands.

He chuckles, bringing his hands down to her hips and squeezing, just the once. “I’m doing whatever you’re letting me do, Pansy.”

She swallows, and he watches, impassive, as she curls her toes into the subway-tiled floor. His chest practically cracks itself wide open when he realizes she’s not even attempting to hide how nervous she is.

“Okay,” she agrees, and he catches her smile, fast and fleeting and realer than anything he’s ever seen from her before. She clears her throat. Repeats, more quietly, “Okay.”

[networkingdefinition]

Hamsters Quotes

Official Website: Hamsters Quotes

• A squat cannot be performed on a Smith machine any more than it can be performed in a small closet with a hamster. – Mark Rippetoe • Adrenaline kicks you in when you’re starving. That’s what nobody understands. Except for being hungry and cold, most of the time I feel like I can do anything. It gives me superhuman powers of smell and hearing. I can see what people are thinking, stay two steps ahead of them. I do enough homework to stay off the radar. Every night I climb thousands of steps into the sky to make me so exhausted that when I fall into bed, I don’t notice Cassie. Then suddenly it’s morning and I leap on the hamster wheel and it starts all over again. – Laurie Halse Anderson • And then the turbines generate electricity that goes into the whole town.” “You mean they aren’t powered by giant hamsters on wheels? I was misinformed. – Michael Grant • At school, our classroom had a small rodent zoo consisting of two rabbits, three hamsters, a litter of baby gerbils and a guinea pig. At first, I’d thought the teacher was raising snack food, which impressed me, being the first sign of intelligence she’d shown. Soon, though, I’d figured out the animals’ true purpose and left them alone, though I would never understand the appeal of petting and coddling perfectly good food. – Kelley Armstrong

jQuery(document).ready(function($) var data = action: 'polyxgo_products_search', type: 'Product', keywords: 'Hamster', orderby: 'rand', order: 'DESC', template: '1', limit: '68', columns: '4', viewall:'Shop All', ; jQuery.post(spyr_params.ajaxurl,data, function(response) var obj = jQuery.parseJSON(response); jQuery('#thelovesof_hamster').html(obj); jQuery('#thelovesof_hamster img.swiper-lazy:not(.swiper-lazy-loaded)' ).each(function () var img = jQuery(this); img.attr("src",img.data('src')); img.addClass( 'swiper-lazy-loaded' ); img.removeAttr('data-src'); ); ); );

• But I just felt at one point that I was on a hamster wheel, you know? Just doing movie after movie and thinking so much about career related things and I think missing out on hanging with my friends and family as much I needed to. – Woody Harrelson • DNS is kind of the hamster under the hood that drives the Internet. – David Ulevitch • Even as a child I was fascinated by death, not in a spiritual sense, but in an aesthetic one. A hamster or guinea pig would pass away, and, after burying the body, I’d dig it back up: over and over, until all that remained was a shoddy pelt. It earned me a certain reputation, especially when I moved on to other people’s pets. “Igor,” they called me. “Wicked, spooky.” But I think my interest was actually fairly common, at least among adolescent boys. At that age, death is something that happens only to animals and grandparents, and studying it is like a science project. – David Sedaris • Girls were nice to me in the same way that they would be nice to a hamster. I fantasized about wild encounters with females but knew they’d never happen unless my own involvement could somehow go undetected. – Joel Achenbach • Goldfish and hamsters and white mice and even the little seed in the Styrofoam cup-they all die. So do we. – Robert Fulghum • Have you noticed how the Republicans and Democrats try to copy each other at their conventions. Like at the Democratic convention John Kerry’s daughter told a story about how he once gave CPR to her hamster. At the Republican convention the Bush girls are going to tell a story about how when their hamster was bad, their dad built them a little electric chair. – Jay Leno • Haven’t had your fill of interesting events?” “Never. They are the spice of life.” She held up her half-finished hat. “How do you like it?” “It’s nice. The blue is pretty. But what do the runes say?” “Raxacori-Oh, never mind. It wouldn’t mean a thing to you anyway. Safe travels to you and Saphira, Eragon. And remember to watch out for earwigs and wild hamsters. Ferocious things, wild hamsters.” – Christopher Paolini • He was not used to the smell of dragon breath, which is best described as a combination of the stench of burning rubber and the stink of old socks, with overtones of a hamster cage in dire need of a cleaning. – Angie Sage • I always find cardio the most monotonous. Running on a treadmill shows me why hamsters are so crazy. – Luke Evans • I always see to the dogs first and leave the cats and the occasional birds and rabbits and hamsters for later. It isn’t that I play favorites, it’s just that dogs are needier than other pets. Leave a dog alone for very long and it’ll start going a little nuts. Cats, on the other hand, try to give you the impression that they didn’t even notice you were gone. Oh, were you out? they’ll say, I didn’t notice. Then they’ll raise their tails to show you their little puckered anuses and walk away.- Blaize Clement • I can’t shut my brain off. It’s like a hamster wheel.” ~ Justin – Richelle Mead • I could keep trying to do the same kind of comedies. You know how it’s going to go, and you can get an audience with it, but then I feel like a hamster on a wheel. – Vince Vaughn • I do not mean to be the slightest bit critical of TV newspeople, who do a superb job, considering that they operate under severe time constraints and have the intellectual depth of hamsters. But TV news can only present the “bare bones” of a story; it takes a newspaper, with its capability to present vast amounts of information, to render the story truly boring. – Dave Barry • I don’t believe in happy endings. Children have got to face death sooner or later. Granny and Grandpa die, dogs die, cats die, gerbils and those frightful things – what are they called? – hamsters: all die like flies. So there’s no point avoiding it. – Raymond Briggs • I don’t believe in reincarnation, and I didn’t believe in it when I was a hamster. – Shane Richie • I don’t want to talk to you no more, you empty headed animal food trough wiper. I fart in your general direction. Your mother was a hamster and your father smelt of elderberries. – Graham Chapman • I feel so agitated all the time, like a hamster in search of a wheel. – Carrie Fisher • I got ham but I’m not a Hamster – Bill Bailey • I know what the intimidation level of high school is. You’re on a hamster wheel, running, running, running, trying so hard to fit in. It’s all about how you deal with what you’re given, feeling OK with being the odd man out before you’re finally successful. – Drew Barrymore • I love running cross-country…You come up a hill and see two deer going, ‘What the hell is he doing?’ On a track I feel like a hamster. – Robin Williams • I love watching him think,” Maeve told Lily. “You can almost hear that poor little hamster running and running on its wheel. – Jim Butcher • I voted against Gerald Nabarro in my first general election, but my defiance made no difference. If you had put a Conservative rosette on a mustachioed hamster, it would have been elected. – Jeremy Paxman • If anybody felt worse than I did, it was Amos. I had just enough magic to turn myself into a falcon and him into a hamster (hey, I was rushed!) – Rick Riordan • If the sun were made of hamsters, the earth would be incinerated. – Michael Schumacher • I’m done with men. I have a hamster. That’s all I need. – Janet Evanovich • It’s fine to be on the hamster wheel, running and running, trying to grab the brass ring or whatever you define as success, but your relationships, that’s really all that matters when it’s all said and done. – Katie Couric • It’s for the hamster that I’m gonna buy! This is so perfect! (after opening a hamster wheel at Christmas) – Gerard Way • I’ve lived here … my whole life. It’s where I lost all my baby teeth. Where tiny hamster, gerbil, and bird skeletons lie in rotted-out cardboard coffins beneath the oak tree in our backyard. Also where, if some future archaeologist goes digging, they’ll find the remains of a plush toy: a gray terrier named Toto I buried after the accident. – Jennifer McMahon • Lissa knelt down, compassion on her face. I wasn’t surprised, since she’d always had a thing for animals. She’d lectured me for days after I’d instigated the infamous hamster-and-hermit-crab fight. I’d viewed the fight as a testing of worthy opponents. She’d seen it as animal cruelty. – Richelle Mead • Most of us are animal lovers. We insist that we love all animals equally – the hamster, the weasel, and the zebra – but if pressed, we will admit to being either a cat person or a dog person. – Nicole Hollander • New Rule: Gay marriage won’t lead to dog marriage. It is not a slippery slope to rampant inter-species coupling. When women got the right to vote, it didn’t lead to hamsters voting. No court has extended the equal protection clause to salmon. And for the record, all marriages are “same sex” marriages. You get married, and every night, it’s the same sex. – Bill Maher • No matter if you’re a man, woman, cat, hamster, you will get lost in Matt Bomer’s eyes. I don’t know what they are made of outside of dreams and rainbows and amazingness but it truly doesn’t matter. And when he sings. It’s like God gave with both hands and then grew a third hand and graced him with more. – Channing Tatum • One of my producers said this business is like a hamster on that little wheel thing that goes around and around. You may have a great day and get great ratings, but then you’ve got another show to do – whatever moment of success or happiness you have you’ve got to keep grinding it out for the next day. – Sean Hannity • Privately, I consider religion to be a load of bollocks, but when you have a sobbing five year old wanting to know what happened to her hamster, you develop an instant belief in anything that dissolves some of the heartbreak off her face. – Tana French • Some of my best friends are Venture Capitalists, but let’s face it, a hamster with Alzheimer’s could make those kind of numbers. It’s great work if you can get it. – Scott Adams • Some Poor grad student pressing on the flanks of a hamster and out comes a doctorate on the other side – Robert M. Sapolsky • Sung to the tune of O Christmas Tree O woe is me, O woe is me, I used to have a hamster tree, But it was eaten by a newt, And now I have no cuddly fruit, O woe is me, O woe is me, I used to have a hamster tree! – Clive Barker • The hamster called. He wants his home back. – James Patterson • The Hamsters really kick ass – Slim is one of your greatest guitar players – Walter Trout • The kid makes you sick. He looks the part, he walks the part, he is the part. He’s six-foot something, fit as a flea, good-looking – he’s got to have something wrong with him….Hopefully he’s hung like a hamster! That would make us all feel better! – Cristiano Ronaldo • The real slums are another matter. The bad parts of Tondo are as bad as any place I’ve seen, ancient, filthy houses swarmed with the poor and stinking of sewage and trash. But there are worse parts – squatter areas where people live under cardboard, in shipping crates, behind tacked-up newspapers. Dad would march you straight to the basement with a hairbrush in his hand if he caught you keeping your hamster cage like this. – P. J. O’Rourke • The thing is, we have to let go of all blame, all attacking, all judging, to free our inner selves to attract what we say we want. Until we do, we are hamsters in a cage chasing our own tails and wondering why we aren’t getting the results we seek. – Joe Vitale • The wheels are turning, but the hamsters are all dead. Make it idiot-proof and someone will make a better idiot. I learned long ago, never to wrestle with a pig, you get dirty; and besides, the pig likes it. – George Bernard Shaw • The world’s tragedy is that men love women, women love children, and children love hamsters. – Joanna Trollope • We sometimes feel like hamsters on a wheel, covering the same musical ground we did 20 or more years ago. – Bent Saether • Well, I’m an uncle now … don’t know if I’m a good one. My nephew asked me the difference between a hamster and a gerbil and I told him I thought there was more dark meat on a gerbil. – Bobcat Goldthwait • What if hamsters fought in the American Revolution? – Colin Mochrie • While I liked hamsters, too, the Habitrail cage was expensive. Even I could see that the interconnecting boxes, tubes, and spheres could easily bankrupt a family and lead to addiction later in life. Because, how would you know when to stop? How could you stop? An entire city could be built with a Habitrail. – Augusten Burroughs • Why shouldn’t it be that way for the rest of us? Why not just go with it? Just walk the dog and send the tweets and eat the scones and play with the hamsters and ride the bicycles and watch the sunsets and stream the movies and never worry about any of it? I didn’t know it could be that easy. I didn’t know that until just now. That sounds good to me. – Joshua Ferris • With boys you always know where you stand. Right in the path of a hurricane. It’s all there. The fruit flies hovering over their waste can, the hamster trying to escape to cleaner air, the bedrooms decorated in Early Bus Station Restroom. – Erma Bombeck • Wondering where Ranger was now, when I needed him. Why wasn’t he here, insisting on locking me up in a safe house? Now that my hamster’s cage was clean, I’d be happy to oblige. – Janet Evanovich • Yeah, well, don’t worry about it. I’ve never met a Daimon yet I couldn’t take. (Wulf) Guess again, little brother. You just met one, and trust me, he’s not like any you’ve ever met before. He makes Desiderius look like a pet hamster. (Acheron) – Sherrilyn Kenyon • You ignorant little slug!” the Trunchbull bellowed. “You witless weed! You empty-headed hamster! You stupid glob of glue! – Roald Dahl • Your Mother was A Hamster and you Father Smelled of elder berries. – John Cleese

  [clickbank-storefront-bestselling]

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[equitiesstocks]

Hamsters Quotes

Official Website: Hamsters Quotes

• A squat cannot be performed on a Smith machine any more than it can be performed in a small closet with a hamster. – Mark Rippetoe • Adrenaline kicks you in when you’re starving. That’s what nobody understands. Except for being hungry and cold, most of the time I feel like I can do anything. It gives me superhuman powers of smell and hearing. I can see what people are thinking, stay two steps ahead of them. I do enough homework to stay off the radar. Every night I climb thousands of steps into the sky to make me so exhausted that when I fall into bed, I don’t notice Cassie. Then suddenly it’s morning and I leap on the hamster wheel and it starts all over again. – Laurie Halse Anderson • And then the turbines generate electricity that goes into the whole town.” “You mean they aren’t powered by giant hamsters on wheels? I was misinformed. – Michael Grant • At school, our classroom had a small rodent zoo consisting of two rabbits, three hamsters, a litter of baby gerbils and a guinea pig. At first, I’d thought the teacher was raising snack food, which impressed me, being the first sign of intelligence she’d shown. Soon, though, I’d figured out the animals’ true purpose and left them alone, though I would never understand the appeal of petting and coddling perfectly good food. – Kelley Armstrong

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• But I just felt at one point that I was on a hamster wheel, you know? Just doing movie after movie and thinking so much about career related things and I think missing out on hanging with my friends and family as much I needed to. – Woody Harrelson • DNS is kind of the hamster under the hood that drives the Internet. – David Ulevitch • Even as a child I was fascinated by death, not in a spiritual sense, but in an aesthetic one. A hamster or guinea pig would pass away, and, after burying the body, I’d dig it back up: over and over, until all that remained was a shoddy pelt. It earned me a certain reputation, especially when I moved on to other people’s pets. “Igor,” they called me. “Wicked, spooky.” But I think my interest was actually fairly common, at least among adolescent boys. At that age, death is something that happens only to animals and grandparents, and studying it is like a science project. – David Sedaris • Girls were nice to me in the same way that they would be nice to a hamster. I fantasized about wild encounters with females but knew they’d never happen unless my own involvement could somehow go undetected. – Joel Achenbach • Goldfish and hamsters and white mice and even the little seed in the Styrofoam cup-they all die. So do we. – Robert Fulghum • Have you noticed how the Republicans and Democrats try to copy each other at their conventions. Like at the Democratic convention John Kerry’s daughter told a story about how he once gave CPR to her hamster. At the Republican convention the Bush girls are going to tell a story about how when their hamster was bad, their dad built them a little electric chair. – Jay Leno • Haven’t had your fill of interesting events?” “Never. They are the spice of life.” She held up her half-finished hat. “How do you like it?” “It’s nice. The blue is pretty. But what do the runes say?” “Raxacori-Oh, never mind. It wouldn’t mean a thing to you anyway. Safe travels to you and Saphira, Eragon. And remember to watch out for earwigs and wild hamsters. Ferocious things, wild hamsters.” – Christopher Paolini • He was not used to the smell of dragon breath, which is best described as a combination of the stench of burning rubber and the stink of old socks, with overtones of a hamster cage in dire need of a cleaning. – Angie Sage • I always find cardio the most monotonous. Running on a treadmill shows me why hamsters are so crazy. – Luke Evans • I always see to the dogs first and leave the cats and the occasional birds and rabbits and hamsters for later. It isn’t that I play favorites, it’s just that dogs are needier than other pets. Leave a dog alone for very long and it’ll start going a little nuts. Cats, on the other hand, try to give you the impression that they didn’t even notice you were gone. Oh, were you out? they’ll say, I didn’t notice. Then they’ll raise their tails to show you their little puckered anuses and walk away.- Blaize Clement • I can’t shut my brain off. It’s like a hamster wheel.” ~ Justin – Richelle Mead • I could keep trying to do the same kind of comedies. You know how it’s going to go, and you can get an audience with it, but then I feel like a hamster on a wheel. – Vince Vaughn • I do not mean to be the slightest bit critical of TV newspeople, who do a superb job, considering that they operate under severe time constraints and have the intellectual depth of hamsters. But TV news can only present the “bare bones” of a story; it takes a newspaper, with its capability to present vast amounts of information, to render the story truly boring. – Dave Barry • I don’t believe in happy endings. Children have got to face death sooner or later. Granny and Grandpa die, dogs die, cats die, gerbils and those frightful things – what are they called? – hamsters: all die like flies. So there’s no point avoiding it. – Raymond Briggs • I don’t believe in reincarnation, and I didn’t believe in it when I was a hamster. – Shane Richie • I don’t want to talk to you no more, you empty headed animal food trough wiper. I fart in your general direction. Your mother was a hamster and your father smelt of elderberries. – Graham Chapman • I feel so agitated all the time, like a hamster in search of a wheel. – Carrie Fisher • I got ham but I’m not a Hamster – Bill Bailey • I know what the intimidation level of high school is. You’re on a hamster wheel, running, running, running, trying so hard to fit in. It’s all about how you deal with what you’re given, feeling OK with being the odd man out before you’re finally successful. – Drew Barrymore • I love running cross-country…You come up a hill and see two deer going, ‘What the hell is he doing?’ On a track I feel like a hamster. – Robin Williams • I love watching him think,” Maeve told Lily. “You can almost hear that poor little hamster running and running on its wheel. – Jim Butcher • I voted against Gerald Nabarro in my first general election, but my defiance made no difference. If you had put a Conservative rosette on a mustachioed hamster, it would have been elected. – Jeremy Paxman • If anybody felt worse than I did, it was Amos. I had just enough magic to turn myself into a falcon and him into a hamster (hey, I was rushed!) – Rick Riordan • If the sun were made of hamsters, the earth would be incinerated. – Michael Schumacher • I’m done with men. I have a hamster. That’s all I need. – Janet Evanovich • It’s fine to be on the hamster wheel, running and running, trying to grab the brass ring or whatever you define as success, but your relationships, that’s really all that matters when it’s all said and done. – Katie Couric • It’s for the hamster that I’m gonna buy! This is so perfect! (after opening a hamster wheel at Christmas) – Gerard Way • I’ve lived here … my whole life. It’s where I lost all my baby teeth. Where tiny hamster, gerbil, and bird skeletons lie in rotted-out cardboard coffins beneath the oak tree in our backyard. Also where, if some future archaeologist goes digging, they’ll find the remains of a plush toy: a gray terrier named Toto I buried after the accident. – Jennifer McMahon • Lissa knelt down, compassion on her face. I wasn’t surprised, since she’d always had a thing for animals. She’d lectured me for days after I’d instigated the infamous hamster-and-hermit-crab fight. I’d viewed the fight as a testing of worthy opponents. She’d seen it as animal cruelty. – Richelle Mead • Most of us are animal lovers. We insist that we love all animals equally – the hamster, the weasel, and the zebra – but if pressed, we will admit to being either a cat person or a dog person. – Nicole Hollander • New Rule: Gay marriage won’t lead to dog marriage. It is not a slippery slope to rampant inter-species coupling. When women got the right to vote, it didn’t lead to hamsters voting. No court has extended the equal protection clause to salmon. And for the record, all marriages are “same sex” marriages. You get married, and every night, it’s the same sex. – Bill Maher • No matter if you’re a man, woman, cat, hamster, you will get lost in Matt Bomer’s eyes. I don’t know what they are made of outside of dreams and rainbows and amazingness but it truly doesn’t matter. And when he sings. It’s like God gave with both hands and then grew a third hand and graced him with more. – Channing Tatum • One of my producers said this business is like a hamster on that little wheel thing that goes around and around. You may have a great day and get great ratings, but then you’ve got another show to do – whatever moment of success or happiness you have you’ve got to keep grinding it out for the next day. – Sean Hannity • Privately, I consider religion to be a load of bollocks, but when you have a sobbing five year old wanting to know what happened to her hamster, you develop an instant belief in anything that dissolves some of the heartbreak off her face. – Tana French • Some of my best friends are Venture Capitalists, but let’s face it, a hamster with Alzheimer’s could make those kind of numbers. It’s great work if you can get it. – Scott Adams • Some Poor grad student pressing on the flanks of a hamster and out comes a doctorate on the other side – Robert M. Sapolsky • Sung to the tune of O Christmas Tree O woe is me, O woe is me, I used to have a hamster tree, But it was eaten by a newt, And now I have no cuddly fruit, O woe is me, O woe is me, I used to have a hamster tree! – Clive Barker • The hamster called. He wants his home back. – James Patterson • The Hamsters really kick ass – Slim is one of your greatest guitar players – Walter Trout • The kid makes you sick. He looks the part, he walks the part, he is the part. He’s six-foot something, fit as a flea, good-looking – he’s got to have something wrong with him….Hopefully he’s hung like a hamster! That would make us all feel better! – Cristiano Ronaldo • The real slums are another matter. The bad parts of Tondo are as bad as any place I’ve seen, ancient, filthy houses swarmed with the poor and stinking of sewage and trash. But there are worse parts – squatter areas where people live under cardboard, in shipping crates, behind tacked-up newspapers. Dad would march you straight to the basement with a hairbrush in his hand if he caught you keeping your hamster cage like this. – P. J. O’Rourke • The thing is, we have to let go of all blame, all attacking, all judging, to free our inner selves to attract what we say we want. Until we do, we are hamsters in a cage chasing our own tails and wondering why we aren’t getting the results we seek. – Joe Vitale • The wheels are turning, but the hamsters are all dead. Make it idiot-proof and someone will make a better idiot. I learned long ago, never to wrestle with a pig, you get dirty; and besides, the pig likes it. – George Bernard Shaw • The world’s tragedy is that men love women, women love children, and children love hamsters. – Joanna Trollope • We sometimes feel like hamsters on a wheel, covering the same musical ground we did 20 or more years ago. – Bent Saether • Well, I’m an uncle now … don’t know if I’m a good one. My nephew asked me the difference between a hamster and a gerbil and I told him I thought there was more dark meat on a gerbil. – Bobcat Goldthwait • What if hamsters fought in the American Revolution? – Colin Mochrie • While I liked hamsters, too, the Habitrail cage was expensive. Even I could see that the interconnecting boxes, tubes, and spheres could easily bankrupt a family and lead to addiction later in life. Because, how would you know when to stop? How could you stop? An entire city could be built with a Habitrail. – Augusten Burroughs • Why shouldn’t it be that way for the rest of us? Why not just go with it? Just walk the dog and send the tweets and eat the scones and play with the hamsters and ride the bicycles and watch the sunsets and stream the movies and never worry about any of it? I didn’t know it could be that easy. I didn’t know that until just now. That sounds good to me. – Joshua Ferris • With boys you always know where you stand. Right in the path of a hurricane. It’s all there. The fruit flies hovering over their waste can, the hamster trying to escape to cleaner air, the bedrooms decorated in Early Bus Station Restroom. – Erma Bombeck • Wondering where Ranger was now, when I needed him. Why wasn’t he here, insisting on locking me up in a safe house? Now that my hamster’s cage was clean, I’d be happy to oblige. – Janet Evanovich • Yeah, well, don’t worry about it. I’ve never met a Daimon yet I couldn’t take. (Wulf) Guess again, little brother. You just met one, and trust me, he’s not like any you’ve ever met before. He makes Desiderius look like a pet hamster. (Acheron) – Sherrilyn Kenyon • You ignorant little slug!” the Trunchbull bellowed. “You witless weed! You empty-headed hamster! You stupid glob of glue! – Roald Dahl • Your Mother was A Hamster and you Father Smelled of elder berries. – John Cleese

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[technicalsolutions88]

A ruling in late October against a little known French adtech firm that popped up on the national data watchdog’s website earlier this month, is causing ripples of excitement to run through privacy watchers in Europe who believe it signals the beginning of the end for creepy online ads.

The excitement is palpable.

Impressively so, given the dry CNIL decision against mobile ‘demand side platform’, Vectaury, was only published in the regulator’s native dense French legalese.

Here is the bombshell though: Consent through the @IABEurope framework is inherently invalid. Not because of a technical detail. Not because of an implementation aspect that could be fixed. No. You cannot pass consent to another controller through a contractual relationship. BOOM pic.twitter.com/xMlNHJTKwl

— Robin Berjon (@robinberjon) November 16, 2018

Digital advertising trade press AdExchanger picked up on the decision yesterday.

Here’s the killer paragraph from CNIL’s ruling — translated into “rough English” by my TC colleague Romain Dillet:

The requirement based on the article 7 above-mentioned isn’t fulfilled with a contractual clause that guarantees validly collected initial consent. The company VECTAURY should be able to show, for all data that it is processing, the validity of the expressed consent.

In plainer English this is being interpreted by data experts as the regulator stating that consent to processing personal data cannot be gained through a framework arrangement which bundles a number of uses behind a single ‘I agree’ button that, when clicked, passes consent to partners via a contractual relationship.

CNIL’s decision suggests that bundling consent to partner processing in a contract is not, in and of itself, valid consent under the European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) framework.

Consent under this regime must be specific, informed and freely given. It says as much in the text of GDPR.

But now, on top of that, the CNIL’s ruling suggests a data controller has to be able to demonstrate the validity of the consent — so cannot simply tuck consent inside a contractual ‘carpet bag’ that gets passed around to everyone else in their chain as soon as the user clicks ‘I agree’.

This is important because many widely used digital advertising consent frameworks rolled out to websites in Europe this year — in claimed compliance with GDPR — are using a contractual route to obtain consent, and bundling partner processing behind often hideously labyrinthine consent flows.

The experience for web users in the EU right now is not great. But it could be leading to a much better Internet down the road.

Where’s the consent for partner processing?

Even on a surface level the current crop of confusing consent mazes look problematic.

But the CNIL ruling suggests there are deeper and more structural problems lurking and embedded within. And as regulators dig in and start to unpick adtech contradictions it could force a change of mindset across the entire ecosystem.

As ever, when talking about consent and online ads the overarching point to remember is that no consumer given a genuine full disclosure about what’s being done with their personal data in the name of behavioral advertising would freely consent to personal details being hawked and traded across the web just so a bunch of third parties can bag a profit share.

This is why, despite GDPR being in force (since May 25), there is still so many tortuously confusing ‘consent flows’ in play.

The long-standing online T&Cs trick of obfuscating and socially engineering consent remains an unfortunately standard playbook. But, less than six months into GDPR we’re still very much in a ‘phoney war’ phase. More regulatory rulings are needed to lay down the rules by actually enforcing the law.

And CNIL’s recent activity suggests more to come.

In the Vectaury case, the mobile ad firm used a template framework for its consent flow that had been created by industry trade association and standards body, IAB Europe.

It did make some of its own choices, using its own wording on an initial consent screen and pre-ticking the purposes (another big GDPR no-no). But the bundling of data purposes behind a single opt in/out button is the core IAB Europe design. So CNIL’s ruling suggests there could be trouble ahead for other users of the template.

IAB Europe’s CEO, Townsend Feehan, told us it’s working on a statement reaction to the CNIL decision but suggested Vectaury fell foul of the regulator because it may not have implemented the “Transparency & Consent Framework-compliant” consent management platform (CMP) framework — as it’s tortuously known — correctly.

So either “the ‘CMP’ that they implemented did not align to our Policies, or choices they could have made in the implementation of their CMP that would have facilitated compliance with the GDPR were not made”, she suggested to us via email.

Though that sidesteps the contractual crux point that’s really exciting privacy advocates — and making them point to the CNIL as having slammed the first of many unbolted doors.

The French watchdog has made a handful of other decisions in recent months also involving geolocation-harvesting adtech firms, and also for processing data without consent.

So regulatory activity on the GDPR+adtech front has been ticking up.

Its decision to publish these rulings suggests it has wider concerns about the scale and privacy risks of current programmatic ad practices in the mobile space than can be attached to any single player.

So the suggestion is that just publishing the rulings looks intended to put the industry on notice…

The decision also notes that the @CNIL is openly using this to inform not just the company in question but whole ecosystem, including adtech of course but also app makers who embed ads and marketers who use them. You're all on notice!

— Robin Berjon (@robinberjon) November 16, 2018

Meanwhile adtech giant Google has also made itself unpopular with publisher ‘partners’ over its approach to GDPR by forcing them to collect consent on its behalf. And in May a group of European and international publishers complained that Google was imposing unfair terms on them.

The CNIL decision could sharpen that complaint too — raising questions over whether audits of publishers that Google said it would carry out will be enough for the arrangement to pass regulatory muster.

This rules the @IABEurope out as an option, but more than that: @Google forced publishers to collect consent on its behalf for advertising profiling. They have said that they will audit that publishers do it right — but will auditing be enough?

— Robin Berjon (@robinberjon) November 16, 2018

For a demand-side platform like Vectaury, which was acting on behalf of more than 32,000 partner mobile apps with user eyeballs to trade for ad cash, achieving GDPR compliance would mean either asking users for genuine consent and/or having a very large number of contracts that it’s doing actual due diligence on.

Yet Google is orders of magnitude more massive of course.

The Vectaury file gives us a fascinating little glimpse into adtech ‘business as usual’. Business which also wasn’t, in the regulator’s view, legal.

The firm was harvesting a bunch of personal data (including people’s location and device IDs) on its partners’ mobile users via an SDK embedded in their apps, and receiving bids for these users’ eyeballs via another standard piece of the programmatic advertising pipe — ad exchanges and supply side platforms — which also get passed personal data so they can broadcast it widely via the online ad world’s real time bidding (RTB) system. That’s to solicit potential advertisers’ bids for the attention of the individual app user… The wider the personal data gets spread, the more potential ad bids.

That scale is how programmatic works. It also looks horrible from a GDPR ‘privacy by design and default’ standpoint.

The sprawling process of programmatic explains the very long list of ‘partners’ nested non-transparently behind the average publisher’s online consent flow. The industry, as it is shaped now, literally trades on personal data.

So if the consent rug it’s been squatting on for years suddenly gets ripped out from underneath it there would need to be radical reshaping of ad targeting practices to avoid trampling on EU citizens’ fundamental right.

GDPR’s really big change was supersized fines. So ignoring the law would get very expensive.

Oh hai real time bidding!

In Vectaury’s case CNIL discovered the company was holding the personal data of a staggering 67.6 million people when it conducted an on-site inspection of the company in April 2018.

That already sounds like A LOT of data for a small mobile adtech player. Yet it might actually have been a tiny fraction of the personal data the company was routinely handling — given that Vectaury’s own website claims 70% of collected data is not stored.

In the decision there was no fine but CNIL ordered the firm to delete all data it had not already deleted (having judged collection illegal given consent was not valid); and to stop processing data without consent.

But given the personal-data-based hinge of current-gen programmatic adtech that essentially looks like an order to go out of business. (Or at least out of that business.)

And now we come to another interesting GDPR adtech complaint that’s not yet been ruled on by the two DPAs in question (Ireland and the UK) — but which looks even more compelling in light of the CNIL Vectaury decision because it picks at the adtech scab even more daringly.

Filed last month with the Irish Data Protection Commission and the UK’s ICO, this adtech complaint — the work of three individuals, Johnny Ryan of private web browser Brave; Jim Killock, exec director of digital and civil rights group, the Open Rights Group; and University College London data protection researcher, Michael Veale — targets the RTB system itself.

Here’s how Ryan, Killock and Veale summarized the complaint when they announced it last month:

Every time a person visits a website and is shown a “behavioural” ad on a website, intimate personal data that describes each visitor, and what they are watching online, is broadcast to tens or hundreds of companies. Advertising technology companies broadcast these data widely in order to solicit potential advertisers’ bids for the attention of the specific individual visiting the website.

A data breach occurs because this broadcast, known as an “bid request” in the online industry, fails to protect these intimate data against unauthorized access. Under the GDPR this is unlawful.

The GDPR, Article 5, paragraph 1, point f, requires that personal data be “processed in a manner that ensures appropriate security of the personal data, including protection against unauthorised or unlawful processing and against accidental loss.” If you can not protect data in this way, then the GDPR says you can not process the data.

Ryan tells TechCrunch that the crux of the complaint is not related to the legal basis of the data sharing but rather focuses on the processing itself — arguing “that it itself is not adequately secure… that they’re aren’t adequate controls”.

Though he says there’s a consent element too, and so sees the CNIL ruling bolstering the RTB complaint. (On that keep in mind that CNIL judged Vectaury should not have been holding the RTB data of 67.6M people because it did not have valid consent.)

“We do pick up on the issue of consent in the complaint. And this particular CNIL decision has a bearing on both of those issues,” he argues. “It demonstrates in a concrete example that involved investigators going into physical premises and checking the machines — it demonstrates that even one small company was receiving tens of millions of people’s personal data in this illegal way.

“So the breach is very real. And it demonstrates that it’s not unreasonable to suggest that the consent is meaningless in any case.”

Reaching for a handy visual explainer, he continues: “If I leave a briefcase full of personal data in the middle of Charing Cross station at 11am and it’s really busy that’s a breach. That would have been a breach back in the 1970s. If my business model is to drive up to Charing Cross station with a dump-truck and dump briefcases onto the street at 11am in the full knowledge that my business partners will all scramble around and try and grab them — and then to turn up at 11.01am and do the same thing. And then 11.02am. And every microsecond in between. That’s still a fucking data breach!

“It doesn’t matter if you think you’ve consent or anything else. You have to [comply with GDPR Article 5, paragraph 1, point f] in order to even be able to ask for a legal basis. There are plenty of other problems but that’s the biggest one that we highlighted. That’s our reason for saying this is a breach.”

“Now what CNIL has said is this company, Vectaury, was processing personal data that it did not lawfully have — and it got them through RTB,” he adds, spelling the point out. “So back to the GDPR — GDPR is saying you can’t process data in a way that doesn’t ensure protection against unauthorized or unlawful processing.”

In other words, RTB as a funnel for processing personal data looks to be on inherently shaky ground because it’s inherently putting all this personal data out there and at risk…

What’s bad for data brokers…

In another loop back, Ryan says the regulators have been in touch since their RTB complaint was filed to invite them to submit more information.

He says the CNIL Vectaury decision will be incorporated into further submissions, predicting: “This is going to be bounced around multiple regulators.”

The trio is keen to generate extra bounce by working with NGOs to enlist other individuals to file similar complaints in other EU Member States — to make the action a pan-European push, just like programmatic advertising itself.

“We now have the opportunity to connect our complaint with the excellent work that Privacy International has done, showing where these data end up, and with the excellent work that CNIL has done showing exactly how this actually applies. And this decision from CNIL takes, essentially my report that went with our complaint and shows exactly how that applies in the real world,” he continues.

“I was writing in the abstract — CNIL has now made a decision that is very much not in the abstract, it’s in the real world affecting millions of people… This will be a European-wide complaint.”

But what does programmatic advertising that doesn’t entail trading on people’s grubbily obtained personal data actually look like? If there were no personal data in bid requests Ryan believes quite a few things would happen. Such as, for e.g., the demise of clickbait.

“There would be no way to take your TechCrunch audience and buy it cheaper on some shitty website. There would be no more of that arbitrage stuff. Clickbait would die! All that nasty stuff would go away,” he suggests.

(And, well, full disclosure: We are TechCrunch — so we can confirm that does sound really great to us!)

He also reckons ad values would go up. Which would also be good news for publishers. (“Because the only place you could buy the TechCrunch audience would be on TechCrunch — that’s a really big deal!”)

He even suggests ad fraud might shrink because the incentives would shift. Or at least they could so long as the “worthy” publishers that are able to survive in the new ad world order don’t end up being complicit with bot fraud anyway.

As it stands, publishers are being screwed between the twin plates of the dominant adtech plaforms (Google and Facebook), where they are having to give up a majority of their ad revenue — leaving the media industry with a shrinking slice of ad revenues (that can be as lean as ~30%).

That then has a knock on impact on funding newsrooms and quality journalism. And, well, on the wider web too — given all the weird incentives that operate in today’s big tech social media platform dominated Internet.

While a privacy-sucking programmatic monster is something only shadowy background data brokers that lack any meaningful relationships with the people whose data they’re feeding the beast could truly love.

And, well, Google and Facebook.

Ryan’s view is that the reason an adtech duopoly exists boils down to the “audience leakage” being enabled by RTB. Leakage which, in his view, also isn’t compliant with EU privacy laws.

He reckons the fix for this problem is equally simple: Keep doing RTB but without any personal data.

A real-time ad bidding system that’s been stripped of personal data does not mean no targeted ads. It could still support ad targeting based on real-time factors such as an approximate location (say to a city region) and/or generic and aggregated data.

Crucially it would not use unique identifiers that enable linking ad bids to a individual’s entire digital footprint and bid request history — as is the case now. Which essentially translates into: RIP privacy rights.

Ryan argues that RTB without personal data would still offer plenty of “value” to advertisers — who could still reach people based on general locations and via real-time interests. (It’s a model that sounds much like what privacy search engine DuckDuckGo is doing, and also been growing.)

The really big problem, though, is turning the behavioral ad tanker around. Given that the ecosystem is embedded, even as the duopoly milks it.

That’s also why Ryan is so hopeful now, though, having parsed the CNIL decision.

His reading is regulators will play a decisive role in pushing the ad industry’s trigger — and force through much-needed change in their targeting behavior.

“Unless the entire industry moves together, no one can be the first to remove personal data from bid requests but if the regulators step in in a big way… and say you’re all going to go out of business if you keep putting personal data into bid requests then everyone will come together — like the music industry was forced to eventually, under Steve Jobs,” he argues. “Everyone can together decide on a new short term disadvantageous but long term highly advantageous change.”

Of course such a radical reshaping is not going to happen overnight. Regulatory triggers tend to be slow motion unfoldings at the best of times. You also have to factor in the inexorable legal challenges.

But look closely and you’ll see both momentum massing behind privacy — and regulatory writing on the wall.

“Are we going to see programmatic forced to be non-personal and therefore better for every single citizen of the world (except, say, if they work for a data broker),” adds Ryan, posing his own concluding question.”Will that massive change, which will help society and the web… will that change happen before Christmas? No. But it’s worth working on. And it’s going to take some time

“It could be two years from now that we have the finality. But a finality there will be. Detroit was only able to fight against regulation for so long. It does come.”

Who’d have though ‘taking back control’ could ever sound so good?

from Social – TechCrunch https://ift.tt/2Bmt1zN Original Content From: https://techcrunch.com

[sheminecrafts]

How a small French privacy ruling could remake adtech for good

A ruling in late October against a little known French adtech firm that popped up on the national data watchdog’s website earlier this month, is causing ripples of excitement to run through privacy watchers in Europe who believe it signals the beginning of the end for creepy online ads.

The excitement is palpable.

Impressively so, given the dry CNIL decision against mobile ‘demand side platform’, Vectaury, was only published in the regulator’s native dense French legalese.

Here is the bombshell though: Consent through the @IABEurope framework is inherently invalid. Not because of a technical detail. Not because of an implementation aspect that could be fixed. No. You cannot pass consent to another controller through a contractual relationship. BOOM pic.twitter.com/xMlNHJTKwl

— Robin Berjon (@robinberjon) November 16, 2018

Digital advertising trade press AdExchanger picked up on the decision yesterday.

Here’s the killer paragraph from CNIL’s ruling — translated into “rough English” by my TC colleague Romain Dillet:

The requirement based on the article 7 above-mentioned isn’t fulfilled with a contractual clause that guarantees validly collected initial consent. The company VECTAURY should be able to show, for all data that it is processing, the validity of the expressed consent.

In plainer English this is being interpreted by data experts as the regulator stating that consent to processing personal data cannot be gained through a framework arrangement which bundles a number of uses behind a single ‘I agree’ button that, when clicked, passes consent to partners via a contractual relationship.

CNIL’s decision suggests that bundling consent to partner processing in a contract is not, in and of itself, valid consent under the European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) framework.

Consent under this regime must be specific, informed and freely given. It says as much in the text of GDPR.

But now, on top of that, the CNIL’s ruling suggests a data controller has to be able to demonstrate the validity of the consent — so cannot simply tuck consent inside a contractual ‘carpet bag’ that gets passed around to everyone else in their chain as soon as the user clicks ‘I agree’.

This is important because many widely used digital advertising consent frameworks rolled out to websites in Europe this year — in claimed compliance with GDPR — are using a contractual route to obtain consent, and bundling partner processing behind often hideously labyrinthine consent flows.

The experience for web users in the EU right now is not great. But it could be leading to a much better Internet down the road.

Where’s the consent for partner processing?

Even on a surface level the current crop of confusing consent mazes look problematic.

But the CNIL ruling suggests there are deeper and more structural problems lurking and embedded within. And as regulators dig in and start to unpick adtech contradictions it could force a change of mindset across the entire ecosystem.

As ever, when talking about consent and online ads the overarching point to remember is that no consumer given a genuine full disclosure about what’s being done with their personal data in the name of behavioral advertising would freely consent to personal details being hawked and traded across the web just so a bunch of third parties can bag a profit share.

This is why, despite GDPR being in force (since May 25), there is still so many tortuously confusing ‘consent flows’ in play.

The long-standing online T&Cs trick of obfuscating and socially engineering consent remains an unfortunately standard playbook. But, less than six months into GDPR we’re still very much in a ‘phoney war’ phase. More regulatory rulings are needed to lay down the rules by actually enforcing the law.

And CNIL’s recent activity suggests more to come.

In the Vectaury case, the mobile ad firm used a template framework for its consent flow that had been created by industry trade association and standards body, IAB Europe.

It did make some of its own choices, using its own wording on an initial consent screen and pre-ticking the purposes (another big GDPR no-no). But the bundling of data purposes behind a single opt in/out button is the core IAB Europe design. So CNIL’s ruling suggests there could be trouble ahead for other users of the template.

IAB Europe’s CEO, Townsend Feehan, told us it’s working on a statement reaction to the CNIL decision but suggested Vectaury fell foul of the regulator because it may not have implemented the “Transparency & Consent Framework-compliant” consent management platform (CMP) framework — as it’s tortuously known — correctly.

So either “the ‘CMP’ that they implemented did not align to our Policies, or choices they could have made in the implementation of their CMP that would have facilitated compliance with the GDPR were not made”, she suggested to us via email.

Though that sidesteps the contractual crux point that’s really exciting privacy advocates — and making them point to the CNIL as having slammed the first of many unbolted doors.

The French watchdog has made a handful of other decisions in recent months also involving geolocation-harvesting adtech firms, and also for processing data without consent.

So regulatory activity on the GDPR+adtech front has been ticking up.

Its decision to publish these rulings suggests it has wider concerns about the scale and privacy risks of current programmatic ad practices in the mobile space than can be attached to any single player.

So the suggestion is that just publishing the rulings looks intended to put the industry on notice…

The decision also notes that the @CNIL is openly using this to inform not just the company in question but whole ecosystem, including adtech of course but also app makers who embed ads and marketers who use them. You're all on notice!

— Robin Berjon (@robinberjon) November 16, 2018

Meanwhile adtech giant Google has also made itself unpopular with publisher ‘partners’ over its approach to GDPR by forcing them to collect consent on its behalf. And in May a group of European and international publishers complained that Google was imposing unfair terms on them.

The CNIL decision could sharpen that complaint too — raising questions over whether audits of publishers that Google said it would carry out will be enough for the arrangement to pass regulatory muster.

This rules the @IABEurope out as an option, but more than that: @Google forced publishers to collect consent on its behalf for advertising profiling. They have said that they will audit that publishers do it right — but will auditing be enough?

— Robin Berjon (@robinberjon) November 16, 2018

For a demand-side platform like Vectaury, which was acting on behalf of more than 32,000 partner mobile apps with user eyeballs to trade for ad cash, achieving GDPR compliance would mean either asking users for genuine consent and/or having a very large number of contracts that it’s doing actual due diligence on.

Yet Google is orders of magnitude more massive of course.

The Vectaury file gives us a fascinating little glimpse into adtech ‘business as usual’. Business which also wasn’t, in the regulator’s view, legal.

The firm was harvesting a bunch of personal data (including people’s location and device IDs) on its partners’ mobile users via an SDK embedded in their apps, and receiving bids for these users’ eyeballs via another standard piece of the programmatic advertising pipe — ad exchanges and supply side platforms — which also get passed personal data so they can broadcast it widely via the online ad world’s real time bidding (RTB) system. That’s to solicit potential advertisers’ bids for the attention of the individual app user… The wider the personal data gets spread, the more potential ad bids.

That scale is how programmatic works. It also looks horrible from a GDPR ‘privacy by design and default’ standpoint.

The sprawling process of programmatic explains the very long list of ‘partners’ nested non-transparently behind the average publisher’s online consent flow. The industry, as it is shaped now, literally trades on personal data.

So if the consent rug it’s been squatting on for years suddenly gets ripped out from underneath it there would need to be radical reshaping of ad targeting practices to avoid trampling on EU citizens’ fundamental right.

GDPR’s really big change was supersized fines. So ignoring the law would get very expensive.

Oh hai real time bidding!

In Vectaury’s case CNIL discovered the company was holding the personal data of a staggering 67.6 million people when it conducted an on-site inspection of the company in April 2018.

That already sounds like A LOT of data for a small mobile adtech player. Yet it might actually have been a tiny fraction of the personal data the company was routinely handling — given that Vectaury’s own website claims 70% of collected data is not stored.

In the decision there was no fine but CNIL ordered the firm to delete all data it had not already deleted (having judged collection illegal given consent was not valid); and to stop processing data without consent.

But given the personal-data-based hinge of current-gen programmatic adtech that essentially looks like an order to go out of business. (Or at least out of that business.)

And now we come to another interesting GDPR adtech complaint that’s not yet been ruled on by the two DPAs in question (Ireland and the UK) — but which looks even more compelling in light of the CNIL Vectaury decision because it picks at the adtech scab even more daringly.

Filed last month with the Irish Data Protection Commission and the UK’s ICO, this adtech complaint — the work of three individuals, Johnny Ryan of private web browser Brave; Jim Killock, exec director of digital and civil rights group, the Open Rights Group; and University College London data protection researcher, Michael Veale — targets the RTB system itself.

Here’s how Ryan, Killock and Veale summarized the complaint when they announced it last month:

Every time a person visits a website and is shown a “behavioural” ad on a website, intimate personal data that describes each visitor, and what they are watching online, is broadcast to tens or hundreds of companies. Advertising technology companies broadcast these data widely in order to solicit potential advertisers’ bids for the attention of the specific individual visiting the website.

A data breach occurs because this broadcast, known as an “bid request” in the online industry, fails to protect these intimate data against unauthorized access. Under the GDPR this is unlawful.

The GDPR, Article 5, paragraph 1, point f, requires that personal data be “processed in a manner that ensures appropriate security of the personal data, including protection against unauthorised or unlawful processing and against accidental loss.” If you can not protect data in this way, then the GDPR says you can not process the data.

Ryan tells TechCrunch that the crux of the complaint is not related to the legal basis of the data sharing but rather focuses on the processing itself — arguing “that it itself is not adequately secure… that they’re aren’t adequate controls”.

Though he says there’s a consent element too, and so sees the CNIL ruling bolstering the RTB complaint. (On that keep in mind that CNIL judged Vectaury should not have been holding the RTB data of 67.6M people because it did not have valid consent.)

“We do pick up on the issue of consent in the complaint. And this particular CNIL decision has a bearing on both of those issues,” he argues. “It demonstrates in a concrete example that involved investigators going into physical premises and checking the machines — it demonstrates that even one small company was receiving tens of millions of people’s personal data in this illegal way.

“So the breach is very real. And it demonstrates that it’s not unreasonable to suggest that the consent is meaningless in any case.”

Reaching for a handy visual explainer, he continues: “If I leave a briefcase full of personal data in the middle of Charing Cross station at 11am and it’s really busy that’s a breach. That would have been a breach back in the 1970s. If my business model is to drive up to Charing Cross station with a dump-truck and dump briefcases onto the street at 11am in the full knowledge that my business partners will all scramble around and try and grab them — and then to turn up at 11.01am and do the same thing. And then 11.02am. And every microsecond in between. That’s still a fucking data breach!

“It doesn’t matter if you think you’ve consent or anything else. You have to [comply with GDPR Article 5, paragraph 1, point f] in order to even be able to ask for a legal basis. There are plenty of other problems but that’s the biggest one that we highlighted. That’s our reason for saying this is a breach.”

“Now what CNIL has said is this company, Vectaury, was processing personal data that it did not lawfully have — and it got them through RTB,” he adds, spelling the point out. “So back to the GDPR — GDPR is saying you can’t process data in a way that doesn’t ensure protection against unauthorized or unlawful processing.”

In other words, RTB as a funnel for processing personal data looks to be on inherently shaky ground because it’s inherently putting all this personal data out there and at risk…

What’s bad for data brokers…

In another loop back, Ryan says the regulators have been in touch since their RTB complaint was filed to invite them to submit more information.

He says the CNIL Vectaury decision will be incorporated into further submissions, predicting: “This is going to be bounced around multiple regulators.”

The trio is keen to generate extra bounce by working with NGOs to enlist other individuals to file similar complaints in other EU Member States — to make the action a pan-European push, just like programmatic advertising itself.

“We now have the opportunity to connect our complaint with the excellent work that Privacy International has done, showing where these data end up, and with the excellent work that CNIL has done showing exactly how this actually applies. And this decision from CNIL takes, essentially my report that went with our complaint and shows exactly how that applies in the real world,” he continues.

“I was writing in the abstract — CNIL has now made a decision that is very much not in the abstract, it’s in the real world affecting millions of people… This will be a European-wide complaint.”

But what does programmatic advertising that doesn’t entail trading on people’s grubbily obtained personal data actually look like? If there were no personal data in bid requests Ryan believes quite a few things would happen. Such as, for e.g., the demise of clickbait.

“There would be no way to take your TechCrunch audience and buy it cheaper on some shitty website. There would be no more of that arbitrage stuff. Clickbait would die! All that nasty stuff would go away,” he suggests.

(And, well, full disclosure: We are TechCrunch — so we can confirm that does sound really great to us!)

He also reckons ad values would go up. Which would also be good news for publishers. (“Because the only place you could buy the TechCrunch audience would be on TechCrunch — that’s a really big deal!”)

He even suggests ad fraud might shrink because the incentives would shift. Or at least they could so long as the “worthy” publishers that are able to survive in the new ad world order don’t end up being complicit with bot fraud anyway.

As it stands, publishers are being screwed between the twin plates of the dominant adtech plaforms (Google and Facebook), where they are having to give up a majority of their ad revenue — leaving the media industry with a shrinking slice of ad revenues (that can be as lean as ~30%).

That then has a knock on impact on funding newsrooms and quality journalism. And, well, on the wider web too — given all the weird incentives that operate in today’s big tech social media platform dominated Internet.

While a privacy-sucking programmatic monster is something only shadowy background data brokers that lack any meaningful relationships with the people whose data they’re feeding the beast could truly love.

And, well, Google and Facebook.

Ryan’s view is that the reason an adtech duopoly exists boils down to the “audience leakage” being enabled by RTB. Leakage which, in his view, also isn’t compliant with EU privacy laws.

He reckons the fix for this problem is equally simple: Keep doing RTB but without any personal data.

A real-time ad bidding system that’s been stripped of personal data does not mean no targeted ads. It could still support ad targeting based on real-time factors such as an approximate location (say to a city region) and/or generic and aggregated data.

Crucially it would not use unique identifiers that enable linking ad bids to a individual’s entire digital footprint and bid request history — as is the case now. Which essentially translates into: RIP privacy rights.

Ryan argues that RTB without personal data would still offer plenty of “value” to advertisers — who could still reach people based on general locations and via real-time interests. (It’s a model that sounds much like what privacy search engine DuckDuckGo is doing, and also been growing.)

The really big problem, though, is turning the behavioral ad tanker around. Given that the ecosystem is embedded, even as the duopoly milks it.

That’s also why Ryan is so hopeful now, though, having parsed the CNIL decision.

His reading is regulators will play a decisive role in pushing the ad industry’s trigger — and force through much-needed change in their targeting behavior.

“Unless the entire industry moves together, no one can be the first to remove personal data from bid requests but if the regulators step in in a big way… and say you’re all going to go out of business if you keep putting personal data into bid requests then everyone will come together — like the music industry was forced to eventually, under Steve Jobs,” he argues. “Everyone can together decide on a new short term disadvantageous but long term highly advantageous change.”

Of course such a radical reshaping is not going to happen overnight. Regulatory triggers tend to be slow motion unfoldings at the best of times. You also have to factor in the inexorable legal challenges.

But look closely and you’ll see both momentum massing behind privacy — and regulatory writing on the wall.

“Are we going to see programmatic forced to be non-personal and therefore better for every single citizen of the world (except, say, if they work for a data broker),” adds Ryan, posing his own concluding question.”Will that massive change, which will help society and the web… will that change happen before Christmas? No. But it’s worth working on. And it’s going to take some time

“It could be two years from now that we have the finality. But a finality there will be. Detroit was only able to fight against regulation for so long. It does come.”

Who’d have though ‘taking back control’ could ever sound so good?

from iraidajzsmmwtv https://ift.tt/2Bmt1zN via IFTTT

[billydmacklin]

Fall Checklist: Installing Locks, Lights, and a Few Garage Updates!

This blog mini-series is a paid partnership with Lowe’s! Thank you for supporting my sponsors!

BY GOLLY the last couple of weeks have been packed. While I’m working on pulling together a post for the wild and wholly ride that was/is restoring the side of my house (it’s done! finally! mostly!), I wanted to pop in and share a smaller project I tackled last week on my long-suffering garage! We took a brief and enlightening tour of the garage’s status back in August, including a bunch of work that I’ve put into it over the years, so feel free to catch yourself up if you’re interested.

In a nutshell: I have, over time, made small and large-ish gestures toward improving my garage. I have also, over time, generally failed to really see these garage-centric projects through to polished completion. Why? Because there’s a whole lot of house that keeps me more than occupied enough, so the garage takes a back seat. Various smaller tasks have been put off until some later date TBD, which is fine and par for the course except for the part where seeing those unfinished items bothers you every single day for months or years. Ya know. It’s not fun having that stuff hanging over you.

SO. Having wrapped up the majority of what I wanted to get done this fall on the side of the house AND being blessed with a few more days of nice fall weather, I took the opportunity to tie up some of these loose ends on the garage! I FEEL SO MUCH BETTER! Allow me to explain myself.

Last time we saw the garage, I’d painted it black, gutted the interior, added a ton of lumber storage, redone the electric, and added a set of 5′ wide french doors to the back to provide easier access for large and unwieldy items that frequently get moved in and out. Of course, in this time I’ve also torn off the back of the house twice, the side of the house once, brought massive amounts of soil into the yard, built raised beds, hauled as much wood in as I’ve brought out…the garage has taken kind of a beating and the time was nigh to give it a little attention.

With all that work behind me you might think there wouldn’t be that much in front of me, but you’d be so adorably wrong, you cute sweet thing. Haven’t we gotten the hang of this by now? The rule is, there’s always more to do. So there are some parts I’m not mentioning, like how that little old deadbolt on that little skinny old door above Mekko’s head in that first picture is…well, we’ll generously call it decorative. It used to work. By some miracle the key actually was conveyed to me at the house closing, and by some additional miracle I didn’t lose it. But at some point it stopped latching, and no amount of fiddling seemed to fix it.

Instead of fixing this security-breach-waiting-to-happen, I went ahead and installed a set of french doors that come with no hardware whatsoever! I elegantly painted one coat on the exterior of the doors, and then only scraped the glass on one of them, leaving the decidedly “in progress” look you see above. Which kind of stops being acceptable after a couple of years.

SO. With a broken deadbolt on one door, and the other set of doors being held closed inside the garage with a heavy object that successfully defeated the wind blowing the doors open but wasn’t likely to stump a person, we have some issues. SECURITY CONCERNS, you may call them. NOT SMART, DANIEL. Particularly as I have steadily filled the garage with lots of lumber but also various valuable outdoor power equipment that I’d be super duper incredibly bummed to have walk off. Unfortunately this concern has actual basis—the garage did get robbed once, years ago. I hadn’t owned the house long and there wasn’t much out there, but this is why I no longer own a bike! I miss my bike. Some jerk has my bike.

So. Let’s try to avoid that happening again.

Here we’ll be replacing an old surface-mount deadbolt with a new, regular through-the-door deadbolt, so the first order of business was removing the old one! Obviously different brands/eras will mean different designs and parts, but generally you can do this as long as you have access to both sides of the door and a screwdriver.

My surface-mount deadbolt was mounted to the door with a bracket, and then the lock housing was attached with three flat head screws.

After removing all of the parts from the inside of the door, removing the exterior trim was easy-peasy. Insert key and pull.

Here’s where things get slightly tricky. Because most of the surface-mount deadbolt’s guts are in the surface-mount housing, the hole in the door is way too small for a modern deadbolt where the guts are housed inside the door. This hole was 1.5″ or so, but my new lock called for a 2 1/8″ hole. At this point I could have decided to just drill a new hole below the existing one and patch the old hole, but that’s one of those solutions that’s somehow lazy and also more work.

For larger holes like this, you’ll need a hole saw. Over the years I’ve just bought them piecemeal as-needed, but it’s nice to get a snazzy set with a little carrying case if you’re fancy like that. In case you’ve never used one, essentially that part in the bottom fits into your drill, and that drill bit in the center kind of acts as a pilot to anchor your hole saw in place while you drill. Without that small bit (it’s removable in case it breaks), it’s pretty much impossible to keep the hole saw in place—instead it’ll jump all over the place, damaging your surface and making you so sad.

So. The problem is thus. There’s already a hole where that bit needs to drive in to keep my hole saw from walking as I drill. Never gonna work.

SO! Using a speed-square to mark the location of the existing hole for reference, I then attached a small piece of scrap wood temporarily to the door. A couple of drywall screws does the trick, and those holes are small enough to patch super easily.

Then, continue as usual. The deadbolt will almost certainly come with a simple paper template, which makes quick work of figuring out exactly where to drill. Many, like this Schlage one I’m using, allow for a couple of different options for the center point, in case your door has narrow stiles (like this one!) or you need to align with other existing hardware.

Because my scrap wood block throws off the thickness off the door, I opted to drill my pilot hole and then remove the paper template, so I could reuse it after removing the temporary block. Remember I’ll also need to drill a hole through the side of the door for the bolt to go in and out of.

See how nicely that works? The temporary block continues to keep the hole saw in that spot until you’ve made it all the way through the door. Then just unscrew it and you have a perfect hole! Then it was just a matter of taping the paper template back up and drilling the 1″ hole through the side with a different drill bit, where the paper template instructed. I used a forstner bit, but a spade or auger bit would work, too.

Congrats on your perfect hole. One down, one to go!

For the french doors, I decided to keep it really simple and went with this nice Schlage keyed entry door handle, so the lock and the handle are one piece of hardware. It installs very similarly to the deadbolt, and because there weren’t any weird existing conditions to work around it went pretty fast!

So that was the project. But then…you know…one thing leads to another. Instead of just installing the new hardware and walking away, I decided to spend a little extra time finally finishing painting the new french doors, and repainting the old side door. Because each of those french doors has 15 lites, it’s kind of nice that the glass comes with a protective plastic film that you can just cut away and dispose of after painting and be left with very little to razor blade off the glass.

I also figured there was no time like the present to give the original doorknobs from the side door a little TLC. There wasn’t a ton of old paint but it was stubborn, so I threw them in my dedicated old hardware crock pot to loosen it all and then scrubbed them clean. Works like a charm.

A note about those knobs and the door they came from: I noticed during this adventure that the rim lock on the inside of the garage door has a patent date on it from 1869! That aligns pretty closely with when the house was likely built (1865, until proven otherwise), but I can’t imagine this garage pre-dates the early 20th century, just looking at the framing, materials, foundation, windows, etc. Most of the doorknobs in my house are white porcelain, but these kind of marbled faux-bois ones are used in a few places like the inside of closets (presumably they weren’t considered as fancy?). It makes me wonder if there used to be a different barn/shed/outbuilding of some kind that got demolished, with parts like this door getting reused for the newer structure.

Who knows, but it’s things like that which make me feel very…comfortable in this house? I totally would have done the same thing a hundred years ago. Love a recycling project!

Sooooooooooooooooo. Before I know it, I have all the tools and ladders out and am just casually repainting half the garage in a day, as one does. There were a couple little areas of peeling paint, plus some caulk splitting, plus I used a satin finish this time instead of a matte finish, which to me looks a little nicer and feels easier to keep clean and avoid scuffing. It took about a gallon of Valspar Duramax exterior latex in satin, which I had color-matched to the same color I used the first time around, Ben Moore’s Onyx.

One of my new painting must-haves is this particular paintable Big Stretch caulk by Sashco, which is now available at Lowe’s! I was so excited when I saw it there, since it used to be kind of difficult to find. It’s great stuff. I hate it when I finish a painting job only to have the caulk crack after a few months, not to mention the damage that can cause when it’s on an exterior.

Oh right, also! I had all but forgotten that when I roughed in the electric in the garage, I left a wire for another exterior light over the french doors! I picked up this simple and classic light, which I opted to spray paint black. All black everything garage! I considered a pop of color but then thought…nah, better not.

I used some Rust-o-leum spray paint I had half a can of down in the basement (this one is similar!), and it looks so nice! One VERY COOL feature of this light is that it has a light sensor on the canopy, which automatically turns it on when it gets dark out. Why don’t all exterior lights have those?! You can actually buy a similar part and retrofit almost any fixture fairly easily—I’m already thinking I might do that for the lights on the street-facing side of the garage, since I can’t seem to program the timer switch to save my life. I can’t handle advanced technology.

And THEN, taking a step back from my work, it occurred to me that even though those french doors bring a lot of nice light into the garage, once the glass has been scraped and cleaned they also REALLY expose the yard to a view of all the mayhem inside. NOPE. I HAVE NOT COME THIS FAR FOR THIS. Too much realness. I just want to keep up appearances, damn it!

So THEN, I picked up two of these affordable curtains from Lowe’s, plus four of these rods so I could kind of stretch and pleat the fabric on the back of the doors without having flappy curtain fabric in a place where they’d likely get dirty or caught on something. The curtains themselves are a pretty sheer polyester with kind of a linen look, so they should hold up well to this kind of use. The rods are also easily removable from the brackets, meaning the curtains can be taken down with little effort and thrown in the wash to my heart’s content.

(Sorry for the scary nighttime pictures—it gets dark early now and my momentum cannot wait for things like natural daylight.)

The curtains were a bit too long for my doors, so I had to hem them about 10″. OH YES HE DID BREAK OUT THE SEWING MACHINE. He’s drilling through doors! He’s painting the garage! He’s stripping hardware! He’s refinishing a light! He’s installing electric boxes! He’s sewing curtains! These are the days I’m really hoping no neighbors are watching me from their windows, because I seem patently unhinged. Is this…the blogger lifestyle? Am I finally doing it right?!

The curtains worked out really well, though. I’m kind of proud. GETTIN. IT. DONE!

Hey hey, garage! Looking pretty slick! You may note that CLEARLY I am unconcerned with the garage showing its age in the from of layers and layers and layers of old paint. Am I the only one who kinda…digs that? Like I think I actually prefer it on a building like this?

I love the way that old doorknob really pops against the black, especially now that it’s clean.

So. Real talk. If I had to choose my favorite thing about the past few years of world history, I can tell you one thing that would rank. It used to be that finding matte black hardware for anything was near impossible, and often meant resorting to spray paint. NO LONGER. The powers that be have deemed matte black a FULL ON TREND and now the options are vast! I love that major brands like Schlage have caught on so quickly and made this option available—I know it’s JUST A DEADBOLT but I’ll still agonize over how it looks, and this one looks handsome and inconspicuous and legitimately makes me happy. Also it WORKS! VERY WELL! Obviously I wasn’t obsessing over the security of my garage before this, but it bothered me and now it doesn’t. I have room in my head for all sorts of other things to bother me now!!

I’m also really pleased with the Schlage keyed entry handle on the french doors! I installed a simple slide bolt at the top of the left side door inside to keep it stationary, and the right side door now does all of these door things that are very exciting. It opens! It closes! It latches! It locks! The improvement is night and day. Also can we appreciate how nice those curtains look? I SEWED. FOR YOU. Mostly for me but also for you.

I’m not mad about this 5 year progress! In case you’re looking for flaws…I decided to extend the sill under the french doors to the edges of the casing (it should have been done that way to begin with; I’m not sure what we were thinking), so the wood epoxy covering the patch was still curing and not ready for paint when I took these pictures. The window on the side also needs a lot of work, so I’m saving that for another day. So there are still some problem areas, but the improvement achieved in this short exciting whirlwind has me feeling SO much happier with the whole thing in the meantime.

Super thrilled with how this light came out! The factory finish on the inside of the shade was white, which I considered leaving alone but I’m glad I sprayed it black. That combined with this adorable (and honestly pretty convincing!) LED filament-style bulb creates a really nice amount of light in this area of the yard. I really like those faux Edison-style LED bulbs for exterior lights—they cast a very warm light (even warmer than an incandescent), and the energy consumption is so low that they don’t drive up the old electric bill.

So there we have it! I’m having a hard time putting this feeling into words, but I’ll try anyway: we’re decidedly at the end of fall, and for the first time in this house, that fact isn’t inspiring major panic and feelings of immense personal failure. In years past it’s always been something…the roof, or the heat system, or the unfinished exterior work, or last year when the kitchen was just a total shell with no walls or insulation (not to mention electric, plumbing, or anything else), or the year before when walking through the house felt like a tour of the post-apocalypse. Which is all to say, if you’re in the thick of it: I don’t know that there’s a point at which the work ever get easier, but it does get more manageable. A day will come when that fall to-do list feels more plausible than aspirational, and you might actually feel like you’re doing this whole thing kind of right. One foot in front of the other.

Fall Checklist: Installing Locks, Lights, and a Few Garage Updates! published first on https://carpetgurus.tumblr.com/

[interiorstarweb]

Fall Checklist: Installing Locks, Lights, and a Few Garage Updates!

This blog mini-series is a paid partnership with Lowe’s! Thank you for supporting my sponsors!

BY GOLLY the last couple of weeks have been packed. While I’m working on pulling together a post for the wild and wholly ride that was/is restoring the side of my house (it’s done! finally! mostly!), I wanted to pop in and share a smaller project I tackled last week on my long-suffering garage! We took a brief and enlightening tour of the garage’s status back in August, including a bunch of work that I’ve put into it over the years, so feel free to catch yourself up if you’re interested.

In a nutshell: I have, over time, made small and large-ish gestures toward improving my garage. I have also, over time, generally failed to really see these garage-centric projects through to polished completion. Why? Because there’s a whole lot of house that keeps me more than occupied enough, so the garage takes a back seat. Various smaller tasks have been put off until some later date TBD, which is fine and par for the course except for the part where seeing those unfinished items bothers you every single day for months or years. Ya know. It’s not fun having that stuff hanging over you.

SO. Having wrapped up the majority of what I wanted to get done this fall on the side of the house AND being blessed with a few more days of nice fall weather, I took the opportunity to tie up some of these loose ends on the garage! I FEEL SO MUCH BETTER! Allow me to explain myself.

Last time we saw the garage, I’d painted it black, gutted the interior, added a ton of lumber storage, redone the electric, and added a set of 5′ wide french doors to the back to provide easier access for large and unwieldy items that frequently get moved in and out. Of course, in this time I’ve also torn off the back of the house twice, the side of the house once, brought massive amounts of soil into the yard, built raised beds, hauled as much wood in as I’ve brought out…the garage has taken kind of a beating and the time was nigh to give it a little attention.

With all that work behind me you might think there wouldn’t be that much in front of me, but you’d be so adorably wrong, you cute sweet thing. Haven’t we gotten the hang of this by now? The rule is, there’s always more to do. So there are some parts I’m not mentioning, like how that little old deadbolt on that little skinny old door above Mekko’s head in that first picture is…well, we’ll generously call it decorative. It used to work. By some miracle the key actually was conveyed to me at the house closing, and by some additional miracle I didn’t lose it. But at some point it stopped latching, and no amount of fiddling seemed to fix it.

Instead of fixing this security-breach-waiting-to-happen, I went ahead and installed a set of french doors that come with no hardware whatsoever! I elegantly painted one coat on the exterior of the doors, and then only scraped the glass on one of them, leaving the decidedly “in progress” look you see above. Which kind of stops being acceptable after a couple of years.

SO. With a broken deadbolt on one door, and the other set of doors being held closed inside the garage with a heavy object that successfully defeated the wind blowing the doors open but wasn’t likely to stump a person, we have some issues. SECURITY CONCERNS, you may call them. NOT SMART, DANIEL. Particularly as I have steadily filled the garage with lots of lumber but also various valuable outdoor power equipment that I’d be super duper incredibly bummed to have walk off. Unfortunately this concern has actual basis—the garage did get robbed once, years ago. I hadn’t owned the house long and there wasn’t much out there, but this is why I no longer own a bike! I miss my bike. Some jerk has my bike.

So. Let’s try to avoid that happening again.

Here we’ll be replacing an old surface-mount deadbolt with a new, regular through-the-door deadbolt, so the first order of business was removing the old one! Obviously different brands/eras will mean different designs and parts, but generally you can do this as long as you have access to both sides of the door and a screwdriver.

My surface-mount deadbolt was mounted to the door with a bracket, and then the lock housing was attached with three flat head screws.

After removing all of the parts from the inside of the door, removing the exterior trim was easy-peasy. Insert key and pull.

Here’s where things get slightly tricky. Because most of the surface-mount deadbolt’s guts are in the surface-mount housing, the hole in the door is way too small for a modern deadbolt where the guts are housed inside the door. This hole was 1.5″ or so, but my new lock called for a 2 1/8″ hole. At this point I could have decided to just drill a new hole below the existing one and patch the old hole, but that’s one of those solutions that’s somehow lazy and also more work.

For larger holes like this, you’ll need a hole saw. Over the years I’ve just bought them piecemeal as-needed, but it’s nice to get a snazzy set with a little carrying case if you’re fancy like that. In case you’ve never used one, essentially that part in the bottom fits into your drill, and that drill bit in the center kind of acts as a pilot to anchor your hole saw in place while you drill. Without that small bit (it’s removable in case it breaks), it’s pretty much impossible to keep the hole saw in place—instead it’ll jump all over the place, damaging your surface and making you so sad.

So. The problem is thus. There’s already a hole where that bit needs to drive in to keep my hole saw from walking as I drill. Never gonna work.

SO! Using a speed-square to mark the location of the existing hole for reference, I then attached a small piece of scrap wood temporarily to the door. A couple of drywall screws does the trick, and those holes are small enough to patch super easily.

Then, continue as usual. The deadbolt will almost certainly come with a simple paper template, which makes quick work of figuring out exactly where to drill. Many, like this Schlage one I’m using, allow for a couple of different options for the center point, in case your door has narrow stiles (like this one!) or you need to align with other existing hardware.

Because my scrap wood block throws off the thickness off the door, I opted to drill my pilot hole and then remove the paper template, so I could reuse it after removing the temporary block. Remember I’ll also need to drill a hole through the side of the door for the bolt to go in and out of.

See how nicely that works? The temporary block continues to keep the hole saw in that spot until you’ve made it all the way through the door. Then just unscrew it and you have a perfect hole! Then it was just a matter of taping the paper template back up and drilling the 1″ hole through the side with a different drill bit, where the paper template instructed. I used a forstner bit, but a spade or auger bit would work, too.

Congrats on your perfect hole. One down, one to go!

For the french doors, I decided to keep it really simple and went with this nice Schlage keyed entry door handle, so the lock and the handle are one piece of hardware. It installs very similarly to the deadbolt, and because there weren’t any weird existing conditions to work around it went pretty fast!

So that was the project. But then…you know…one thing leads to another. Instead of just installing the new hardware and walking away, I decided to spend a little extra time finally finishing painting the new french doors, and repainting the old side door. Because each of those french doors has 15 lites, it’s kind of nice that the glass comes with a protective plastic film that you can just cut away and dispose of after painting and be left with very little to razor blade off the glass.

I also figured there was no time like the present to give the original doorknobs from the side door a little TLC. There wasn’t a ton of old paint but it was stubborn, so I threw them in my dedicated old hardware crock pot to loosen it all and then scrubbed them clean. Works like a charm.

A note about those knobs and the door they came from: I noticed during this adventure that the rim lock on the inside of the garage door has a patent date on it from 1869! That aligns pretty closely with when the house was likely built (1865, until proven otherwise), but I can’t imagine this garage pre-dates the early 20th century, just looking at the framing, materials, foundation, windows, etc. Most of the doorknobs in my house are white porcelain, but these kind of marbled faux-bois ones are used in a few places like the inside of closets (presumably they weren’t considered as fancy?). It makes me wonder if there used to be a different barn/shed/outbuilding of some kind that got demolished, with parts like this door getting reused for the newer structure.

Who knows, but it’s things like that which make me feel very…comfortable in this house? I totally would have done the same thing a hundred years ago. Love a recycling project!

Sooooooooooooooooo. Before I know it, I have all the tools and ladders out and am just casually repainting half the garage in a day, as one does. There were a couple little areas of peeling paint, plus some caulk splitting, plus I used a satin finish this time instead of a matte finish, which to me looks a little nicer and feels easier to keep clean and avoid scuffing. It took about a gallon of Valspar Duramax exterior latex in satin, which I had color-matched to the same color I used the first time around, Ben Moore’s Onyx.

One of my new painting must-haves is this particular paintable Big Stretch caulk by Sashco, which is now available at Lowe’s! I was so excited when I saw it there, since it used to be kind of difficult to find. It’s great stuff. I hate it when I finish a painting job only to have the caulk crack after a few months, not to mention the damage that can cause when it’s on an exterior.

Oh right, also! I had all but forgotten that when I roughed in the electric in the garage, I left a wire for another exterior light over the french doors! I picked up this simple and classic light, which I opted to spray paint black. All black everything garage! I considered a pop of color but then thought…nah, better not.

I used some Rust-o-leum spray paint I had half a can of down in the basement (this one is similar!), and it looks so nice! One VERY COOL feature of this light is that it has a light sensor on the canopy, which automatically turns it on when it gets dark out. Why don’t all exterior lights have those?! You can actually buy a similar part and retrofit almost any fixture fairly easily—I’m already thinking I might do that for the lights on the street-facing side of the garage, since I can’t seem to program the timer switch to save my life. I can’t handle advanced technology.

And THEN, taking a step back from my work, it occurred to me that even though those french doors bring a lot of nice light into the garage, once the glass has been scraped and cleaned they also REALLY expose the yard to a view of all the mayhem inside. NOPE. I HAVE NOT COME THIS FAR FOR THIS. Too much realness. I just want to keep up appearances, damn it!

So THEN, I picked up two of these affordable curtains from Lowe’s, plus four of these rods so I could kind of stretch and pleat the fabric on the back of the doors without having flappy curtain fabric in a place where they’d likely get dirty or caught on something. The curtains themselves are a pretty sheer polyester with kind of a linen look, so they should hold up well to this kind of use. The rods are also easily removable from the brackets, meaning the curtains can be taken down with little effort and thrown in the wash to my heart’s content.

(Sorry for the scary nighttime pictures—it gets dark early now and my momentum cannot wait for things like natural daylight.)

The curtains were a bit too long for my doors, so I had to hem them about 10″. OH YES HE DID BREAK OUT THE SEWING MACHINE. He’s drilling through doors! He’s painting the garage! He’s stripping hardware! He’s refinishing a light! He’s installing electric boxes! He’s sewing curtains! These are the days I’m really hoping no neighbors are watching me from their windows, because I seem patently unhinged. Is this…the blogger lifestyle? Am I finally doing it right?!

The curtains worked out really well, though. I’m kind of proud. GETTIN. IT. DONE!

Hey hey, garage! Looking pretty slick! You may note that CLEARLY I am unconcerned with the garage showing its age in the from of layers and layers and layers of old paint. Am I the only one who kinda…digs that? Like I think I actually prefer it on a building like this?

I love the way that old doorknob really pops against the black, especially now that it’s clean.

So. Real talk. If I had to choose my favorite thing about the past few years of world history, I can tell you one thing that would rank. It used to be that finding matte black hardware for anything was near impossible, and often meant resorting to spray paint. NO LONGER. The powers that be have deemed matte black a FULL ON TREND and now the options are vast! I love that major brands like Schlage have caught on so quickly and made this option available—I know it’s JUST A DEADBOLT but I’ll still agonize over how it looks, and this one looks handsome and inconspicuous and legitimately makes me happy. Also it WORKS! VERY WELL! Obviously I wasn’t obsessing over the security of my garage before this, but it bothered me and now it doesn’t. I have room in my head for all sorts of other things to bother me now!!

I’m also really pleased with the Schlage keyed entry handle on the french doors! I installed a simple slide bolt at the top of the left side door inside to keep it stationary, and the right side door now does all of these door things that are very exciting. It opens! It closes! It latches! It locks! The improvement is night and day. Also can we appreciate how nice those curtains look? I SEWED. FOR YOU. Mostly for me but also for you.

I’m not mad about this 5 year progress! In case you’re looking for flaws…I decided to extend the sill under the french doors to the edges of the casing (it should have been done that way to begin with; I’m not sure what we were thinking), so the wood epoxy covering the patch was still curing and not ready for paint when I took these pictures. The window on the side also needs a lot of work, so I’m saving that for another day. So there are still some problem areas, but the improvement achieved in this short exciting whirlwind has me feeling SO much happier with the whole thing in the meantime.

Super thrilled with how this light came out! The factory finish on the inside of the shade was white, which I considered leaving alone but I’m glad I sprayed it black. That combined with this adorable (and honestly pretty convincing!) LED filament-style bulb creates a really nice amount of light in this area of the yard. I really like those faux Edison-style LED bulbs for exterior lights—they cast a very warm light (even warmer than an incandescent), and the energy consumption is so low that they don’t drive up the old electric bill.

So there we have it! I’m having a hard time putting this feeling into words, but I’ll try anyway: we’re decidedly at the end of fall, and for the first time in this house, that fact isn’t inspiring major panic and feelings of immense personal failure. In years past it’s always been something…the roof, or the heat system, or the unfinished exterior work, or last year when the kitchen was just a total shell with no walls or insulation (not to mention electric, plumbing, or anything else), or the year before when walking through the house felt like a tour of the post-apocalypse. Which is all to say, if you’re in the thick of it: I don’t know that there’s a point at which the work ever get easier, but it does get more manageable. A day will come when that fall to-do list feels more plausible than aspirational, and you might actually feel like you’re doing this whole thing kind of right. One foot in front of the other.

Fall Checklist: Installing Locks, Lights, and a Few Garage Updates! published first on https://novaformmattressreview.tumblr.com/

[generouslysublimehologram-blog]

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