#and James of course but that’s its own complicated variable

[improbabledragon]

Okay one of my favorite things about dark heir is the way it gave me a story where the main character has a dark secret and in some ways things would be simpler if he just told his friends but, alas, he does not trust his friends, he thinks if he tells them, that they will turn on him … BUT HES RIGHT

This is a trope in a hundred thousand stories and I almost always hate it because miscommunication as a plot complication is frustrating and boring to me usually

But here???? HERE???? The whole time I was like, you know what Will, you are correct do not tell your friends yet actually. And you know it’s gonna come out eventually but the timing has gotta be just right. Have to wait long enough that they know you better and trust you and will stop themselves from just killing you immediately

But wait too long and Uh Oh you have been Lying To Your Friends For Months and now they trust you Less, for this has added to your sins

And then it comes out and Will was right they all turn on him 😭

Well. Almost.

[cursebreaker-lilith]

I only posted her original profile in September, but I’ve changed some stuff and wanted to do a new drawing. Lili was pretty new to me then, and I’ve found her voice a lot more since so it only felt right to have a do over on her profile.

This is all up to the beginning of year 6.

EDIT: Some formatting changes made 5-12-21

BASICS

Name: Lilith Silvia Vesta Brooks

Nicknames: Lili, Pipsqueak, Pip

Name Meaning: Lilith references a figure from Jewish folklore, Silvia comes from her grandmother’s name and references a figure from Roman mythology, Vesta was also chosen by her grandmother and references the Roman goddess of the hearth.

Gender: Cis Female 

Pronouns: She/Her

Age: 16 (Variable depending on what year I’m writing about)

Birthday: October 19th, 1972

Zodiac: Libra

Blood Status: Half-blood

Ethnicity/Nationality: White Brit

Sexuality: Self identifies primarily with queer but is okay with being called bisexual. Is also probably on both the asexual and aromantic spectrum, but the words for them hadn’t been coined in her time period. 

Appearance

Body:

Height: 165cm / 5′5

Build: Average to stocky, hourglass shape

Eyes: A bright yellow-green, noticeably a bit big and round.

Hair: Pale blonde hair that is very thin and fine. She likes doing it up in different ways, from ponytails, to pigtails, to braids. Right before starting her 6th year, she cut her hair short and permed it on an impulse encouraged by her Muggle friends.

Skin: Pale skin that burns easily but quickly fades into a tan

Misc: Small and usually unnoticeable scars scattered across her hands and face from ice in the Ice Vault that will fade wholly with time (most already have by 6th year). Pierced ears--one in each lobe as a teenager but adds more as an adult.

Material Items:

Clothing: As a young child, she tried to keep up with mainstream Muggle fashion. She preferred lots of bright colors, stripes, gaudy jewelry, and scrunchies. Dear lord she loves scrunchies. As she got older however, she began to phase out of the bright colors and mainstream fashion into something which would soon be called grunge. Not completely grunge however as she still loves her statement earrings and scrunchies. Usually wears baggy/non form fitting clothing.

Accessories: Almost always wearing some sort of dangly and obnoxious statement earrings. Always has at least three scrunchies on her person.

In her school bag: Her wand, at least five scrunchies, school books and papers, books Rowan wants her to read, an old crochet penguin for good luck (her first attempt at crochet animals), crochet hooks and yarn, journal and papers related to Cursed Vault plans, at least three cool looking rocks she found on the ground.

Reference:

Face Claim: N/A

Voice Claim: N/A

Personality

Traits:

+  loyal, friendly, extroverted, responsible, mature, kind, adaptable, quick learner, resourceful, hopeful, courageous

+/— determined, good liar, intense, clever, intelligent, independent

— obsessive, untrusting, secretive, forceful, quick temper, angry, abrasive, single minded, rule breaker, rude, spiteful

Description:

Lili has a lot of pent up anger and a quick temper. She’s angry at her family, at authority, at the world. She’s not good at processing this anger and thus tends to lash out at people very often and often very cruelly and violently. She knows this and tries to keep in check but isn’t very good at doing so even as she ages. Because of her anger, she also tends to keep grudges for quite a while, even for stupid or petty reasons and is slow to admit she’s wrong.

In a better world, she would be known for her friendliness. Lili can be very friendly and relaxed. She talks first and makes a judgement second, trying to be as open minded as possible. She’s very casual yet polite and likes people being the same back to her.

Lili is determined in a way that tends towards the negative. Her laser focus on things tend to quickly become obsessions if someone she trusts doesn’t intervene quickly enough.

After her mother stopped being a parent towards her at a young age, Lili learned to take care of herself quickly. She’s become clever and resourceful in her steps to becoming independent. It’s left her mature and responsible for her age, but also untrusting and secretive, convinced she can do it on her own (or with Rowan only).

Lili is very loyal to those that earn her loyalty. For those she cares about, she would do anything. If you do something to lose that loyalty, expect harsh treatment after if Lili even deigns to speak to you. She’s not afraid of cutting people out of her life if they betray or anger her.

Other:

Likes: crafts (crochet, knitting, sewing), Rowan and Barnaby, scrunchies, dangly earrings, being busy, collecting things, fashion

Dislikes: Merula and Ismelda, Rakepick, Snape, most other Slytherins, people who get in her way, Dumbledore, Doctor Who after the 5th Doctor, not getting enough sleep, flying class

MBTI: ESTP

Alignment: Chaotic Neutral

Hogwarts

Hogwarts House: Slytherin

OWL Classes:

Astronomy: 6/10 (E)

Charms: 9/10 (O)

DADA: 9/10 (O)

Flying: 2/10 (A)

Herbology: 3/10 (A)

History of Magic: 2/10 (A)

Potions: 4/10 (A)

Transfiguration: 7/10 (E)

OWL Electives:

Ancient Runes:  9/10 (O)

Arithmancy:  6/10 (O)

Care of Magical Creatures:  6/10 (O)

NEWT Classes:

Ancient Runes: 9/10 (O)

Arithmancy: 6/10 (E)

Charms: 9/10 (O)

DADA: 9/10 (O)

Transfiguration: 7/10 (E)

Extracurriculars:

Clubs: Dueling Club (3rd-4th year), Fencing Club (2nd-5th year), Transfiguration Club (occasionally from 2nd year on)

Quidditch: N/A

Prefect or Head Boy/Girl: N/A

Best Classes:

Charms It’s the one class she’s very naturally talented at. She never needs to study much, but she barely has to try with Charms. Someday she’ll beat Ben and be the best in their year at the class.

Defense Against the Dark Arts She’s not good at this because of any professor, she’s good at this because of her excursions into the Cursed Vaults giving her practical knowledge.

Worst Classes:

Flying Listen, if people were meant to fly, then they’d have wings, or a spell letting people properly fly would be created by now. Lili will be staying on the ground, thank you very much.

Herbology She’s lived in the city her whole life and being around so many plants is strange. She doesn’t hate the class, but she does use it to catch up with her friends rather than study.

Potions She doesn’t have the patience for potions, and that’s even when she doesn’t have Snape refusing to acknowledge her existence.

Favorite Professors:

Flitwick She thinks Flitwick is great. There’s not much more to say. He’s responsible but not smothering, and still thinks well of her brother. If she ever had to pick an adult to trust, it would be Flitwick.

Kettleburn She had taken Care of Magical Creatures because Rowan had wanted a third elective and Lili didn’t want to take Muggle Studies or Divination. However, she ended up loving the class and thinks Kettleburn is hilarious. She honestly wished she could take the class NEWT level, but her schedule was already full.

Least Favorite Professors:

Snape She has a very complicated relationship with Snape. He hates her because of her brother (who he did not get along with), because she reminds him of James Potter, and because her nickname, Lili, reminds him of his lost love Lily Evans every time he hears it. Lili, of course, does not know any of this and thinks he just hates her for no reason. Jacob thought he was a Death Eater (he got that from whispers older kids who Jacob knew were definitely Death Eaters), so Lili uses that as justification to not like him.

Rakepick She never trusted her and barely liked her, even before she became a professor. Her opinion didn’t go improve any time in fifth year.

Magic

1st Wand: Blackthorn, unicorn hair, 11 3/4 in, shiny and slightly flexible

“Blackthorn, which is a very unusual wand wood, has the reputation, in my view well-merited, of being best suited to a warrior. This does not necessarily mean that its owner practises the Dark Arts (although it is undeniable that those who do so will enjoy the blackthorn wand’s prodigious power); one finds blackthorn wands among the Aurors as well as among the denizens of Azkaban.”

2nd Wand: Aspen, phoenix feather, 12 in, fairly rigid

“In my experience, aspen wand owners are generally strong-minded and determined, more likely than most to be attracted by quests and new orders; this is a wand for revolutionaries.”

Special Abilities: Natural Legilimens, Occlumency

Boggart

Form: Jacob telling her she’s useless and unwanted and that everything she’s doing is for nothing.

Riddikulus: Has not found anything yet that works

Amortentia

What they smell: the Owlery, Standard Ingredient, and something else, something she can’t figure out

What they smell like to others: Lavender, hot chocolate, campfire smoke

Patronus

Form: A goshawk. Independent and intelligent hunters who focus intently on stalking their prey.

Memory: A childhood memory of going to a fair. Jacob looked after her the entire night, and it’s one of the last times she remembers seeing both of her parents laugh.

What they see in the Mirror of Erised: Herself with her family–Jacob is there and looks like how she remembers him, and her mother and father are holding hands and smiling. As she ages, her mother and father are phased out of the image and replaced by her friends, her new family.

FAMILY

Father: David Brooks

Muggle

b. 1943

Works at an accounting firm.

In theory, he was alright with magic and the wizarding world. In practice, it unnerved him more than he could say. When his children started doing accidental magic, and when Jacob came home from Hogwarts talking about nothing but spells and magic, that was it for David. He filed for divorce in 1980 and hasn’t spoken to his ex-wife or children since. He has since married to a fellow Muggle, treating her children as his own and speaking rarely of his biological children. He doesn’t even know Jacob disappeared.

Mother: Carina Flora Brooks (nee Braddock)

Pureblood

b. 1944

Ravenclaw

Works for a wizarding travel magazine as a photographer, travels around the world frequently

She was perhaps not meant to be a mother, and would have been happier following in her brother’s shoes of travelling the world with no responsibilities. However, her mother was insisting she marry and Carina, in a fit of rebellion, decided to marry a nice Muggle she knew instead of the purebloods her mother had picked out.

Carina was never very good with either of her children, and in particular could never get along with Jacob, resorting to abuse (emotional and physical) to try to get him to behave how she wanted. Despite this, she totally shut down when Jacob disappeared, feeling like a failure. This led to her severely neglecting her daughter to wallow in her own misery day and night. It also led to an irrational hatred of Hogwarts. She refuses to read any letters sent by them and has made several subtle attempts to make Lili miss the Hogwarts Express.

Brother: Jacob Seraphinus Ulysses Brooks

Half-blood

b. March 8th, 1967

Slytherin

Currently missing.

Never able to make friends easily or keep his mouth shut, Jacob always had a hard time fitting in, so he turned to books. He preferred fiction over nonfiction, but one history book’s mention of Cursed Vaults on Hogwarts’ grounds led to a search that would dominate his, and his sister’s, life.

He was an outcast in his house and Hogwarts, besides for a few acquaintances, and instead focused on reaching his goals. He was reckless and brave (the Sorting Hat considered putting him in Gryffindor), but obsessive, secretive, and increasingly dependent on the idea of “the end justifies the means.”

Grandfather: Ambrose Braddock

Pureblood

b. 1903

Ravenclaw

Deceased

Known for being Britain’s first natural Legilimens in a century. The Braddock family is known for being a line of natural Legilimens, but none in the family had had the ability in five generations before Ambrose was born. This ended up leading to an offer of marriage from the Malfoy family who wanted the connection to this rare ability. Later realized his grandson was also a natural Legilimens, but died before he could teach Jacob more than the basics on how to control it and never realized his granddaughter also had the ability.

Died of sickness in 1975 at age 72

Grandmother: Silvia Braddock (nee Malfoy)

Pureblood

b. 1911

Slytherin

Never worked, has always been a housewife

Your typical upper class, conservative grandmother. She may not believe that strongly in pureblood mania anymore, but she still believes in things like “children should be seen, not heard,��� and corporal punishment. Was in an arranged marriage to Ambrose and never really grew to love him feeling she was marrying beneath her Malfoy heritage. Fairly reclusive nowadays, only entertaining old friends for brunch and going to the occasional pureblood party.

Uncle: Victor Felinus Braddock

Pureblood wizard

b. 1940

Gryffindor

Has a different job every few months, deosn’t really needs to have one and his work ethic shows that

Considered a fun uncle by his nephew, and an annoyance by his niece. Has a lot of stories, and a slight drinking problem.  While his mother was annoyed at him for having a dalliance with a Muggle-born, she was even more furious that he refused to marry Suzie. Victor didn’t want to be tied down, and left her to raise their two daughters only appearing in their lives every few years.

Cousins: Donna and Caroline Jones

Half-bloods

b. 1960 and 1975

Both Gryffindor

Welsh

Their mother Susan Jones was a Muggle-born Sorted into Gryffindor in the same year as Victor Braddock. The two have had an on again, off again relationship since their Hogwarts years that has resulted in two daughters.

Donna was sorted into Gryffindor in 1971 (meaning she would have been roommates with Lily Evans which is a coincidence I swear) and it’s easy to see why. She’s confident, brash, and blunt. She has many problems with her father and refuses to interact with that side of the family. Works in the Department of Magical Law Enforcement for the Ministry.

Caroline is the opposite of her much older sister and was surprised to find herself in Gryffindor (Sorted there in Lili’s 3rd year). She’s timid and quiet, but with a backbone hidden underneath. She wilts at any negative tones, but is always ready to extend a hand to anyone who has hurt her, even multiple times.

Step family: Sabina Brooks, Ioan and Luca Ciobanu

Muggles

b. 1949, 1975, and 1980

Immigrants from Romania to England

After divorcing Carina, David began dating Sabina shortly after and later married her, acting as a father to her two young children. The four of them live together in London.

Pets:

Alfred An easily frightened black cat that once belonged to Jacob

Doctor Hoot A large barred owl that frequently forgets it’s an owl and not a lapdog

FRIENDS

Best Friends:

Rowan Khanna Her best friend!! She originally befriended Rowan because Rowan reminded her of her muggle friend, but it soon blossomed into a different, much closer relationship. Whenever Rowan is gone, Lili doesn’t really know what to do (”I’m going to cut all the sleeves off my robes.” “Why??” “Rowan left an hour ago and she’s like 85% of my impulse control.”) and Lili would never have made it through any of the Cursed Vaults without her. She probably also would have gotten expelled for brawling and dueling in like second year without Rowan. I’m not joking about that impulse control thing.

Barnaby Lee Lili didn’t like Barnaby at first. Even before he worked for Merula, she thought he was nothing more than a stupid jock and made fun of how Snape would pick on him in Potions. Then she actually talked to him and did a complete 180. “I’ve only known Barnaby for an hour, but if anything happened to him, I would kill everyone in this room and them myself.” She liked how sweet and genuine he was despite his awful upbringing. He’s always there to support her, and she’s really grown to love him for that. He once thought he had a crush on her, but it wasn’t really romantic (”The feeling was friendship but he had never experienced it before.”).

Good Friends:

Bill Weasley He’s like the big brother Jacob should’ve been. She was not thrilled to have a complete stranger helping with the Vaults, but in hindsight she’s so very glad she listened to Rowan. Lili isn’t sure she could have gotten half of what she’s done done without Bill’s help and steadfastness.

Charlie Weasley Their friendship kind of crept up on Lili. Charlie was closer friends with Ben and Barnaby, so while Lili had a passing familiarity with him before the Forest Vault, she wouldn’t have called them friends. She was surprised when she turned out to really enjoy his company when he started helping with the Cursed Vaults.

Chiara Lobosca Chiara was someone Lili tangentially knew due to people confusing them for each other (the hair color; once Chiara hits a growth spurt and Lili doesn’t people stop). Then Lili is forced to partner with Chiara in Herbology in 3rd year, and besides seeing her Herbology grade go up the slightest bit, she finds a friend in Chiara, appreciating the girl’s seemingly infinite kindness.

Friends:

Nymphadora Tonks They get along in classes, but Lili doesn’t trust Tonks with anything serious.

Liz Tuttle The two have many overlapping friends but don’t really hang out with each other.

Badeea Ali She really respects Badeea, but they just don’t have many reasons to be around each other.

Jae Kim Lili thinks he’s hilarious and very smart, but doesn’t trust him as far as she could throw him.

It’s Complicated:

Ben Copper Probably the most complicated relationship here. She befriended him out of pity and continued their friendship because of his skill at Charms. He’s had a crush on her since they were 11 when she stood up for him which no one had ever done before. Then the Red Robed Wizard Reveal tm happened and Lili dropped him and ignored him, though he tried to make it up to her. 6th year only drives a deeper wedge between them as Lili can’t stand his recent behaviour. Ben finally confessing about his love for Lili in 6th year didn’t help mend anything either.

Tulip Karasu After finding out that Tulip had purposefully not told her about Jacob’s room, Lili instantly decided she was an undesirable but necessary ally. Lili does not like Tulip for most of their time at Hogwarts as she’s really pissed that someone would keep her brother’s things from her. Lili will talk to her about the Cursed Vaults, but they do not hang out and Lili does not consider her a friend. This really, really hurts Tulip’s feelings but Lili doesn’t really care. The relationship does get a bit better in 6th year, but it’s never going to be a close one. In a better world without the Vaults, they’d probably get along smashingly as while Lili isn’t a prankster, she has no problem egging them on.

Love Interests:

Penny Haywood Her first, longest, and most confusing crush. She was wary of Penny at first. Popular girls were rarely that 100% nice, but Penny truly was. She also had a nice smile and pretty hair and soft hands…. It took Lili quite a while (like four years and Bill telling her) to figure out it was a crush and then….she did absolutely nothing. She panicked and stopped talking to Penny for a while before sheepishly apologizing when Penny confronted her. They went to the Celestial Ball together, but “as friends.” That did not stop them from having a Moment that Lili interpreted completely wrongly and she assumed Penny didn’t like her romantically. Penny in fact did, and since Lili never reacted to their Moment in the proper way, Penny assumed that Lili wasn’t interested. The two continued having crushes on each other for the rest of their time at Hogwarts and remained close friends after they both graduated.

Talbott Winger Her second, less confusing, crush. Similar to Barnaby, Lili didn’t think much of Talbott at first. He was that one kid who was talented at Transfiguration and she once saw him chatting casually to an owl in the Owlery. He was weird and she ignored him. Then she was paired with him on a class assignment in 3rd year and a friendship bloomed despite Talbott’s protests. It was a casual thing at first, but then Lili helped Talbott find his mom’s necklace, and their talk under the stars about family and the past and future deepened their friendship. Having already figured out she had a crush on Penny by this time, she managed to get the signs that she now also had a crush on Talbott, which made her panic, again. However, since Talbott is even worse with emotions than her, she didn’t do anything drastic like she did with Penny. They went on one date in 6th year but that was going too fast for Talbott and they decided to stay friends until Talbott felt more comfortable being around people. Lili took this….mostly gracefully.

Diego Caplan The two met in the Dueling Club in 4th year. Diego was impressed with Lili’s skill and tried to befriend her and also maybe flirt with her a bit. Lili, who tends to gravitate towards people who are unashamedly themselves, found his over the top flirting hilarious and was instantly endeared to Diego. She really enjoyed being around him, finding his lightheartedness helped her forget some of her troubles with the Cursed Vaults, especially in 5th year. He asked her out on a date, her first one, and she agreed. She enjoyed the date, but 5th year was the peak of her obsession with the Cursed Vaults so she broke it off. They later dated again during 6th year, after Lili’s one date with Talbott.

Dormmates:

Rowan Khanna see above

Desdemona Selwyn An OC. Their entire relationship can be explained with that one text post that’s like “Bitch.” “Blocked.” “Wait unblock me I need to tell you something.” “Unblocked.” “Bitch.”

Vidalia Barrows An OC. Lili has said like two sentences to Vidalia and she plans to keep it that way. Vidalia just eats and sleeps and does whatever Desdemona says to do.

Doesn’t Interact:

Murphy McNully/Skye Parkin/Orion Amari/Erika Rath She’s not involved in Quidditch.

Andre Egwu I just can’t think of a way to work him into the plot lol They would get along somewhat well otherwise.

Enemies:

Merula Snyde Hated each other’s guts for a while. Then Lili gave up her Frog Choir spot and Merula gained a small crush (even if Lili was a total ass about giving it up). While they’ll never be friends, by the time of 5th and 6th year they’ve become reluctant allies similar to Lili and Tulip above. Lili will probably never totally befriend her, but she’s learned to be civil and that’s progress.

Ismelda Murk Lili doesn’t really like Ismelda but she considers her all bark and no bite. Ismelda hates Lili because she thinks Lili and Barnaby are gonna end up dating and is jealous.

Desdemona Selwyn An OC. See above.

Most of Slytherin House Lili has never been shy about being half Muggle and being proud of it, and in a house that still worships Voldemort, that sets her apart. The few that don’t find her being pro-Muggle distasteful don’t want to be exiles in their own dorms and avoid talking to her.

Story

Childhood:

Lili’s childhood was never that great. Her parents fought frequently over her and Jacob’s use of accidental magic, and this eventually caused them to divorce when Lili was 9. Her mother in particular was emotionally and physically abusive but Jacob spared her from the worst of it.

Jacob was always the best part of her childhood. She loved her parents, but Jacob was the person she always looked forward to seeing. When he went to Hogwarts, she was upset for weeks, and when he went missing, she was devastated (especially as he went missing the night of her birthday).

Her mother didn’t take it well. Carina was not particularly close with Jacob, but this obviously big failure of her as a parent hit her hard. She became very emotionally withdrawn from Lili and threw herself into her photography work, leaving the country, and Lili, for weeks at a time.

Lili had to become very independent very quickly after that. That, plus the fact that she didn’t have any non-Muggle friends meant she trusted very few people and lied often. Getting her Hogwarts letter was a relief and a promise of freedom

Hogwarts:

: )

see here: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1467043

Adulthood:

Lili is very distraught after graduation and leaves everyone she knows behind to travel Europe and find herself. She spends several years doing this, helping people and doing odd jobs.

Eventually, she finds that she has a talent for languages, picking up a few easily in her travels, and starts to consider possibly doing something related to language whenever she goes back to Britain.

Miscellaneous

She fuckin loves scrunchies.

Has lived in a Muggle neighbourhood her whole life.

Likes muggle TV. Grew up watching Doctor Who. Not impressed with the 6th Doctor, and glad she was away at Hogwarts during his run. Favorite Doctor is the 4th and she knit herself her own version of his scarf.

Likes collecting things! She loves cool rocks on the sidewalk, tacky tourist souvenirs, and things you find for $1 in a thrift store.

She can knit, crochet and sew. She likes making little crochet animals and giving them to friends (or just keeping them and having a plushy empire around her bed).

Loves having her photo taken and has a whole collection of photos, but hates taking photos. It reminds her of her mother.

One of her Muggle friends got her into fencing. She thought it would be useful to hone her athletic skills with, so she continued doing it when she went back to Hogwarts in the fall.

The type of person who needs to be doing something 24/7. When she doesn’t have anything to focus on, she tends to be all over the place and rather annoying.

Quieter and more complacent as a kid. it was after her family broke apart that the need to be so driven started to become a part of her personality.

Love Like You from Steven Universe is a song for her and Jacob (from Jacob’s POV)

Chameleon by Michela is a song that fits her

Tropes:

Big Brother Worship

Determinator

Family Eye Resemblance

Good is Not Nice

Hair Trigger Temper

Jerk with a Heart of Gold

Parental Neglect

[cassatine]

@sulfisreen, whom I cannot thank enough, pointed to me this tweet about the minefield issue of what Lucas’ VII-IX would have been, something on which i do have Opinions A NEW LUCAS WHILLS QUOTE!! That doesn’t happen everyday. And wow, what quote. 

Context first: the quotes come from the James Cameron’s Story of Science Fiction book, which accompanies a four episodes, ehr, documentary series of the same name -- I haven’t watched the series or read the book and wouldn’t have without that quote, but I’ll be doing that in the next weeks. Both are quite recent, google tells me the series was release in April (2018) and the book in May. In all likelihood the quotes used in the book come from interviews conducted for the TV series.

As a disclaimer of sorts -- “Lucas on future stories and how much they’re planned” covers a range of quotes that go from fully honest to intentionally misleading and chart many changes in the conception of that future through the years. Without anything corroborating or invalidating it it’s hard to know where these new quotes fall. They also come from an interview not particularly focused on Lucas’ would-have-been ST and conducted what, five years or so after he stopped working on it. Basically some fuzziness is to be expected, and imo it could hardly be more open to interpretation.

I’ve never seen the Whills mentioned within the context of the ST (beyond speculation of course), even less what little we’ve been told of Lucas’ plans for it -- which, as the tweet noted, are pretty much only known through what other people have said, and can be resumed to: Luke would have been there as an aged master, and the protagonist would have been his student, a woman on her path to Jedi-hood, because Lucas had done two dudes already. 

It’s not really a discrepancy, since that premise is compatible with Whills-y happenings, but it’s interesting it wasn’t ever mentioned before. A few possible reasons: it’s pretty obscure lore and wouldn’t speak to much of the audience. It’s definitely not where the ST is going, and the official narrative would rather stress the similarities between Lucas’ early plans and the final product. It clashes against the Whills as conceived in the new canon and inspired by Lucas’ older conceptions of them (they changed). It’s never made it out of Lucas’ head and onto paper, or only as obscure notes. It’s what he would have done now that he thinks about it (again, very recent interviews), and not what he would have done before selling the franchise. It’s really fucking weird as far as stories goes. It’s kept in reserve for some future story. 

“microbiotic world” -- that’s super interesting if very obscure. Microbiotic has to do with microbiomes, ie. microbial biomes. A biome is a geographically defined ensemble of ecosystems, characterized by its climate, flora, and fauna. It’s not a static thing -- it’s a lot of variables with complex feedback relationships. A microbiome is basically the same thing but with microbial organisms and on a much, much smaller scale, like the insides of you. I don’t know what Lucas meant by it, but I think we can cross a literal Fantastic Voyage off the list I. I’m very curious to see other people think of it, but for now I lean towards it’s metaphorical, and it’s a tortuous way to talk about the unseen web of relationships between living things, which in the GFFA is infused with Meaning (the Force). The important thing, and you’ll see I can even bring the balance into it, is that again, a “microbiotic world” is not a static system -- i’ll try and illustrate with a biome, because same notion: let’s say a given year you have, idk, less rain than average; that’s going to affect vegetation growth, which in turn is going to affect animals. Herbivores will have less to eat and population numbers will be impacted, which will then impact carnivores. It’s a lot more complicated, but the general idea is basically that if you change a variable, the others will be affected like ripples. It’s a very strong system, very adaptable, but at some point if there’s too much stress put on it, it can collapse which is... not good. Something something balance. And I can’t not think about midi-chlorians, because they’d very much be part of microbiomes in the GFFA, and because even metaphorically you can’t really talk microbiome without talking symbiosis -- which was a theme touched upon in TPM, partly through the midi-chlorians. [Insert conspiracy board picture] 

The Whills operating differently than ehr, regular beings works with what we knew of them already; it’s always risky trying to nail down specifics wrt the Whills, but until now it seemed to be more of a “another plane of existence” kind of deal rather than a “microbiotic world” one, so that’s interesting. 

The controlling the universe bit, on the other hand that’s... mostly new. Though there was never much to learn about them,  observers more than anything; incredibly powerful, operating on a whole other level of existence, ascended beings of a sort, pretty much beyond mortality, quite ineffable, and very much a narrative device. They were conceived as a framing device (the Journal of the Whills of the OT) and repurposed for the PT to stress the fact that Force ghostery was a Big Deal, and started as observers more than anything, an they aren’t known to have directly intervened in the GFFA. I can’t remember anything specifying that no, they don’t intervene, ever, and imo there’s grounds to speculate they’ve got nothing against indirect action. And they were always supposed to be incredibly powerful, with an understanding and knowledge of the Force pretty much beyond that of the Jedi / any Force tradition in the GFFA. I don’t think Lucas means control as in everything happens because of them and free will doesn’t exist and neither does happenstance. Going back to the biome/microbiome and the concept of a complex web of relationships between living things that, if too stressed, can collapse... if the concept of the Whills wasn’t to be completely reinvented, they could have easily fit in such a system, as entities both within and without, making sure that collapse doesn’t happen by influencing events. 

Okay, next we learn they feed off the Force, and I always did love the “the Force is parasitic” kind of speculation, and I would so have been there for the version of the ST in which the Whills are some bad news eldritch beings, but... idk. It just doesn’t feel very Lucas. I do think his ST would have had its own identity and its share of “what you thought was wrong” moments, and it’s true the Whills were pretty obscure as far as lore go so not the hardest thing to retcon, but still that’s a pretty big departure. But again, it’s pretty open to interpretation -- is it a negative thing? or more of a natural kind of process? No way to know, at least until we’re told more. 

Tbh I don’t think there’d be much to tell anyway; Lucas had barely begun working on the ST when he sold the franchise, and whatever his initial notes and outline covered, it would have gone through many changes. I mean, the Whills were initially supposed to be in the OT, then they were supposed to be in the PT, and I think that’s beautiful (and ironic) that apparently they were supposed to be in the ST at some point, but there’s about no way to know if they’d have made it to the final cut. 

Thanks to the second quote, I can just hear a thousand voices screaming “lucas did have a master plan!!” and I wish that notion would have died off by now. That’s about the nicest thing I have to say on the second quote. 

[novarainart]

Made for Each Other (Chapter 2)

“That’s disgusting, Tony.”

Tony gave Steve his arched brow of judgment. Steve, to his credit, seemed genuinely and mildly appalled.

“Hilarious,” Tony’s tone suggested he found it anything but, “it’s an acronym for Binarily Augmented Retro Framing. Still way in its infancy, but I’ve got the prototype for the prototype.”

Steve peered around Tony’s shoulder as the shorter man opened a metal safe the size of a refrigerator. He could see the insides lined with a plush looking material customized to fit snuggly around different pieces of equipment. Tony began emptying the contents: an awkward looking helmet with an exaggerated visor, a large amp-like machine fitted with a touch screen panel, four projectors with detachable tripods, coils of wire of varying lengths and thicknesses, and an assortment of hand sized attachments.

Wasting no time, Tony started assembling the tech right there on the floor, all the while rambling an explanation at Steve.  

“This stunning bit of innovation is going to help me help you.” Steve couldn’t help but stare at Tony’s deftly moving hands, making something so complicated look laughably easy. “Basically, the headset will access your hippocampus, stimulate memories, and display those memories through these projectors. I’ll get to see what’s going on in that pretty little head of yours, while this,” Tony patted the amp-like machine, “is going to feed me audio so I can better flesh out an algorithm for his personality.”

Moments like this reminded Steve how much he appreciated Tony. Ever since their helicarrier debacle, the genius made a point to translate his usual techno-babble into laymen’s terms for Steve’s benefit. The gesture reflected a kindness that Tony liked to pretend he didn’t have. A gesture laden with poetic meaning: the futurist welcoming the man out of time.

“What was it like making your first one?” Steve asked, meandering around the workshop, knowing he could do little to help Tony as he worked.

Technology was not his forte.

“First what? AI?” Tony barely spared a glance at Steve, who nodded once in confirmation, then shrugged. “Took longer than it really should have, but that’s because I was mostly drunk.”

Steve had made his way to the well stocked kitchenette, deciding on making coffee, when he paused to look at the other incredulously. “You created artificial intelligence while you were drunk?”

“Mostly drunk,” Tony corrected, gesturing at one of the two single armed robots. “The end result was DUM-E: a cautionary tale to future geniuses everywhere.”

DUM-E somehow expressed curiosity with a high-pitched whistle upon hearing its name. The robot swivelled on its axis in search of something, grabbing the nearest tool with rubber padded claws, and trundled its way to Tony. DUM-E’s wheels barely made a sound on the polished floor, eagerly approaching Tony with its prize, like a toddler wanting to help daddy with his work. Tony turned to look at the offered tool, frowning in irritation.  

“How’s a level supposed to help me with this?” Tony’s words were biting. “You’re useless, you know that right?”

Steve smirked as he witnessed the exchange because he wasn’t fooled in the slightest. Tony proved Steve’s instincts correct when he took the level from DUM-E with a put upon sigh, trying to give a surreptitious pat to the robot’s claws at the same time.  

“I think he’s fantastic,” said Steve, his tone playfully goading.

“Quit it, you’ll fill his circuits with undeserved self-worth.”

DUM-E whirred excitedly at Steve’s praise, completely oblivious to (or purposely ignoring) the verbal abuse from its own creator. Perhaps the robot was used to it or, like Steve, learned not to take Tony’s insults at face value. Satisfied, the robot rolled its way back to its brother, U, possibly bragging about its accomplishments as it whirred and clicked, chattering happily.

Steve chuckled at the robot’s innocent antics, busying himself with making coffee for Tony. It was the least he could do while the other labored to gift him with the impossible.

***

When Tony offered to make Steve an AI, he was already proficient in the craft with multiple programs under his belt. Tony was truly a leader in the field, so much so that he managed to whittle down the process of designing, creating, and executing to about two months. This time, however, the process almost doubled, taking about four and a half months to complete.

Tony was ready for it. He adjusted his calculations from the start, accounting for several variables, especially the factor of relying on Steve’s memories for data.

Steve, however, was not ready for it. Despite Tony’s dream for BARF to become a treatment option for trauma survivors, it offered little comfort when used outside of its intended purpose. Needing to review and relive years of memories, each more harrowing than the last, was both teasing and tortuous for Steve. Even with a past mired in warfare, it was no easy feat for the super-soldier to stay afloat amongst so much roiling, sometimes all consuming emotions.   

While Steve watched Tony input the last lines of code, surrounded by holographic schematics and who knew what else (Steve certainly didn’t), his thoughts were far away. Looking back on the last several months, Steve could admit he underestimated the exact toll the process would take. Mental exhaustion was almost a constant after every session of data collection. It was naive for him to have assumed anything, but he thought he could simply show Tony what Bucky was like and let it be that.

How foolish.

But, soon, worth it.  

Seeing Tony push away from the desk monitors, Steve stepped back to give the shorter man a wider berth, knowing the other liked to move around when he worked. Steve hadn’t been hovering, exactly, but he was standing nearby. His nerves felt like a live wire, too active to sit still on the couch and sketch like he normally did.  

“Bring up the biometrics will you, J?” Tony snapped his fingers, immediately summoning several holo-screens, their free floating images bathing him in white-blue light.   

“Of course, sir,” replied JARVIS, the AI’s disembodied voice posh as ever.

Steve had a millisecond to appreciate JARVIS’s manners before finding himself in awe. Multiple holograms blossomed around Tony, painting him in an array of colors that made Steve’s hand itch with the desire to paint, to preserve the moment. Tony was the eye of a storm comprised of living data, his movements conducting a whirlwind of energy, a symphony of kinetic power.

He was in his element.

“Let’s see what we’ve got,” Tony muttered distractedly, causing some graphs to fluctuate when he flicked his wrist as if spinning a dial.

What happened next wasn’t an “all of a sudden” sort of thing, more like a gradual awakening.

A spherical blue shape phased into existence mere feet in front of Tony at waist level. It looked like an atom but the size of a baseball, spinning lazily in midair. Unable to help himself, Steve drew closer again to stand behind Tony, doing his best to avoid disturbing the other. Steve’s eyes were transfixed onto the little sphere.

“All right, J,” Tony tapped a few more commands on the floating holo-screens, “sync up the algorithm.”

“Syncing now.”

Tony dismissed the holo-screens to give them an uninterrupted view of the little sphere. Steve observed how the syncing caused the sphere to almost shiver, thrumming with an awareness of what was happening. Not a minute passed before the shivering stopped and the sphere faded out. Steve was about to panic over the experiment failing, but his nerves were eased by JARVIS.

“Syncing complete.” Steve mentally sighed in relief. “The algorithm has been accepted. Shall I proceed with post-sync activation, sir?”

“Actually,” Tony turned halfway to grin at Steve, “why don’t we let the good Captain have the honors?”

“Yeah?” Steve couldn’t hide his excitement, but it quickly evaporated into uncertainty. “What am I supposed to do?”

The insecure part of Steve half expected Tony to become annoyed, at worst accuse him of being ungrateful. Instead, Tony softened his grin, encouraging Steve with a reassuring smile.  

“Greet him like you would your friend.”  

Clearing the nervous lump from his throat, Steve spoke hesitantly, trying to mentally prepare himself for the unexpected.

“Hey, Buck--um, it’s been a while.”

Turns out, preparing for the unexpected was impossible.

Steve was met with neither a disembodied voice nor the little blue sphere. What materialized was the hologram of a man in his late 20’s or early 30’s, standing at an even 6’0 with a moderate build. He was dressed in a plain collared shirt with casual slacks. He had short, almost wavy hair combed neatly to the side, leaving his face open, friendly. He had a square jaw and striking eyes that elevated his boyish cuteness to roguishly handsome.

It was a hologram completely identical to the late James Buchanan Barnes.

The hologram smiled a smile Steve had seen so many times, but it was the voice that made it real--made Steve feel like he was being teleported back in time, back before the ice.

“Did you miss me, punk?”   

[khalilhumam]

Measuring Domestic Resource Mobilization–Thoughts on a New Study by NORAD

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New Post has been published on http://khalilhumam.com/measuring-domestic-resource-mobilization-thoughts-on-a-new-study-by-norad/

Measuring Domestic Resource Mobilization–Thoughts on a New Study by NORAD

“Measurement is the first step that leads to control and eventually to improvement. If you can’t measure something, you can’t understand it. If you can’t understand it, you can’t control it. If you can’t control it, you can’t improve it.” ― H. James Harrington While there is debate in the management literature about the primacy of measurement in effecting change, there is no doubt that it is a necessary component of bringing about lasting change. The research and convening that CGD has been doing on domestic resource mobilization (DRM) have focused on political impediments to increased DRM in developing countries. With input from local researchers in five developing countries, we have spelled out the barriers to increased DRM and discussed them with ministers of finance from a wide range of African countries. And throughout our work, it has been evident that a critical component of the politics of DRM is performance measurement. While, in general, analysts have focused on tax-to-GDP ratio as a narrow gauge of performance, policymakers also need to benchmark their revenue systems both against good practices as well as performance of other countries to design and implement future reforms. And once a diagnosis and reforms are implemented, measurement will be critical to demonstrate that reform measures are having the desired impacts, both in increasing revenues and in making the tax system more efficient and equitable. In fact, currently there are six DRM assessment tools that were introduced mostly in the past six years. To a lay person, they would appear to be too many, given that there are two more in the offing! The first one focuses on assessing the design of tax policies and is being jointly developed by the IMF and World Bank. The second is meant to assess Base Erosion and Profit Shifting activities and is being developed by German Development Cooperation and International Bureau of Fiscal Documentation. On top of the assessment instruments already in use, there are four data collection and reporting tools. Funded and supported by donors and international organizations, such as the IMF, OECD, and the World Bank, they are now widely used to diagnose weaknesses in different dimensions of a country’s tax system.  Frode Lindseth of the Norwegian Tax Administration has just published a valuable inventory of these tools and frameworks. The work was undertaken to support the Norwegian Agency for Development and Cooperation (NORAD) in its DRM technical assistance to developing countries. Lindseth looked at the comparative advantages of the various tools and frameworks and the complexity of choices that developing country officials and their supporting partners face in their use. Lindseth is appropriately objective and non-normative in his assessment of the diagnostic and measurement landscape and defers any recommendations of particular tools as “such a decision will depend on country specific circumstances.” But given our experience in working with developing countries and in managing DRM technical assistance, we take away several important lessons from his paper:

No tool is complete in providing diagnostics, data collection, design advice, and monitoring. Countries are thus forced to choose several tools and marry them with their own processes to craft a strategy. Typically developing country tax administrations are strapped for resources, and choosing among various tools complicates their choices, especially when the complementarities and synergies across tools are not clearly demonstrated for the users. Neither do the assessment tools explain to countries how their use should be sequenced to minimize costs for developing countries’ tax administrations.

Development partners should exploit existing tools rather than design their own. Where there are gaps, new tools should be complementary to existing efforts. Each of the five diagnostic tools grew out of individual donor and institutional needs, with only the Tax Administration Diagnostic Assessment Tool (TADAT), launched in 2015, representing an effort of donors to work together to a common framework. In 2016 the Platform of Collaboration on Tax (PCT) was established to bring together expertise and enhance cooperation among the four largest multilateral organizations engaged in DRM technical assistance. But two of the four members of PCT came up with new tools―the Tax Diamond and the Maturity Models after 2016. While these new tools may fill an important technical assistance design gap for World Bank teams and for the OECD advisory work, they have also introduced an element of complexity for developing countries in deciding where they should spend their scarce diagnostic resources. And very recently, the International Bureau of Fiscal Documentation (IBFD) has launched another assessment tool, TAx-Ray, claiming to have a more comprehensive methodology.

Development partners and developing countries could build on Lindseth’s work to create a guide to the use of these tools. While each developing country can use Lindseth’s paper to make preliminary decisions about how to exploit the tools, tax administration officials need to understand technical assistance providers’ expectations of how impact will be measured and what tools partners see as most useful for diagnosis and evaluation. Currently, there is no consistent methodology or guidance across the donor community.

The cost of using the various tools is difficult to estimate. While development partners can absorb much of the diagnostic cost, developing country tax administrations bear the brunt of reform design, implementation, evaluation, and data reporting, with the opportunity cost of taking tax officials away from their “regular work” being largely unmeasured. This makes any kind of cost effectiveness calculation difficult. It would be useful to have some cost estimates from countries that have used some of these tools in guiding others’ choices. Of course, it is almost impossible to assess how much it cost donors and international institutions to develop these tools.

Reporting on which countries have used which tools is uneven. While country confidentiality concerns are understandable, it would no doubt be useful to developing countries undertaking assessments to know what other countries have done, if not the specific results. For example, the TADAT website gives this information in some detail, while Tax Diamond and the Maturity Models do not, although data are available on request. Some agreement could be reached amongst partners and countries as to what minimal information can be publicly divulged for the betterment of the DRM community.

Considerable progress has been made to consolidate sources of data and make them consistent across countries, while trying to minimize reporting burden. As Lindseth suggests, this effort should continue, with the International Survey on Revenue Administration (ISORA) being the best data source on tax administration and USAID’s Collecting Taxes Database providing the most information for analyzing fiscal systems as whole. As with diagnostic tools, development partners and countries should eschew creating additional data sources that require input from member countries. Most of the countries providing data to the 2019 edition of the African Tax Outlook also did so to ISORA, both tools supported by broadly similar donors.

The available data sets are now of sufficiently wide coverage, in terms of countries and variables, and duration to allow more sophisticated analysis of tax systems. Donors should support researchers, particularly in developing countries, to exploit these data and enrich the analytic bases for policy reform. Equally, the attention should be directed at improving the quality of the data to make it useful for policy design.

We agree with Lindseth that the toolbox should be reviewed periodically to ensure complementarity and relevance of the various tools and whether there is scope for merging some of them. It would best that such an evaluation be undertaken jointly by partners, developing country representatives, and independent researchers. 

Lindseth’s work is a critical first step in helping the DRM community understand the tools in the DRM measurement toolbox. Consistent use of the right tools will ensure donor and developing countries marshal their limited reform resources well. The donor community and developing countries should build on this paper to that end. CGD will convene some of the key players in the months ahead to help move this work forward.

[hermanwatts]

Sensor Sweep: Year’s Best Horror, Blood Sundown, Al Williamson, Northworld

RPG (Modiphius Entertainment): Before Conan, there was Kull! DANGER BREEDS CAUTION, AND ONLY A WARY MAN LIVES LONG IN THAT WILD COUNTRY WHERE THE HOT VENDHYAN PLAINS MEET THE CRAGS OF THE HIMELIANS AN HOUR’S RIDE WESTWARD OR NORTHWARD AND ONE CROSSED THE BORDER AND WAS AMONG THE HILLS WHERE MEN LIVED BY THE LAW OF THE KNIFE. Here, for the first time in roleplaying gaming, Kull and his world are described in all their savage, dreamlike glory.

Writing (Larry Correia): Of course the article is trash. It comes from Buzzfeed. They get everything wrong. But worse, some of the quotes in there from certain writers are agenda driven garbage, which give aspiring writers a completely ass backwards view of how publishing works. I want to see writers be successful. I’m rooting for you guys. This crap right here? It is defeatist garbage, and if you buy into this pity party, you are going to artificially limit your career.

Fantasy (DMR Books): Lin Carter (1930-1988) blazed a trail in fantasy literary criticism, and for that we owe him a debt. Today on what would have been his 90th birthday I celebrate his pioneering efforts as a historian and guide, thank him for treating fantastic material with respect and enthusiasm—and also offer some critique I think he might have welcomed.

Science Fiction (Black Gate): First, it’s Heinlein’s first novel in that it’s the first one he wrote, way back in 1938 and 1939, when he hadn’t yet broken into print. But it didn’t sell, was never published at the time, and went unknown for decades. In fact the manuscript was thought lost; Heinlein and his wife had destroyed copies in their possession in the approach to Heinlein’s death. Yet another copy of the ms. was found years later, after Heinlein’s death in 1988, and, as Robert James explains in an afterword here, was published in 2004, with an introduction by Spider Robinson. (Spider Robinson would later publish Variable Star, based on a Heinlein outline, in 2006.

Edgar Rice Burroughs (Dark Worlds Quarterly): Edgar Rice Burroughs was a professional in the best sense of the word. This meant he worked hard at producing the best work he could. It also meant he knew you didn’t stop a successful franchise but always left a back door for more stories in the future. With Tarzan, Pellucidar and John Carter he used pretty much the same method (which I think was largely instinctual and certainly not planned).

REH and HPL (Westhunt): Just as Robert E. Howard’s take on prehistory was closer to the truth than the one promulgated by archaeologists  in the past few decades,  H.P. Lovecraft’s views on insanity were more realistic than the common ones in American popular culture – where people are thought to be driven insane by trauma, where your mum and dad fuck you up by their actions, rather than their genes.

Comic Books (Bleeding Cool): Robert E. Howard’s Conan is brought to life UNCENSORED! Discover the true Conan, unrestrained, violent, and sexual. Read the story as he intended!

In the kingdom of Vendhya, the king has just died, struck down by the spells of the black prophets of Yimsha.The king’s sister, Yasmina, decides to avenge him…and contacts Conan, then chief of the Afghuli tribe. But several of Conan’s warriors have just been killed by the men of the kingdom of Vendhya, further complicating the matter. The princess thought she could use the Cimmerian, but rather it is she who will serve his interests…

Fiction (Misha Burnett): I love it when a plan comes together! Yes, I do have a plan, although it may not be evident from my publishing schedule. Ever since I realized that short fiction is the ideal medium for me, I have been working towards building a body of work. As I’ve said several times in this blog, I am now writing stories with an eye not just to first publication, but to inclusion into a series of collections.

Fiction (Marzaat): My multi-part look at this John Buchan collection concludes. Buchan took a cruise to the Aegean in 1910 and that’s the setting of “Basilissa”. This 1914 story is my least favorite in the collection. It mixes precognitive dreams with a standard damsel-in-distress romantic plot. Every April since boyhood Vernon has had a dream where he enters a house with many rooms and senses a danger. On each repetition of the dream, the danger draws closer.

RPG (Tenkars Tavern): Using my Soapbox to “Discourage” a Problem at Some Tables… So I’m not 100% when this post will be, well posted, but I’m running with the assumption that this will be my 1st weekly entry here at the Tavern. There’s so many things I could write about, but one thing popped into my head, something I feel strongly about and something that has a back story. There are probably three things I’m passionate about, well maybe five things, or 50……..I really don’t keep track, but clearly I’m a passionate, passionate man…..

History (Brandywine Books): I’ve been doing a little translation lately (I’ll tell you more about it later) which reminded me of one of my favorite passages from Snorri Sturlusson’s Heimskringla. This story involves King Eystein I, far from the most renowned of Norway’s kings, but very possibly the most likeable. He was part of a set, sharing a joint monarchy with his brother, Sigurd Magnusson. They were both the sons of King Magnus Bareleg, who never got the memo that the Viking Age was over, and died young and outnumbered in Ireland, declaring, “Kings were made for glory, not for long life.”

Pulp Magazines (Pulp Net): Adventure magazine was one of the “Big Four” of pulp magazines. For those not aware, the other three are Argosy, Blue Book, and Short Stories. Adventure existed from 1910 to 1971, though not always as a pulp fiction magazine. Ridgeway, which had been bought by Butterick Publishing, who published sewing patterns and related magazines, published Adventure, along with Everybody’s and Romance, until selling these to Popular Publications in 1934. I suspect Butterick basically sold Ridgeway to Popular, similar to Popular buying out Munsey in 1941.

Art (DMR Books): The great Al Williamson died on this date in 2010. Not to be confused with the equally cool Jack Williamson—wouldn’t it have been awesome if Al had adapted Jack’s “Legion of Space” tales to comics?—Al was the “kid brother” and child prodigy at the Cartoonists and Illustrators School which was run by the legendary Burne Hogarth. Al would fill the same role at EC Comics, where he worked with the likes of Frank Frazetta, Roy Krenkel and Wally Wood. Here’s an excellent bio from the Inkwell Awards website:

Science Fiction (Science fiction fantasy blog): The Northworld Trilogy, by David Drake.  This trilogy was first published as three individual novels: Northworld (published 1990), Northworld Vengeance (1991) and Northworld Justice (1992), although I have all three in one paperback omnibus, published by Baen in 1999. The first novel (but not the others) has the distinction of its own Wikipedia page, so if you want a thorough plot summary – complete with spoilers – you can look it up. The principal character of the story is Nils Hansen, a classic SF hero; an intelligent and highly capable leader of a special police unit on the planet Annunciation, and exceptionally skilled in close combat.

RPG (Dr Bargle blogspot): I’ve been running the sample adventure in Blood Sundown for the past few nights for players who are relatively new to RPGs and it has worked a treat. Everywhen’s simple mechanics with little bookkeeping or arithmetic make it ideal for new or casual players, and the range of pregenerated characters included mean you can be up and running almost straight away. The sample adventure could probably be played in an evening if players most fast, but it’ll have taken us three sessions of 2(ish) hours.

Cartoons (Black Gate): The show’s setup couldn’t be simpler. Sometime in the near future – near enough for there to be no such thing as microwave ovens but future enough for personal hovercraft to be no big deal – Dr. Benton Quest (one of the world’s “top scientists”) roams the globe, troubleshooting various problems for the U.S. and other friendly governments. (We’re never told what Dr. Quest is a doctor of, and it’s impossible to pin down his specialty. Is it nuclear physics? Chemistry? Geology? Botany? Oceanography? Molecular biology? Who knows? He shows a deep knowledge of all of these fields and more, like that guy they had to retire from Jeopardy.)

Horror (Jayro Thermal): 8 stories from Year’s Best Horror Stories 1980        The Year’s Best Horror Stories Series VIII, Edited by Karl Edward Wagner (1980, DAW) Volume VIII was the first edited by Karl Edward Wagner. In 1980 the boom was underway.  When I first landed a copy of this paperback, I read the stories by Dennis Etchison, Ramsey Campbell, Harlan Ellison, Alan Ryan, and Charles L. Grant, but I left money on the table when I got distracted and picked up another book instead.

Publishing (Kairos): Imagine that you’re an artist of some sort desiring to make a living through your art. In the case of novelists, this used to mean seeking approval from an agent and then an editor before landing a book deal with one of the big New York publishers. That publishing model is on the way out, thanks to decades of literary malpractice on the big publishers’ part brought to a head by the Kindle revolution and finished off by Corona-chan. We can expect another round of mergers and mid list contract cancellations. When the dust settles, old pub will be reduced to pimping a handful of name authors at Costco.

Sensor Sweep: Year’s Best Horror, Blood Sundown, Al Williamson, Northworld published first on https://sixchexus.weebly.com/

[jameseconomics]

ARE NDERWATER AUTO LOANS A THREAT TO OUR ECONOMY? COULD BE.

ECON 191117 DE

 Financial markets, especially the bond market, calmed down as last week ended -- allowing participants a much-welcomed rest.  It wasn’t that there weren’t things to worry about, though.

One worry is, or should be, about personal debt.  This has naturally received less attention than the public debts run up by our federal, state, and municipal governments. Neither personal nor household debt directly appear in the bond market so there is not the same cause-effect visible in bond prices, of course, but that doesn’t mean that their impact on the economy isn’t important.

One example of worrisome personal debt is the deterioration of the credit dimension of the automobile industry. Based on information from the Edmunds car-shopping information firm, one-third of owners who trade in their cars and buy new ones have negative equity in the car they turn in.  They owe more money than the vehicle it is worth. A finance company steps in and makes up the difference, though, and the customer drives off with a new car.

The response of the automobile dealerships, then, has been to fold the negative equity into a new, larger new car loan, making everybody happy.  The customer is happy to be driving a new car.  The dealer is happy because, as Edmunds notes, automobile dealerships make more money being the middleman on loans than they do selling the car.  Only one person is unhappy: the economist who looks at what is happening and finds it worrisome.

What’s the worry? The automobile industry is beginning to take on some of the characteristics of the housing industry in its build-up to financial disaster. It is a variation in a minor key at this point but still risky for our economy.

One of the lessons we apparently didn’t learn from the home mortgage collapse is that you can’t build sound industry growth on a foundation of shaky loans.  Lending money to people who can’t pay it back always leads to unhappiness.  If it is done on a large scale the unhappiness can precipitate a disaster as it did in the Wall Street collapse of 2007-2008.  

An automobile is a complicated mechanism and so is its economics. The purchase of an automobile is part rational to meet a real need, and part other variables such as price of the new car as well as turn-in, loan interest rate and availability, mechanical reliability of the existing vehicle, and design.  

The economic setting is also significant, but with its own set of complexities.  The negative equity problem in automobiles, for example, has its origins in the Great Recession, especially, of course, the increase in unemployment that made monthly payments difficult to maintain. What is surprising, though, is that the percent of underwater automobile loans continued to rise as the economy slowly recovered. In fact, it remains at record high levels even after the economic rebound.

Part of the underlying ca©use is embedded in the mathematics of the car sales system.  Two math factors stack the deck against consumers in the weakest financial positions.

The first factor is the increasing price of automobiles and the increasing cost of automobile repair and maintenance as well as the increasing complexity of the care itself. What was once a simple matter that even a do-it-yourself (DIY) owner could handle is now often an expensive procedure by a skilled mechanic. These price increases push the vehicle replacement need earlier and earlier, and that, through the second factor, tends to reduce the owner’s equity.

The second factor is the basic mathematics of an installment loan.  The early payments go mostly toward interest; only the tiniest amount of loan principal is reduced.  This is true whether the loan is for a car, a house, an appliance, or anything else. It is simply in the math of the loan payoff curve.  

Pushing a borrower to refinance earlier and earlier in an automobile loan time span, then, puts the buyers perpetually on the wrong end of the loan principal reduction curve, reducing the chance for the owner to accumulate any equity in the automobile. This problem only worsens with longer loan time spans, which now average over 80 months for many underwater buyers. The consumer’s first bad decision has grown into an almost inescapable financial snare.  

Should we do something about this situation before it bursts its bubble?  Probably, from an economic standpoint. The Federal Reserve once regulated installment loans and perhaps it would be worthwhile reexamining that course when unwise lending is a threat to our overall economy.  Regulating and rationalizing that market, though, would have a slowdown impact on the automobile industry and its jobs, though, and that is a separate, complicated economic policy issue and a story in its own right. JAMES MCCUSKER -30-

©Copyright 2019 James J. McCusker

NOTE:This column was published in the 16 Nov 2019 edition of the Everett, WA “Herald.”

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These tools helped scientists win the Nobel Prize

New Post has been published on https://nexcraft.co/these-tools-helped-scientists-win-the-nobel-prize/

These tools helped scientists win the Nobel Prize

Each Nobel Prize-winning discovery is a long, arduous, collaborative process requiring many years of work, and many minds working together.

But researchers don’t, in the words of Isaac Newton, stand on the shoulders of giants alone. They also wield impressive machinery to help them see better, track outcomes more precisely, or process data perfectly. These are the tools that enabled the 2018 Nobel laureates to go for gold:

Prize for physics

This year’s Nobels were, in the words of PopSci’s own Charlie Wood, “a rare nod to technology over fundamental physics.” The three winners—including the first woman to win the prize in physics in 55 years—are master light manipulators.

Arthur Ashkin found a way to stop and hold an object in the ray of light. (Similar, Wood notes, to the fictional Star Trek tractor beam.) Ashkin’s very real “optical tweezers” essentially trap tiny particles or diminutive bacteria in its path. When the laser moves, the stuff inside moves with it. NASA hopes to use the technology to trap and analyze space dust or cosmic ice crystals.

Gérard Mourou and Donna Strickland, meanwhile, found a way to amplify a laser without destroying the machine generating it. By stretching the laser out with a fiber optic cable and later compressing it together again, they could deliver a short concentrated pulse. They published their results in 1985, and the “chirped pulse amplification” has been used in numerous technologies since, from cutting metal to correcting vision.

Just a half-century ago, it’s worth noting, none of this would have been possible. While scientists had been experimenting with cathode rays and x-rays and other concentrated light since the late 1800s, the laser (or “light amplification by stimulated emission of radiation”) was only invented by Theodore Maiman in 1960.

Prize for medicine

James P. Allison, a harmonica-playing Texan, is one of two scientists honored this year for his role in using the human immune system to fight cancer. In the 1990s, he pioneered the basis of immune checkpoint therapy, which helps the immune system register cancer cells, and give the body a better chance to fight back.

Allison’s early workbench was rudimentary by the standard of today’s biotechnologists. His 1996 paper describing a ground-breaking immune “blockade” primarily namechecks mice, the biological materials under analysis, and perhaps a needle or two for injection. But today, Mt. Sinai oncologist Miriam Merad says, scientists working on similar problems have dozens of tools at their disposal.

Merad, for example, harnesses a suite of “single-cell technologies”, which allow her team to analyze one cell at a time, instead of denser, more complicated tissues made from many cells. In the process, researchers have uncovered new information about the most minute cell behaviors, and the variability between cells. Multiplexed imaging, which layers many images together to create higher-resolution visualizations, is one revolutionary tactic. One day, 3D renderings of everything from cells to full-blown tumors could be available to all oncologists.

In the future, Merad says, she hopes for a implantable device that can track a patient’s immune system responses in real time, without hurting them. For his part, Ilya Shmulevich, a genomics expert at the Institute for Systems Biology, is betting on advancements not just in data collection, but in its management. “Indeed, bioinformatics tools today are needed to integrate the massive amounts of data that can be collected from a patient,” he wrote via email. “I believe we need to develop computational models of the tumor microenvironment so that these models can be used… to identify the optimal drug or combination of drugs.”

Prize for chemistry

A trio of scientists shared this year’s Nobel for chemistry for creating new proteins, some of which could improve health or fight disease, and others that reduce the environmental impact of everyday manufacturing techniques.

Notable among the honorees is Greg Smith, who in 1985 invented a technique for developing new proteins called phage display. Now common in many laboratories, phage display is a many-step process for handling some of the most minuscule materials around. But it requires only the most fundamental modern chemistry tools—or, frankly, kitchen equipment—around: water, a special plate, and a dish.

The first step in the phage display is to insert promising proteins or genetic material into a microtiter plate. The recognizable, many-welled tray for conducting chemical analyses was created in 1951 by a Hungarian doctor. But it only became popular—and mass-producible through a mold—in the 1980s.

From there, scientists add a bacteriophage (that’s a virus that invades bacteria) and force the DNA or other materials to express themselves. The concoction is poured into a dish—yes, a dish—and the materials left to bind. When they wash the dish in the lab sink, only the targeted materials should remain on the plate. The remnants can be manipulated and magnified as needed, everything still needs to be sequenced and analyzed, and of course you need skill, creativity, and good luck to go from dish-washing to a new life-saving drug. But those three tools, in the Nobel Prize committee’s words, formed the basis of “a revolution based on evolution.

Written By Eleanor Cummins

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From 'Dunkirk' to 'IT': The Top 9 Hollywood movies of 2017

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  With Hollywood performing lower than what was expected, 2017 still had some movies which entertained us to the core. From intense War for the Planet of the Apes to terrifying IT, the outgoing year had something for everyone. While, there were many big budget films like The Mummy reboot, King Arthur, Ghost in the Shell and Life which bombed on the box office, small budget movies like Logan Lucky, Split and Baby Driver ruled the hearts of the audiences and critics too.

With that being said, here are nine Hollywood`s Top Movies of 2017 9) Logan Lucky:

One of the most unexpected hits of 2017, Logan Lucky proves why Hollywood should give more and more chances to independent filmmakers to get into the industry.Set in North Carolina, two brothers Jimmy Logan (Channing Tatum) and Clyde Logan (Adam Driver) attempt to pull off a heist during a NASCAR race.The Logan brothers aren`t doing too well, and after a Logan brother with a bad leg yells the code word `cauliflower` to another Logan brother with one arm, a brassy Logan sister is brought on board to hatch a highly complicated plan to rob money from right under a racetrack.The movie becomes super-crazy when Joe Bang (Daniel Criag) shows up.The characters in this film are worthy of spinoffs; they deserve to be thought about instead of merely being laughed at.High-octane fun that`s smartly assembled, Logan Lucky is a welcome end to Steven Soderbergh`s retirement -- and proves he hasn`t lost his ability to entertain.All the moving parts are truly moving and makes this flick a crazy yet emotional ride. 8) IT:

One of Stephen King`s most iconic adaptation which made its way to the big-screen in 2017, IT became a sensation in the minds of the people since the time of its inception.The Dark Tower, this year`s first adaptation of King`s iconic novels, bombed at the box-office which made the audiences worried for the horror classic. But, when you have a scary clown in the movie, what could go wrong? IT, the novel, is a brick of a book that at 1,300 pages long would be just as useful a murder weapon as it is a source of thrills.The story focuses Seven young outcasts in Derry, Maine, who are about to face their worst nightmare -- an ancient, shape-shifting evil that emerges from the sewer every 27 years to prey on the town`s children. Banding together over the course of one horrifying summer, the friends must overcome their own personal fears to battle the murderous, bloodthirsty clown known as Pennywise.Despite how truly frightening Pennywise is - every time he appears on screen, and it`s just the right amount of time, the audience watching the movie grew visibly uncomfortable.The movie, lives and dies with the Losers; their carefully fleshed out stories, the bullying they endure, and the firm friendship that helps them survive. Unlike most horror films, IT is a drama first and which to be honest is quite refreshing. It`s a terrific set-up to what is going to be a restlessly-anticipated Chapter 2.Watch the movie and YOU`LL FLOAT TOO! 7) Split:

After a string of flops in his kitty, Split became the most triumphant movie for director M Night Shyamalan. Triumphant in two ways - Firstly, the movie ended his search for a hit and secondly, the critics and audiences got to know that Shyamalan still has the `firepower` to make good movies.McAvoy plays Kevin, a victim of child abuse who has slipped into a deep state of dissociative identity disorder in which, as a coping mechanism, he has created 23 distinct personalities, some of which are more sinister than the others. And in the opening scene of the film, one of his particularly menacing avatars kidnaps three young girls and locks them up in an underground cellar.McAvoy`s performance here is nothing short of extraordinary. Though we don`t get to see each of the 23 personalities, but Shyamalan wisely chooses to develop only a handful of them.Shyamalan movies are known for its twist-in-the-end type of conclusions and no wonder he has given an incredible twist in this one too.Split may not be of everyone`s taste, but the story, craftsmanship, and excellent performances will haunt you for quite a while. As will some beastly bits. 6) Star Wars: The Last Jedi: 

The moment you hear Star Wars, goosebumps start to take place all over your body. The eighth installment in the epic sci-fi franchise, titled The Last Jedi, has taken the world by storm and is in no mood to stop. Directed by Rian Johnson, The Last Jedi is a rewarding experience for anyone who has stuck with this series through thick and thin.The Last Jedi picks up right where the Force Awakens (2015) left off. Luke Skywalker`s peaceful and solitary existence gets upended when he encounters Rey, a young woman who shows strong signs of the Force. Her desire to learn the ways of the Jedi forces Luke to make a decision that changes their lives forever. Meanwhile, Kylo Ren and General Hux lead the First Order in an all-out assault against Leia and the Resistance for supremacy of the galaxy.The movie probably does the best job of any Star Wars film of capturing the allure of the Dark Side and the spiritual turmoil that would lead to-and also result from-its embrace. Director Rian Johnson delivered the best, most spiritual Star Wars film since the Empire Strikes Back. It is one of the finest blockbusters of the year.So just breathe and see the movie. THE FORCE IS ALWAYS WITH YOU! 5) Blade Runner 2049: 

If there is one movie that should have got some love from the audience this year, then it is Denis Villeneuve`s sci-fi epic Blade Runner 2049. The movie is a lot like the original film, and depending on your stance on that sci-fi classic, this could either be the best news you could`ve hoped for, or the worst. The movie is a story of Officer K (Ryan Gosling), a new blade runner for the Los Angeles Police Department, unearths a long-buried secret that has the potential to plunge what`s left of society into chaos.His discovery leads him on a quest to find Rick Deckard (Harrison Ford), a former blade runner who`s been missing for 30 years.This might be the best Harrison Ford movie in recent years; he keeps on getting better and better with each film. Meanwhile, Gosling cements his place as one of the great actors of this generation.Visually stunning and narratively satisfying, Blade Runner 2049 deepens and expands its predecessor`s story while standing as an impressive filmmaking achievement in its own right.The flick is bold, challenging cinema, an almost Biblical success; like Terence Malick`s The Tree of Life, Martin Scorsese`s Silence, and Nolan`s Interstellar, it positively demands multiple viewings. 4) War for the Planet of the Apes:

Apes have never been better and meaner. Matt Reeves` Planet of the Apes trilogy had it all. It all started with Emotions, Action and most importantly the tension of apes sharing a world with the humans and War for the Planet of the Apes` gives a befitting end the trilogy. War for the Planet of the Apes is the rare blockbuster that arrives once every year.In the movie, Caesar (Andy Serkis) and his apes are forced into a deadly conflict with an army of humans led by a ruthless colonel (Woody Harrelson). After the apes suffer unimaginable losses, Caesar wrestles with his darker instincts and begins his own mythic quest to avenge his kind. As the journey finally brings them face to face, Caesar and the colonel are pitted against each other in an epic battle that will determine the fate of both of their species and the future of the planet.The flick is poetic blockbuster storytelling, the kind we don`t see enough of anymore. Director Matt Reeves continues to excel handling delicate subject material. Crafted by many immensely talented people, sculpted around a flawless central performance by Andy Serkis. And while no one is talking about it, but he surely deserves a nod for Academy Award for his performance.The film combines breathtaking special effects and a powerful, poignant narrative to conclude this rebooted trilogy on a powerful and truly blockbuster note.With this third movie, Reeves` Planet of the Apes just got a step ahead of Nolan`s The Dark Knight Trilogy, when it comes the Best of Trilogies in Hollywood. 3) Wonder Woman:

A movie that changed the landscape of superhero movies in 2017. Director Patty Jenkins gave the fans what they needed, a superheroine who does not use any gadgets or manipulation as a superpower, her biggest strength lies in her pure heart. Wonder Woman is like an old-school superhero movie, just like the Christopher Reeve` Superman.Patty Jenkins, who many thought was a `gamble` for the franchise, rises above the immense pressure piled on her. She delivers a film which proves that even in a genre as repetitive as this one, correct answers can still be found despite sticking to the formula, when you get each variable right. The stunt choreography is one of the finest you would have witnessed.While everyone got really angry when Gal Gadot was initially casted as the Princess of Themyscira, she exactly knew how to make them mum and she did exactly that. She delivered a performance which not just had good acting skills but also had a heart. Her acting, the brilliant action sequences and the innocence she shows when she first encounters the world of men, is what makes her performance so special.It is without a doubt, the best superhero movie of 2017. 2) Baby Driver: 

If you thought that `Fast and the Furious is the most stylish action movie you have ever seen, think again friends, Edgar Wright`s Baby Driver leaves F & F movies biting the dust.This Edgar Wright movie the best action movie since Mad Max: Fury Road and also, in a fun twist, the best musical since La La Land. The movie revolves around getaway driver Baby (Ansel Elgort) relies on the beat of his personal soundtrack to be the best in the game. After meeting the woman (Lily James) of his dreams, he sees a chance to ditch his shady lifestyle and make a clean break. Coerced into working for a crime boss (Kevin Spacey), Baby must face the music as a doomed heist threatens his life, love and freedom.With thrilling action scenes, interesting characters, a killer soundtrack and an exceptional editing that follows the beat of the music as if the music is a character itself, Baby Driver delivers a hell lot of style and substance.This is one ride you would not want to miss! 1) Dunkirk:

What do you need to make a perfect blockbuster? A real story, some likable characters, tense situations, war and a masked Tom Hardy. And who can combine all of them and make something epic for the viewers, none other than Christopher Nolan. Dunkirk, a film about men, created by men, is a force of nature - an elemental beast of a movie about finding the meaning of life surrounded by the meaninglessness of war.The story revolves around the evacuation of Allied soldiers from Belgium, the British Empire, and France, who were cut off and surrounded by the German army from the beaches and harbor of Dunkirk, France, between May 26- June 04, 1940, during Battle of France in World War II.Christopher Nolan, who is a master in taking the viewers on a ride that is both exhilarating and emotional too. The best thing he does with Dunkirk is that all the powerful moments in the movie are because of the story and the visuals that he presented on the screen and not from the characters. With that being said, all the characters in the movie have done a superb job in giving fans a picture how would anyone feel when you are stuck on a beach with no roof, with no place to hide and the enemies are bombarding you from air.Those air shots in WWII planes, which Nolan used in the movie, is nothing short of a miracle. The camera isn`t shaky and give us enthralling visuals.In short, this two-hour movie serves up an emotionally satisfying spectacle, delivered by a writer-director in full command of his craft and brought to life by a gifted ensemble cast that honours the fact-based story.

Honourable Mentions - Logan, Coco, Okja and Wonder.

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How to Make $5,000 an Hour Selling on Amazon

I get it.

You don’t understand the complexity that is selling on Amazon, and you don’t have time to learn it.

Don’t worry – I have it covered.

I’ve sold tens of millions both on Amazon as a third party seller and tens of millions more directly to Amazon.

Those millions sold have been made selling a variety of products, among various industries, at a mix of price points and using several different methods.

However, the basic principles are universal, so while I can’t guarantee you a sales volume on Amazon, I can stand behind a productivity number:

I have personally achieved $5,000 in sales for every hour I spent with my Amazon activities.

So how can you grow your business to make serious money on Amazon?

Let’s dive into some straight talk.

Get Enthusiastic

Amazon is the future. It’s time to get on board and excited about it.

Don’t just make Amazon part of a growth strategy. Make it the growth strategy for your business.

I’ve worked with an old fashioned manufacturer that has been in business for several generations. Within 18 months they were selling more on Amazon than through their traditional channels.

How did they do it?

They didn’t mess around when it came to selling on Amazon.

They tossed their whole product line on Amazon, identified the services they needed to outsource and created new internal processes specifically for Amazon.

How to Make Money on Amazon – Checklist:

Identify what items make sense for you to sell on/to Amazon.

Check if the items are already sold on Amazon.Free tools like Keepa.com can help you gauge if the items have already been sold by Amazon Retail at some point.

Compile the necessary information to submit those items to Amazon. Perhaps use existing Amazon listings for your product. Collect pictures, feature data and descriptions.

Identify the processes an Amazon order will follow.

Search for and implement software services that simplify these steps.

Recruit Virtual Assistants for any tasks that are not already performed and core to your business.

Create and document processes that absolutely cannot be done within 4 and 5.

Submit the product data to Amazon (Seller Central or Vendor Express).

Process orders.

Make improvements to 4, 5 and 6 as necessary.

Amazon is not overly complicated and does not have to be your biggest competitor.

In fact, it can be your initial parlay into household name status, and multi-million dollar sales.

Sell Directly to Amazon

Don’t try to beat Amazon at its own game.

Amazon is growing its direct catalog, so swim with the tide – not against it.

Aside from Amazon becoming your customer instead of your competitor, selling directly to Amazon eliminates the job new sellers are worst at, i.e. forecasting and marketing your product become Amazon’s duty.

Editor's Note

The promotion of your products remains your brand’s responsibility unless you pay Amazon to do it for you. According to James Thomson, former head of Selling on Amazon, “If you sell to Amazon, Amazon doesn’t promote anything unless you step up and pay big marketing dollars. Promoting your brand remains your responsibility.”

Also, many items sold by Amazon sell for more and faster, all things being equal.

There will be a margin difference for FBA sellers that are not competing against Amazon here.

In other words, selling unique goods on Amazon currently not already sold there is how you make the most margin.

Re-read the chapter about why re-selling is the least practical method to Amazon success to understand why this is.

So, let’s see: selling directly to Amazon puts you on the right side of the future, is easier and leads to more sales. Keep in mind; this doesn’t mean it is right for everyone, but it certainly is an option.

One Seller’s Growth with Selling to Amazon

Sell on Amazon Yourself

This isn’t [necessarily] a contradiction to the previous section. Start by selling yourself on Amazon if you find it easier to get up and going, or use this to complement your sales to Amazon.

Selling on Amazon along with selling to Amazon keeps Amazon honest and doesn’t allow the whims of their algorithm to lead to stockouts of your products.

Selling to Amazon also allows you to jump start sales of new products by giving Amazon’s bots the confidence they need to start bringing it in themselves.

Editor's Note

This practice is not recommended for most sellers, especially sellers that are novice to selling on Amazon. Consult an Amazon consultant before using this method.

A Case Study: How to Sell to — and on — Amazon

A sheet metal factory in the industrial space wanted to come out with a line of consumer products to sell on Amazon.

Based on some cursory searches on Amazon for sheet metal products and knowing the limits of their machinery, they created a simple folding work bench to be used in congested garages and sheds.

It was made with the machines they already had, hardware they were already buying and sheet metal they already stocked.

Actual Factory

Actual Prototype of Product on a Wall in a Factory Hallway

Their initial production run was four units.

Yup, four.

The total cost of labor and materials was less than most people’s weekly grocery bill. They put up an Amazon listing and sold two units in the first week.

Actual Amazon Listing Taken Shortly After Product Went Live

After that first week and with lifetime sales of only two units, the sellers, who had created an account to sell directly to Amazon, offered the product directly to Amazon.

The price offered to Amazon was similar to the net amount the company received from Amazon when selling through Seller Central.

Since selling commission and shipping costs were no longer part of the equation, the sellers could sell their product to Amazon for significantly less than $149.95 without actually cutting into their margin.

Within a week of submitting the product, the company received an order from Amazon for five units.

Although Amazon’s Order Had Not Yet Shipped They Still Promoted the Product

Despite only two sales, the product moved to the third result in relevant keywords, in a similar position to items with as many as 138 reviews.

Of course, a sale of five items to Amazon is small time, but the idea of going from product concept to the top of the rankings on Amazon in a few weeks is possible.

It is highly unusual, but it is doable.

Use Amazon Cleverly

Once you have become familiar with the inner workings of Amazon, you should take a step back.

Look at your business with just Amazon in mind and figure out which services or methods provide you the most benefit.

How to Make the Most on Amazon:

1. Dropshipping with FBM.

Adding non-stock or custom items to Amazon and then dropshipping to customers can add to your revenue, but it can also help reveal new trends or overlooked items that should be stocked as part of a standard offering.

If you are setting up to dropship already, there is nothing to lose.

All costs, including Amazon’s, are variable and since items can be added to Amazon with little set up, even the administrative hassle is minimal.

Think this seller has 2,000 sitting on a shelf? No, but if someone preferred to buy on Amazon, they would get the sale.

Amazon allows this seller to be available to millions of shoppers and only produce an item once it has actually been sold.

Price Discrimination

Not sure how to price your items, especially newly launched products?

Play around by adjusting the price on Amazon to see what the effect has on volume.

Because pricing is relatively instantaneous, it is possible to offer a product at a variety of different price points so that in a few days or weeks a brand or retailer has a better idea of the optimal price.

This can be helpful because price tags and price sheets have a perceived permanency in the minds of consumers, but online prices do not.

Take advantage of this to test prices for better Amazon margins or velocities, and to optimize those numbers for sales outside of Amazon, like in a retail store or website.

If I didn’t know any better, I would think that the top two organic results for “Pour Over Coffee Stand” were really the same product sold at two different prices to test two different pricing strategies.

Hint: they are.

2. FBA for items sold outside of Amazon.

FBA is simply just that. Items are fulfilled by Amazon.

There is the implication that these items are likely also sold on Amazon, but that does not have to be the case.

Many sellers use Amazon’s fulfillment services to pick, pack and ship items that were sold elsewhere like a retail or online store. This is done even when they may have stock in their warehouse.

Amazon’s shipping rates with the major carriers are so low that, even with the additional charges for picking and packing, their total shipment cost can be lower than negotiated carrier rates for many mid-market firms. This can be true even for shipments within a company’s own state.

Editor's Note

Sellers often use this service so they don’t have to split inventory for Amazon and non-Amazon channels. James Thomson, former head of Selling on Amazon warns, “If you use FBA to fulfill orders outside of Amazon (called multi-channel fulfillment), Amazon raises the shipping costs, and you aren’t likely to see much cost saving at all.”

Additionally, Amazon has extremely low 2-Day and Next Day rates, so during the end of the Christmas season, many sellers are able to offer quick shipping for reasonable prices by leveraging Amazon’s buying power.

Cost to Ship from a Warehouse Compared to Amazon Shipping the Same Item

Why not have Amazon ship every unit if you can save 25% in shipping fees, the cost of labor and materials by having them do everything?

Here’s an example from my own product set.

Offering Competitive Products

Odds are that you have competition –– and that they are pretty successful, too. Why not cash in on their sales and success by offering their products on Amazon as well?

Not only might you get better insight into their sales numbers and product features, but you’ll be getting paid to do it.

More sincerely, you probably have holes in your product line:

You don’t carry a certain color

They have metric versions you don’t

They have a unit that sells for under $100 and your cheapest offering is $119.

Even if you don’t offer the whole line, you may be able to generate more sales on your own site and on Amazon by extending your product line to include items your competitors offer for which you don’t have a substitute.

Look at these four different clothes dryer lint traps from four different manufacturers.

The only way to make money off of every version sold on Amazon is two win the Buy Box for each one like the seller below, Professional Grade Products.

3. Amazon Private Label.

Consider offering a line of products on Amazon that is only available on Amazon.

What makes a product unique, technically?

To Amazon, a unique UPC. To most customers, a specific model number.

That’s it. Not a different patent number, manufacturer or even color.

Whether it is a specific bundle or the same item as normally available, but in a different box, many sellers see the best results by having a unique offering on Amazon.

Often, dealers or brands are only concerned about their products and not a brand’s or reseller’s version of a similar product.

In the example below, Vortex is selling the same product, but at a different price point to try to be true to their main “premium” brand, but also get more volume through a generic brand item.

The HUGE Opportunities in Private Labeling on Amazon

In the late 2000’s, and continuing on today to a degree, most brands that had traditionally dominated big box retail channels shied away from selling on Amazon.

They feared having their items sold on Amazon would diminish their brand and annoy their existing retail partners.

This led to holes in Amazon’s catalog in many high velocity categories because the brands that dominated that space everywhere else were not represented on Amazon.

Naturally, new “Amazon Only” brands are continually created to fill that space.

Can you create the top brand on the world’s top marketplace? We are in a rare moment in time when you really might be able to.

In a search for “flashlights,” for instance, why isn’t it dominated by Maglight or Rayovac, like many retail stores would be? Have you ever heard of any of these? Some aren’t even branded!

Editor’s Note

As a private label seller, you are still responsible for respecting existing trademarks and patents, and doing appropriate testing on your products.

Value Your Time

Amazon is all about automating and simplifying tasks.

All of the other tactics from this chapter lead to sales, but to hit the $5,000 per hour productivity mark, you need to reach out for help.

These outsourcing concepts are so essential to understanding how to maximize Amazon as a platform. So, let’s make these following lines our mantras, and walk through how to actualize each.

Many tasks can be completed by a computer more accurately, faster and better than by a human.

If no one has created a program for a computer to use (based on #1), perhaps it is because that task isn’t worth doing in the first place.

If a task can’t be done better by a computer, but still is worth doing then there are likely people specializing in that task that can do it more effectively than you.

Many tasks can be completed by a computer more accurately, faster and better than by a human.

This is not an exhaustive list and there are many valid programs in this category and others that may fit your business. However, these are the programs I currently use. Do your own research based on your specific needs to find the best fit.

Repricing

Automatically change your price for an item (with parameters you set up front) to optimize sales velocity.

Appeagle: Inexpensive way to automate pricing, but very limited. Basically, it lowers your price from a base level if your competition lowers theirs.

Feedvisor: Very expensive algorithmic repricer that optimizes your margin by trying to win the Buy Box most of the time and taking into account other factors that affect who wins the Buy Box aside from price. Unlike any other repricer, it will raises your price (again, within limits) if you can still win the Buy Box despite the higher price. It also has a bunch of other great reporting and tools.

Inventory Management

Keep track of your Amazon vs. non-Amazon inventory and know when to reorder from suppliers

Stitch Labs: Great integration of sales and inventory when selling across multiple channels, like a BigCommerce site and Amazon.

RestockPro: Simple, but accurate and customizable methods for knowing where your Amazon inventory is, how much it is worth and when you need to reorder more.

Feedback Management

Keep your product and seller reviews frequent and positive.

Feedback Five: Automatically send emails to buyers requesting feedback.

Logistics Snafu Recovery

Get credited when shippers or Amazon make mistakes.

Refund Retriever: Scans your FedEx and UPS bills for charges that should be waived due to them not honoring their guarantees. 100% variable cost (they simply get a portion of what they recover).

Refunds Manager: Audits your inbound shipments to Amazon to file claims for discrepancies (and they do happen). 100% variable cost (they simply get a portion of what they recover).

Shipping

All ground services available for orders from all channels on one screen.

Shipstation: Easy set up, few bugs and integrates with any existing shipping accounts. Also, allows non-Amazon orders to be fulfilled with inventory at Amazon fulfillment centers with one click. I ship orders from my phone with their app daily.

Sales Tax

Compile sales tax data and file all in one place

TaxJar: Simple, effective and low cost. Not what you associate with taxes.

Warehousing

Store or even process your Amazon inventory as needed.

Flexe: Rent local storage space for as little as $5 per day. Take on larger orders or stock up for the holiday season without flooding your store or warehouse.

FBAPrep: Send your items (even straight from overseas) to be organized, QA’ed, packed and shipped directly to Amazon’s warehouses according to Amazon’s requirements.This allows you not even to touch the products you sell on Amazon.

Competitive Research

See how your product sales stack up.

Jungle Scout: Follows your Amazon searches and seamlessly provides data regarding estimated monthly sales volume. Use this to find new products or estimate your market share.

If no one has created a program for a computer to use (based on #1), perhaps it is because that task isn’t worth doing in the first place.

Many new sellers make the mistake of focusing on the small stuff. They are so eager to succeed on Amazon that they put all their effort into fine tuning a single or handful of listings even though it makes almost no difference to the customer.

There is no software program that reshuffles your product images in different orders, rearranges your bullet points and A/B tests “cozy” versus “comfy” as adjectives in your listing title.

Yes, you want good listings with beautiful pictures. You want to generate some reviews.

But, with competition always on the same page and just a click away, remember that five minutes negotiating a better price with your supplier or using a cheaper shipping service is more valuable than spending 100 hours perfecting an Amazon listing.

Case Study of Priorities in the Wrong Place

The Search: Silicone Pour Over Dripper

The top result spent five minutes creating a listing.

They did not pay a service for any product reviews, edit their listing to test different keywords, or frankly, give it a second thought once they sent in their inventory to Amazon.

The picture, title, bullets and description are acceptable. Simple as that.

What they did do, however, was commit to 1000 units out of the gate and negotiate exceptionally good pricing so that they could afford to sell it for a few cents cheaper than their competition (See the 4th and 5th items that are from the same manufacturer in China).

Also, unlike those listings appearing below the POVA one, no reviews were paid for, so there was no need to factor in hundreds of giveaways and service fees into the price.

Who knew people shopped based on cost alone?

Alternatively, see page 8 of the same search –– a yellow version of the exact item from a different seller with 17 subsidized product reviews, a bunch of staged photos, a convoluted title (it’s not a filter after all) and for what?

The second mantra put in different terms could be, “Are you productive or busy?”

Are you genuinely adding value to or eliminating waste within the process (like using Amazon integrated shipping software or automating sales tax reporting) or are you trying to “hack” Amazon?

Make no mistake; Amazon doesn’t want to be tricked, so even something that works, for now, may not work in the future.

Stick with proven productivity enhancers like the software programs out there for sellers like you.

If a task can’t be done better by a computer, but still is worth doing then there are likely people specializing in that task that can do it more effectively than you.

Listen, a lot of Amazon experts and courses will emphasize the value of pictures, bullet points, and listing titles. I am not saying those are not important. 

They are, as is:

Customer service.

Compliance.

Advertising.

Listing management.

You need to make sure all of these things get done and are done well. But, you certainly don’t have to do them yourself. Use these services to outsource the work.

Fiverr

Fiverr is easy to set up, has great results and is only $5.

Need the backgrounds removed for some product shots? 5 bucks.

Want someone to research relevant keywords and add them to your listing? Just 5 dollars.

Need someone to scrape data from your site to add to your Amazon listing? $5.

Editor’s Note

This site also has a bad rap for having been the destination to get fake product reviews. Do not pay for product reviews on Amazon.

Upwork

Thousands of people with Amazon experience are available for custom jobs through Upwork. The general process is:

Search for people with a particular skill set or simply post a job description and wait on applicants –– usually you will have two dozen within 24 hours.

Select candidates, submit any interview questions

Choose a person to hire

There are extensive reviews on most freelancers and Upwork has programs that allow you to monitor progress and keep the workers honest. Many are well-versed in Amazon-specific tasks and can be hired for a single job or on an ongoing basis.

Users can create a stable of freelancers that have delivered well in the past, helping you to build a network that is more and more efficient over time. The productivity gains here are substantial.

Freeeup

Don’t have time even to worry about hiring people for specific Amazon activities? Of course not, you have been reciting your mantras.

Freeeup was created by an Amazon expert who created a corral of hundreds of Upwork freelancers. Freeeup assigns and manages your team freelancers based on the complexity of the Amazon services.

If you need to create listings, fulfill orders, advise on reorders and handle customer service, you can try to recruit all those people or just send a message to Freeeup and they will handle it all.

Consultants

Software and outsourcing services can help you execute your plan, but what if you need help developing your plan?

This book should give you a working knowledge of how to concoct an Amazon strategy, but invariably each business has its complexities and complications.

There are a handful of good Facebook groups and message boards, but for tailor-made solutions, consider reaching out to someone who walks the walk.

The Amazon Solution Provider Directory

Looking for more Amazon help? Browse through our directory of solution providers either on the web or via a PDF. 

Want more insights like this?

We’re on a mission to provide businesses like yours marketing and sales tips, tricks and industry leading knowledge to build the next house-hold name brand. Don’t miss a post. Sign up for our weekly newsletter.

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How to Make $5,000 an Hour Selling on Amazon published first on http://ift.tt/2wGG0YJ

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A ‘Responsive’ Articulate Storyline Solution

The age old Storyline dilemma: Build for desktop or build for mobile. In this post I will show you how to build for both and combine them into one seamless ‘responsive’ course.

You’ve been tasked with developing a responsive project using Articulate Storyline. You know that Articulate Storyline 3/360 is not responsive (the player is responsive, but course content remains fixed). How do you accomplish the task?

One solution that works well in most cases is designing a course that fits “in between” a desktop and tablet or a tablet and mobile size, and it provides both a desktop and “mobile” solution. But what if you truly need versions that are optimized for all three platforms: desktop, tablet, and phone? “In between” designs won’t work. My solutions to this challenge is to build two versions of the course and combine them into a seamless package.

A seamless two-solution package works well because it will automatically detect which version of the course works best for the current screen and load it. It also maintains all the LMS suspend data between the two versions, which enables a learner to start the course on their desktop and later resume the course on their phone And you will only need to have one course in your LMS.

This solution does require you to develop and maintain two versions of your course. I recommend you completely finish development and approval of the desktop version before starting on the mobile version to help avoid a lot of duplicated work.  The good news is that Storyline is quite good at resizing content when you resize the course. In the example I am showing here I did not need to tweak any content after resizing the course.

How it works

When a user launches a Storyline 3/360 course:

It loads the index_lms.html file into the browser.

The index file runs some JavaScript to determine what its environment is: is it on a mobile device? Is it on an on Android? Is Flash installed? Along with other questions.

Once it knows about its environment, it selects the best version of itself for that environment. (These options depend on which boxes you checked when you published the course: Is there a Flash version? Is there an HTML5 version? Etc.)

Then the index_lms.html file loads the selected version into the browser: index_lms_html5.html or index_lms_flash.html and sets some variables according to the environment.

This is where our opportunity to hijack the process and inject our own solution comes about. We can add a bit of code to that selection logic to check the screen size and load another version of the course if needed.

The process:

First you will want to create your desktop version and try to ensure it is as stable as possible. If later you need to update content or functionality you will have to do it in both courses.

Make a copy of the Storyline file and resize it to something mobile-friendly.

Publish the original file and this new, mobile-friendly file.

Create a folder named “mobile” inside the published desktop folder.

Copy the mobile files into the mobile folder.

Open index_lms.html (and/or story.html if you are not using an LMS) in your favorite editor.

Replace line 165 (202 in story.html) with the code below:

var folder = ""; var w = window.innerWidth; var h = window.innerHeight; if(h>w) folder = "mobile/" return folder + url;

That’s it! Our code above simply compares the screen width to its height. If it’s taller than it is wide, the code adds the “mobile” folder to the path that is used to load the course. We could make this more complicated by adding a check to see if it’s actually on a mobile device or if the screen size is less than a specific pixel range, but this simple check works for our demo.

Check out the demo here.

Watch the video below to learn more. In this video, I walk through the solution in a bit more detail.

James Kingsley has worked in the eLearning Industry for over 15 years. He has won several awards for combining technologies to produce better eLearning. He is an Articulate MVP. James is the Senior Technology Architect for eLearning Brothers and the Co-Founder of ReviewMyElearning.com. You can follow him on Twitter or connect with him on LinkedIn for additional tips and examples.

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from Free Online Courses http://elearningbrothers.com/responsive-articulate-storyline-solution/