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Balancing Warmth and Minimalism in Modern Kitchen Design

Minimalism and a modern kitchen can go hand-in-hand. Keep only the bare essentials on your countertop, and choose drawers over cabinets for easy access to things you use daily.

Selecting a color palette that is warm rather than cool can instantly make your modern kitchen cozy. Neutrals are always a safe choice, but consider incorporating some light browns or blues into your color scheme.

Subway Tile Backsplash

Subway tile is a classic kitchen backsplash material that never goes out of style. It’s affordable, easy to clean and versatile enough to work with any style of kitchen. In this farmhouse kitchen from Family Handyman, a black subway tile backsplash offers contrast to the white cabinets and wood shelving while still looking modern and fresh.

If you’re looking for more of a neutral look, try a matte stacked bond subway tile. Its simplicity elevates open shelving and won’t look busy next to dishes or other kitchen gear.

To make a statement, incorporate dark hues into your backsplash with a herringbone pattern. This bold choice makes an understated accent behind the range hood, while still allowing the countertop to take center stage. Dark finishes throughout this Florida kitchen from Maite Granda also add warmth and a touch of drama.

Kitchen Island with Seating

While it may seem counterintuitive, kitchen islands with seating can create a cozy and inviting atmosphere in modern kitchen design while maintaining minimalist aesthetics. This island by Almost Makes Perfect features a foldable tabletop that can be unfolded to create extra dining space when entertaining guests. This kitchen also boasts plenty of storage, including screened cabinets on either side that tuck away extra kitchen supplies.

This kitchen uses odd numbers of globe pendant lights to draw the eye up and highlight a ceiling that’s both bright and airy. White walls and ceiling paint also helps the room feel larger.

Minimalists are very selective about the decor they display in their homes, choosing accent pieces that have both functional and decorative purposes. Displaying a few curated items, like the vases and ceramics in this kitchen by Chelius House of Design, can add personality to a modern space without creating clutter.

Natural Light

Adding natural light is one of the most effective ways to create a cozy and inviting atmosphere in your modern kitchen design. This can be accomplished through large glazed windows or a skylight. For example, this kitchen by Gold A La Mode integrates large glazed windows into the wall that allow for abundant sunlight during the day.

Using natural materials such as wood and stone also helps to create a warm and welcoming environment in your modern kitchen design. The use of wooden beams, wood counter tops, or even a simple wood hand towel can add a touch of warmth and comfort.

Another great way to bring a sense of coziness into your modern kitchen is through the use of color. Choosing natural colors such as green or yellow and using them throughout the room can help to add a warm and inviting feel.

Warm Color Palette

A warm color palette creates a cozy and inviting atmosphere in modern kitchen design while maintaining minimalist aesthetics. This scheme can include a variety of shades, from muted browns that mimic the look of coffee or chocolate to bold reds that add a sense of warmth and energy.

If a full warm color scheme feels too loud for your space, consider layering neutral colors in a monochromatic style, like the Property Brothers’ airy Save My Reno kitchen. The woven barstools and blue accent furniture tie the color scheme together without overwhelming the simple room design.

Another way to incorporate a warmer hue into your kitchen is with a dark paint color. Shades of navy, maroon, and dark brown can create a dramatic, glamorous mood in a modern kitchen.

Lighting

The right lighting can make a cozy and inviting atmosphere in modern kitchen design. Choose recessed, pendant, and overhead lighting with warm light bulbs and warm white hues to create an inviting feel.

A clean aesthetic favors simple, geometric styles for lighting fixtures in modern and contemporary kitchens. Whether you opt for crystal chandeliers or caged bulbs, these pieces will suit your minimalist style without detracting from the room’s visual appeal.

Displaying decorative items like a framed artwork or an antique teapot can help introduce coziness into your modern kitchen design. You can also use items like a stack of hand towels to add a textural element to your cooking space.

Displaying a few vases of fresh flowers can fill your kitchen with warmth and beauty. Adding a table runner in a conservative texture is another way to create a cozy feeling in your modern kitchen.

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Metro Vancouver’s Premier Kitchen and Bath Renovation Company

The kitchen is often the heart of the home, so it makes sense that it would play such an integral role in your house’s overall look and feel. It’s also a space that people spend a significant amount of time in, so it must look its absolute best. That’s why Vancouver Kitchen Renovation is proud to offer Kitchen Design and Renovations in Vancouver, BC. We believe that a well-designed kitchen can transform the way you live, and we’re committed to helping you create the perfect space for yourself and your family. Whether you’re interested in updating your existing kitchen or building a brand new one, we can help you achieve your dream kitchen. We’ll listen carefully to your ideas and preferences, and together we’ll figure out which options will work best for you. Once we’ve determined what you’d like to see in your new kitchen, we’ll put together a detailed proposal outlining everything we propose, including a breakdown of the estimated budget and timeline. If you decide to move forward with our proposal, we’ll begin working immediately to bring your vision to life.

We understand that to be successful is to stay ahead of the curve. That means staying current with the latest technology and design trends. We always want to improve our products or services without breaking the bank. That’s why we stay connected to the latest technologies of NKBA, National Kitchen and Bath Association. In addition, at Vancouver Kitchen renovation, our primary focus is providing sustainable kitchen design and renovation packages, and we believe in sustainable living. Sustainable living is a way of life in harmony with nature. It is a lifestyle which focuses on the preservation of our environment. Sustainable living is a philosophy emphasizing respect for the environment and concern for its well-being. This means we should take care of the planet and treat it as if it were our home. We should try to preserve what we have and protect it from destruction. If we do this, we will enjoy the benefits of the earth’s resources for many generations. Whether you’re planning a major remodel or adding finishing touches to your current kitchen, we’d love to discuss your project. Book your showroom consultation online.

Main Areas of Service in British Columbia:

Vancouver

North Vancouver

West Vancouver

Burnaby

Coquitlam

Squamish

Whistler

Frequently Asked Questions

How can you style your small white kitchen?

Small white kitchens require a lot creativity. Natural materials like wood, stone, or glass are the best ways to create beautiful designs for small white kitchens. Also, remember that white kitchens should be kept clean and organized.

Add personal touches to the space. This will make your kitchen feel more homey.

Which color goes best in a white kitchen

White kitchens can be decorated in many colors, but walnut looks great with it. The warmth of the natural wood tones will enhance the space. They will also work well together. Black and grey are great choices if you want something subtler. For bolder colours, such as yellow or red, you can make a statement. Whichever route you choose, ensure the rest of your decor ties in with your choice so that the space looks cohesive.

How can I make my kitchen whiter?

There are a few ways that you can make your white kitchen more enjoyable. One way is to add coloured appliances and backsplash tiles. If you wish to add warmth and character to your white kitchen, another option is to use wood elements. You can also use warm LED lighting to bring out white’s natural warmth. Whatever your choice, remember that personalizing your kitchen will make it unique.

How can you not regret your kitchen remodeling?

You must be patient. It takes time to renovate.

Your daily life will be significantly affected by a kitchen renovation. Do your research before you start. This comprehensive guide will help to avoid regrets in your kitchen renovation.

Consider your lifestyle first.

You can choose the right materials to suit your needs and budget.

Consider the maintenance of your countertop, not only its appearance.

Select the best appliance for you in terms of style and size.

You can choose the backsplash that best suits your needs.

You should inspect the interior of your cabinets, walls, and drawers.

Communicate with your contractor and kitchen designer throughout.

Customize your storage solutions in your design to fit your appliance and gadgets

Don’t get your lighting lightly.

Don’t ignore kitchen ergonomics!

Make sure you don’t use up any space in your kitchen design.

Choose the right cabinet finish.

Plan before you commit.

Hire the right people for the job.

Don’t forget you need a place for your garbage.

Do you prefer to remodel a kitchen’s floors or cabinets?

It depends on how the floor is being installed. Before installing floating flooring, your counter and cabinets must be installed first. Install your glue-down or nails-down flooring first, then your cabinets. Speaking with a professional to see what option is best for you and your kitchen remodel is best.

Statistics

In large firms, the commission charged by the GC ranges from 15 to 25 percent of the total job cost. (thespruce.com)

Experts also recommend setting aside 20 percent of your budget for surprises, including unpleasant demolition discoveries. One is water damage, the electricity that is not up to code, or other budget-spiking gotchas. (hgtv.com)

“We decided to strip and refinish our kitchen cabinets during a heat wave with 90-plus-degree temperatures and 90 percent humidity in a house with no air conditioning. (familyhandyman.com)

Your most significant cost investment for a kitchen remodel will usually be cabinets, typically comprising 25 percent of your budget. (hgtv.com)

Followed by cabinet cost, labour, and appliance costs consume 20 percent each of your budget. (hgtv.com)

External Links

homeadvisor.com

Find out how much it costs for a kitchen remodel by Compose: Search Engine Optimization.

How much does a kitchen remodel increase your home’s value? – HomeAdvisor

forbes.com

Amazing Kitchen Remodel Ideas That Will Refresh Your Home

hgtv.com

Choosing Kitchen Appliances | HGTV

HGTV – Creating a Kitchen to Serve Entertaining

homeguide.com

2022 Kitchen Remodel Cost Estimator

Cost To Add A Room Per Square Foot

How To

How to design a beautiful kitchen you’ll love to cook in for years

Kitchen designs should incorporate aesthetics, functionality, and practicality. It is important to plan your space carefully so you feel at home and can prepare delicious food, entertain friends, or just relax after a hard day.

These are some ideas to help you design your dream kitchen.

The layout that is most suitable for you will be the best. L-shaped and U-shaped kitchens are the most popular. L-shaped kitchens make it easy to entertain and can hold multiple cooks. U-shaped Kitchens are ideal for families who spend a lot in the kitchen. They provide plenty of counter space and storage. Galley kitchens work well in small spaces because they are efficient and simple to use.

Consider the different options for cabinetry and make sure you are choosing high-quality products. There are many options to choose from, depending on your budget. High-end cabinets can pay huge dividends. They’ll last longer, look better, and provide superior protection against moisture, humidity, and temperature changes.

Pick a color scheme to make you happy. Whether it’s your favorite shade of green or pink, find a color palette that will bring color and life to your kitchen. You can use bright colors or soft pastels. Make sure that it matches the rest in the room.

Find a good balance between function and beauty. It’s not necessary for your kitchen to be beautiful all of the time. Sometimes you need more to pay attention to functionality than looks. However, this does not mean that you shouldn’t include some decorative elements. For a striking focal point, use a mixture of glass and metals like chrome, brass or ceramic.

Create a comfortable environment. Remember that comfort is the most important thing when designing your kitchen. It’s likely that you will spend a lot time in your kitchen so it should feel warm and inviting. Add seating areas, lighting fixtures, or other features that will make you feel relaxed after a long work day.

Storage is important. You should have ample storage space in your kitchen to store all your cooking tools, utensils as well as dishes, pots and pans. So, when planning your kitchen remodel, consider adding additional cabinet space.

Include a pantry. A pantry is a great way to store and organize food items. Plus, having a separate area where you can stockpile extra supplies will prevent clutter from building up around the rest of your kitchen.

A new flooring option might be worth considering. The flooring you choose will significantly impact your kitchen’s overall look and feel. There are many options available. If you have a small space, consider running the same flooring throughout the house to avoid the need for transition pieces.

Plan for expansion. One of the biggest mistakes people make when remodeling their kitchens is not including enough room for future growth. Expanding your kitchen is possible by adding a walk-in pantry, sliding doors or expanding the countertop space.

You should ensure that there is enough light. Being able to see your work is the best way you can enjoy your kitchen. You should ensure that your kitchen is well-lit and has plenty of natural light.

Install energy-efficient appliance. Remodeling your kitchen should be about energy efficiency. This means you need to replace older appliances with more energy-efficient models.

Be realistic about your budget. Make sure you do an in-depth analysis of your finances before shopping for appliances, cabinets, and other kitchen items. It will help you narrow down the options and save money in the end.

Make sure you have a designated space for entertaining. Whether you enjoy hosting dinner parties or entertaining friends over drinks, a designated area for dining will allow your guests to socialize and gather.

Add an island. An island is a great addition for any kitchen.

Helpful Resources:

35 Best Outdoor Kitchen Ideas | Kitchen Design 2023 | Kitchen Cabinet Design | Kitchen Design Ideas

Outdoor kitchen design ideas 2023. #kitchendesign2023 #kitchendesignideas #kitchendesign #kitchendesign #kitchenideas

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purplehairedwonder · 2 years ago

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Chapter 1080: Holding Out for a Hero

Man, the events happening outside of Egghead continue to be fascinating, don’t they? We’re going from one Emperor’s territory last week to another’s this week, as this chapter takes place entirely on Hachinosu.

So, Blackbeard took Coby hostage with the intent of using him to bargain with the World Government to make Hachinosu an actual country with Blackbeard as king.

This is an unexpected development. On the surface, it lines up because Blackbeard is quite power hungry, and what could be more powerful than a king? It worked for Doffy for a decade. We also know he wants to be Pirate King, and this would make him king of Pirate Island... a kind of Pirate King, I suppose. My assumption, though, that Blackbeard’s desire here is part of a larger plan, like him becoming a Warlord to get access to Impel Down. The question is what next step this might lead to, though.

Could he be scheming to gain access to Mariejois at the next Reverie? (Yes, I’m aware the next one isn’t for four years; we’re also talking about a guy who stayed with the Whitebeard Pirates for twenty years before making a move.) Let’s not forget the existence of the national treasure that Doffy mentioned needing the Ope Ope no Mi for?

(And where is Blackbeard currently? Oh, you know, just fighting the owner of the Ope Ope no Mi.)

Anyway, Blackbeard assumes the World Government will go out of their way to rescue their young hero, but Coby tells him that is not going to happen because...

And, according to Kuzan (who many also believe to be a member of SWORD), the World Government won’t negotiate over a member of SWORD.

Slight tangent, but this explanation doesn’t make a lot of sense to me. If the members of SWORD have resigned their commissions, doesn’t that mean they’ve literally quit their jobs? How are they still employed by the Marines (e.g., we saw Coby escorting the Dressrosan entourage to the Reverie)? And, if members of SWORD resigned their commissions, then the World Government would be aware of who the members are, which seems counterintuitive for a group that is the direct opposite of CP0/Aegis.

Hopefully we’ll get more clarification here, but the explanation is, well...

Aaaaaaaaaanyway, Blackbeard plans to try to negotiate anyway because the optics will be terrible if the World Government doesn’t help the hero of Rocky Port.

SPEAKING OF ROCKY PORT. We got another mention. And it turns out Rocky Port was on Hachinosu this whole time?!

That’s quite surprising for a few reasons. One, it means that apparently civilians live on Hachinosu, not just pirates (as Coby became a hero for helping civilians). Two, it likely means that Law made it all the way to Hachinosu during the timeskip. My boy was just jetting all over the New World while preparing to take down Doffy, wasn’t he?

I need to know what happened at Rocky Port, Oda. I’m begging you. (I wrote some other thoughts about Rocky Port in a separate post here.)

Another wrinkle in this whole thing is that Perona has arrived to rescue Moriah, who apparently is not dead after all.

The fact that Blackbeard took Moriah captive rather than killed him seemed to support the idea that he’d take Law hostage rather than kill him if he comes out ahead in their fight.

Another thing we learn in this chapter is which members of the Blackbeard Pirates are present on Hachinosu: Shiryu, Avalo Pizarro, Vasco Shot, and Sanjuan Wolf. (Also, some of their Devil Fruits are wild. Pizarro’s seems like an upgraded version of Pica’s, for instance.)

Meanwhile, Blackbeard, Van Augur, Jesus Burgess, and Doc Q are at Winner Island, facing off against the Heart Pirates.

That leaves Lafitte, Catarina Devon, and Kuzan to be on the ship heading for Egghead.

At the end of the chapter, the cavalry arrives. We meet some more members of SWORD, including Tsuru’s granddaughter.

I just wanted to include this page because it’s a really freaking cool angle.

We also see Helmeppo and Tashigi. (No Smoker, though. Where is he, I wonder?)

And then there’s Garp.

Last chapter we finally got a named attack from Shanks. Now we’re getting one from Garp. And neither disappointed. WOW.

Wow wow wow.

(I hope Coby wasn’t caught up in that explosion, heh.)

Another break so soon is brutal. But these last few chapters have been absolute bangers, damn.

#Another chapter another banger #One Piece 1080 #One Piece chapter 1080 #One Piece chapter 1080 spoilers #One Piece spoilers #Blackbeard #Coby #Garp #Trafalgar Law #Kuzan #One Piece #Chapter write-up

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sebastianshaw · 4 years ago

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Let's go wide and predictable... Tell me about the different WoD incarnations for Shaw. :>

OK SO First thing I am glad you are also a nerd for this so I don’t don’t to explain all these terms. Secondly wow I need to be better about tagging/organizing, I couldn’t find all the other posts on this I was SURE I wrote. SO HERE’S A BIG FAT POST, RIP YOUR EYES

VAMPIRE Lasombra: This is the clan I typically default to in answers for him AS YOU HAVE NOTICED. I mean, they’re dark aristocrats who are all about Social Darwinish, preying on the weak, and the strong reigning. They primarily enforce this subtly through political games, but they have NO PROBLEM throwing an elegant Potence-backed punch. While one would think that these proud predators demanding sniveling obedience---and one would, in a way, be right---they certainly don’t RESPECT it, and it can even induce violent rage in them. Fits Shaw to a T. Sure, the Catholicism/Church control and Spanish origins and attraction to the sea and Abyss mysticism aren’t for him, but hey, he fits the outlook of the Clan perfectly aside from the religious aspects, and no one fits EVERY stereotype of a clan anyway. Most Lasombra are Sabbat, and he could be too, but he would be in it for personal power, not true belief in being the Sword of Caine. I can equally easily see him going antitribu for the political power and stability of the Camarilla. My other choices for him are VENTURE which is pretty obvious, but also Gangrel, which sounds counterintuitive but I HAVE A REALLY GOOD ARGUEMENT FOR IT! WEREWOLF Shadow Lord. Total Shadow Lord for pretty much all the same reasons as Lasombra. Like just LOOK AT THIS QUOTE: “ The Shadow Lords are a fictional tribe of Garou (werewolves) in White Wolf Game Studio’s Werewolf: The Apocalypse role-playing game. […] The Shadow Lords’ lives are like a daily game of chess and a constant struggle for power […] Shadow Lords respect power and condemn weakness, any cub who’s not strong enough in their eyes is banished from the tribe [… ] None of the other tribes like them very much, or at all, but even the ones who hate them most don’t question their ability to get things done. […] perhaps the largest camp, the Lords of the Summit tend to be the stereotypical Shadow Lords - power-hungry, manipulative, ambitious, and arrogant. This by no means makes them less dangerous foes.” And like. . . .they focus on political and intellectual power FIRST, and that sort of character is typically physically weak. But as with the Lasombra, nope, the Shadow Lords had bodily power too; they’re described as looking more like over-muscled pit bulls in lupine form than wolves. So....yeah, that’s perfect. Because Shaw does fight “smart” first, he ideally never touches his opponent, but when he has to? BOY CAN HE PULVERIZE. So, Shadow Lord Shaw is a Homid, probably an Ahroun but maybe a Philodox, and he has a lot of Glass Walkers following him as well as fellow Shadow Lords; he finds great use in their technological talents and ability to adapt to an urban environment and OWN it (rather than just SURVIVE in its fringes like a Bone Gnawer, as he sees it) and they organize themselves in a corporate-like structure where he takes a natural lead. While the Shadow Lords are stereotypically/traditionally Eastern European, they can be of any race today. Shaw’s dad is English, but since we never see his mom in canon, for this version I’m saying his mom was a great big Eastern European Shadow Lord, and that’s why he never knew her, because the Garou aren’t typically raising their own young. He’s just. . . .big brutal wolf boy. And has like a billion puppies/Kinfolk kids. I DREW HIM FERA Ok, so I picked a BUNCH of Fera for Shaw, and you know why? I could. Literally just because I could. I don’t have a DM to tell me no! I even picked extinct ones, BECAUSE I WANTED TO! Cat-wise, I like him as a Khan or a Khara. Are the Khara extinct? Yes. Do they really suit him, the way they’re described less as warriors and more just secret-gatherers? Not at all. I picked them because I just like the idea of him turning into a massive, massive black smilodon. Because I think it’s cool and I don’t have to respect canon here. He can be the last of the Khara and not fit them at all if I say so. And hey, he LOOKS like a prehistoric man already! As for the Khan. . . .of the extant Bastet, the Simba and Khan fit him best. And if I am being honest? The Simba probably are a better fit for him. And I’m fine with that. I’m fine with Shaw as a big ol werelion with a black mane. But I also just really, really like the Khan. And as I have made clear, I am running this show. So my first choice for him that isn’t a Shadow Lord, is a Khan. They’re most typically Indian, Chinese, or (due to breeding with colonizers in India) English, so he could be one of the English Khan, and hey, fighting the Wyrm gives him a good outlet for. . . himself. Their human forms are also typically tall and HUGE, upwards of 300 lbs, and they’ve sired some of the most beautiful kittens and powerful bloodlines. T “ The Simba may declare themselves nobility, but the weretigers fit the title. Regal hunters and warriors, these Bastet evoke the respect the lions demand. From the snowy mountains of Asia to the cities of India, the weretigers hunt the spawn of Asura and defend the last of their Kin. They’re solid, dependable, smart and strong. Their weaknesses, such as they are, come from being too trusting or too sure of themselves. Khan are straightforward and action-oriented, not clever schemers. Whatever a Khan does, he does full-tilt — fighting, romancing, hunting, studying, even contemplating. These Bastet throw themselves into all tasks with vigor and passion, and their bodies, in any form, bristle with vitality. Most Khan love company; though few of them can stand the presence of another of their kind for long, they often enjoy companions. And who would deny a tiger’s friendship? It’s said the Khan were brought forth to battle demons, and many of them take that charge literally. Vampires, Asura and fomori have few enemies more relentless than a tiger. Perhaps that’s why the Khan have been brought to the verge of extinction: They made too many of the wrong kind of enemies.” “ The tribe’s traditional cultures stress honor and obedience. The treachery of Nagda was worsened by the stain it put on the tigers’ pride. While solitary in nature, most Khan establish protectorates where they defend a given family or land against corruption. The fact that “defense” occasionally includes killing certain people doesn’t detract from the tribal purpose. The Kahn were created to war against demons. Those who court the darkness must die “ “ While many Khan tend to be bad-tempered and aggressive, others love company of all kinds (and are powerful enough to demand respect). “ So, is that ALL Shaw? No. He’d be a particularly nasty, scheming Khan, in fact, a little unusual for his breed. But that’s hardly unheard of. After all, the famous English Khan named Lord Clouster “had cobras for a heart; he tossed his own kuasha beneath the wheels of a train, fed his wife to a suttee fire by pretending to be dead, then killed his children when he found they did not carry the Changing Touch.” And another Khan, the Indian sultan Nagda, got into a feud with another Khan and “ taken over by his rage, the Sultan Nagda betrayed his race and used a tribal secret. During an eclipse, his assassins struck all over Asia, slaying nearly 100 Khan and many Kinfolk outright.” So, Khan can be bad too. But not as bad as the Simba. “ “The Lords of Sunlight.” That’s what they call themselves. Like the blazing mane around the heads of their kings, werelions liken themselves to the sun. All things have a place and an order and rebels must be reminded of this fact. The real fact, of course, is that the other tribes dislike the lions; the Simba may call themselves “Lords of Sunlight,” but many other cats give them another name: “The Dark Kings,” an unflattering comparison to the Khan. The Simba aren’t villains; they’re magnificent lords, slayers of demons. Things are simply out of order. When the balance is restored, when the humans know their place and the cities become graveyards, the lions will be proven right. The demons of the modern age can be traced to the end of the Impergium and the laxity of the Changing Breeds. The Simba mean to put things in order, and if that requires bloodshed, so be it. Warfare is the sport of kings” “ Werelions value strength and order. Despite their bloody reputation, Simba adore their loved ones, and watch their Kinolk closely. Children and kittens are raised within the pride and must constantly prove themselves to survive. “ “ Each pride has one Mtolo (“father”), or dominant male, and several Kirii (“wives”) and Anwana (“young hunters”). Small prides defer to larger ones, and may owe allegiance to a Chakuva (“High King”) like Black Tooth. “ So, Simba are very patriarchal, very hierarchal, and want to run everyone else and feel they’re entitled to do so by birthright, and the more I talk the LESS it sounds like Shaw actually? Like don’t get me wrong, he’s proud and power-hungry AS YOU KNOW, but what sets him apart from Apocalypse or Magneto or Xavier is that Shaw has never sought to have mutantkind follow him. He has his own ideologies, but he has never sought to lead others or enforce it on them. So really, the Simba mentality of “we should be in charge because it’s us” DOESN’T work for him, nor does the idea of being entitled to do so, as Shaw’s “power first” mentality is all about EARNING your position, not deserving it automatically. It’s all very Fabian though! So I’ll leave that here as a bonus for you instead of going back and deleting it lol. yEAH HE’S A BAD KHAN, BASICALLY And his Pyrio, no matter what cat type he is, would be Night. Each Bastet has a “Pyrio” meaning a classification of their general personality and what fields they’re likely to pursue and be talented in. “Like the Dark Father Cahlash, the favor of the Night indicates a sinister or hidden nature. Most Bastet with this Pryio tend to withdraw from others, concentrating on their own business unless interrupted. Although they might not be actively malignant, they have short tempers and quiet ways, and fiercely guard their privacy. Night Bastet prefer occupations such as assassin, scholar, scientist and dark mystic. In the wilderness, the Night cats are hidden hunters and man-eaters, with nasty dispositions and an eerie reputations. These are the cats whose deeds are told around campfires for years to come. If you’ve got a disposition toward the Night, activities that cause others discomfort, reinforce your private space or protect some valuable secret from outsiders can refresh your Willpower.” So yeah. Shaw is a night kitty. Rats are not the type that fit him the MOST, but I drew him as a RATKIN WARRIOR anyway. Because rats. Also while I drew him as a Warrior, he could also be an Engineer or a Plague Lord (specifically sylphyllis; every Plague Lord contracts with a disease spirit and embodies its most horrific symptoms and I just love the idea of this hideous terrifying syph-ridden Shaw) And hey, he can get into the “culling humanity” and “survive so that you may breed” deal! Most wererats also have very little kindness towards the weak either, despite being the underdogs of the Fera themselves. Likewise, hyenas aren’t the breed that fit him the most but I kinda dig the idea of him as an Ajaba? Their role was choosers of the slain, tasked with culling the sick, dying, and unfit. They were called rainmakers because of the tears their task brought to others, and they did not spare even their own. Then, the Simba came to their lands, and enacted genocide against them. They left Africa and spread across the globe, now breeding indiscriminately to survive and can be any race. What holds them together now first isn’t any duty, but the desire to simply stay alive. And both those things---culling weakness, and being knocked off his pedestal and now forced to fight for scraps in the shadows to survive---seem fitting for Shaw. The philosophy is obviously what he’s always had, and the degraded position reflects where he currently is in canon. He’s not usually the underdog, but he is here---but doubtlessly a brutal one, the Fera equivalent of a gang leader, recruiting Also they’re matriarchal and I kinda like the idea of him having to deal with that, as....that kind of fits too? Shaw was the only MAN of note in the Hellfire Club. All the other most iconic, powerful, threatening members were women, and Shaw’s never really had a chance (or tried to fuck with) any of them. He’s USED to being around a ton of badass ladies who are calling the shots, that’s just TUESDAY for him. Finally---FINALLY-- I could see him as the odd human-born Rokea. A Great White, of course. Again, it was probably his mother who was the Fera, some monstrous creature who came on land and mated with his human father, only to spawn this boy while still out of the water. All Rokea are ugly in their human state, but Shaw looks better than most due to being born on land and as a human, and he is also able to move through---and thrive---in human society. Since he is seen as a Betweener---one of the Rokea who “betrays” the Sea by living on land instead---stepping into what should be his natural habitat is always risky for him, as other Rokea WILL kill Betweeners on sight. And the single-minded nature of sharks leaves little room for explaining oneself. Oh did I say finally SURPRISE I HAVE ONE MORE. The peaceful, matchmaking, extinct Apis don’t really fit SHAW aT ALL, and they’re EXTINCT, but I love the idea of him turning into a HUGE BLACK BULL. So here’s my explanation. The deal with the Apis is that when their numbers reached the single digits, a last handful of young Apis called Last Hope went into the Deep Umbra and haven’t been seen since. The “hook” in the 20th anniversary Changing Breeds book for their return is that maybe they finally came out the Umbra and back to the physical world. My idea is that he and HAVEN are mebers of Last Hope who have re-emerged in modern times to bring back their kind---something that rests entirely on SHAW’S shoulders, since Haven’s womb was cursed by the Wyrm. So it’s up to him to just breed with as many women and cows as possible. So he’s got an excuse! And as for why he’s so un-Apis, my explanation is that the trauma of their species being wiped out and the time that was allowed to fester in them during their long sleep in the Deep Umbra, drove Haven and Shaw to two extremes of Apis behavior. Haven took on the gentle caretaker side to the extreme, becoming so pacifistic she can’t fight or defend herself. Shaw went the other end, becoming so enraged and resentful that he’s become more like a bloodthirsty predator himself. Eventually, they both fall to madness after re-emerging, but in the opposite ways that everyone expect. It’s the sweet gentle Haven who ends up Frenzying other of control in a berserker rage, rampaging across the city in massive bovine form, causing untold death and destruction until she’s put down. . . .while the cruel violent Shaw falls to a “cow version of Harano” sinking into a depression so profound he goes catatonic up until Haven’s own loss of sanity, at which point he throws himself on her horn. The story ends with the last of the Apis truly dead, but with a new hope for the species living on in Shaw’s children, who are showing signs of being Kinfolk or Apis themselves.

#world of darkness #vampire the masquerade #werewolf the apocalypse #wod #wta #vtm #episomalvector

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talabib · 4 years ago

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Be Happier!

When a friend or acquaintance asks you what you want, you might say “to be happy.” Who doesn’t want that?

But despite our deep-seated desire for happiness, most of us spend our time pursuing other things such as careers, money or love – even though these things are just shades of what might make us happy.

What if instead of pursuing these elusive goals, we focused on finding happiness directly?

This post explores how your mind and body work and how you can use these facts to find the true path to happiness. From pretending you’re a child to making sure both your nostrils aren’t clogged, you’ll learn practical ways to live a brighter, happier life.

We focus too much on the future, but we can train ourselves to remain in the present moment.

What were you thinking before you started reading this post? Perhaps you were mulling over plans for the upcoming weekend or worrying about a work deadline.

Spending time thinking about the future may make you feel as if you’re productive, but often the opposite is true.

Why? Focusing on the future reduces your attention in the present moment, making you more likely to miss significant things that are happening now. This lack of presence can cause problems with relationships at work and home. What’s more, constantly thinking about what’s to come can leave you less productive today and worse, emotionally drained.

Staying fully present in the moment will help you perform better at work and may even make your job more enjoyable. And forget about the belief that multitasking is efficient. It isn’t. In fact, performing multiple tasks makes you complete each task much less efficiently.

One study, for instance, monitored people having conversations while driving. Researchers found that activity in the section of the brain dedicated to driving was reduced by 37 percent while the driver was talking!

Other research shows that people feel much happier when they are 100-percent engaged in a task, even if the task is relatively boring.

So how can you stay present in every moment, whether minor or major? There’s no shortcut. Being present is a skill you need to practice.

The first step is to remove unnecessary distractions. Try decluttering your workspace; also, block access to websites you like to browse on your laptop and silence your mobile devices while you work.

The next step is to focus on tasks in small time increments. Setting a timer can be useful. When you carve out specific, limited amounts of time to complete tasks, you’ll find yourself enjoying each task more, and additionally, your sense of achievement will skyrocket.

Practicing meditation is another way to stay in the moment. By letting thoughts go, you’ll become calmer and more attentive to the world around you.

In addition to boosting productivity and happiness, meditation can have other surprising results. Some people who meditate say they experience a world that appears more vivid, with brighter colors and richer tastes!

Many of us live in a world fueled by constant stress, which is said to help us thrive. But it doesn’t!

Many people think stress is a necessary fuel to stoke certain behaviors, such as ambition or personal achievement. Let’s examine this assumption to see if it holds water.

There are two kinds of stress: the good, short-term kind and the bad, long-term kind.

Short-term stress sends adrenaline coursing through the body and often inspires better mental and physical performance. Consider the exhilaration an athlete might feel when people cheer, motivating him to perform at his best. Practicing and playing in a “real” game are different precisely for this reason.

Too much stress, however, can harm the body and eventually turn into chronic stress, which can lead to illness – and even cause stress in people around you.

Emotions, both good and bad, are contagious. They are transmitted through pheromones, or chemicals, that the body releases when we sweat. So when a coworker is anxious or afraid, that person’s stress is bringing everyone else down!

Not to worry, though. Long-term stress can be curbed through the body’s natural resilience. Think of an antelope that goes back to grazing just minutes after narrowly evading a predator. We too are gifted with the ability to calm ourselves – without it, we’d hardly be equipped to meet life’s challenges.

You’ve no doubt seen how a small child can bounce back from tears with laughter. This is a perfect example of the resilience of the human spirit.

But many people today have a weakened resilience to stressful situations. Consider how advertisers use stress to grab a buyer’s attention, promising beauty or an attractive companion if you buy a product. This scheme stresses you by reminding you that you might lack these things in your life.

The daily barrage of emails, social media updates and news further contributes to the modern human’s high levels of stress.

The best way to reduce stress is through the body, by learning how to breathe properly.

Have you ever been told to “just relax” when you’re stressed out? It probably didn’t feel very useful. Taking a bath or going for a walk, on the other hand, often helps to calm frayed nerves.

So what do these actions tell us about the nature of stress?

The bottom line is that we’ve been misled in how to deal with stress. Two common approaches are either talking ourselves out of stressful, upsetting situations or suppressing our emotions and pretending nothing’s wrong. Is it a surprise that neither “trick” really works?

Crucially, research shows that attempting to control or suppress a thought or feeling when you are stressed only makes the problem loom larger in your psyche. Suppression can lower self-esteem, increase negative emotions and worsen memory over the long term.

Researchers at Stanford University found that people who regularly suppress negative emotions, for instance, generally experience more negative emotions overall than positive emotions.

So how do we tame stress in a healthy fashion? We now know that the best way to calm down is actually from the outside-in – in other words, through the body.

Think about the way you breathe when you’re anxious – you probably take shallow breaths. When you’re calm, however, you breathe deeply and steadily. Research supports this practice: by changing your breathing, you can change your emotions.

Experts have successfully used breathing techniques in work with war veterans suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). Deep breathing helps to normalize levels of the stress hormone cortisol, which increases emotional resilience.

You too can practice deep breathing exercises. Not only do these exercises make you calmer but they also they give you a boost of energy!

It may seem counterintuitive that being calmer can energize you, but it’s true! Let’s explore how you can change your breathing habits for the better.

Breathing techniques and slow-paced activities can help build resilience against stress.

The British wartime slogan, “Keep Calm and Carry On,” has become a popular quote on T-shirts, coffee mugs and other items in recent years. But how does one keep calm in reality?

This is where simple breathing exercises come into play. Doing so regularly helps you essentially rewire your nervous system.

Start by closing your eyes and taking slow, deep breaths for a few minutes every day. Pay close attention to your breath, noticing whether it is deep or shallow. Make sure to exercise deep, conscious breathing especially if you are angry or stressed.

Breathing in such a manner might make you feel self-conscious at first, but soon your practice will become a natural reflex that will help quiet your nerves!

Another effective technique is called alternate nostril breathing.You might be surprised to know that only one of your nostrils actually “does” the breathing on a daily basis. To experiment with alternate nostril breathing, try blocking the airflow of one nostril, pressing down on it with your hand. Then alternate, blocking the flow of the other nostril.

This exercise will increase the airflow through the less dominant nostril. By exercising your less active nostril, you’ll enable greater airflow through your nose. More air means easier, calmer breathing – and in turn, a calmer you.Try practicing alternate nostril breathing for a few minutes a day and see if you can feel a difference!

Of course, there are other exercises you can do to calm yourself: slow-paced activities such as long walks are helpful. In fact, any activity that slows you down, such as meditation, yoga or tai chi, is healthy for you. Long walks in nature have been shown to reduce anxiety, lighten the mood and even improve memory.

And if you ever needed an excuse to hug someone you love, here it is! Research has shown that physical contact with a loved one reduces stress, too.

Burnout happens when we worry too much, exhausting our minds and our nerves.

Have you ever felt “burnt out” from a job? In the working world, this has become a widespread phenomenon, and it is growing. What exactly causes burnout?

There are three main ways in which you can exhaust your mind.

The first is experiencing extreme emotional highs or lows. Such events can drain you both mentally and physically.

The second is trying to exercise self-control all the time. Doing so tires your mind, making you less likely to make sound decisions later on. Resisting the temptation of a breakfast donut in the morning, for example, can weaken your ability to say no to a bag of potato chips for dinner.

And finally, if you constantly worry (or worry about upcoming events that you feel will make you more worried), you can experience constant, often crippling, fatigue.

The solution to preserving your energy is to find something positive in each and every situation.

Doing things that make you feel good is simply good for you. One study found that when people watched a funny video or received a surprise present, they showed no fatigue and displayed more resilience in maintaining self-control.

Even a boring task can be enjoyable if you focus on why the task is worthwhile – maybe this chore is helping you save up for a vacation or is teaching you a new skill.

Staying positive and calm will also help you perform better in stressful situations.

A soldier was injured in a firefight. By using calming techniques, the soldier said he was able to give orders and carry out commands while injured that he otherwise couldn’t have if he was over excited or nervous.

Learn these three easy steps to becoming more creative by learning to make time for idleness.

How do you feel when you’re doing absolutely nothing? Do you feel bad, or guilty? Yet idleness might be just the medicine your body and soul needs.

Contrary to the popular belief that you have to be focused to come up with innovative ideas, not concentrating might be what you need to do.

In interviews, professionals across a number of fields have said that creativity is highly prized. To be creative, however, you have to let your mind wander – only then can you come up with novel solutions.

One study found that participants performed better on a difficult task after they stepped away from their desks and spent time daydreaming. If you’ve ever had a “eureka” moment while in the shower, you know that this is true!

But many people are so used to being overstimulated that it’s an uncomfortable feeling to let the mind just wander.

A study conducted at the University of Washington showed one extreme version of this inability to just be. Participants could sit and do nothing or give themselves electric shocks. Many participants – even those who said they’d pay to never experience an electric shock again – still chose to shock themselves, to do “something” instead of nothing.

So how do you combat an aversion to idleness? Ignite your creative idleness with three easy steps.

First, in between tasks that demand your full attention, perform mindless tasks that only require partial attention, like data entry. But don’t confuse mindless tasks with leisure tasks such as surfing Facebook or Twitter feeds, as these tasks actually hold your full attention.

Second, make time for play. Whether jumping up and down on a trampoline or playing hide and seek with your children, activities that aren’t goal-oriented allow your brain to change gears and in doing so, work to expand your thinking horizons.

And finally, allow for moments of silence. Instead of filling all your time watching, listening or reading, find a space in which your mind is allowed to be totally quiet – for instance, through meditation.

You’ll be more creative and successful overall if you spend more time doing nothing. Activities unrelated to your work are frequently the ones that can have the greatest positive influence on it.

It’s time to conquer the negativity bias. Less self-criticism, more self-compassion and self-love.

When a friend tries something new and fails, what do you do? It’s likely you choose not to criticize her or tell her to give up. Yet this is exactly what many of us do to ourselves.

Being your own worst critic can be good in small doses, but being too self-critical is counterproductive.

Rather than boosting motivation, constant self-criticism can lead to depression. Being tough on yourself makes you focus disproportionately on your negative attributes instead of on your positive ones.

Why are we so hard on ourselves? Researchers say being tough may have been a survival mechanism for early humans. Focusing on the negative probably helped our ancestors avoid dangers in the wild.

Today, however, this negativity bias isn’t helpful, as most mistakes don’t immediately mean you’re dinner for a hungry predator. Excessive self-criticism instead is crippling, making you afraid of failure, which in turn can lead to poorer performance overall – which becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Studies conducted with athletes found that a fear of failure was enough to make a star performer fail at critical moments despite years of rigorous training.

The answer to all these problems is to have more compassion for yourself.

Self-love and understanding will give you a healthier, more balanced view of your skills and the world around you. If you adopt a less critical perspective of yourself, you’ll be affected less by internal and external criticisms, and consequently become more resilient to daily stress.

Self-compassion will also make you more likely to take on challenges you think you may fail at – which is necessary for success.

Once you better understand your mistakes and failures, you’ll bounce back more easily from the lows, instead of letting your critical internal voice keep you down.

Expressing gratitude helps you focus on what you have instead of what you think you lack.

For many, Thanksgiving is a day of gratitude and gorging on traditional dishes. Roasted turkey and pumpkin pie aren’t bad in moderation, of course. But gratitude is a dish we should always eat more of.

Research shows that only around half the people in the United States regularly show gratitude to one another. As the benefits of showing gratitude are so overwhelming, it’s surprising we don’t express thanks more often. In fact, expressing gratitude is possibly the greatest act of self-compassion there is.

Gratitude helps us focus on what we have instead of what we lack, and thus makes us as people less materialistic and more positive-thinking. Showing gratitude regularly can even help you sleep better, simply because as you drift off, your positive thoughts will make you feel more peaceful.

Other simple steps to be kinder to yourself include repeating supportive phrases. Be your own cheerleader, and don’t forget that mistakes are a part of life.

Sure, “to err is human” – so remember that everybody has faced failure at some point. If you acknowledge this fact, it will help you approach your failures as a learning experience.

Writing is another way to become more self-compassionate. Start a journal and let your feelings flow onto the page.

You could even experiment by writing a letter to yourself, but write as if you were talking about a friend. Creating this distance between your feelings and thoughts may help you put life events into better perspective. You might also try writing down a daily list of achievements or things for which you are grateful.

Taking a pen to paper is a simple action that can have positive, long-term health effects. Recent studies have shown what writers have always known – that you can regulate emotions by writing about them.

Reap the many rewards that come from being kind to others instead of focusing on yourself.

Growing up, you may have been told that you need to look out for yourself before anyone else. How much truth does this instruction hold?

Focusing too much on yourself can have negative effects. It makes you a poorer judge of people, generally less liked by others and can even make you sick.

Looking out only for “number one” can also make you egotistical, a classic trait of narcissists. Such people are blinded by their egos, making them exaggerate their own abilities. While narcissists may feel superior, when they fail, as everyone must, it usually hits them harder than it would those who are humble.

The behavior of selfish people often makes them disliked by the crowd. Egotists are also less likely to form meaningful personal bonds, which can lead to health issues, such as depression.

The antidote to being self-absorbed is to look outward with a compassionate, open heart. Compassion means being sensitive to those around you and acknowledging the distress of others. Being empathetic is, in fact, hard-wired in human nature.

This might come as a surprise given the “dog-eat-dog” world we live in. But German researchers found that chimpanzees and young children, without knowledge of learned social practices, will go out of their way to help a companion in need.

Interestingly, being compassionate can also be good for business. A 2011 study from Michigan University that focused on compassion in the workplace found that showing compassion improved company performance levels and profit margins and increased employee happiness.

Curiously, those same employees were not only happier but also healthier. The same study found that compassionate individuals on average lived longer and were more resilient to stress.

Many of us are taught to look out for ourselves, but the proof of the pudding is in the eating; being kinder improves business success, relationship bonds, overall health and personal happiness.

The key to happiness is being present in the moment, eliminating stress and letting your creative juices flow freely. Self-care is important, but so is showing compassion for others. Only by being kind to ourselves and each other can we thrive both as individuals and as a society.

Action plan: Show you care with words.

When a friend appears to be distressed, verbally communicate that you see she might be hurting. Doing so shows you care about her feelings and gives her a chance to correct you, in the case that you’ve misread her emotions. Communicating with and caring for each other compassionately amid hard times helps to reduce stress for everyone involved.

#Be Happier!

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rodrigohyde · 6 years ago

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How to Make Your Apartment Look Bigger

No matter your living situation — your first place with a college roommate, that studio you found in your price range, or that tiny apartment you and your partner nabbed in the most sought-after neighborhood — most of us have had a small apartment at one point in our lives. And as the years go on, that will likely be increasingly the case. The largest cohort of working-age folks, millennials, are moving to urban and metro areas in record numbers. This can only mean one thing: more people and fewer apartments.

RELATED: How Often You Should Be Replacing Your Sheets

Once you’re all moved in, your goal is to maximize your space to the best of your ability. Short of knocking down walls to the neighbor's apartment, how can you make a small space seem more open? It’s easier than you may think. We spoke with expert interior designers who work regularly in city-sized spaces to get quick and easy design and décor hacks that will make you (and anyone else you might entertain) feel like your apartment is practically the Red Keep.

Seeing Is Believing

One of design’s most basic functions is influencing how you perceive and respond to what you are seeing through visual cues. While simple design can’t literally enlarge your surroundings, it can help do so figuratively. You can start with the walls enclosing your space.

“Textures or small patterns on wallpaper create the effect of appearing to be farther away than they actually are,” says Stefan Steil, New York School of Interior Design faculty member and principal of Steilish Interiors & Architecture. Thus, they extend your perspective past the actual wall. And you can even apply the same concept to ceilings.

Fallyn Flaherty-Earp, DuPont’s market and business development manager, agrees. She points to their Celestial vinyl (commercial grade and consequently pricier) wallcovering collections inspired by the heavenly bodies — rings of Saturn stripes and “flying fish” patterns from the Volan constellation that “create the illusion of a much larger space.”

Steilish Interiors and Architecture

Should you choose to paint instead, be aware that there is some debate on the merits of a light or dark color in enhancing space. But Brian del Toro, who honed his artistry working at Parish-Hadley and with interiors legend Bunny Williams, feels it’s more important to create consistency.

“[I favor] a monochromatic color scheme,” he says, adding it blurs any distinction of areas and provides uninterrupted continuity throughout. Contrasting colors, he explains, tend to look crowded, while tones from the same hue will keep things unified, adding a feeling of harmony. Benjamin Moore has a helpful guide to finding what color works best for you.

Anthony George Home

Finish the Wall

Now, turn your attention to what’s actually on the walls. If you have large windows, you’re already ahead of the game. The more natural light you allow in, the airier your room will seem. Otherwise, you can also benefit from that magician’s ploy of using mirrors.

“[Using mirrors] is an easy trick,” says Anthony Gianacakos, the founder of Anthony George Home. “A well placed mirror will reflect light and make it appear that there are more windows in the space. I recommend positioning one either across or perpendicular to an existing window.”

Brian del Toro

Art can fulfill the same function, he suggests. “Hang frames in different heights and widths to draw the eye in many different directions and add dimensions in a space.” Similarly, del Toro decided to decorate his own apartment with several pieces of framed art and photography to serve as various “views” or “windows” into panoramic scenes.

Peter Sandel

Size Matters

There are many misconceptions about design. When it comes to furniture, interior designer Patrick J. Hamilton, whose work has appeared on HGTV, wants to clarify a common design fallacy: “You can use bigger pieces in smaller rooms!”

RELATED: Everything You Need for a Home Bar

This may initially come across as counterintuitive, but according to him, the problem lies more in buying one piece to serve one function, then another, then another, until you end up with what he describes as “a parade of too-small pieces that look like they are all on clearance ... a small bookcase, a side table, a filing cabinet.” And it is the all-too-common accumulation of these disparate items that build up into clutter.

Instead of more trendy and tedious methods meant to “spark joy,” Hamilton has another suggestion: “Look at all your needs at once and address them with one bigger piece, [such as] a chest or console that serves some, if not all, of those functions.” This allows form and function to meet in the middle. “Similarly, pick chairs that double for dining as well as pull-up living room chairs. I always tell clients to think fewer, better, bigger.” With that in mind also consider pieces with multiple uses: couches that collapse into daybeds or ottomans with inside storage.

Steilish Interiors & Architecture

Peter Sandel may be a Texas native accustomed to wide open spaces, but this talented interior designer and founder of Peter Sandel Design once lived in a studio apartment in one of New York City's most notorious neighborhoods for diminutive domiciles, lower Manhattan’s West Village, for 12 years. He knows what he’s talking about when it comes to furniture size relative to space.

“Incorporating a large, key [piece of furniture] tricks the eye, making the room appear [more grand],” he tells us. “Investing in quality furniture actually saves money in the long run. Online shopping for vintage and antique furniture in sites [such as] Sotheby's Home and Chairish have made what was once an expensive and time consuming hobby into a cost-effective and sustainable way to furnish your home.” Other great sites for serious furniture shoppers include AptDeco, One Kings Lane, even eBay.

As a finishing touch, Steil advises that to anchor your furniture while seemingly creating space around it, add a textured and broad multi-patterned striped rug to stretch your view of the room.

Steilish Interiors and Architecture

If all this decorating inspiration has you thinking about turning a simple design project into a more substantial renovation, every expert we spoke to echoes the same sentiment: Leave it to the professionals. You will be dodging untold (and likely expensive) DIY disasters. These tips and tricks will help create the illusion of more space in smaller, often rented apartments. If you use this time and (lack of) space to your advantage, you’ll be ready to tackle bigger jobs once you move onto a mortgage.

You Might Also Dig:

10 Best Vodkas You Can Buy How To Automate Your Home Without Spending A Fortune How to Bring Pantone's Color of the Year Into Your Home from AskMen Style https://www.askmen.com/style/fashion_advice/how-to-make-your-apartment-look-bigger.html

#AskMen Style

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jodybouchard9 · 8 years ago

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9 Home Decor Myths You Should Stop Believing Immediately

KatarzynaBialasiewicz

Even if you’re an ardent amateur decorator, starting from scratch in a new place can be intimidating. So many white walls screaming out for paint, so much bare hardwood dying for furniture. What’s a new homeowner to do?

Maybe you don’t want to shell out for an interior decorator and besides, you have Pinterest on your side. Hey, you can do this thing yourself, right? All you need to do is follow the rules of the decor road. You know the ones we’re talking about—the nuggets of conventional wisdom like “don’t paint a small room with a dark color” or “avoid mixing metals.”

But not every decor rule should be considered gospel—in fact, some are downright myths. Here, our expert designers clear up nine misconceptions about how you should decorate your home. So get moving and decorate your place already!

(For a chance to win $20,000 to spend on the home of your dreams, enter the realtor.com® Entryway to $20K sweepstakes at realtor.com/entryway20k. No purchase necessary. See official rules.)

Myth No.1: Ceilings must be white

Photo by Sroka Design, Inc. – A complementary ceiling color gives a cozy feel.

White ceilings might seem like the norm, but they aren’t right for every room.

“White ceilings can actually be distracting if there is no other white in the room,” says Dee Schlotter, the senior color marketing manager for PPG.

Deep-emerald walls look strange with a blazing-bright ceiling. That cheerful yellow you carefully selected for the kitchen seems too bold with the ceiling so stark white. A complementary color—or even a coordinating off-white shade—can prevent distraction, Schlotter says.

Myth No. 2: Everything should match perfectly

The days of matching and monochromatic looks are over. Instead, cohesive coordination reigns supreme. Think: Wood tones, lush fabrics, and colors that harmonize with (not identically match) your walls. Otherwise, you risk dull, monotone decor that bores every visitor who passes through your doors.

“Look at the undertones of the primary color scheme,” says Jill Hosking, an interior designer in Windham, NH. “It does take more time and effort to coordinate versus match, but your room will look and feel more cohesive, chic, and likely will seem to be a better reflection of your personal style.”

Myth No. 3: Less furniture equals more space

You might believe paring down your furniture collection will make your small room feel massive—so there’s more room for activities, right?—but be prepared for some disappointment after the final Craigslist buyer trucks away the love seat. In fact, the empty space feels tiny.

“A fully furnished room will actually make the space feel bigger,” says Megan Hopp, a designer with Homepolish. “It’s counterintuitive, but having the right amount and right-size pieces in a layout will make your room feel bigger, better, and help you breathe a sigh of relief.”

If your massive sectional overwhelms the space, consider sizing down with a new couch—but don’t ditch the seating entirely.

Myth No. 4: Dark walls make a space look small

Photo by Rugo/ Raff Ltd. Architects

White or neutral tones aren’t the only shades allowed in a tiny room. Far from off-limits, dark walls can even size up the space.

“Covering all of the surfaces of a room in one color makes it larger,” Schlotter says. Choose a hue that moves you—warm, rich, buttery, soothing—and “envelop the space,” she says. Yes, even the ceiling.

“One unified color fades defining lines, which enhances the coziness of the space and makes it feel larger,” she says.

Myth No. 5: Decor pieces can’t touch

A couch 5 feet from a side table and another 5 feet from the coffee table feels museum-like, not comfy-cozy. And contrary to popular belief, table decor is allowed to slightly obscure your artwork. (It can actually look better!)

“Yes, your lamp can cover the bottom corner of the mirror, and your armchair would love to live in front of your bookcase,” Hopp says. “Just like a sandwich, each ingredient on top of the other makes for a much better recipe than each piece alone.” Bon appetit!

Myth No. 6: You can’t have nice furniture if you have kids

Yes, skip the pricey white leather armchair, unless you’re eager to dress it up with crayon. But you don’t have to ditch all of the expensive and lovely pieces you’ve collected over the years. You can even buy new, elegant furniture that make you happy—even with your rugrats scrambling around.

The key is to choose and position your pieces carefully, and to aim for indestructible materials and finishes. It might seem counterintuitive, but splurging on well-made furniture could end up saving you in the long run. It’s more likely to hold up to years of abuse than the cheap models you think you’re resigned to own.

Myth No. 7: Never mix metals

Photo by Casey & Fox

Gone are the days when it was taboo to mix metals. With the infusion of brilliant golds, brushed nickels, and rich coppers into our decors, designers have found themselves asking: Why limit ourselves to just one? It turns out, you can have it all.

“Mixed metallics is not only a good thing, in my opinion, it’s a better choice than confining yourself and your design to one or the other,” Hopp says.

Some metals, such as copper and gold, contribute warm tones—others (think silver and nickel) are cooler. Together, they create “a healthy balance” that adds texture, glamour, and dimension to your space.

Myth No. 8: Art goes up high

Photo by Laura U, Inc.

Move that art lower—please, designers plea. Hang your art like a museum does: at eye level. Placed properly, the glory of your collection can be fully appreciated by your guests, who won’t have to crane their necks.

“Try moving your pieces down so as to sit just above the center point of the wall,” Hopp says. “Think about how art looks in a gallery. Follow suit, and bring it down.”

Myth No. 9: You should always be on trend

We’ll be the first to admit that we spend a lot of time telling you which interior design trends you should incorporate into your home, and which ones are so last year. But here’s something we don’t say often enough: You shouldn’t let Pinterest (or us!) dictate your decor decisions. Following design trends blindly creates a soulless space. Soulless as in dead.

“Only infuse trends into your home if it’s one you truly like and can live with longer than a year,” Hosking says. “It’s unrealistic to paint your walls every year or to add that mirrored chest to the dining room because ‘it’s in.'”

Love a style but hesitant to go all-in on a trend? Consider using smaller pieces to incorporate popular fabrics and styles into your home.

Pillows, throws, and art are easy ways to “infuse a trendy look without breaking the bank or generating buyer’s remorse,” Hosking says. And once you’re tired of the chevron, or the Swiss cross, or the trellis, donate the piece, take a tax deduction, and try something new.

The post 9 Home Decor Myths You Should Stop Believing Immediately appeared first on Real Estate News & Advice | realtor.com®.

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jeffreyhowardz · 6 years ago

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Brighten up your Living Room with 7 Easy Steps

The living room is the most essential room of the whole home. We make use of the family area for relaxing, socializing, spend time together with family there, and a lot more. But a dull living room reduces boost and comfort the feeling while a cheerful and bright living room creates a positive atmosphere. If you believe your present interior doesn’t build your room more glowing and cheerful afterward, it. It means you must revive your inner to make it brighter and comfortable. Here I want to reflect several home improvement guidelines that can help you in jazz.

Add a White paint to your Living Room:

Many women and men check-out mirrors to reflect light when trying to decorate a place. But that’s a bit of a design myth. Since the non-hue does not absorb some colors, the perfect way to scatter light is by using a lot of white. White transmits as much lighting as possible, rebounding into surfaces. Whether it has brightness you search, the first thing that you should do is paint your ceiling and walls white.

And if you wish to be competitive, then don’t stop with these walls. Consider earning whitened furniture and also additional elements like frames or art, bedding, and even drapes.

However, before you begin renovating, you first need to inspect the roof shingles of your home. Look for holes and the cracks to receive it fixed since they can damage your decoration and wall paints. They are talking about the roofing condition, particularly water leaks from openings and such cracks, which left unsightly marks on the wall. So be sure to inspect the roof to almost any cracks and openings until you get some roofing contractors. Additionally, it is essential to consider the required steps in the condition. Otherwise, the total roof replacement cost, or even the maintenance cost is likely to be anticipated.

Also Read: 9 Things to Consider Before Painting a Room

Change the Accessories:

If you think your rooms are now too predictable, change the pillows rugs, wall art, as well as shouts. Add 1 or 2 of the newest colors of the season in accent bits for a popup once you’ve maintained your color scheme impartial. Throw to a shameful that is tiny. Black is an eye fixed neutral that could revive your color scheme and vibrant. Do not think we? Give it a go. Grab a sweater or coat and throw it. Don’t the colors around this soda up? Doesn’t the fabric’s feel stand out more? Now put straight back where it goes and get going searching for some black accents.

You will incorporate cushions update one of your wall art bits, or even arrange a dark serving on your ottoman. It’s likely to find loads of cheap accessories which can be timeless out of year-round that is dark. You might also provide spray and a DIY approach to paint one of your accessories. Should you not overdo it, black is décor. There’s a wall a bit.

Also Read: Interesting Themes for Home Decoration

Change the Lighting:

It seems evident that adding considerable lighting will decorate your residence. But you may be overlooking some easy alterations you may make. Keeping your glass lamps clean and Changing bulbs outside can make a significant effect. Once you might have recessed lights, your space will be radically enhanced by then installing LED units when reducing your electrical bill.

Placing the right shape Mirrors:

Mirrors are influential in creating the room bright and relaxing. A mirror gets most of the natural lighting of the room, opens a small distance, enriches the viewpoints and adds liveliness to décor. To create adding in earning your family room glowing and energized a mirror effect, you then ought to pick the perfect mirror and position it. Here is exactly what shape of this mirror to choose and a couple of tips on where you can position the mirrors.

Position a whole-body mirror between two windows. It may look like this. There is a window, and the sunlight will increase the sunlight. That may impart a relaxing mood.

Place a mirror between artworks. The key is in the manner in which you arrange the frames throughout the mirror. The structures should be placed and must have the sizes.

Mirrors can help brighten up the living room. The light is reflected by it and leaves the area look larger and brighter. You should put the cushions carefully, signify that the sun is coming from the lighting during the night, and to reflect the sunlight through the entire daytime. Maybe a floor to ceiling mirror or even a wall-mounted mirror may help brighten up the family room.

Counteract the interior with black:

It appears counterintuitive but introducing a couple of hits of black or charcoal adds touches of comparison, which will make the places that are light enclosing more popup. Appearance to narrow down elements, as an example, as these seats or fabrics, sharp picture frames to find the ideal dose of darkness or ceiling lamps.

It’s better to add some punches of black and blue (or navy) to a space to create a beachy vibe that remembers luxe beachfront getaways with loads of summer sun.

Buy some Area Rugs:

Dark hardwood or laminate floors are a hot and gorgeous staple for houses. However, they could drain of lighting without windows out of several corridor spaces, a fantastic deal. Runner carpets at a tone will break this up a form of floor to give the most mixture of airiness and richness to you. A patterned rug like this one integrates off-whites to get lightness without revealing every speck of dirt.

Reflecting Floor:

Reflective flooring may increase the light in your living room. The area is occupied by the ceiling while in the region and followed closely with a floor. Thus, you must pay attention to it. It is going to have a substantial effect on the manifestation of this room. There are two unique kinds of reflective the hardwood, the floors along with floors. A fantastic example is marble. It certainly will incorporate brightness and will provide color.

Renovating your living room seems a difficult task, but once you learn the correct method to complete, it is now straightforward to do. Here, I try to demonstrate in brightening up your room, some natural means which may help you. I think these tips and tricks will help everyone else who would like to re-establish their living room.

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Author Bio:

Emily is a voracious writer, passionate about art and designs. With her skills in designing and content marketing, Emily has helped many brands in architecture, real estate, and roofing industry. The best example – Skywalker Roofing – They are one of the leading roofing companies in North Carolina.

The post Brighten up your Living Room with 7 Easy Steps appeared first on Kravelv.

Brighten up your Living Room with 7 Easy Steps published first on https://wallsgshop.tumblr.com/

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chocolate-brownies · 6 years ago

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What drove Malala Yousafzai to find the strength to launch a campaign for the rights of girls and women in Pakistan? What leads someone to start a community garden in the middle of an urban food desert? From very public leaders to people in your daily life working to make things better for their families, neighborhoods, or workplaces, they each have at least one thing in common: a strong sense of purpose.

As a trait, purpose appears to have evolved in humans so that we can accomplish big things together—which may be why having a powerful sense of purpose is linked to better physical and mental health. Purpose is adaptive, in an evolutionary sense. It helps both individuals and the species to survive.

The prevailing belief is that purpose arises from having a gift or passion. But that’s only part of the truth.

Yet when it comes to our own sense of purpose, many of us are at a loss. We struggle to know what role we play in the bigger scheme of things. We dabble in this or that; we get inspired and then lose interest; and mostly, we just feel frustrated that we don’t know “what we were born to do.”

The prevailing belief is that purpose arises from having a gift or passion that sets you apart from others. But that’s only part of the truth. A sense of purpose also grows from your connection to others (which is why a crisis of purpose can also be a symptom of being isolated).

Here are a few ideas to uncover ways to make a difference in your life—and connect to others in the process.

Turn Hurts into Healing

Like the kid who was bullied who turns into an advocate for victims’ rights, purpose often stems from having personal experience that you realize can benefit someone else. The desire to help can transcend your own interest—you begin to see how your story fits into a larger conversation. And that’s where purpose thrives.

Kezia Willingham was raised in poverty in Corvallis, Oregon, her family riven by domestic violence. “No one at school intervened or helped or supported my mother, myself, or my brother when I was growing up poor, ashamed, and sure that my existence was a mistake,” she says.

When she was 16, Willingham enrolled at an alternative high school that “led me to believe I had options and a path out of poverty.” She made her way to college and then got a master’s degree and has worked as a family and children’s advocate for more than 15 years.

“I want the kids out there who grew up like me to know they have futures ahead of them,” she says. “I want them to know that they are just as good and valuable as any other human who happens to be born into more privileged circumstances. Because they are.”

What disadvantage or discrimination have you experienced in your life? How did you deal with it? Who might benefit from your experience?

Cultivate Awe + Gratitude

Feeling connected to something larger than ourselves can also kindle a sense of purpose. As Dacher Keltner at the University of California, Berkeley’s Greater Good Science Center has shown, awe can provide the emotional foundation where a sense of purpose flourishes.

Of course, it’s not enough to just feel like you’re a small part of something big; you also need to feel driven to make a positive impact on the world. And that’s where gratitude comes in.

Research finds that people who count their blessings are much more likely to try to contribute to the world beyond themselves. And it’s reciprocal. People who engage in more altruistic behaviors, like volunteering or donating money, tend to have a greater sense of purpose in their lives.

“It may seem counterintuitive to foster purpose by cultivating a grateful mind-set, but it works,” says psychologist Kendall Bronk.

Where in your life do you experience wonder and awe? What do you feel truly grateful for? How might you pay it forward?

Tell Your Story

Purpose often arises from curiosity about the narrative arc of your own life story. One study found that those who see meaning and purpose in their lives are able to tell a story of change and growth. In other words, narrative can help us to see our own strengths and how applying them can make a difference in the world.

“We all have the ability to make a narrative out of our own lives,” says Emily Esfahani Smith, author of The Power of Meaning. “It gives us clarity on our own lives, how to understand ourselves, and gives us a framework that goes beyond the day-to-day and basically helps us make sense of our experiences.”

By writing her memoir Refocusing My Family: Coming Out, Being Cast Out, and Discovering the True Love of God, Amber Cantorna took her own struggle—and strengths—and used them as a tool to help others facing the same kind of pain and rejection from their faith community. “My sense of purpose has grown a lot with my desire to share my story—and the realization that so many other people have shared my journey,” she said.

What obstacles have you encountered? What strengths helped you to overcome them? How did other people help you? How can you use this knowledge to make life better for others?

The post How to Find Your Purpose appeared first on Mindful.

#sleep sounds #sleep music #white noise app #nature sounds #relaxing sounds #rain sounds for sleeping

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jovialsoulinfluencer · 6 years ago

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5 Smart Design Hacks for Hiding Ugly AC Vents

If you’re working on a room’s design, that last thing you may think about is an ugly AC vent or other air vents. However, they can often detract from the style of the room. AC vents have a way of looking too modern for rustic or retro styles, too industrial for more whimsical artistic styles and too outdated for those sleek modern styles. This is especially true in older homes, where vents tend to have ugly grating or outdated panels on them that clash with nearly every home style.

But rather than replacing those HVAC vents, why not try to hide them? There are several ways to hide AC vents without obstructing airflow. Take a look below for ways to hide those vents.

A doormat can make a classy vent covering. Image: Debbie Doo’s

Find a doormat covering for AC vents

Probably one of the neatest hacks you’ll find is covering air vents with doormats. This sounds counterintuitive, but it’s actually a wonderful way to add some style and class.

The photo above shows how a basic open-design doormat fits right over an ugly AC vent. All the homeowner had to do was spray paint the mat to give it a more metallic texture. That helped it look like a stylish and more expensive grate. Two small nails on the top of the mat were all it took to hang the piece. And with that, the vents leading from the air conditioner cooling system are an eyesore no more.

A simple spray paint job on the vent grating can make the vent fit in with the room’s style. Image: You’re Like Really Crafty

Spray paint air vents to match

Another simple idea is to remove the AC vents and spray them to match the surrounding paint. You can usually remove vents easily enough by undoing two screws. Then a can of spray paint turns that previously ugly vent leading from AC units into a color or finish that can match any home style.

You might try the styles you see in the photo above. The vents actually just blend in with the surrounding wall paint. You could also get artsy and creative with the idea. Try painting the vent the same color as a bold accent shade in the room, like a bright cherry red. Or, go for a more metallic shade that stands out if you have an industrial theme. Feel free to get creative while painting those vents.

You can actually find stylish and intricate vent covers. Image: Swoon Worthy

Use a cover

There are also plenty of attractive covers that can fit right over the AC vents, or even larger vent eyesores, like this radiator cover in the photo above. A style like this is a creative way to add some geometric classiness to the space. But the open design still means that you’re not obstructing air flow.

You can also paint an item like this to fit in with any room’s color scheme. See how the white cover in the photo above fits in with the light color scheme on the wall. The piece is so well designed that it looks like it belongs there.

Combine an air vent covering with some shelving. Image: Pinterest

Go for shelving

For a more comprehensive approach, add some piece of carpentry over ugly wall vents that lead from the HVAC system. An example is the gorgeous piece in the photo above. You can see the air vents are sitting behind the open diamond-shaped pattern.

The added shelving on the top makes the pattern part of a cohesive piece. Plus, there’s the benefit of adding usable shelving in your home this way. You may need a carpenter to complete this project if you’re not one yourself. But it may be well worth it to cover those ugly vents leading from the air conditioning or heating system.

Furniture can go in front of an ugly AC vent, as long as it has an open design at the bottom. Image: The Sister Sophisticate

Put a piece of furniture in front of the AC vent

This idea may seem counterproductive. After all, putting pieces of furniture in front of AC vents seems like it would restrict air flow in the room. However, there are pieces of furniture with open doors at the bottom.

An example is the cabinet in the photo above. You can see how the doors at the bottom have an open design to them. All you would need to do is remove the back of the cabinet so that air from the air conditioning could come up through the doors. Any piece of furniture with an open element where the vent sits would work.

Remember while decorating to make sure your HVAC system is in working order. It may be time to do routine maintenance, filter replacements, repairs or total system replacements. Schedule an inspection with your local HVAC professional to be sure your system works properly.

Do you have any other design hacks for air vents or covers? Let us know in the comments.

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from https://freshome.com/hacks-for-hiding-ugly-ac-vents/ via 5 Smart Design Hacks for Hiding Ugly AC Vents

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cessanderson · 6 years ago

Photo

5 Smart Design Hacks for Hiding Ugly AC Vents https://ift.tt/2zVR0ER

But rather than replacing those HVAC vents, why not try to hide them? There are several ways to hide AC vents without obstructing airflow. Take a look below for ways to hide those vents.

A doormat can make a classy vent covering. Image: Debbie Doo’s

Find a doormat covering for AC vents

Probably one of the neatest hacks you’ll find is covering air vents with doormats. This sounds counterintuitive, but it’s actually a wonderful way to add some style and class.

A simple spray paint job on the vent grating can make the vent fit in with the room’s style. Image: You’re Like Really Crafty

Spray paint air vents to match

You can actually find stylish and intricate vent covers. Image: Swoon Worthy

Use a cover

Combine an air vent covering with some shelving. Image: Pinterest

Go for shelving

Furniture can go in front of an ugly AC vent, as long as it has an open design at the bottom. Image: The Sister Sophisticate

Put a piece of furniture in front of the AC vent

Do you have any other design hacks for air vents or covers? Let us know in the comments.

The post 5 Smart Design Hacks for Hiding Ugly AC Vents appeared first on Freshome.com.

Michelle Honeyager

#Freshome.com - Interior Design & Architecture Magazine

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takenews-blog1 · 7 years ago

Text

App of the Week: Launch actions, not apps, with this killer iOS widget

New Post has been published on https://takenews.net/app-of-the-week-launch-actions-not-apps-with-this-killer-ios-widget/

App of the Week: Launch actions, not apps, with this killer iOS widget

I’ve obtained the brand new iPhone 6s on preorder for Friday, and one of many options I’m most enthusiastic about is 3D Contact, which, amongst different issues, permits customers to leap proper into an motion inside an app. Meaning you possibly can soar straight to the selfie cam or rapidly begin a name to your partner from the house display.

When you personal an earlier iPhone on contract or simply aren’t fascinated with upgrading proper now, you might imagine you’re caught having to navigate by ever-more-complicated apps. However Apple simply allowed the following neatest thing into the App Retailer. Launch Heart Professional helps you to soar proper into an motion inside an app from a widget in At the moment view, and it already works with hundreds of apps on iPhones proper now.

Meaning you possibly can pace dial your mother with one contact or soar straight into the textual content dialog along with your partner as a substitute launching Messages, backing out of your present dialog, scrolling to search out your partner, then beginning to to kind. (Or worse, simply begin typing once you open Messages and ship it earlier than realizing that you just instructed your boss you’re going to choose up milk in your manner dwelling.)

Nevertheless it’s not simply inventory apps; you can even set it as much as launch Google Maps loaded up with transit instructions dwelling, or launch the digicam contained in the Instagram app, or begin a tweet within the Twitter app with the final photograph you took already hooked up. There are actually lots of of hundreds of potentialities. All of it works by making the most of URL schemes, which builders code into apps to make it simpler to launch actions from the net.

If this all sounds barely acquainted, that’s as a result of it’s. The unique Launch Heart was truly launched again in 2012, letting customers launch purposes by hacky notifications that popped up at particular occasions. Launch Heart Professional, launched later that yr, launched a cleaner interface and extra sturdy actions as app builders added help for extra URL schemes.

Nonetheless, Apple didn’t have widget help on the time, so customers needed to open Launch Heart Professional to leap into an app’s motion, which appears fairly counterintuitive, however the app nonetheless had loads of customers. This previous week, Launch Heart Professional lastly made it previous Apple’s censors so as to add its personal widget. Customers can now add quick-launch actions to the pull-down At the moment view on their iPhones, even after they’re locked.

Launch Heart Professional is competing with just a few different productiveness apps. Maybe the preferred is Workflow, which helps you to add actions on to your own home display with Safari’s Add to Homescreen perform. Nonetheless, Workflow’s setup is kind of a bit extra difficult and skews in direction of extra technical capabilities.

Launch Heart Professional is iOS solely and is at the moment $three.99 on the App Retailer, $1 off its common worth. There’s additionally a $four.99 Launch Heart Professional for iPad, which brings the concept of launching actions to the larger display, however doesn’t have widget performance fairly but. In order for you a style of that 3D Contact performance however don’t plan on getting the brand new iPhone anytime quickly, avoid wasting cash and get Launch Heart Professional as a substitute.

#App of the Week #Productivity

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douchebagbrainwaves · 7 years ago

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WHEN THE COMPANY IS DEFAULT ALIVE, WE CAN SPRING ON THE WORLD A STREAM OF NEW STARTUPS

But with company names there is another layer that tends to come back to the painting over and over. So I think you should make users the test, just as you would an email, and it's different from what was originally envisioned. By 15 I was convinced the world was created by a giant rabbit, and always snapping their fingers before eating fish, Xes are also particularly honest and industrious.1 So it's hard to change something.2 And the days when VCs could wash angels out of the big galley and put them in a boat together. It's worth studying this phenomenon in detail, because this is what I expect spam to evolve into: some completely neutral text followed by a url.3 The first discovery I'd like to conclude with a joint message from me and your parents. To the extent there is a peloton of younger startups behind them. We should have expected this.4 Then you can measure what credentials merely predict.

Viaweb's was the Microsoft Word of ecommerce. In 1940, any argument against Churchill's aggressive policy was defeatist.5 A friend who moved out of Manhattan said merely that her 3 year old how he plans to support himself.6 Mostly because of the doubling, occurring three times in nonspam mail would be enough.7 You could also try the startup first, and if you aren't one of them.8 If you actually want to compress the gap between rich and poor, you have to give advice, you can usually find version 1 of it in a second: they make bad cars. And he'd be right.9 And so having a notion of good art, in the sense that your performance can make or break an ambitious young South Korean. Startups are very counterintuitive. At home, hackers don't work in noisy, open spaces; they work in says computer science on the outside. If you try to decide what to do if it wants to continue to believe something like this well into adulthood. Inside your head, you're going to spend years working on something like the natural history of computers—studying the behavior of algorithms for routing data through networks, for example.

Even Newton fell into this trap. Startups are intrinsically risky. I could see myself—making at least 4 of these 5 mistakes. People will pay extra for stability. In a big company be doing research, and set them to work instead on problems of the most valuable exercises you can try if you want to give money to the poor, you have to try to think of World War II as a triumph of freedom over totalitarianism. I happen to have it. Now we seem to be getting out of hand last summer when we had 84 companies in the current filter, free in the Subject line and doesn't have an office yet, or your founders are technical people with no business experience operating out of an apartment.10 At home, hackers can arrange things themselves so they can continue to learn.

Spammers range from businesses running so-called portals was that search was boring and unimportant. Do you go up or down? They're too busy trying to spend all that money to get started. A company. Plus founders who've just raised money are often encouraged to overhire by the VCs who funded them. And what are the universities thinking?11 So we ditched Artix and started a new company, Viaweb, to make something, it helps to be driven by a spirit of benevolence. Why did no one propose a new scheme for micropayments? This seems to be that the most important tool to a hacker is to work with him on something. For the next year or so, if anyone expressed the slightest curiosity about Viaweb we would try to invest in us if we had better than a 1 in 24 chance of succeeding. They never had to bet the company on Betamax. But it's also because money is not the same thing, but slower.12

On current spam, I've been able to think about.13 This essay is derived from a guest lecture in Sam Altman's startup class at Stanford.14 And since you can delay pushing the button for a while, but their business model is a down elevator. A couple years ago a venture capitalist friend told me about a new startup he was involved with. Its fifteen most interesting words are as follows: let g 2 or gethash word good 0 b or gethash word good 0 b or gethash word good 0 b or gethash word good 0 b or gethash word good 0 b or gethash word bad 0 unless g b 5 max.15 Of the founders, everything grinds to a halt.16 The way to do venture investing. If there were two features we could add to our software, both equally valuable in proportion to its ability to prevent parents from influencing their children's success directly. When I was in grad school I used to joke that our function was to tell founders things they would ignore.

A stage before series As turned into de facto series B rounds.17 So of course your first impulse is to disregard them. I wouldn't bet on it. So it's not just nice.18 The hard part about figuring out what people want, companies that move things also create wealth. Sure, it can be good art is art that achieves its purpose particularly well. Could other countries introduce more individualism into their technology companies and research labs without having it metastasize as strip malls? He called a maximally elegant proof one out of a new round of funding.19

Notes

The US is becoming more fragmented, the other by adjusting the boundaries of what you learn in even the most part and you start fundraising, but we decided it would have gone into the heads of would-be startup founders tend to make peace.

Stone, op.

There are lots of others followed. They'd freak if they stopped causing so much pain, it would destroy them.

But in this respect. Some want to lead. More generally, it means they still control the company will either be a sufficient condition. The company is like starting out in the mid 1980s.

As Anthony Badger wrote, for example, understanding French will help dispel the cloud of semi-sacred mystery that surrounds wisdom in so many had been transposed into your bodies. Which explains the astonished stories one always hears about VC inattentiveness.

Or you make something hackers use.

According to the World Bank, the underlying cause is the bellwether. Treating high school textbooks. As we walked in, say, of course. Indifference, mainly.

Then Josh Wilson came in to pick your brains. Perhaps it would have seemed a miracle of workmanship. I can't refer a startup you can say I need to be, unchanging, but I'm not saying public school kids at least bet money on convertible notes often have you heard a retailer claim that companies will one day be able to grow big in people, instead of hiring them. In effect they were.

The second alone yields someone who's stubbornly inert. Because we want to measure that you should be your compass. When an investor would sell it to the home team, I've become a function of the world, and that the only way to see how universally faces work by their prevalence in advertising. Perhaps it would feel pretty bogus to press founders to have the balls to ask for more than one level of protection is one of the x axis and returns on the group's accumulated knowledge.

Ii. This is why, when I was a new business designed for scale. Watt reinvented the steam engine. Because the title associate has gotten a bad idea.

Not one got an interview. A larger set of plausible sounding startup ideas, because the ordering system was small.

These horrible stickers are much like what you love, or Seattle, 4 in DC, 6 in Chicago, 8 in London, 13 in New York is where people care most about art, they don't, you're not going to be writing with conviction. They act as if you'd invested at a Demo Day pitch, the growth rate has to be significantly pickier. The real problem is not such a low grade, which is a big change in response to their software that doesn't have dangerous local maxima, the less educated parents seem closer to what modernist architects meant. Which in turn forces Digg to respond promptly.

There's a sort of person who wins. We could have used another algorithm and everything I write out loud can expose awkward parts.

To a kid who had to bounce back. For example, would probably be interrupted every fifteen minutes with little loss of productivity.

This explains why such paintings are slightly worse. We managed to screw up twice at the mercy of investors started offering investment automatically to every startup we funded, summer jobs are the usual standards for truth. This was certainly true in the Ancient World, Economic History Review, 2:9 1956,185-199, reprinted in Finley, M.

Never attribute to malice what can be and still provide a profitable market for its lack of movement between companies combined with self-imposed. It's lame that VCs may begin to conserve board seats for shorter periods.

A YC partner can estimate a market for a future in which his chief resident, Gary, talks about the Thanksgiving turkey. In many fields a year of focused work plus caring a lot of people we need to run a mile in under 4 minutes. Siegel, Jeremy J.

That was a strong one. Once someone has said fail, no one on the matter, get rid of everyone else and put our worker on a wall is art. What you're too early for a sufficiently identifiable style, you may have to spend all your time working on that?

I skipped the Computer History Museum because this is a bit. That's why there's a continuum here. Scribes in ancient philosophy may be useful here, because the kind that prevents you from starving.

Thanks to Hutch Fishman, Marc Andreessen, Kevin Hale, Savraj Singh, Trevor Blackwell, Jessica Livingston, Sam Altman, and Daniel Gackle for their feedback on these thoughts.

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jmtapio · 8 years ago

Link

Narabu is a new intraframe video codec. You probably want to read part 1, part 2 and part 3 first.

So we're at the stage where the structure is in place. How do we decode? Once we have the structure, it's actually fairly straightforward:

First of all, we need to figure out where each slice starts and ends. This is done on the CPU, but it's mostly just setting up pointers, so it's super-cheap. It doesn't see any pixels at all, just lengths and some probability distributions (those are decoded on the CPU, but they're only a few hundred values and no FP math is involved).

Then, we set up local groups of size 64 (8x8) with 512 floats of shared memory. Each group will be used for decoding one slice (320 blocks), all coefficients. Each thread starts off doing rANS decoding (this involves a lookup into a small LUT, and of course some arithmetic) and dequantization of 8 blocks (for its coefficient); this means we now have 512 coefficients, so we add a barrier, do 64 horizontal IDCTs (one 8-point IDCT per thread), add a new barrier, do 64 vertical IDCTs, and then finally write out the data. We can then do the next 8 coefficients the same way (we kept the rANS decoding state), and so on.

Note how the parallelism changes during the decoding; it's a bit counterintuitive at first, and barriers are not for free, but it avoids saving the coefficients to global memory (which is costly). First, the parallelism is over coefficients, then over horizontal DCT blocks, then over vertical DCT blocks, and then we start all over again. In CPU multithreading, this would be very tricky, and probably not worth it at all, but on the GPU, it gives us tons of parallelism.

One problem is that the rANS work is going to be unbalanced within each warp. There's a lot more data (and thus more calculation and loading of compressed data from memory) in the lower-frequency coefficients, which means the other threads in the warp are wasting time doing nothing when they do more work. I tried various schemes to balance it better (like making even larger thread groups to get e.g. more coefficient 0s that could work together, or reordering the threads' coefficients in a zizag), but seemingly it didn't help any. Again, the lack of a profiler here is hampering effective performance investigations. In any case, the performance is reasonably good (my GTX 950 does 1280x720 luma-only in a little under 0.4 ms, which equates to ~1400 fps for full 4:2:2).

As a side note, GoPro open-sourced their CineForm HD implementation the other day, and I guess it only goes to show that these kind of things really belong on the GPU; they claim similar performance numbers to what I get on my low-end NVIDIA GPU (923.6 fps for 1080p 4:2:2, which would be roughtly 1800 fps on 720p60), but that's on a 4GHz 8-core Broadwell-E, which is basically taking the most expensive enthusiast desktop CPU you can get your hands on and then overclocking it. Kudos to GoPro for freeing it, though (even under a very useful license), even though FFmpeg already had a working reverse-engineered implementation. :-)

Next time, we'll look at the encoder, which is a bit more complicated. After that, we'll do some performance tests and probably wrap up the series. Stay tuned.

via Planet Debian

#Reading

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johntoomaydallas-blog · 8 years ago

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John Toomay Dallas - Fathers, Sons and Football

In the spring of 1970, as a prospective middle-round NFL draftee, I was haunted by a recurring nightmare. On a practice field somewhere, between two blocking dummies, I faced a monstrous offensive tackle, who sat poised and quivering in his stance. To the tackle’s left, on the far side of one bag, a center hunkered over a football. Behind the center, a quarterback. Behind the quarterback, a running back, whom I was required to bring down after shedding the tackle’s block — a ritual of pain known as the Nutcracker Drill.

I never succeeded. Night after night, my failure unfolded with a sickening regularity. Dead-eyed, an inhuman mass of rippling muscle, with a machine-like mastery of his brutal technique, the tackle, at the snap of the football, would slam his fists into my rib cage. Lifting me up, he would tip me over backwards, pinning me to the turf like a bug as the running back went skittering by.

Squirming helplessly there, I could see my embarrassed teammates turning away. Then a growling, gap-toothed coach would straddle me, leering down in disgust. “Get up! Go again!” he would bellow. I would shake my head no. “Coward!” he would roar. Still, I would refuse. “You are what I loathe,” he would growl. “A loser.” And with that, I would wake up.

While most of the figures in the dream were obscure, the coach was not, for he was none other than Vincent T. Lombardi, then in the final year of his life, now the subject of an eye-opening new biography by David Maraniss, “When Pride Still Mattered: A Life of Vince Lombardi.”

I wanted no part of him. Of all NFL coaches, Lombardi, I knew, was the one coach who could expose me for what I was. A loathsome creature of some indeterminate species. Certainly not a man. Something on the pathetic periphery of masculinity. Without heart. A defeatist. A loser.

It was exactly this kind of fear that always made playing football a mixed experience for me, that drained the joy from a game I should have loved unconditionally. Fear of not pleasing the coach. Of not measuring up. In this violent game, what frightened me was not getting hit but being subjected to the scornful eye of the man above me. It took me years to understand this fear — and by the time I did, I had to wonder if I had subjected my own sons, whom I had vowed never to treat the way I had been treated, to the same thing.

As it happened, I was spared the experience of playing for Lombardi, but not of escaping his legacy of shame. For I was drafted by a team that shared my fear of Lombardi’s scrutiny — that in fact had twice been humiliated by the Lombardi juggernaut — Tom Landry’s Dallas Cowboys. In their first crushing defeat by Lombardi’s Packers, in the 1966 NFL Championship Game, which the Cowboys lost when Packer safety Tom Brown intercepted a pass in the Packer end zone, snuffing a game-winning Cowboy drive as time expired, the Cowboys were deemed too inexperienced, too new to the pressures of championship football to succeed at that level. But after their second numbing defeat, in the legendary “Ice Bowl”Championship Game in 1967, the very character of the club came into question, not only by fans and by sportswriters, but by the Packer players themselves. As Maraniss reports, the Packers were nothing short of disdainful of their Cowboy opponents. “We had their number,” said Packer receiver Max McGee. “Lombardi had the hex on Landry.” Other players observed that Cowboy receiver Bob Hayes unwittingly gave away plays by putting his hands in his pockets for runs, pulling them out for passes. The consensus was that the Cowboys didn’t have the goods.

In an attempt to incorporate the Lombardi mystique, since it was impossible to defeat it, Cowboy General Manager Tex Schramm acquired three of the Packers’ aging veterans. Uncharacteristically, Schramm, in making this move, overrode the strong objections of his coach, who reportedly wanted nothing to do with former Packers. But here they came anyway: linebacker Lee Roy Caffey, offensive tackle Forrest Gregg and cornerback Herb Adderley.

Adderley was the first of the Packer veterans to join the club, and for a time he resided with the more transient players, in a Dallas Holiday Inn. That’s where I got to know him. Because he had gone where I feared to go, into the valley of the shadow of Lombardi, and emerged victorious, like a triumphant knight, Herb from the beginning was someone special to me. He was disarmingly open and friendly — unusual for a veteran of his stature, who normally wouldn’t pass the time of day with an obscure rookie. On more than one occasion, Herb joined me for a meal, and until he arranged for his own transportation, often rode with me to practice.

Of course I asked him about Lombardi. Yes, Lombardi could be brutal, Herb confirmed, but he also felt that characteristic of his coach was in service of something else. He talked about the togetherness of the Packers, the love the players had for one another, the amazing feats they were able to accomplish — all out of a passion that had been inspired by Lombardi. But was it because of Lombardi, or in spite of him, that those feelings arose? I didn’t have the nerve to ask the question, but one thing was certain. If Herb was a product of Lombardi, then Lombardi the man couldn’t be as bleak as I’d imagined.

I was beginning to wonder, though, about Landry. By this time, I had been exposed to him for several months, and it was becoming clear that the two coaches occupied alternative football universes. Squat, blunt, volatile, Lombardi was an earthy Italian who valued simplicity and directness, while Landry was tall and aloof, a born-again Christian who had an almost prissy aversion to anything of the earth. An industrial engineer and World War II bomber pilot, Landry valued intellect over instinct, thought over feeling, science over the chaos of Lombardi’s emotional alchemy. As far as coach Landry was concerned, players were responsible for their own motivation, while his job was to put them in position to make plays. The schemes he devised to accomplish this task were labyrinthine. While Lombardi’s defense might be described as “Tackle the man with the ball,” Landry’s Flex defense required recognition of offensive patterns, internalization of the probable outcomes of those patterns and a corresponding reaction. Locating the football only came after following the branches of his logic tree — a counterintuitive approach that could take years to master.

For a defensive end, for example — which was my position — if you were in the off-set of the Flex, your key was not the immediate threat of the gigantic tackle across from you, who wanted to grind you into hominy grits, but rather the guard positioned next to the tackle, who was hardly a concern. It was the movement of the guard that dictated whether you met the tackle with your outside shoulder or simply caromed off him to slide inside if the guard happened to be pulling — all according to some larger plan that only Landry understood. The advantage of this approach, for me, was that it eliminated those head-to-head encounters with much bigger players that I could never fail to lose, giving me instead a gap to fill on one side of the tackle or the other, a contest I could always hope to win. For this reason, Landry, unlike Lombardi, was not a big proponent of the Nutcracker Drill, since it simply didn’t serve him — which I also found appealing.

But what would happen, I wondered, if a truly great player were inserted into this mechanism, someone hard-wired to his instincts, who hadn’t been trained to ignore them — someone gifted like Herb, a refugee from the instinctive world of Lombardi? What would happen? Herb shrugged off the notion, saying he was just happy to have an opportunity to play football. But as we rode out to practice on those hot, late summer afternoons, sometimes, it seemed, I could smell the smoke.

That was a private thought, of course, one I was reluctant to share with teammates. What I was willing to share with them was my enthusiasm for Herb. No need, though, as it turned out, because everybody was enthusiastic about him. A consummate professional, sporting a glittering Packer Super Bowl ring, Herb, who is black, was a magnetic figure in the locker room, for both black and white alike. “Peace, love and happiness” was how he concluded nearly every exchange. “Brother A” was what he came to be called. Herb’s soothing presence in the locker room defused racial tensions that had plagued the team for years.

On the field, Herb was equally impressive. Even at the age of 31, the future Hall of Famer moved with the grace of a gazelle. He could hang in the air like Dr. J. His instincts were impeccable. Predictably, however, his technique was in conflict with the technique required of a cornerback to play Landry’s Flex. Instead of reading the on-side tackle and guard for run, as Landry required, Herb was doing what he had done for Lombardi the previous nine years, focusing on the receiver, peripherally picking up the main flow of action, reacting to what he saw. For a time, it didn’t matter. That initial season, as Herb made a mighty contribution to the first-ever Cowboy Super Bowl run, and again, in ’71, as the Cowboys achieved the pinnacle with Herb as co-captain, coach Landry let his consternation slide. The following season, however, as younger players began to develop enough to step in, things changed. Abruptly, for Herb, it got ugly.

In Dallas, watching game films was a three-hour marathon, with all players and staff present, unlike other teams, who split off into position groups to watch films. During these sessions, Landry himself ran the projector, going over the performance of every player on every play. If you’d had a bad game, watching game films could be an excruciating experience. Some players, suspecting they were in for it, took barbiturates to get through the sessions. Their armpit sweat rings would meet across their chests.

“Clueing” was what Tom called Herb’s technique. And in one session during the ’72 season, the refrain rang like a sour mantra: “Herb, you’re clueing again.” Coach Landry had a habit of transposing words, names, numbers, and he was doing that now, substituting “clueing” — a bit of his own terminology — for what he really meant to say, which was that Herb, again, was guessing. In Landry’s system, “guessing,” reacting instinctively, was a cardinal sin. If you followed his keys, took his clues, then your actions were predicated on a set of mathematical probabilities, gleaned from hours of study, rather than on the vagaries of instinct, which lacked accuracy, certainty, conformity with the assembly line performance of the other defensive players. “Guessing,” for Tom, could too easily become an excuse, and there was no room for excuses, either in football or in life.

“Herb, you’re clueing again!” The anger in Tom’s voice, as the meeting progressed, escalated out of all proportion, and finally Herb rose to defend himself. It was an unprecedented moment for the team. No player had ever challenged the coach. Unaccustomed to Tom’s habit of transposition, Herb had no idea what Tom was talking about with his “clueing” criticism. Angry and confused, Herb snapped something back at him, then left the room. The moment was quickly forgotten by the players, but not by the coach. Not long afterwards, during a game with the Giants, Herb was benched after swatting down a potential touchdown pass. Out of position again, he had been reacting instinctively. Despite the positive outcome of the play, it was all Tom could take.

“Herb, you’ve got to play the defense like everybody else!”

“You mean I’m supposed to let a guy run by me and catch a touchdown pass?”

“Yes, if that’s what your keys tell you to do!”

“No. I don’t play that way.”

“Then you won’t play at all.”

The confrontation took place privately at halftime. When we took the field for the second half, Charlie Waters was in Herb’s place. Herb watched the rest of the game from the sidelines.

Over the next few weeks Herb continued to start, but was spelled by Waters, for increasing periods of time. Then, before a game with the Chargers, Herb was summoned to a meeting with Landry. In the meeting Herb was told that his midseason grades were poor, that he had become a detriment to the team for harassing the younger defensive backs during practice.

Herb stared at Landry in disbelief. Maybe he was having problems with coverage, but he hadn’t been harassing his teammates. If anything, he had been a mentor to the younger players, generously offering his help.

Said Landry: “Waters is the starter now. Stay or leave, I don’t care.”

Herb left the meeting without saying a word. He was not about to sacrifice his salary by retiring, so he continued to practice, now relegated to the scout team, but playing hard, covering, knocking down balls. When he was prevented from further participation in practice, even as a member of the scout team — for being a “distraction,” as he was told — Herb, for the rest of the season, watched quietly from the sidelines. At the conclusion of the season, he retired. Again, quietly. With all the dignity he had exhibited as a player.

“Tom Landry had a bitterness in his heart for me,” Herb remarked in a recent conversation. “After all I did for that team, I’ll never understand it.”

“Me either,” I replied. But I wondered if Lombardi’s psychology didn’t hold a clue to the nature of those forces that had been working against Herb — the “how” of them, anyway, if not the “why.”

In one of the most compelling sections of his book, Maraniss examines Lombardi’s contradictory relationship to pain. Evidently unable to tolerate the slightest physical discomfort in himself, Lombardi sought to exorcise that demon from his players, using as his instrument the Nutcracker Drill, over which he presided with glee. “It is characteristic of many leaders,” writes Maraniss, “that they confront their own weaknesses indirectly, by working to eliminate them in others, strengthened in that effort by their intimate knowledge of frailty.”

Perhaps Landry was also one of those leaders. Although he and Lombardi were antithetical personalities, perhaps Landry, too, acted indirectly. For Herb, as he departed, seemed to carry all the residual frustration of Landry’s lifelong competition with Lombardi. That Herb had come to the team over Landry’s objections exacerbated the situation. That Herb had been instrumental in Dallas’ success dumped more salt in Tom’s wound. As the personification of this seeping hole, Herb had to be humiliated, then dispatched. Some leaders, it seems, must purge to be purged.

Maraniss’ insightful analysis forced me to think again about my nightmare. I came to realize that my fear, and submerged anger, was directed not just at any authority figure, but at precisely the kind of authority figure who worked out his own weaknesses on the bodies of others. Seen in this light, my refusal to participate in the drill was no act of cowardice, but rather an act of healthy resistance.

In fact, the Lombardi who haunted my dreams was a stand-in for someone else. After all, I didn’t know Lombardi. Although he had possessed this trait in life, I had no way of knowing that. I had appropriated him to mask a more intimate figure, one who also embodied the trait. A larger force, who, at the time, I was unable to name. Old Dad, it seems, is never far from the scene. And it was Old Dad, not just Landry and what I imagined Lombardi to be, but my own dad, whom I had been carrying around on my back. It was a load far heavier than I should have allowed it to be.

Ironically, my father bore little resemblance to the squat, volatile Lombardi, but on more than one occasion he was confused for Landry on the street. Both men were tall, fair, square-jawed and handsome, with a Christian upbringing and a military bearing. My father became an Air Force general; Landry flew bombers in World War II. Trained as engineers, both men were analytical. Both made a virtue of losing their hair. But if they were physically dissimilar to Lombardi, my father and coach Landry did share one attribute with him: a need to create and mold an image of themselves out of their respective environments.

Perhaps this trait is also characteristic of a certain kind of leader. For Lombardi and Landry, the object of their desire was their football teams. Lombardi was very direct in stating his wishes, as Maraniss reports. And the Cowboys were quintessentially a team concerned with “image” — an image, of course, that was a reflection of their leader, Landry. On the field, a technical failure to conform could lead to a chilling dismissal, as in the case of Herb. Off the field, there were similar consequences. I recall once quoting Nietzsche to a TV sports reporter on the subject of critics. The reporter, Tom Hedrick, wanted to know if the current criticism of the team was harmful to players. Citing my source, I said, “Critics don’t bite for the sake of the sting, Tom. They bite because they need your blood.” He laughed, but the next time I saw him, he told me that a club official had instructed him not to talk to me anymore, but to find somebody else more cooperative. “Nietzsche! That’s not football! People don’t want to hear that crap!”

Because my father wasn’t a coach, this dynamic played out much closer to home. Not surprisingly, it had its origins in his own upbringing. My father’s father was in his mid-50s when my dad was born, in his mid-60s when my dad approached puberty — the time when many boys show their first serious interest in sports. A Yale-educated congregational minister, pursuing, at the age of 64, a Ph.D. at the University of Edinburgh in 1934, my grandfather was simply too preoccupied to spend time with my dad. Filling this paternal void was my grandfather’s young missionary wife, who had her own ideas about what little boys should do and be. The photograph is still haunting: My dad and his brother, Ted, dressed up in satin and lace, two proper Victorians — a pair of Little Lord Fauntleroys. They hated it. They hated the imposition of her ideal as much as they hated my grandfather’s absence. This pathetic state of affairs, they vowed, would not be repeated when they had kids.

And so it wasn’t. From an early age my dad was out in the yard with me, throwing balls. Baseballs. Footballs. Basketballs. It was fun. My brother, Tim, and I often went to a nearby vacant lot to slog through the mud of a crisp November day, hurling each other down, flinging passes through the deepening dusk on a field with no boundaries, in a game with no score. Those afternoons were exhilarating, unforgettable. Primal. Pure. But at some point a line was crossed. I was around 9 or 10, I guess, when my dad started the exercise sessions, in conjunction with our first sojourns into organized sports. Weights. Calisthenics. Regularly, whether my brother and I wanted to or not. The rationale was always present: “My dad never worked with me. Someday you’ll thank me for this.” Nicknames were invented for us. The sports fantasy was spun out, now with a particular emphasis on football, perhaps in reaction to my grandmother’s general aversion to any sort of unrefined masculine expression.

My attitude to football was complicated. I discovered that I had talent, and I enjoyed playing. But also I knew that it was my dad’s fantasy for us that was operative here, not our fantasy for ourselves. On some level, I felt my talent was being exploited, co-opted, by my dad. My own physical gifts, it seemed, no longer belonged to me. My solution was to sabotage that appealing part of myself. Or rather to do it sometimes.Because of course at other times it felt too damn good to succeed! It was a senseless, self-destructive bind, I knew. And I vowed, with as much conviction as my father had vowed it before me, that this pathetic state of affairs would not be repeated with my own children.

As the father of two boys, I was loath, as they grew up, to encourage them to play football. There were just too many coaches out there who were hell-bent on re-creating the world in their image, even if their world consisted of nothing more than a bunch of confused, snot-nosed 6-year-olds, whose deepest desire was simply to squat and dig in the dirt. Living in Texas, however, it was inevitable that my sons would discover the game, and so they did, in middle school, but on their own, without parental prodding.

“Dad, I love to cover kicks,” said my younger son, John, as he prepared for his first college season several years later. That he could speak such a sentence was at first a shock. “John! My God!” He was such a sweet, sensitive child. A moon-child, as I always thought of him, because that was the first word he spoke. Not “Ma-ma,” or “Da-da,” but, pointing to the heavens, his face full of glee: “Moon!” And now he was telling me he loved to cover kicks? But then I realized that John’s utterance meant that he appreciated the game at its purest level. That he knew its joy, as my brother and I had known its joy on that vacant lot so long ago. And it was gratifying to realize that he could still find the essence of a game that had transmogrified into a commercial circus. That he had not been hamstrung, as I had been hamstrung during my own career, by a debilitating, Landry-like self-consciousness. For my elder son, though, the game proved to be harrowing.

Seth is three years older than John, and as he grew up, he discovered soccer, a game he truly loved. “Soccer: the intelligent man’s football” was a sticker on the bumper of his coach’s car, and he often pointed it out as we left the field after a practice. But I got too involved with his participation in the sport. I was around too much. I was much too interested. Around the age of 9 or 10 I noticed in him my own tendency at that age to devalue his ability, to dismiss it as unworthy of pursuit. There was a scene after one game in which I excoriated him for failing to play up to his potential, for failing to focus, to concentrate — to do, in other words, what I had never consistently done myself. I angrily implored him to “be a player.”

Immediately, I realized my mistake and backed off. I decided to let him own his own experience of the sport, without me co-opting it. The strategy paid off, for very quickly Seth blossomed into a more than accomplished halfback. But had I gone too far? Was it already too late? Had I already implanted in him what had been implanted in me — an image of “Dad” he could only hope to resist?

When, in middle school, Seth decided to go out for football, I was supportive, but, because of my own experience, deeply ambivalent about his decision. I kept my concerns to myself, however, until a Thursday afternoon late in September 1989, when the Hillcrest High School freshmen took the field to play the freshmen of neighboring A. Maceo Smith. Smith was a new high school then, with no varsity team, so older players were playing down — juniors on the JV, sophomores with the frosh. But one player in particular appeared to be even more of a ringer than the Dallas Independent School District permitted.

“Boy, look at the size of that fullback,” I remarked to my wife as we sat watching warm-ups. “If he hasn’t voted in a presidential election, I’ll kiss somebody’s butt.”

The player in question was huge, over 6 feet tall, weighing in excess of 225 pounds — a man among boys, as a survey of our team quickly confirmed. Watching him, I got worried. “Somebody’s going to get hurt.”

In my nightmare of Lombardi I was pancaked in a Nutcracker Drill and refused to get up. Ironically, the Nutcracker Drill, though a powerful symbol, was next to worthless as training for a game, because of the unnatural constraints of the dummies and the lack of passing to keep players honest. Rarely, in a game, did such an isolated instance occur, but in this game, toward the end of the first quarter, one did. It was a reenactment of my deepest football fear — but my son lived my nightmare.

Maceo Smith had the ball on the Hillcrest 20-yard line. An off-tackle play had been called, and once again the gargantuan fullback accepted the hand-off. But this time he was headed straight for 170-pound Seth, playing left defensive tackle. Seth had shed his block beautifully and was now crouched in the hole, poised for the hit, as the fullback bore down on him.

Physically, Seth was more than outmatched. He was an insect in the path of a bus. Part of me wanted him to turn away, to bail out, fall down — anything to avoid the moment that was coming. But the other part of me demanded that he stand fast.

He didn’t move. He stood his ground. “My God,” I yelped, bolting to my feet, as the concussive BANG! of their collision rang through the empty stadium. Helmets went flying. “What a hit!” I bellowed, grabbing my wife. For an instant, I was as proud of Seth as a football parent could be.

Then my wife said, “He’s not moving.”

I peered at the field. The fullback had gotten groggily to his feet. But Seth was still down, unmoving. He was surrounded by players gesturing frantically for their coach. I ran onto the field.

Seth was numb all over. Taking no chances, the medical staff summoned an ambulance, positioned him on a board and loaded him up. Off we went, Seth a motionless lump, the paramedics checking vitals as we raced to the hospital.

Outside, it was a stunning autumn evening. The sky was big and blue. The first stars glimmered. I felt like I was going to throw up. Well, here you are, I thought. You’re in an ambulance, racing to the hospital, your son numb on a board, groaning. Injured in a fucking football game. And he may never get up.

In the emergency room I watched as doctors carefully removed Seth’s helmet, cut away his uniform, sliced off his shoulder pads. As one physician queried him, peering into his eyes with a penlight, a portable X-ray machine was wheeled into the room. Then a nurse asked me to step out, so that I would not be exposed to the radiation.

Outside, I wandered down the hallway, glancing into the various treatment rooms. A broken arm here, a gashed forehead there. Worried relations paced the floor. In the waiting room, I bought a soft drink, flopped down. Another ambulance was backing up to the door.

After a while the nurse reappeared and motioned me back. By this time, Seth had been moved to a holding room beside the main treatment area. A doctor met us at the door.

“Good news,” he said. “The X-rays were negative.”

“Thank God,” I murmured.

“Seth’s suffered a concussion, and some pinched nerves, and strained muscles in his neck. We’ve given him medication.”

In the holding room, Seth was propped up in a hospital bed, his face flushed, his eyelids fluttering, as he dropped in and out of sleep. I settled down in a chair to wait. An hour later, as feeling returned to his arms and legs, he looked up, smiled.

“Dad, everything’s tingling.”

“Good,” I murmured.

“Does that mean I’m all right?”

I nodded, told him the doctor’s diagnosis. He sighed, reached for a glass of water.

“So what happened?” he asked.

“You mean on the play?”

“Yeah.”

“It was a great hit, Seth,” I said. “That big fullback, head-up in the hole — it was like a cannon going off. One of the biggest hits I’ve ever seen.”

Even as the words came out of my mouth, I regretted that what I was saying could sound like callous enthusiasm.

“Gee, thanks, Dad,” he said, mockingly.

I helped Seth sit up then, grabbed his shoes. Although he was going to be all right, we both felt awful.

“You can quit now,” I wanted to tell him. “As far as I’m concerned, you could never play another down.”

But I couldn’t bring myself to say it. No, it’s his decision, I thought. He’ll do the right thing.

And eventually he did. He quit. He quit not out of fear, or to spite me, but because he wanted to. He made his own decision. To my everlasting gratitude, he shed the spectre of demanding, judgmental, unpleasable coach. Maybe someday I’ll be free of it myself.

Maybe. Someday.

Pat Toomay is the author of "The Crunch" (W.W. Norton & Co.) and a novel, "On Any Given Sunday" (Donald I. Fine). He played 10 years in the NFL, primarily with Dallas and Oakland.

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