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sadnightforus · 17 days ago

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PARTY 4 U (HVC)

party-goer!vernon x party-thrower-gn!reader

SYNOPSIS: What's a better way to catch the attention of the man that you’ve been silently (or not so silently) pining for since your first year of college? Throw a party of course, or go to the same party that he attends. You chose the former, throwing the party, as you only have a semester left until you both graduate. Your prayer was answered when he showed up, but will he return your feelings too?

WORD COUNT: 4.3K

WARNINGS: alcohol, marijuana and drugs usage, yearning, implied suggestive content, a little misunderstandings, a few cuss words, insecurities. The reader is sort of implied to be AFAB with outfits and such but I’m writing mc to be as neutrally gendered as I can. mentioned of yves from loona (ha sooyoung the goat). I try to keep the hair color out of the picture so it’ll only mention the hairstyle!

A/N: Nobody knew but I'm Charli's biggest fan (the Jaehyun’s fic next life was based on her demo). Also wrote this cause Vernon is a huge Charli’s fan. In honor of the mv to this song finally dropping, I dedicate this song to him <3 (also why is this au so long???)

reblogs, comments and likes are appreciated!

“Are you sure that he’s coming?” Your friend asks, her arms crossing as she looks at you with skepticism.

“I’m sure. The news is all over the campus.” You say, masking your own fear behind the confident and nonchalant persona that you think you have mastered over the years.

“Well…” She trails off, before slowly stepping out of the kitchen and she picks up one of the lighters to do god knows what.

As the neon lights that are installed from every corner of the room flashes across everybody’s faces, making them look alluring like stars under the spotlight and the sounds of people talking pass by your ears, you are reminded of how you got here.

Let’s start at the very beginning.

You recalled, the second semester in your first year of university, where you thought that your regular life would proceed with the usual boring, mundane and predictable routines, becomes much spicier.

As you sat in your seat for your first lecture of the day, and only had 7 minutes left until the professor entered the classroom, you saw a man who walked into the lecture hall with confidence and his head held high, headphones covering both of his ears, as his washed denim jacket and the white plain shirt tucked loosely and ragged against his skin in a way that suggests that he knows a thing or two about dressing up. You were face to face with the most beautiful man you’ve seen, who will be your classmate. Your first impression of him was that he must’ve been a confident person, maybe even someone who socializes and interacts with others quite often, a friendly person.

You hoped to get to know him better.

By the second year, as you continued to share classes with him, and being in the same class as him for many months made you realize that your first impression was the opposite of him. Sure, he was kind, but he keeps to himself a lot, and he hangs with a circle of people, who are all popular. This made you distressed, actually. You might’ve had some excuses to get close to him if he was more outgoing, but he wasn’t.

So you spent the next two years silently admiring him from afar, even actually went as far to change your ways. Although you are quiet, also remain in the background at first and never quite fond of parties, as you prefer to do real night outs like at abstract places or places buzzing with extreme energy, you slowly find yourself going to parties that his friends throw.

Then, there was an incident in the 3rd year of college, where you recalled that it was your second party of the school year, where you also smoked weed for the first time. Lame. You know. But you typically don’t ever indulge in them, mainly only alcohol and cigarettes on the side. But he tasted like marijuana and the love that you’ve harbored for him all this time as your tongue slipped down his throat in the dingling bathroom that shone of bright blue neon lights, inside Chan’s house.

It never went further than that.

You both kissed. And kissed. You both did this when the opportunities arose, which is whenever the conversation took a different direction, and occasionally hung out where he was the one to call first. It’s quite impressive that you both go this long without getting physical.

It’s a routine that you never get used to, but always looking forward to. You both hardly made out, but you both talked to each other quite a lot, for people who had no affiliations and thread on the lines of strangers, friendship and romantic relationship. You’d notice— sometimes, he showed up at the parties, sometimes, he didn’t. Admittedly, you were disappointed, as you put on the prettiest dress and so much effort was wasted just for it to not be seen by him.

You felt like you were being played, and even your friend tried to knock some sense into you.

“I told you a million times. He’s playing with your feelings.” Your friend, Sooyoung, reminded you again as you did your makeup for a party that you heard that he’d attend.

“I know.” You muttered in annoyance, even though your friend was right about it. In your head, you’d

“And you do the same thing, every time.” She complained as she watched you repeat the process of dolling up, it wasn’t surprising to her at all, but like normal human’s nature, she herself got exhausted as she watched you stuck in a cycle of unreciprocated love.

“Do you think I’m an idiot?” You questioned, rolling your eyes as the brushes stroked against your skin. Sooyoung looked at you with her judgmental stare, her tongue spelled it out, loud and clear.

“Sort of.”

That was the conversation that you had with her. It’s a mantra at this point.

And every time that she was right, each time after the party ended, you went home and wallowed in self pity and inferiority. And Sooyoung watched you being pathetic and hopeless like that, but you just wouldn’t listen.

You’re determined to change it today.

That’s why you managed to convince Sooyoung to help you with the party preparations. And she swore up and down that this is the only time she’d ever help you if you did something for Vernon to notice you.

Your parents’ house, now left empty for days now, has transformed from a living space into a place for entertainment, void of treasures and valuables that could be stolen or broken, as you locked them away.

How… pathetic you are, throwing a party for a guy who you’re in this weird talking stage with.

You put on the shortest dress, one that makes even the less-than-holier you feel uncomfortable. But really, for the sake of him, you’re willing to endure the discomfort. And your lipstick was carefully applied and curated in a way that makes your lips kissable, in hope that he would find it hard to not be kissing you until nothing around you both mattered.

The sound of kisses, laughter and music fill your ear, but you tune it out as you stand in the kitchen, directly facing the front door, even from the very back away. With this place, you can effectively monitor the event and also see the newcomers of the party firsthand, as quickly as you can. You have nothing on you, not even the drink, because you wanted to be sober enough to see his face. You can’t afford to be so drunk that you’ll be throwing yourself at a guy because he looks just like Vernon, or you made it all up.

Time passes by quick, as quick as the time that it took for you to realize that you harbored more than a feeling of admiration for that boy you saw in your first year of college, as quick as your impulsivity to throw this party, just to have him come to your house. 10, 20, 30, 40, and 57 minutes passed by since it started, yet you can hardly spot even his friends walking through that door first.

60, 70, 80 passed and there’s anybody but him passing through that door. You start to get impatient and anxious. You try so hard to not bite on your now manicured nails, you want Vernon to notice all those pretty little charms on your nails, in hope to be appealing to him.

There’s a nagging in at the back of your head that goes;

What if he doesn’t show up?

Then it would mean nothing, would it?

What do you even call him? He’s not your friend with benefits. And certainly not your boyfriend, far from an acquaintance or just merely a classmate. But are you friends with him?

99 Minutes has passed, you let out a sigh as the night grows older.

You remember today that it was a full moon, and even if you don’t believe in anything like manifesting, you make a prayer. You close your eyes and make a wish for every second that counts.

May he show up. May he return your feelings.

If only he shows up exactly on the 100th minute.

You open your eyes, and you’re met with the striking figure that has stolen your breath 4 years ago. At the same time, it has been 100 minutes since you’ve waited for him. Just as you wish.

He came through that door like a star, shining bright in the sky, out of your reach, only letting you admire his beauty before he walked out again.

His hair has been dyed back to brown, after a period of him bleaching it in a dark blonde. This hair color makes him look even more unattainable, to you. It highlights his beauty and his deep set eyes so beautifully that you’re left to stare at the universe's creation, who knows your name, and exists in the same time as you, but not your heart.

That’s what love does. It breaks your heart but you can’t stop wanting him.

He comes with a few friends, you think you see Wonwoo, the most introverted person ever, comes out of his hibernation. There is probably something in the stars, but you don’t want to overthink things. You also spot Soonyoung, the most introverted person, tags along. It’s like they’re there to balance Vernon tonight, seeing the polar opposites of them both.

The metal necklace around his neck, which you instantly recognize that it’s from a brand that he has been wanting to get for quite awhile, as you remember this fact from one of the talks with him, the washed, rough looking denim jacket and jeans, and a tank top that has texts written all over, which you couldn’t be bothered to read, as you are distracted by the man that you’re at least 20 feet away from. Vernon greets the people who greet back to him, but keeps the interaction short and almost professional, as if it wasn’t his intention to get to know new people.

“So, are you going to talk to him?”

“Jesus, you can’t warn me beforehand?” You lose your balance and stumble backward as Sooyoung’s voice snaps you out of your daze when looking at the man who is in your vision. You feel like an invisible wall has been built just for you both to act like nothing has happened. You don’t know when she will even come back.

“You throw a party for him but you won't even talk to him? Really?” She looks at you like a disappointed mother, and honestly, she probably is. “You know this is your last chance.”

Right, it’s so goddamn close to the graduation period. And nobody, including him, will attend parties by then. They’ll be too busy studying.

You roll your eyes, fed up by her, but you just lack the courage, as you fear rejection more than silence. But it also kills you to not know what he is thinking about, or his opinion on you. He’s too calm and stoic, while you're an open book of an emotional mess.

“Give me a blunt or alcohol first, maybe I’ll find it in me to go and finally say it.” You say it as a joke, but Sooyooung doesn’t take it so lightly. She just silently opens the cabinet and reaches for a plastic cup, then fills it with some soju, while her face shows that she reaches her breaking point.

You can only stare at her in horror. She means business.

“You can’t complain that you’re nervous now, here.” You got handed a drink and like a grateful friend you are, you just sadly thank her, and then gulp down, finishing the first cup after a while.

After 3 cups of it, as served by your friend, you finally find it in you to go and walk around to Vernon, who is seemingly standing in the corner, on his phone and keeping an eye out for Hoshi and apparently, also Seokmin, who you have no idea when did he get here. Nonetheless, you pick a place, standing not too close to him, leaning against the wall, trying to not show the significance of his presence in your brain.

“Hi.” You smile awkwardly as Vernon seems to finally snap out of his daydream or train of thoughts. “Sorry I’m late to greet you. As a host, that’s impolite.”

You try to insinuate subtly that this party is not just any party, it’s yours, one that you threw it in hope for him to come.

Surprisingly, Vernon smiles back, he didn't seem disappointed, and he seems to be in quite a friendly mood.

“I know, that’s why I came.”

You swear that you’re delusional but that’s… crazy to hear it. It makes it sound like he came to this party because you throw it.

“Really? I guess the rumors go around as intended.” You chuckle, trying to extend the time you have with him. “Is the party to your liking? I throw it for the first time, so I’m quite nervous.”

You're lying, you’re more nervous about your crush right here, you’re not worried that the party isn't good, but you want the party to be good for him,

“No. The party is really fun.” He reassures you and you can tell that it comes from his heart, so the tension from your body slowly eases out little by little. “But I don’t feel like doing anything, so I’ll sit and watch.”

Your smile subtly drops. Should you celebrate the fact that he isn’t so drunk by now that he most likely will kiss someone or upset that he doesn’t think it’s cool enough to let loose? You put on that plastered, perfect subtle smile to hide that growing ugly feeling of disappointment that attempts to eat you.

You almost ask him why he even bothered to come to your party then.

“I guess I’ll do the same then.” You shrug it off, biting the inside of your tongue lightly, preventing yourself from utter more words that would ruin the mood.

“Hmm.” He nods, then he looks at you, like he always has been. You just never notice it, but he sneaks glances at you. “Did you do something to your hair?”

You can’t hide your expression that goes from stunned to one filled with happiness. So he notices that your hair has been dyed as you needed a new change in appearance and even completed with slight curls.

“Oh yeah I did. The color fades away so I dyed it.”

The last time he saw you properly (and last time you both kissed) was at least a month ago. Since then, Vernon appeared less and less in your line of sight and you thought that you lost him for good, but he still shows up to his classes, just that he barely goes to parties for unknown reasons.

You both fall into a comfortable silence, from outsiders’ perspective. From your perspective, it’s as awkward as it comes, but you have to pretend that you don’t enjoy being near him, even if the atmosphere was nothing short of platonic. If only they know the history that you both share together.

You inch yourself closer to him, doing ever so subtly, by pretending that it’s all accidental, but you might've been too eager, and he can probably tell that you faked your nonchalance around him.

Something about him tonight seems different– he talks less, and he lingers his stares to spaces that you can only imagine, or hope it involves you. You missed the taste of cannabis, the liquor whether it’s cheap or highly sought after because it’s the finest drink on earth, nicotine, or soda; anything really, as long as it sits on his lips, and his tongue allows yours to intertwine like he’ll never let this go. But with the way the silence seems to be stilling everything around you both, even if your own party turns obnoxious and chaotic, you still yearn for the excitement that he can give you.

The pink balloons start float around, and you don’t remember setting it up at all, in fact, you don’t remember seeing this many balloons in your life in a single space, but when you see Sooyoung just keeps bringing them more and more, and the sound of music and music goes from a mild to extreme joy and recklessly wild, you know that it’s getting out of control. You do nothing to stop it.

Vernon suddenly nudges you, then you only by then notices that he took sips of champagne, and you have no idea who provided him that. But as his lips are pressed to the glass, you are reminded of how his kisses usually taste like, and it has you wondering, wanting to know what it feels like if you kiss him right now. You wonder, would it taste sweet, or would the champagne taste like a sour heartbreak that you only can swallow it down with every will that you have?

“Can we talk somewhere private for a bit?”

Is he finally addressing the tension and the weird relationship that you have going on?

You feel like you need another drink, but the alcohol finally hits a little after a long while, so it washes some of your doubts away. It really boosts that confidence, while you’re less than completely sober.

“Oh sure.”

You follow his lead, and it was really somewhere, so goddamn quiet and secluded, in fact, nobody would’ve come to check the available spot here at all. The fact that it was upstairs made your mind run with wild thoughts but you calmed yourself down, not wanting to get your hopes up, just to be let down.

“You look like you’ll be cold.” He says, inspecting you as he takes off his jacket, and it drapes all over your figure, providing an additional warmth to your body– and maybe even heart.

You don’t understand why he’s so nice all of the sudden. You both barely talk, what was the last meaningful conversation you had with him again?

“Why-”

“I-”

You both speak at the same time, interrupting each other. Vernon, the man that he is, speaks up, his voice is deep, husky and brings this weird emotional feeling to you.

“You go first.”

You sigh, searching for the look in his eyes that he somehow feels the same as you do. You’re met with the familiar warmth, which makes it hard to read. Why does he look at you like this? You hate that he isn’t an open book, unlike you.

“Why are you so nice to me?” You question him, voice wavers from the underlying vulnerability that threatens to surface and spills over any time soon, if you don’t have a hold of it. “You’re so confusing, I don’t understand you.” You bite your lips, trying to hold back from becoming an unpleasant memory to him.

For the first time ever, his eyes flicker with an emotion– there’s confusion and almost… affection, but also hurt. You both have been walking on this weird line that blurs between a normal and intimate relationship, one that doesn’t hold any value or title but so much substance yet with no filling. It’s like chasing a high that never stops. And you hate chasing it, you want a definite answer now.

“Because…” He looks at your face, observing how there is an expression of melancholy, regret and shame. “You have always been there, you have always been someone to me.”

Your face drops, again, but he is quick to clarify.

“I came to this party because you threw it.” He gulps, and you see the facade that he works so hard to build starts to crack, little by little. “Because it is you, it has always been.”

He inches closer to you, and the tears now are filling your visions as you finally hear the confirmation, which he cups your face gently and wipes it away.

You cry as you feel his gentle touch, this is what you were dying to hear, but the ‘I love you’ hangs in the air like a ghost, even as the pink balloons and the DJ mixes fly around to accompany this newly changed atmosphere between the two of you. You close your eyes, and then re-open, confessing it to him. No more games, no more pretense.

“I threw this party, just for you. I was hoping that you would come and see me.”

He looks at you like you just hung him the moon, and his hands gently fall to caress your soft lips now. You know what he wants, you both want it, but there is too much to talk about.

“I have always loved you. You helped me out in Mr. Song’s class once. I knew it was silly, but it was the first time we properly talked, and my crush for you snowballed since then.”

You remember that it was the first semester, that one time he got sick and he ended up reaching out to you through a friend of a friend to send over the class’ materials that he greatly missed. The interaction was short lived and so insignificant to you that you blocked it from your memory. You feel like shit for not remembering it.

“You probably don’t remember…” Vernon mutters, looking disappointed and you just pout in his hold. All his moodiness disappears, he can’t ever be mad at you.

“I make excuses to see you, and kiss you every time. I feel sorry that I took advantage of our friendship… like that.”

“Friends don’t kiss.” You state, your eyelashes batting so prettily as your heart beats wildly, syncing with his. “And I’d like to kiss you again.”

This time, he pulls you closer, and then you feel it– the kiss you have been waiting for. Your eyes are closed in contentment, feeling like jello. You finally know what is the taste and flavor that sits on his tongue– the finest champagne there is out there, and it tastes like addiction and the future with him that you hope will become a reality as you wake up next to him onward.

As the neon lights cast a shadow, changing colors constantly from blue, pink, purple, and everything in between, so are your swirling thoughts, but they only involve him, and the same goes to the man who can’t get enough of the taste on your tongue, which mirrors his, despite you drinking a pretty cheap alcohol that slowly fades away as his tongue acts as a cleanser, attempting to vacuum it away.

Once the oxygen runs out and the unbearable urge to breathe consumes you both again, you pull away, your body trembles slightly in exhaustion due to prolonged makeout session. The intense high you try to chase through kissing seems too far out of reach now, but at least you have your answer now.

“I love you, Y/N.”

You don’t have to say it back, you never have to, as you reach over to kiss him on the lips, now incoherent and too drunk on the taste of his tongue.

And the neon lights switch to pink, celebrating the new relationship changes and a now clear definition between you both.

BONUS

“Hey, where did Vernon go?” Soonyoung asks Wonwoo, who’s lost in his own reality of god knows what. He didn’t even want to come, but Vernon bribes them with favors to pay for their lunch and that’s how the man himself got Wonwoo to come to this place.

“How would I know?” Wonwoo groans, and then a presence of an unfamiliar girl walks to them, she looks like she is looking for them both personally.

“Are you Soonyoung and Wonwoo?”

“Yeah. But who are you?” Soonyoung is quick, and Wonwoo’s soul already leaves his body, his exhaustion catches up to him.

“I’m Y/N’s friend, Sooyoung. Does that ring any bells?”

Soonyoung sits up, yes. Now he remembers why Vernon begs them to come to this fucking party. Sooyoung smiles at the flicker of the recognition in his eyes. He knows how you look, and you, but not the girl in front of him.

“Look over there.” She points to their right, which is the direction of the staircase, and Wonwoo, who wasn’t interested at first, follows her command, and then sees something unbelievable.

Vernon, his arm slings around you, and even the jacket wraps around you. He knows, they know instantly that it has to be Vernon’s– nobody wears that DIY-stitched up jacket and the denim that got abused to the point it almost becomes white.

“Is that what I think it is?” Wonwoo questions, he looks like he couldn’t believe his eyes. He thinks to himself that Vernon would definitely get more annoying now that you both make it official. He definitely didn’t sign up for that.

“Yep.” Sooyoung’s voice confirms their suspicion– and the cherry on top? Vernon kisses your hand and cheeks, you both laugh as the purple light shines on you both, making you both look like the romantic leads in a play. The act that is too intimate for two people who sometimes hang out with each other.

“I’m going to kill him if they both start kissing now.” Is the last thing Soonyoung said before he turns away, ignoring the sight of you both. But they’re all happy for the both of you, even if it comes in the form of annoyance.

Now both men just need to make sure that Vernon can pay their lunch fees now. After all, Vernon dug his own grave for suggesting the deal that he’ll totally get them expensive takeouts if you do happen to like him back.

COPYRIGHTED BY SADNIGHTFORUS, 2025

#kpop au #kpop imagines #kpop scenarios #kpop fanfic #kpop fluff #svt fic #svt x reader #svt angst #vernon x reader #vernon svt #vernon au #kpop angst #ha sooyoung #loona #svt x y/n #svt x you #vernon chwe #vernon angst #vernon fluff

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news-update-covid-19-usa · 4 years ago

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NEWS UPDATE USA !!! A Missouri couple says they dragged their feet on getting the Covid-19 vaccine. Then they got sick

Louie Michael and his wife, Pattie Bunch, were both hospitalized last month with Covid-19 in Springfield, Missouri.

An ambulance first had rushed her, with respiratory failure, to an emergency room one day; he was admitted the next night. "You may not make it through the night," she recalls a physician telling her. Michael remembers the doctor asking him about possible intubation: "Do you want us to fight for you? Do you want us to do anything we can to save your life?" Bunch, now recovery at home, says she felt helpless. "You have no control." Coronavirus cases, hospitalizations and deaths are rising again in Missouri, with the federal government deploying a Covid-19 surge team to provide public health support. The state's health department estimates that more than 70% of the virus in the state is the more infectious -- possibly more dangerous -- Delta variant. That variant, first identified in India, accounted for 51.7% of all new Covid-19 infections in the country over the two weeks that ended Saturday, the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has estimated. State health officials push vaccination efforts Robert Knodell, acting director of the Missouri Department of Health and Senior Services, on Friday acknowledged significant outbreaks of the Delta variant in north-central Missouri and a similar surge in southwest Missouri. Vaccination, Knodell told reporters, "is now, and remains the number one most effective mitigation step that every Missourian age 12 and over can take to protect themselves, to protect their families, and their neighbors." Dr. George Turabelidze, a state epidemiologist, said Missouri had "vulnerable hot spots" where not enough people were vaccinated and warned the state is "heading towards widespread infection with Delta."

Over the past week, Missouri's Covid-19 caseload was second highest in the country, with 15.5 new cases per 100,000 people daily, or 108 cases per 100,000 people over seven days, according to Johns Hopkins University data. Arkansas had the highest rate at 15.7 new cases per 100,000 people each day, the data showed. At Springfield's Mercy Hospital, the rapid spike in hospitalizations left administrators scrambling to borrow ventilators from other hospitals. At the city's CoxHealth hospital system, 90% of coronavirus patients had the Delta variant. "We are seeing a tremendous increase in the number of Covid patients in our emergency department over the past several weeks," said Dr. Howard Jarvis, medical director of the emergency department at CoxHealth. He added, "We are going to get worse over the next couple weeks. Certainly people are out doing a lot more things. I think there's a lot of people that have less concern about the virus. Now we don't have a very high percentage in this area of people who are vaccinated." Breeding grounds for more deadly Covid-19 variants Missouri is not alone. More than 9 million people live in 173 US counties with Covid-19 case rates at or more than 100 cases per 100,000 people in the last seven days and with vaccination rates lower than 40%, Dr. Rochelle Walensky, director of the CDC, said at a White House briefing on Thursday. More than 90% of those counties also have a vaccination coverage of less than 40%, according to Walensky.

"Many of these counties are also the same locations where the Delta variant represents the large majority of circulating virus," Walensky said. "Low vaccination rates in these counties, coupled with high case rates -- and lax mitigation policies that do not protect those who are unvaccinated from disease -- will certainly, and sadly, lead to more unnecessary suffering, hospitalizations and potentially deaths." In fact, a new data analysis has identified clusters of unvaccinated people, most of them in the southern United States, who are vulnerable to surges in Covid-19 cases and could become breeding grounds for even more deadly variants. The analysis by Georgetown University researchers identified 30 clusters of counties with low vaccination rates and significant population sizes. The five most significant clusters cover large swaths of the southeastern US and a smaller portion in the Midwest. The clusters are largely in parts of eight states -- from Georgia to Texas and southern Missouri. About one-third of Americans have not received a Covid-19 shot. About 39% of Greene County residents fully vaccinated Katie Towns, acting director of the Springfield-Greene County Health Department, said the county -- population about 300,000 -- had 240 Covid-19 cases just on Wednesday and 17 deaths in the last two weeks. About 39% of its residents are fully vaccinated, according to health department website. "We're not a huge community," she said of the 240 cases. "That's a really large number and we haven't seen these numbers since we had a surge back in December and January." About 56% of adults in Missouri have received at least one Covid-19 vaccine dose and 39.4% of residents are fully vaccinated, according to CDC data. In Taney County, where the southwestern Ozark city of Branson is a huge tourist draw, about 25% of its roughly 56,000 residents are vaccinated. "It runs the gamut," Lisa Marshall, director of the Taney County Health Department, said of the hesitancy to the vaccine. "Maybe they just want to wait and see or ... it's not quite ready yet. Maybe they're just not someone that vaccinates. We've also heard a little bit of concern over how quickly the vaccine was developed." Overall, data shows that Covid-19 is expected to swell in less vaccinated communities, especially as the Delta variant continue to spread in those areas. In Missouri, a federal surge team deployed there is to include an epidemiologist, research assistants, a health communication specialist, contact tracers and others who will help with vaccination and outreach, according to the health department. The teams include members of CDC, the Department of Health and Human Services, and the Federal Emergency Management Agency "We have a CDC representative helping us with ... investigating the (Delta) variant and its presence here in our community," Towns said. "But we just have ... one representative right now. We'll gladly accept the additional resources."

At the 500-bed CoxHealth hospital system, Jarvis said nearly all of the new Covid-19 admissions have been unvaccinated younger patients. "This is going to keep happening," he said of the latest surge in cases. "It may peak here and then it's going to spread to other places. If we don't get enough vaccinated there's going to be another variant that's probably worse. It's just that's the way viruses work." Couple, sick with Covid-19, holds hands in the ICU In Rogersville, Louie Michael said he and wife Pattie Bunch, a nurse, had been "dragging our feet" since the spring about getting a Covid-19 vaccine. In mid-June, Bunch got sick. "It felt like a bomb dropped on me," said Bunch, who is still recovering less than a month later. "I just wasn't feeling good at all. And I thought, 'Oh, no.'" An ambulance rushed her to the hospital with respiratory failure on June 17. The next night, Michael, an entertainer, had to be rushed to the same emergency room in Springfield. A nurse eventually put them in the same ICU room, where Michael took a snapshot of them holding hands. "We didn't know how it was going to turn out," said Michael, who along with Bunch urges people to get vaccinated. "We didn't know if we'd get to go back home." "Or see our kids again, or our family or grandson," she said. "It could have just ended that night," said Michael, who has been with Bunch for 30 years. "It made me mad. I didn't want it to end that way. It's not supposed to end that way ... and unfortunately, it's ending for a lot of people that way."

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#covid19 #pandemic #us

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daggerzine · 5 years ago

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Early DC hardcore gent Rob Moss tells us what it was like then....and now.

When I became friends with a Rob Moss on Facebook a year or so back I knew the name sounded familiar. Then, I’d heard he was a musician (as well as an author) and releasing a new record under the name Rob Moss and Skin-Tight Skin. Hmm….very interesting band name. I then began digging a little deeper and found out it was the same Rob Moss who had been in the Washington, DC-area pre-Marginal Man band called Artificial Peace and had later played in Government Issue for a time.

Apparently Rob hadn’t played music since those old hardcore days, but was now back in the saddle and living in Portland, Oregon (where he’s lived for several years). With Rob Moss and Skin-Tight Skin he put together an interesting concept, a different guest guitarist for each song. Some of the names you will definitely recognize from the punk rock days and beyond. It’s certainly a unique sounding record (and I reviewed it here on the site a few weeks back).

I wanted to ask Rob about the old days and have him bring us up to the present and everything in between. He was more than happy to oblige.

You’re on Flex Your Head and were in two iconic Washington, D.C. hardcore bands, were you born and raised there?

We moved from Boston to Wheaton, Maryland in 1966 – I was three – and to Bethesda a year later. The Bethesda I grew up in had a downtown of mostly old two- and three-story buildings, and there were cows in the field across from Walter Johnson High when I went there. I’ve not lived in the D.C. area since the fall of 1983.

Do you remember your earliest exposure to music?

My first memories are my dad playing records, like Edvard Grieg’s Hall of the Mountain King and Prokofiev’s Peter and the Wolf. I think he chose them because that kind of music’s so visual. In the mid 1970s I discovered WPGC, a Top-40 station. I had a Radio Shack cassette deck that I’d put up against the radio to record stuff like The Night Chicago Died (Paper Lace) and Blockbuster (Sweet).

How and when did the punk rock bug hit you?

The how and who was Marc Alberstadt (original drummer in Government Issue). We’ve been friends since kindergarten and went to Hebrew school together. We used to hang out at his house and listen to his older brother’s records. Like Can’t Stand the Rezillos, the first Generation X album and the Sex Pistols. The when was 1978 or ’79.

Back then, Kenny, Marc’s brother, would sneak us in to see bands at the Psyche Delly and at the University of Maryland. There were no underage shows then. We saw the Slickee Boys, the Bad Brains, Tina Peel, Sorrows – bands like that.

But as far as really getting bit by the bug, it was when I saw how much fun the Slickee Boys had on stage. I had to start my own band, even though at that point I didn’t play a guitar or anything. This was before the Teen Idles, Dischord, or any of that.

When did you first pick up an instrument?

Marc was already playing drums, and Brian Gay played guitar. They convinced me to get a bass. Brian and I started getting together at his mom’s place in 1979 to write songs. They were pretty crude, we were taking our cues from the :30 Over D.C. compilation album.

How did you meet the Artificial Peace guys?

Let’s go back further. I was away for two weeks in the summer of 1980. And during that time, Government Issue had formed with Brian on bass and Marc on drums.

Brian and I already had a bunch of songs, and he still wanted to play guitar. So we formed another band – he played in both. We knew Mike Manos from school and learned that his brother had a drum set. Mike didn’t really know how to play. Marc gave him some tips, the rest was on-the-job training.

But we still needed a singer. This new wave-looking girl, named Sandra something-or-other, appeared in our school. She’d just moved from New York. None of the other girls at school looked like her. We asked her to sing. We called ourselves The Indians – it was supposed to be ironic.

Our first show was at American University with the GIs, S.O.A. and Youth Brigade. But it got cancelled at the last minute. So everyone met up at Roy Rogers. Fifty, maybe seventy-five, punks walked into the place within a few minutes of each other. The manager came out from behind the counter, he thought we were up to no good. But all we wanted was something to eat and to come up with a plan-B.

We ended up playing that night in the basement of a house in D.C. It was the first time we actually got to hear Sandra sing, because she’d kept pulling a no-show to our practices. John Stabb said she sounded like a dying parakeet.

After that we replaced her with Steve Polcari, who we’d known since junior high school, and changed our name to Assault and Battery. We played some shows like the infamous Pow Wow House gig, which I had set up, and recorded a demo a few months later.

But at the end of the summer of 1981, Brian went to art school in Chicago and I started at the University of Maryland. That meant the GIs needed a new bass player and we needed a new guitarist. Minor Threat had just broken up for the first time, and Brian Baker joined the GIs on bass, he later moved to guitar. Red-C had also just disbanded, so we welcomed Pete Murray to join us.

Artificial Peace was the name of one of our songs. I don’t know if we’d played it with Brian, I may have written it after he left. But we felt like we needed a new band name. We became Artificial Peace.

What were some of Artificial Peace’s most memorable shows?

Opening for the Bad Brains at the Peppermint Lounge in New York City. H.R. called the number he had for me, which was the pay phone down the hall from my dorm room in College Park. We drove up the day of the show, unloaded our gear and discovered H.R. gave me the wrong date. It was the next day. The show itself was terrible! The soundman screwed us. There was nothing in the monitors, we couldn’t hear a thing.

We played another show in NYC at the A7. The first band went on at midnight, we went on around five in the morning. Cheetah Chrome played that night, all I remember was that he was pretty messed up.

We also opened for Black Flag in Baltimore on their Damaged tour. We played well, but the power went out twice during Black Flag’s set. Henry recreated the Damaged album cover and punched out one of the mirror tiles that edged the stage. Lots of blood. How punk rock (laughing)!

As far as D.C., we played some shows at the Wilson Center, which were probably our best. We also played a talent show at the high school that Mike, Steve and I went to. We’d graduated the year before – I don’t recall how we got on the bill. A lot of punks showed up, it was pretty funny.

Only known color photo to exist of Artificial Peace. Wilson Center, 1982. Photo by Davis White.

How did the band end?

Pete called me on the phone, telling me that he and the guys didn’t want to play anymore. It was a surprise. He gave no reason. A few weeks later I heard about Marginal Man. I guess they couldn’t be straight with me.

Was G.I. next? How did that happen? Stabb was my first D.C. hero that I ever met (1985 in Trenton).

Before I joined the GIs, I got together a few times with Kenny Alberstadt, who’s a fantastic guitarist, as well as a female guitarist, whose name escapes me. She looked like Joan Jett and played great! But it didn’t go anywhere.

Then Mitch Parker left Government Issue in the spring of 1983, and I got a call asking if I wanted to join. I played on the GIs summer tour. Our first show was at CBGBs. We had John’s dad’s Buick and a U-Haul trailer full of gear. Just us, no roadies. Tom and I did nearly all the driving. John never got a license. We’d let Marc drive only if Tom and I needed a break. We’d crash at people’s houses after the shows. Some nights it was at nice place and we got to do laundry. Other times, it was more like a squat. Tours were grueling then.

Marc Alberstadt, Tom Lyle, Rob Moss, Tuffy. Outside Shamus O'Brien's, South El Monte (Los Angeles), 1983. Photo by Jordan Schwartz.

John Stabb and Rob Moss, Sun Valley Sportsman's Hall (Los Angeles), 1983. Photo by Ted Ziegler.

How did your tenure in G.I. end? Did you stop making music?

Around the end of the tour I heard that my transfer to Boston University got accepted. I told the guys. Tom, understandably, was not happy. Once I moved, I stopped playing. And by that time, I felt the scene wasn’t fun anymore.

How did Rob Moss and Skin-Tight Skin come about? Had the idea been brewing for a while?

I’d always wanted to do something more in music. About three years ago I picked up a guitar, started writing songs and posted a few on Facebook. Dwight Reid asked if I wanted to record them at his home studio. He’d play bass and we’d find a drummer. That’s how it happened.

Why did you get a different lead guitarist for each song?

I can get by playing rhythm guitar and singing, but not leads. And I wasn’t ready to commit to forming a touring band. Under those circumstances it would’ve been too big an ask to interest a great lead guitarist to get involved.

But what if, instead, I asked a different guy to play on each song? So I called up old friends and friends of friends, and nearly everyone agreed to help.

What made it such an incredible experience for me is how many musicians I’ve long admired said yes. In your question earlier, about when the punk rock bug hit me, I told you about seeing the Slickee Boys when I was 16 and hearing the first Generation X album. To have guys from those bands – Marshall Keith and Bob ‘Derwood’ Andrews – play on my new album is tremendous. I feel the same about Nels Cline, Don Fleming, Franz Stahl, Stuart Casson, Billy Loosigian, Dave Lizmi, Saul Koll, Chris Rudolf, Marion Monterosso, Spit Stix and everyone else who took part.

How’s the response to the record? Are you happy with it?

Many people comment on the song quality. That even after hearing the album once, they find themselves humming the songs. The earworm thing. To me that’s the best compliment.

What’s also made me happy is hearing from the guys who played on it. That they really like the album as a whole, not just their work on it.

Did you consider recording a hardcore album?

Listening to proto-punk and pub rock made me happy as a kid. And when I speak with friends who were there, many say the same thing. That’s why I make that type of music now, not hardcore.

With all that’s going on, isn’t hardcore still important?

As protest music? I suppose but it seems like preaching to the converted. Bob Dylan’s entire career is protest music, but he grew as an artist to express himself and reach more people. When he went electric in 1966, the folkies booed, they called him a traitor. They expected him to play the same Woody Guthrie songbook forever.

It's the same with hardcore. It had its place. I’m glad to have been part of it. But I no longer want to play it. Still, plenty of my new songs contain the kind of messages I wrote when I was in Artificial Peace. There’s also humor, like Ugly Chair and A Maltese Falcon. Or humor and tragedy, like Got My Ass Stuck in a Tree. Some are about getting older (Tony Alva’s Pictures) or being a kid (Life at 33 1/3 RPM).

How do you discover new music?

Recommendations from friends, mostly. But when I lived in Manhattan in the mid-‘80s to early ‘90s, I had a neighbor in the music business. He’d set down stacks of albums, mostly promo copies, by the trash. I saved what I liked and traded the rest.

That’s how I discovered a band I missed growing up. Willie Alexander and the Boom Boom Band. They were incredible, should’ve been huge! The intro to Rock & Roll ’78 still makes the hair on the back of my neck stand up.

Years later I met the guitarist from that band, Billy Loosigian, through Facebook. And now he’s played on one of my songs. Experiences like that really made the album special to me. I hope it does for everyone else.

What’s next? More music in the future?

Anything’s possible.

https://skin-tight-rock.bandcamp.com/

youtube

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othernaut · 2 years ago

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Potato thoughts.

So there I was, making an admittedly lazy and low-effort dinner, when I was (as I so often regretfully am) reminded that I am an absurd human animal and this thing that I am doing, that I consider functional and everyday, is in fact batshit insane.

Not the cooking itself (admittedly also batshit, but for more pedestrian, i-am-bad-at-life-skills reasons), but the sheer variety involved in what I consider a lazy and low-effort meal. First, the base matter: Potatoes, onions, and chicken wieners. Two root vegetables, one animal. Okay. Then, the lubrication: a mix of sunflower and sesame oils. All right, seeds added; a common omnivore dietary supplement. Then, the flavorings: Garlic (still a root), chili paste (wait, that pepper that wants to harm you?), 1/4th of a beef stock cube (a boiled, powderized entire other animal), salt and pepper (seeds and minerals!) and ketchup (the fruit of another plant that wants to harm you, a grain alcohol fermentation byproduct, and whatever taxonomic hell white sugar is).

Even for an omnivorous species, like, what the hell is this?

Most other animals on Earth specialize into a dietary niche and ride that single diet off into the sunset. Where variety appears, it’s opportunistic and frequently involves insects, which human omnivores paradoxially avoid. It’s rare as hell to find an omnivore with a 50/50 plant/animal diet (i can only recall the maned wolf right now), and even in other opportunistic omnivores, there’s one thing that forms the base of their diet, and everything else is just sort of consumed when you find it. No other creature goes so out of its way to invade and exploit other niches. No other creature looks at the bright red mouth-pain bush and thinks, “How do I extract nutrition from this?”

And because I’m in a lazy potato mindset, I feel like extrapolating this to the rest of the universe. What if this weird mega-omnivorousness isn’t just bizarre for Earth, but bizarre for everywhere? What if most of the other life in the galaxy works like the life on Earth - one staple foodstuff, opportunistic scrounging if it’s available, but primarily a single thing?

What happens if we meet?

Imagine a future where everything goes right. Humans travel to the stars, meet our neighbors, and we get along. Imagine three human drifters kicking around a space station, looking for work, and imagine they get picked up as crewmen on a passing freighter staffed by accommodating aliens who’ve never seen a human before. Imagine being the alien quartermaster, trying to update the manifest with whatever the Human Food turns out to be. Imagine them asking these humans what they want to eat.

One guy’s been surviving off of ramen noodles for the last few weeks while waiting for work to pick up, and, like, he’s alive, he’s been taking a multivitamin, but he’s been seriously considering engaging in space piracy if the result was a good paella. One person keeps wanting to eat better, but they’re half a year away from home and have absolutely no self-control yet: the Spacey’s down at Dock 9 just demoed a pulled pork poutine that they’ve been eating like three nights a week, and the only thing they can actually cook for themselves is lasagna. One girl is lactose and gluten intolerant and has been kept going via fried mushroom-and-onion omelets and unagi rice, but she’s got an ersatz homebrew setup in her room, one’s just at the start of its fermentation cycle, and she’s got all the materials for fish sauce and doesn’t want to just abandon it.

Meanwhile, the alien quartermaster eats food. Like, there’s a grub, named “food”, that every member of their species eats, sometimes with a green broth for supplementary calcium and copper. They’ve never had opinions about food, never wondered if they liked eating food, they just ate it. There’s 38 crates of food grubs flash-frozen just before pupation in the hold. They don’t know what kind of grub a “ramen” is or why this human is angry at it. They don’t know why you would intentionally create and consume flavored medical cleaner. They have passed by Spacey’s once, and it scared them.

After looking up what a “pursuit predator” is, the quartermaster sources 30 live salmon and releases them into their ship’s water system. The humans neither pursue nor predate upon them. The humans display qualities of omnivores, exclusive carnivores, detritivores, granivores, fructivores and more, sometimes all at once, sometimes fluctuating day by day. In frustration, the quartermaster orders 50 pounds of “pulled pork poutine” from Spacey’s; one of the humans eats it exclusively, which causes them to vomit, after which they continue eating the poutine. Two of them try the food-grubs; one human declares them inedible, and the other says it’d be fine with some soy sauce.

The stars are wild and wide. There is such variety in the universe, and the humans apparently want to eat all of it.

#pulled pork poutine is so good though #my own dinner was passable at best #ah hell soy sauce actually would have improved it

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technicalsolutions88 · 5 years ago

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Tempo wants to be the Peloton of barbells. It’s a 42-inch tall screen with 3D machine vision that tracks and teaches you as you workout. The giant upright HD display makes it feel like your personal trainer is right there with you while you compete with others in live and on-demand classes.

Tempo’s Microsoft Kinect-esque motion sensors scan you 30 times per second and notify you if your form is wrong. It’s all housed in a sleekly designed free-standing cabinet that neatly stores the included barbells, dumbbells, attachable weights, workout mat, recovery foam roller, and heartrate monitor.

Tempo opens for pre-orders today for $1995, requiring a $250 deposit and $39 monthly content subscription before shipping this summer.

“Every single product in the market took a piece of equipment out of a gym and slapped a screen on it” says Tempo CEO and co-founder Moawia Eldeeb. “You need to be able to see a user to actually be able to give them guidance so they can work out safely. We wanted to build a fitness experience from the ground up with training and form feedback at the core of it.”

I demo’d Tempo this week and found the in-home convenience, motivational on-screen personal trainers, and the real-time posture corrections gave me the confidence to lift weights without the fear of injury. It might not feel quite as fun and addictive as Peloton, but it offers a facsimile of personal training that’s more affordable than in-person classes that cost $100 or more.

The idea of democratizing access to trainers is what convinced Eldeeb and the Tempo team to stretch its initial $1.8 million in seed funding for four years. While collecting data from its SmartSpot in-gym weight lifting assessment device, Tempo survived long enough to build this prototype.

“Most investors had given up on us. We built this product and had just $700,000 left” Eldeeb recalls. But once people could try Tempo, “we pitched 10 investors and got 9 term sheets. It got very competitive.” The startup recently walked away with a $17.5 million Series A round from Founders Fund, DCM, and Khosla Ventures. Now Tempo will pour that cash into marketing, retail distribution, R&D, and content production.

A founder’s journey out of homelessness

Tempo’s mission is to change people’s lives for the better like personal training did for Eldeeb. “Training is what took me out of a homeless shelter and got me to where I am I today” he reflects.

Tempo co-founder, CEO, and CPO Moawia Eldeeb

Eldeeb’s family immigrated to the US from Egypt when he was nine. But after an explosion leveled their building, they wound up in a homeless shelter. Eldeeb eventually dropped out of middle school to work in a pizza parlor and help pay the bills. But personal trainers at a local YMCA took him under their wing. He eventually paid his way through a computer science degree at Columbia University by working as a personal trainer to his eventual co-founder and CTO Josh Augustin. “Having trainers say you’re getting stronger taught me I could do something for myself.”

While at school, Eldeeb was developing an idea for a physical therapy wearable while Augustin was building 3D sensors for guiding robot perception. They soon realized that a combination of these ideas “offered us the possibility to deliver on the promise of guiding your form and tracking your progress accurately.”

In 2015, they started a company called Pivot to build SmartSpot — a similar looking upright screen that was designed for gyms. It could track users, but only output raw data about their form, like how bent a user’s knees were during a squat. It then worked with trainers to annotate the data to determine what movement patterns were safe and which were dangerous.

Gym owners bought in because it let them track which trainers were actually helping customers improve. “It held trainers accountable. If you weren’t delivering results, it’d be obvious” Eldeeb tells me. The company built up a dataset of over from over 1 million 3D tagged workouts, from hundreds of gyms, overseen by thousands of trainers. That formed the basis of the artificial intelligence that would let Pivot pivot into Tempo.

Pumping Iron With Tempo

At first, Tempo’s giant screen and black or white armoire can feel a bit daunting. The thing is about six feet tall, though it only takes up as much room as a large chair. It makes efficient use of space, with the barbell and dumbbells racked on the back, an internal shelf for the foam roller and mat, and a soft-closing cabinet on the front with the rubber-coated weight set. Keeping everything together means you won’t have to go digging in your closet to start a work out.

Tempo walks users through an initial computer-vision fitness assessment to understand your strength and flexibility so it can set base levels for its exercises. If you have an injury it needs to nurse, Tempo connects you to a human personal trainer that helps customize your workout plan. Otherwise, it uses your goals and data to set out a progressive regimen that gets a little tougher each day. It even blocks you from jumping into later classes so you don’t strain yourself.

Your workout plan begins with tutorial sessions that teach you to do the exercises with safe and proper form. When I was hunching forward during my squats, Tempo’s computer vision would ding me with instant feedback to keep my knees back and chest up. Then once I’d corrected the issue, it congratulated me with little green checkmarks. “Any product that doesn’t offer that is no better than a DVD or YouTube videos” Eldeeb remarks.

From there I could choose between a variety of class styles and lengths, ranging from high intensity interval training circuits to isolated sessions focused on particular muscle groups. In each, you watch a near life-size personal trainer doing the routines right in front of you while they demonstrate form and drop inspirational quotes.

Tempo is producing seven live classes per day from its San Francisco studio which you can also watch on-demand. You can compete against friends or strangers, and Tempo compares you rep for rep so it’s more about perfect form than reckless speed or weight. The live trainers can actually see all your data and your mistakes on a dashboard as they lead classes, and can call you out for screwing up (though you can deactivate this shame mode). Eldeeb says “knowing the trainer can possibly see your numbers will motivate you to actually do this right.”

The class selection interface is suspiciously similar to Peloton’s, though that at least will make it familiar for some. Over time, you build up an immense collection of data on your performance in each work out, excercise, and muscle. Unlike hitting the gym by yourself, you’ll never struggle to remember how much weight to use or whether you’re improving. Classes are soundtracked with dancey remixes sourced from a partnership with Feed.fm to avoid the royalty issues with original songs that slapped Peloton.

Tempo gives feedback when you’re doing exercises wrong, and when you correct yourself

For a 14-person startup, Tempo is trying to do a ton and that can leave some rough edges. The bluetooth armband heartrate monitor can have connectivity issues and the computer vision doesn’t always register every rep, especially if your posture is off. Classes also fail to include enough stretching to prevent strains, instead devoting the start of classes to warmups that ease you in but might not protect your muscles well enough. My quads were destroyed after my demo.

Tempo still achieves its primary objective: it makes weight lifting accessible. No need to drag yourself to the gym or be beholden to a trainer’s schedule, where I’d always end up arriving late and wasting 25% of my session. The form feedback fixes my core complaint about remote personal training app Future I’ve been using for nine months, which can’t see you. That’s led to minor injuries from bad sit-up posture and other incorrect movements. Tempo can’t catch everything, but it can nip some of the most common mistakes in the bud.

Eldeeb was blunt when asked why Tempo is better than well-funded competitors like $3000 Tonal’s wall-mounted resistance cable-based training system or the $1500 Mirror’s massive screen.

“The biggest problem with Tonal is two-fold. Cables and motors do not last. I want this product to be in your house for 10-plus years. [Tempo] is in gyms running 24/7 in for 3 years and it’s still working. The second biggest thing is just feedback.” While Tonal does include a camera and microphone it might employ in the future, it’s not scanning you to detect when you’re lifting weights crooked like Tempo.

As for Mirror, “What is the difference between ClassPass Live and Mirror? It doesn’t come with any equipment, and there’s no training. It’s just a two-way mirror and a Samsung LED panel behind it with an arduino board” Eldeeb rails. He claims it can’t actually monitor your workouts and that his team’s tests found Mirror would say they’d burned 500 calories when they were literally just sitting on their couch in front of it.

Eldeeb demos Tempo

If the software proves to have high retention so people actually recommend Tempo to friends, the biggest hurdle will be its price. You can buy a couple dumbbells for $50 or get a barbell weight bench for a few hundred. Even if Tempo’s $55 per month financing option plus $39 subscription makes it cheaper than a single personal training session or on-par with a gym membership, it could still seem like a serious commitment.

That feeling is magnified by how all of its equipment and classes and data can feel a bit overwhelming. The startup might have to spend a fortune on retail establishments that can guide users through their first Tempo experience. There’s also no mobile version yet, so you can’t bring the work outs on the road with you.

Eldeeb seems guinely motivated to keep improving the product so it’s better than commuting to work out. “Getting to the gym or class is often half the battle. By bringing the gym to you and structuring the classes to be as efficient as possible, Tempo not only makes improving your health more convenient, but it gives you back your most precious resource: time.”

For those comfortable lifting the cheap weights they have at home or hitting up a budget gym, Tempo might seem needlessly overwrought and expensive. But for anyone who needs more instruction or wants to get a Barry’s Bootcamp-worthy workout at home, Tempo might be just their speed.

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sheminecrafts · 5 years ago

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Tempo reveals $17M-funded $2000 weight lift training screen

Tempo opens for pre-orders today for $1995, requiring a $250 deposit and $39 monthly content subscription before shipping this summer.

A founder’s journey out of homelessness

Tempo co-founder, CEO, and CPO Moawia Eldeeb

Pumping Iron With Tempo

Tempo gives feedback when you’re doing exercises wrong, and when you correct yourself

Eldeeb was blunt when asked why Tempo is better than well-funded competitors like $3000 Tonal’s wall-mounted resistance cable-based training system or the $1500 Mirror’s massive screen.

Eldeeb demos Tempo

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magzoso-tech · 5 years ago

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Tempo reveals $17M-funded $2000 weight lift training screen

New Post has been published on http://rebrand.ly/c98un4u

Tempo reveals $17M-funded $2000 weight lift training screen

Tempo opens for pre-orders today for $1995, requiring a $250 deposit and $39 monthly content subscription before shipping this summer.

From homeless to in-home gym

Tempo co-founder, CEO, and CPO Moawia Eldeeb

At one point, Eldeeb was living in a shelter without even a middle school education. But personal trainers at a local YMCA took him under their wing. He eventually paid his way through Columbia University by working as a personal trainer to his eventual co-founder and CTO Josh Augustin. “Having trainers say you’re getting stronger taught me I could do something for myself.”

Pumping Iron With Tempo

Tempo gives feedback when you’re doing exercises wrong, and when you correct yourself

Eldeeb was blunt when asked why Tempo is better than well-funded competitors like $3000 Tonal’s wall-mounted resistance cable-based training system or the $1500 Mirror’s massive screen.

Eldeeb demos Tempo

#Miscellaneous

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ethelbertpaul444-blog · 7 years ago

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What does running do to your brain?

Neuroscientists have contemplated treadmill runners, ultramarathon athletes and a number of lab animals to investigate the consequences of moving on grey matter It may seem self-evident- as you push on through a long run, deviating wildly between hotshots of hardship and glee- that loping can have a huge result on your state of mind. It is an instinctive sentiment that a growing number of neuroscientists have begun to are serious about, and in recent years they have started to show us what actually plays out on the hills and valleys of your grey matter as you run. Their observes corroborate what many athletes know from their own experience: we can use passing as a tool to improve the way we fantasize and experience. And we are currently reading accurately why movement can recall focus, vanquish stress and improve mood. Plus we know why- if you’re lucky – you might get a brief view of nirvana. It would be crazy be suggested that running is a universal solution to all of our mental invites. Certainly, from your brain’s position, you are not able to want to push it extremely hard-handed. German neuroscientists examined the brains of some of the entrants before, during, and after the TransEurope Foot Race, in which competitors slog through 3,000 miles, over 64 consecutive days. In the middle-of-the-road of this absurdly extreme ultramarathon, the runners’ grey matter had shrunk in magnitude by 6 %: the’ normal’ shrinking associated with old age is just 0.2% per year. Luckily, the narrative doesn’t terminate too badly: eight a few months later the athletes’ abilities were back to normal. But if considering gargantuan lengths can be counter-productive, it is clear now that more moderate flows can result in very real benefits. First, in a macrocosm where smartphones bombard us with foreplay and blur the border between work and life, a seizure of recent examines presents why going for a pas going to be able to regain a sense of control. A 2018 venture from West Michigan University, for example, showed that feeing abruptly for half an hour improves” cortical flicker frequency” doorstep. This is associated with the ability to better process information. Two others, from the Lithuanian Sports University and Nottingham Trent University, has been demonstrated that interval guiding improves various aspects of” director affair “. This is a suite of mental high-level departments that include the ability to marshall attention, tune out distractions, switch between enterprises and solve problems. Among the young people learnt, measurable advantages were clear immediately after 10 minutes of interval sprints. They too compiled after seven weeks of training. A brain imaging consider led by David Raichlen at the University of Arizona ties in neatly with these results. They saw clear differences in brain activity in serious runners, compared to well-matched non-runners. For self-evident concludes, you cannot range while you are inside a brain scanner, so the neuroscientists studied the mentality at rest. First, they learnt increased co-ordinated activity in regions, principally at the front of the mentality, known to be involved in director offices and cultivating recall. This represents sense. Second, they recognized relative softening down of the actions of the” default mode system”, a series of linked brain regions that spring into action whenever we are idle or disconcerted. Your default procedure network is the source of your inner monologue, the instigator of mind-wandering and the voice that ruminates on your past. Its results are not always accepted or helpful, and have been associated with clinical depression. Raichlen’s was a preliminary study, but if demonstrated in the future, it will give fresh heavines to the idea that guiding can be a figure of moving mindfulness musing. Brain scans been demonstrated that meditation and moving can have a somewhat similar upshot on the brain; simultaneously committing manager gatherings and becoming down the chattering of the default state structure. Again, this seems instinctively right: in the midst of a drain, you are likely to be immersed in the present moment, tuned into your bodily government, and conscious of your breather. These are all key aims of mindfulness-based rules. Lacing up your trainers and going for a race could, therefore, ensure that they are able to collect some of the mental benefits of mindfulness. Fellowships, extremely, are cottoning on to the therapeutic effects of running: I recently worked with running-shoe fellowship Saucony to create a podcast about the effects of feeing on the mind. All of this might start to explain why some people find that flowing, like mindfulness, can be a helpful highway to overcome stress and dip. Recent experiment from the Karolinska Institute in Sweden sees, at a chemical tier, how work can defuse at least one important biological stress pathway. When you are under stress, metabolic processes in your liver alter the amino acid tryptophan into a molecule with the mumble-inducing reputation of knyurenine. Some of that knyurenine procures its room into your psyche, where its accumulation has been strongly associated with stress-induced dimple, nervousnes diseases and schizophrenia. When you exercise, the levels of an enzyme called kynurenine aminotransferase be developed further in your muscles. This enzyme breaks down knyurenine into the related molecule kynurenic acid, which, importantly, cannot open the brain. In this nature, exerting your skeletal muscles by racing clears from your bloodstream a substance that can cause mental health problems. It is important to be recognised that, for technological and ethical rationales, some of the details of this mechanism have been proven simply in laboratory animals. Saucony has even worded its recent shoe collection “White Noise” after the mind-clearing effects of a drain Photo: Saucony figcaption > root > At first glance, it is not obvious why manipulating your leg muscles should have a direct effect on your mental state. This work offer rare insight into the often-mysterious links between psyche and figure- and is a powerful remembrance that your intelligence is merely another bodily part. What you choose to do with your body will, inevitably, have mental consequences. Running can do more for your climate than smooth out stress. Some luck beings drool about its own experience of the” runner’s high”, which, they claim, is a powerful sensation of euphorium and invincibility. Feeing “ve never” relatively done that for me, but we do now know more about the potent chemical payoffs that running initiations in the mentality. The favourite project of the” endorphin charge” was tolerate in the 1980 s and 90 s, when a series of studies has been demonstrated that the levels of beta-endorphin raise in your bloodstream during the course of a roll. Beta-endorphin targets the same receptors as opiates, and has some similar biological influences. The endorphin scoot hypothesis always had a shortcoming, nonetheless, since beta-endorphin does not cross quickly the blood-brain barricade. And if it didn’t make it into your intelligence, how could it give you a high? In 2008, German neuroscientists gave that right. They employed functional brain imaging to demo that, in trained smugglers, beta-endorphin levels do indeed spike in the psyche after a two-hour movement. Increased positions endorphin the actions of the ability likewise correlated with the smugglers’ self-reported sentiments of euphoria. It is not just home-brew opiates that can dull the aching and invoke your spirits while you are on the run. Endocannabinoids are a diverse genealogy of bodily chemicals which, like cannabis, bind the brain’s cannabinoid receptors. The levels of endocannabinoids moving in the blood rises after 30 times of moderately intense treadmill leading . Rigorous ventures, conducted on laboratory mice, show that running-induced endocannabinoids are responsible for reductions in anxiety and perception of aching. It is a good bet that the same mechanism works in our brains. For many of us, feeing may never hand a drug-like high-pitched. But we now assure why a operate that feels like murder at the start can leave you feel slaked and at ease by the dwelling straight. Some of these studies are initial and need fleshing out. And it is definitely the example that your gender, genetic chart, fitness, expectancies and many other factors besides will influence the behavior your mentality responds to running. Even so, I read all these neuroscientific studies as good information floors. While the physical benefits of feeing and aerobic practise are well established, we are starting to see why ranging can have profound assistances for mental health, more. Hopefully, knowing this will redouble your determination to get out there and guide more frequently. Ben tweets at @mountainogre Read more: https :// www.theguardian.com/ lifeandstyle/ the-running-blog/ 2018/ jun/ 21/ what-does-running-do-to-your-brain http://dailybuzznetwork.com/index.php/2018/07/05/what-does-running-do-to-your-brain/

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mavwrekmarketing · 8 years ago

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Starry CEO Chet Kanojia

Image: starry

You don’t threaten entire industries without making some enemiesor spending some time in court. That’s a lesson Chet Kanojia has lived and learned.

A few years ago, Kanojia took on some of the biggest media companies in the U.S. with his streaming TV startup Aereo. Well before the recent explosion of internet-based TV bundles, Aereo became a tech phenom by streaming broadcast channels over the internet for a small monthly fee.

It had the feel of the next big thing. The company had customers, funding, and no immediate competitors. It was all going to planup until the Supreme Court stopped him. It’s the kind of defeat that can cripple an entrepreneur.

Not Kanojia. Over tequila shots with colleagues on Aereo’s final day, he was already hatching his next move.

“There’s no obligation, but if you walk in we can’t promise it’s going to work,” he told some of his remaining staffers, many of whom took him up on the offer.

Almost three years after that ruling, I’m riding an elevator with Kanojia up to a loft in Charlestown, Massachusetts. He’s going to show me a piece of that technology Kanojia teased over tequila shots.

The elevator arrives, and we walk into a penthouse apartment, where a white triangle with a screen sits on a window sill.

“This is part of Starry,” he said.

Starry is Kanojia’s new venture, a way to provide cheap, wireless internet access to people’s homes. Most people only have one choice for high-speed internet, a choke point that causes any number of issues and is central to the ongoing net neutrality debate.

This device is an internet router, but it’s just the tip of a much larger, technology-sophisticated system that includes various pieces of equipment set up across a city to create super-fast, wireless access. For now, Starry Internet is only running as a beta test in the greater Boston area. The company is on track to launch in several additional cities by the end of this year.

Image: starry

If Starry works, it could mean big things for the internet, not just from a business perspective.

It’s a big if, the kind Kanojia deals in.

“What we’re doing and what other people will do it’s not only critical, it’s necessary,” Kanojia said.

‘All roads lead to India’

Kanojia, 47, is a disruptor at a time when “disruptor” is thrown around by Silicon Valley poseurs with a new food delivery app.

He immigrated from India in 1991 and has expertise in mechanical engineering, computer systems engineering, and the telecommunications industry. He gained notoriety for Aereo, which was well on its way to irrevocably changing the TV business. Prior to that, he had run Navic Networks, which developed data-collection technology for cable companies. He sold that startup to Microsoft in 2008 reportedly for $250 million.

“Engineering, its like magical… Its so abstract that you either get totally intimidated, or you think, ‘How does it work?'”

Like many of tech’s most impactful entrepreneurs, his story started outside the United States. He was born in Bhopal, India. Bhopal is known for being the site of one of the worst industrial accidents in human history. Thousands of people died in 1984 after a nearby pesticide plant leaked toxic gas.

He gravitated to engineering from a young age. He also saw what it meant to have gatekeepers.

When he was growing up in India, young people took one national exam that determined the level of university they could attend. That single exam set children like Kanojia on one path with little ability to veer from it.

“All roads lead to India. Growing up in India theres a hierarchy because there’s so much competition, there’s not a lot of opportunity,” he said. “If you were an engineer or a doctor, you had a path forward. Everybody else, you had to figure it out.”

That experience of fighting for a spot and then being unable to veer from it informed Kanojia’s views on technology and business. You can be successful, sure, but within the system. Entrepreneurship was, for the part, absent, meaning the status quo was never challenged.

Kanojia now relishes that opportunity. Both Aereo and now Starry have been squarely aimed at bringing change to markets in which big companies held outsized power.

Starry Point placed on a rooftop in Somerville, Massachusetts.

Image: starry

“Unchecked corporate interests can do a lot of damage, and there are new age corporate interests that tend to be more ‘Do no evil,'” Kanojia said.

“To me, technology it allows you to transform things, and thats the coolest part about it all. It changes everything,” he added.

Aereo’s rise and fall

Starting in 2012, Aereo looked like a winner. Kanojia raised almost $100 million for the company, which grew quickly. He had the backing of media mogul Barry Diller.

FirstMark Capital was one of Aereo’s investors. Amish Jani, managing director of the firm, had met Kanojia in early 2001 back when he was running Navic. The company had raised some early-stage capital, not that anyone could tell. Jani recalled the first meeting inside Navic’s second offices, a tight-packed room, stacked with boxes and desks side by side.

“What you got the sense immediately was someone who is very intelligent about technology and products and how they can be leveraged to disrupt an industry,” Jani said.

“You saw someone who was very hard-working, and you saw someone who was very gritty about it. This was right around the bubble. Other companies had fancy stuff left and right. [Navic employees] were passionately focused on a mission,” he continued.

Aereo, the project he started after leaving Microsoft in 2010, worked by operating clusters of tiny antennas that streamed broadcast TV to users. It was a hack, but one that seemed to have found a legal loophole around the rules against rebroadcasting over-the-air TV.

Various courts agreed. The broadcasters sued Aereo and lost just about every time until the Supreme Court heard the case. The judges ruled 6-3 that Aereo had exploited a loophole to get around copyright law.

But Aereo wasn’t a failureto Kanojia and to investors. Jani put Aereo on the list of historical investments for his biography. Rather than an acquisition or a public listing below Aereo, it reads: U.S. Supreme Court.

“We built a lot of great momentum and Chet single-handedly accelerated the movement of TV anywhere,” Jani said. “Now every person expects to see a live-stream of their favorite game on their device, no matter where they are. [Aereo] was not a failure. It was masterful execution.”

“Was” being the operative word there. Aereo’s execution was too masterful. A Supreme Court ruling and a few tequila shots later, Starry became the new gig.

Enter Starry

Kanojia already had a backup planand this one involved a loophole as well, though with far fewer legal issues.

It is very expensive to build new internet infrastructure, particularly the “last mile,” which refers to the connections used by normal consumers. Most Americans have no more than one option here. Kanojia recognized this as a problem for Aereo, as it is for every other tech company that operates on the internet. For all the wide range of choices consumers have for services on the internet, it’s all coming down one pipe. And that meant a gatekeeperthe kind that Kanojia doesn’t particularly like.

So he, along with his business partner Joe Lipowski, who serves as Starry’s chief technology officer, started thinking about how to fix that.

“If Aereo succeeded, Aereo was going to need it. If Aereo failed, we were going to need new gigs,” Kanojia said.

Starry’s main product is its router. It looks like Google Home and Eve from Pixar’s Wall-E had a baby. Which is to say, it looks like something I wouldn’t mind having on my window sill. But why would I need a router this fancy?

Well, the simple answer was it provides fast, reliable, in-home WiFi.

In the apartment, Kanojia fired up “Stranger Things” on Netflix. It’s a controlled demo, but it is fast. His experience with Aereo taught him the risks that a company like Netflix faces (or at least faced when it wasn’t quite as powerful as it is now) in trying to stream video.

If only a few companies control the pipes, you’re going to have problems. This is the essence of the net neutrality debate.

“If you dont have net neutrality, how does Netflix continue to make the investment it needs to make?” Kanojia said. “When it doesnt consider the cost to the consumer, the power will be in two to three companies.”

The 10-year plan (as of this moment)

Unlike Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, Kanojia isn’t following a 10-year plan.

“The one certainty in a 10-year plan is in three months, it’ll change,” Kanojia said with a smile when asked about long-term strategy.

“If there is a 10-year plan, it’s find and hire the best,” Lipowski said.

Kanojia said he doesn’t have a hard time recruiting for his new venture.

A Starry employee working at the company’s offices in Downtown Crossing.

Image: kerry flynn/mashable

That’s one reason why Starry’s operations are based in Boston, where nearby Harvard and MIT students are apparently eager to solve challenging problems in the engineering industries, not just build the next Facebook.

“I think a lot of us now are utterly spoiled because each project is more complex and more difficult and more impactful,” Kanojia said.

Kanojia has a lot of work to do. As CEO, his time is split between calls with investors (Starry raised $30 million in a Series B last year, totaling $63 million in funding), hiring, operations, design, sales, and new tech. Like many entrepreneurs, he’s rarely off.

The majority of Starry’s 100 employees do not come from traditional backgrounds in the telecommunications industry. They have some people who worked in defense and other software engineers who have spent most of their past writing mobile apps.

“It’s so fun to sit in this mix because they dont speak each others language. It forces them to build a solid API across people,” Kanojia said, using the tech jargon of API, application program interface, as a metaphor for creating human relationships.

Chet Kanojia on a phone call with investors while standing next to Starry Beam, the network node, in Somerville, Massachusetts.

Image: KERRY FLYNN/MASHABLE

Starry is still in early phrases, but it does have a product in the marketplace. An undisclosed number of Starry Stations have been installed across the country. Starry Internet is live as a beta service in Boston. The station itself is pretty, and that’s part of the selling point.

The biggest question for Starry remains the core technology. It relies on something called “millimeter wave band active phased array” to provide internet access over the air. It’s a technology that others have tried before but failed to make into something ready for consumers.

Kanojia and Starry say they have succeeded where others failed. The company is promising 200 megabit per second speed for $50 per month.

Next up for Starry is perfecting the technology and then, obviously, expanding to markets.

“We’ll make mistakes,” Virginia Lam, Starry’s communications chief, said.

What else would you expect from a true disruptor?

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