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justmenoworries · 2 years

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Shakarian Spy X Family AU:

- Jane Shepard a.k.a. “Specter”, the Alliance’s most capable spy. An expert in hand-to-hand combat, infiltration and diplomacy. When the Alliance hears of a possible rising of violent anti-alien sentiments within certain groups in humanity, they dispatch her to the Citadel in order to investigate and, if necessary, intervene to keep the peace. To do that, she’ll have to get close to a certain human businessman who resides in the Citadel’s upper wards. Only one problem: The businessman is a bit of a paranoiac and only leaves his heavily guarded apartment to visit social events at his daughter’s school. The only way to introduce herself to him for Shepard would be to have a child to enroll, or better yet, a family, as people in the upper wards are a bit traditional and a single mother might be looked down on. She rents a nice apartment and sets up her identity as Jane Shepard, renowned psychiatrist. A child’s easy enough to come by, just adopt one from the lower wards where people don’t care enough to ask questions beyond the bare minimum. A partner proves to be more difficult, as all Alliance agents on the Citadel, male and female, are currently otherwise occupied or have to lay low.

- Jack, a.k.a. “Subject Zero”, is the little girl Shepard chooses from a skeezy orphanage somehwere in the Citadel’s lower wards. Jack used to be part of an experiment to enhance the potential of biotic children, but the project was deemed a failure and abandoned by the people in charge, leaving Jack dumped in an orpahange and forgotten about. Jack’s biotic abilities are immense, to the point they’ve given her telepathy and enable her to read the thoughts of the people around her. Her less than stellar upbringing also left her with a big attitude problem, meaning she’s very aggressive and confrontational and will throw hands if she feels threatened. She was returned to the orphanage several times, because the families who adopted her just didn’t know how to deal with a child that obviously had issues and could throw a couch with her mind. So Jack’s already pretty distrustful of adults. However, she practically imprints on Shepard the moment the woman walks in. Jack reads her mind, sees that this is a woman who has killed and will kill again and thinks “fuck yeah, this is my mom now!” Shepard has no idea Jack knows about her real job and just assumes Jack is a particularly huggy kid (ha!), so she signs the papers and now Jack’s her daughter. Now all that’s left is a partner, but where could Shepard find someone willing to immediately get married to a single parent?

- Enter Garrus Vakarian, a.k.a. “Archangel“, C-Sec desk jockey by day, assassin for the Turian Hierarchy by night. A highly competent sniper and close-range combatant, Garrus actually has a very strict moral code and only really accepted the job to support his sick mother and his younger sister Solana after his father unexpectedly died. He tries to only accept contracts for people who deserve it, like mobsters, drug dealers or traffickers. At the time Shepard moves into the Citadel, he’s in a bit of a bind because he lied to his sister (and maybe his colleagues) about having a girlfriend, so he could escape the frequent attempts at matchmaking. Now he needs someone to pose as his partner for a C-Sec party. As luck would have it, he meets a very nice human lady while getting his suit fixed, who agrees to play his girlfriend for the evening. In exchange, she wants him to play her husband, in order to get her daughter into a prestigious school. Sounds fair, so deal. At the evening of the party, Shepard shows up quite a bit late and also introduces herself as Garrus’ wife instead of girlfriend, having mixed up their missions because she was doing spy stuff before this and maybe has a bit of a concussion from an altercation with a bad guy. Everyone is a bit surprised that Garrus’ wife is a human, apparently. But they seem happy enough together so most just let it go. After a tumultuous run-in with some “patients” of Shepard’s, Shepard decides that getting married for real might just be the perfect cover for both of them, so she proposes to Garrus, who accepts, since the way he sees it, it’s a convenient deal for both of them.

- Last but not least, Eezo, a varren originating from Thessia. Eezo was exposed to Element Zero his entire life, leading to him developing some biotic abilities. He is a lot more intelligent than normal varren, being able to understand basic language. Also, he can see the future. Jack saw him at a shelter during a walk with her parents, read all of this in his mind and spontaneously decided she wanted a pet. Shepard and Garrus were hesitant at first, but Jack and the varren seemed to really get along and it didn’t seem dangerous to her, so they eventually agreed. In a lot of ways, Eezo and Jack are the only ones who can understand each other, so they basically become inseperable from day one.

#shakarian #shakarian au #shepard x garrus #jane shepard #garrus vakarian #mass effect jack #leave me alone i wanted a cute au for my otp #spy x family #spyxfamily

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monstersandmaw · 4 years

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Yup. Part One. This absolute monstrosity quite literally grew wings and took on a life of its own, so yes, there will be a part two shortly, and it will be NSFW.

I shared the mood board/aesthetic for this over on Discord and a couple of people said they were excited, so I hope you enjoy it! It's set in Old Trollbridge, and you may pick up a passing reference to another character whose story was set here... Let me know in the comments if you remember them... Thanks also for your wonderful and enthusiastic feedback on Winter Solstice Chapter Five!

Contents: former school bullies, reader with a very slight potty-mouthed internal monologue, being physically attracted to someone(s!) that you didn't like intellectually/emotionally, watching said people kiss/be physically affectionate, the old 'oh no we've been paired on a project and will have to work together now or we'll get bad marks' trope, and some general growing up :) Wordcount: 5766

Chunky preview:

Winding up at the same university as the two biggest dicks from high school would have been - trying - enough, but to end up not only in the same department but also in the same damned classes was just downright cruel of fate. And yes, that was absolutely the right word for them.

The University of Old Trollbridge was known for its academic excellence in all areas, from cutting edge medicine to more traditional approaches, and the centuries-old institution was a bastion of learning, with places hotly contested. You’d nearly run herself into the ground in school to pass the right exams to get here - to leave all the pettiness of high school behind and finally start over - and here they were. It was going to be exactly the same. You could feel it. They’d worm their way to the top of the hierarchy again, and everyone would worship the ground they touched, and it would all just be awful.

“Fucking hell. This isn’t happening,” you cursed, watching the familiar and very particular hue of the naga’s dark green scales as he slithered across the entrance hall of the history faculty building, his muscular tail rippling with a million iridescent, deep emerald green colours. The atrium wasn’t exactly flooded with light, so somehow he looked like a living shadow.

People watched him; everywhere he went, people noticed him. He was probably one of the more famous undergraduates the university had had in recent years, what with his family’s ancient bloodline and apparently endless bank vaults, and his brief but extremely successful stint in modelling. The fact that the naga and his best friend (and almost literal sex god), Iltho, had gained a place was not all that much of a surprise to anyone, but you’d hoped they wouldn’t have chosen the same flipping department as you for their undergraduate studies. Not that they could be accused of paying their way in; for starters, the university had not accepted that kind of thing for generations.

No, they were both beautiful and unbearably smart too.

It was indecently unfair.

Your lip curled. Just as you’d been about to turn away, your roommate caught up with you. You’d put down that you didn’t mind who you were put with - gender or species - and for once, you’d actually lucked out. Rachel was an extremely talented spell caster, and, from what you’d seen of her in the first two days of your acquaintance, extremely tidy. “What’s up?” she asked, smiling up at you from beneath a thick curtain of vibrant, pastel pink hair. She was also about a foot shorter than you.

You jutted your chin at the naga.

“Oh my god, that’s… wow. I didn’t know we had a celebrity in our department!” she giggled, elbowing you playfully in the side. “Gods above… he’s gorgeous. It’s sinful. It shouldn’t be allowed. How am I supposed to concentrate in Old High Runic if he’s sitting there looking like that?”

“He’s also a massive cock,” you snorted. Fucking ‘Drake Shimmerscale’. Even his name was a giant cliche. Fancy noble lines with their fancy stupid names.

She tilted her head curiously. “You… know him?”

“Went to school with the bastard. Him and his best friend -” you cut off, eyes widening, as a second figure strode out of a doorway and exclaimed loudly. “Fucking… speak of the devil.”

“That’s a bit harsh,” she said, her eyes also locked on the newest arrival. It was easy to see why she’d thought you’d been referring to his appearance; his skin was a deep, ruby red, he had enormous, black, curved horns, a blunt-ended tail, and the bat-like wings that hung down his back looked like they’d been dipped in dark ink at the tips. He was also built like a bull and turned heads wherever he went, and here was no exception. Of course, the incubus would have to keep his ‘influence’ under control while at the university, but that didn't mean he didn't just naturally exude sex appeal anyway. Six-foot-something tall, with long, black hair that he usually wore pulled back into a thick braid studded with golden beads, he had flashing golden eyes and a mouth made for kissing.

Everyone had fantasised about being with him (and/or Drake) at school. Iltho had looked twenty-five since the age of fourteen, and acted like it too. Confident, cocky, quietly arrogant, also filthy rich, and stupendously intelligent, there was nothing that Iltho didn’t have. Really, the duo had made a striking pair, with the milk-white of Drake’s skin and the heated crimson of Iltho’s, their gemstone eyes of yellow and green, and their aloof personalities. The pair had ruled the school without having to do so much as lift a finger. They’d also done nothing to stop the lesser bullies posturing and vying for their attention. ‘Popular’ they may have been, but they’d also been about as liked as a Nightmare at a slumber party.

“No,” you said. “It’s not harsh. They’re both awful and they made life hell for the rest of us.” And with that you turned away, heading for the library.

You fumed as you stalked along the corridor and up the stairs towards the department’s ancient library. Yours was, appropriately enough for the History Faculty, one of the oldest buildings in the university, and it was absolutely everything you’d ever hoped for or dreamed from Old Trollbridge. The sheer aesthetic of it was mesmerising. Taking a huge, deep breath of the slightly musty air as you stepped into the library, you tried to put the pair of bullies out of your mind. This could still be your fresh start, surrounded by fragile parchment and vellum, leather spines, ancient oak tables, and the vague tingle of magic in the air.

There were wards in the ceilings to syphon off excess ambient magic in places like this, and as you let your eyes roam up and follow the conductive brass rods embedded in the ceiling, you nearly crashed into one of the long trestle tables that had been placed in a remote alcove, lit on one side by a huge, leaded, arched window and framed on the other three by bookshelves. As if fate had chosen you a place to settle down, you stared at the empty space for a moment before deciding that this would probably be your study spot for the rest of the year. It was right at the back of the library, and seemed out of the way enough that it wouldn’t be on the regular stamping ground of first years looking for the standard texts. It was also open enough that it probably wouldn’t be sought out for… other activities. The stacks, with their dark corners and endless shadows, seemed much more appropriate for that.

Yes. This would be perfect.

And you wouldn’t have to think about them here either.

Gods, even trying to get the thought of them out of your head prompted a flare of hot ire. Iltho and Drake had been inseparable at school. Class A bullies who just stood there and let everyone else spar and jockey for the dubious honour of being their latest minions and underlings, letting their wealth and, in Iltho’s case, ‘charisma’ carry them through. Half the school had been in love with them at one point, influence or not. And yes, even you had admired them from a distance. Rachel was right - they really were absolutely fucking gorgeous. Both of them. And it fucking sucked.

An hour later, a shadow passed in front of that beautiful window and you glanced up as someone halted beside your table. “That’s a familiar sight,” a deep voice chuckled.

Your stomach dropped and you felt your face fall with horror before you schooled it into something a little more acerbic than you’d ever managed in school. Funny how a few months’ internship abroad over the summer at one of the world’s most prestigious historical institutions could change everything. You hardened your eyes and noticed the way he watched you.

“Iltho,” you said flatly as you cricked your neck to look up at him. “You're blocking the light, but I can’t tell if it’s your wings or your ego that’s obliterating the sun. Would you care to move?”

Read the whole thing right now, as well as all the Mermay 2020 posts (five in total, including extra artwork), a surprise, nsfw ‘ghost lover’ story, all of Winter Solstice up to the current chapter, a new multi-chapter vampire story, the mlm werewolf story, plus everything that’s been posted already on Patreon!

#exophilia #incubus #male incubus #naga #male naga #incubus x naga #incubus x naga x reader #naga x reader #incubus x reader #part one #patreon only #monthly story #patreon monthly story #poly #poly exophilia

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sciencespies · 4 years

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For Male Lemurs, Love Stinks, and Scientists Now Know Why

https://sciencespies.com/news/for-male-lemurs-love-stinks-and-scientists-now-know-why/

For Male Lemurs, Love Stinks, and Scientists Now Know Why

A tail doused with floral, fruity cologne appears to be a strong move for male lemurs looking for love, according to new research.

Ring-tailed lemurs (Lemur catta), endangered primates native to Madagascar, engage in what scientists call “stink flirting” during breeding season. To get ready to impress the lady lemurs, males wipe smelly chemicals secreted from glands on their wrists all over their fluffy tails, they then waft their perfumed appendages in the direction of potential mates.

Now, researchers have used chemical analysis to identify a trio of chemicals present in those secretions that appear to pique females’ interest, reports Elizabeth Pennisi for Science.

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Outside of the breeding season the male lemurs’ wrist secretions are bitter and leathery, mainly used to tell other males to back off. But when it’s time to mate those scents turn sweet and tropical. The researchers took great pains to collect enough of this breeding season cologne for chemical analysis, using tiny pipettes to gather the miniscule quantities of the liquid before it evaporated.

The analysis revealed three molecules that appeared to be involved in wooing females, the researchers report this week in the journal Current Biology. The smelly triumvirate is made up of the compounds dodecanal, 12-methyltridecanal and tetradecanal all part of a group of well known odorants called aldehydes. One of the aldehydes is known to be an insect sex pheromone and another smells sort of like a pear, according to Science.

A male lemur waiving his tail at a female. (Chigusa Tanaka / Japan Monkey Centre)

Wherever the researchers sprayed the chemicals, females spent some extra time sniffing and even licking the perfumed object, but only during the breeding season and only when all three chemicals were present. The males’ production of this concoction was also tied to their testosterone levels, Touhara and his team note in a statement.

The female response to the spritzings of the chemical mixture suggests it may help males find a mate, according to the researchers, making the ingredients of the lemurs’ chemical cocktail candidates for the first ever pheromones discovered in a primate. But, they add, more evidence is needed before using the term “pheromone” officially.

“We don’t know what happens after the female is interested in this odor,” Kazushige Touhara, biochemist at University of Tokyo and the study’s lead author, tells Max Levy of Massive Science. “So we have to really show that this enhances mating to be able to say that this is definitely a pheromone.”

Broadly defined, pheromones are chemical compounds that transmit signals between individuals of the same species. But the definition has been hotly debated and deciding what is and is not a pheromone can be akin to “drawing a line in the sand,” Christine Drea, an environmental anthropologist at Duke University who was not involved in the study, tells Massive Science.

The clearest examples involve chemicals that prompt physiological changes or an obvious behavior across all members of a species.

Female silk moths, for example, secrete the molecule bombykol, which instantly beckons males as soon as they encounter it, reported Daisy Yuhas in Scientific American in 2014. Other pheromones are slower acting: the molecule alpha-farnesene in male mouse urine has been found to accelerate puberty in young female mice.

Despite droves of armpit sniffing experiments in search of isolating a human love potion, “there is no authentic pheromone that has been chemically identified,” Touhara tells Nicola Davis of the Guardian. But Touhara and his team had good reason to go looking for a potential primate pheromone in lemurs.

Lemurs branched away from humans and the great apes some 60 million years ago and have retained a well-developed sense of smell. They’ve got scent producing glands on their shoulders and genitals in addition to the ones on their wrists, and they deploy their arsenal of odors to start fights, jockey for position in the social hierarchy and, as this new research suggests, seduce mates. They even possess an active version of a scent discerning organ, called the Jacobson’s or vomeronasal organ, that is vestigial in humans and apes.

Massive Science asked Tristram Wyatt, a pheromone expert at the University of Oxford, whether this study’s findings might represent the first recorded primate pheromones. “These are really promising candidates,” Wyatt says, “and we’ve not had those before, but what we don’t know at this stage, is that it actually affects anything to do with sex.”

Touhara says the responses of female lemurs after smelling the male’s breeding musk are something his team intends to explore in future research. For his part, Touhara tells Massive Science that the lemur love potion smelled “pretty good, actually.”

#News

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rockislandadultreads · 4 years

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Pandemic/Apocalyptic Fiction

Titles that feature storylines during a pandemic.

Station Eleven by Emily St. John Mandel

4.05/5 stars

Set in the days of civilization's collapse, Station Eleven tells the story of a Hollywood star, his would-be savior, and a nomadic group of actors roaming the scattered outposts of the Great Lakes region, risking everything for art and humanity.

One snowy night a famous Hollywood actor slumps over and dies onstage during a production of King Lear. Hours later, the world as we know it begins to dissolve. Moving back and forth in time—from the actor's early days as a film star to fifteen years in the future, when a theater troupe known as the Traveling Symphony roams the wasteland of what remains—this suspenseful, elegiac, spellbinding novel charts the strange twists of fate that connect five people: the actor, the man who tried to save him, the actor's first wife, his oldest friend, and a young actress with the Traveling Symphony, caught in the crosshairs of a dangerous self-proclaimed prophet.

The Great Believers by Rebecca Makkai

4.21/5 stars

In 1985, Yale Tishman, the development director for an art gallery in Chicago, is about to pull off an amazing coup, bringing in an extraordinary collection of 1920s paintings as a gift to the gallery. Yet as his career begins to flourish, the carnage of the AIDS epidemic grows around him. One by one, his friends are dying and after his friend Nico's funeral, the virus circles closer and closer to Yale himself. Soon the only person he has left is Fiona, Nico's little sister. Thirty years later, Fiona is in Paris tracking down her estranged daughter who disappeared into a cult. While staying with an old friend, a famous photographer who documented the Chicago crisis, she finds herself finally grappling with the devastating ways AIDS affected her life and her relationship with her daughter. The two intertwining stories take us through the heartbreak of the eighties and the chaos of the modern world, as both Yale and Fiona struggle to find goodness in the midst of disaster.

The End of October by Lawrence Wright

3.82/5 stars

At an internment camp in Indonesia, forty-seven people are pronounced dead with acute hemorrhagic fever. When Henry Parsons--microbiologist, epidemiologist--travels there on behalf of the World Health Organization to investigate, what he finds will soon have staggering repercussions across the globe: an infected man is on his way to join the millions of worshippers in the annual Hajj to Mecca. Now, Henry joins forces with a Saudi prince and doctor in an attempt to quarantine the entire host of pilgrims in the holy city... A Russian émigré, a woman who has risen to deputy director of U.S. Homeland Security, scrambles to mount a response to what may be an act of biowarfare... already-fraying global relations begin to snap, one by one, in the face of a pandemic... Henry's wife Jill and their children face diminishing odds of survival in Atlanta... and the disease slashes across the United States, dismantling institutions--scientific, religious, governmental--and decimating the population. As packed with suspense as it is with the fascinating history of viral diseases, Lawrence Wright has given us a full-tilt, electrifying, one-of-a-kind thriller.

The Rationing by Charles Wheelan

3.9/5 stars

America is in trouble—at the mercy of a puzzling pathogen. That ordinarily wouldn’t lead to catastrophe, thanks to modern medicine, but there’s just one problem: the government supply of Dormigen, the silver bullet of pharmaceuticals, has been depleted just as demand begins to spike. Set in the near future, The Rationing centers around a White House struggling to quell the crisis—and control the narrative. Working together, just barely, are a savvy but preoccupied president; a Speaker more interested in jockeying for position—and a potential presidential bid—than attending to the minutiae of disease control; a patriotic majority leader unable to differentiate a virus from a bacterium; a strategist with brilliant analytical abilities but abominable people skills; and, improbably, our narrator, a low-level scientist with the National Institutes of Health who happens to be the world’s leading expert in lurking viruses. Little goes according to plan during the three weeks necessary to replenish the stocks of Dormigen. Some Americans will get the life-saving drug and others will not, and nations with their own supply soon offer aid—but for a price. China senses blood and a geopolitical victory, presenting a laundry list of demands that ranges from complete domination of the South China Sea to additional parking spaces at the UN, while India claims it can save the day for the U.S.

The Dreamers by Karen Thompson Walker

3.66/5 stars

In an isolated college town in the hills of Southern California, a freshman girl stumbles into her dorm room, falls asleep—and doesn’t wake up. She sleeps through the morning, into the evening. Her roommate, Mei, cannot rouse her. Neither can the paramedics who carry her away, nor the perplexed doctors at the hospital. Then a second girl falls asleep, and then another, and panic takes hold of the college and spreads to the town. As the number of cases multiplies, classes are canceled, and stores begin to run out of supplies. A quarantine is established. The National Guard is summoned. Mei, an outsider in the cliquish hierarchy of dorm life, finds herself thrust together with an eccentric, idealistic classmate. Two visiting professors try to protect their newborn baby as the once-quiet streets descend into chaos. A father succumbs to the illness, leaving his daughters to fend for themselves. And at the hospital, a new life grows within a college girl, unbeknownst to her—even as she sleeps. A psychiatrist, summoned from Los Angeles, attempts to make sense of the illness as it spreads through the town. Those infected are displaying unusual levels of brain activity, more than has ever been recorded. They are dreaming heightened dreams—but of what?

Lock In (Lock In #1) by John Scalzi

3.89/5 stars

Not too long from today, a new, highly contagious virus makes its way across the globe. Most who get sick experience nothing worse than flu, fever and headaches. But for the unlucky one percent - and nearly five million souls in the United States alone - the disease causes "Lock In": Victims fully awake and aware, but unable to move or respond to stimulus. The disease affects young, old, rich, poor, people of every color and creed. The world changes to meet the challenge. A quarter of a century later, in a world shaped by what's now known as "Haden's syndrome," rookie FBI agent Chris Shane is paired with veteran agent Leslie Vann. The two of them are assigned what appears to be a Haden-related murder at the Watergate Hotel, with a suspect who is an "integrator" - someone who can let the locked in borrow their bodies for a time. If the Integrator was carrying a Haden client, then naming the suspect for the murder becomes that much more complicated. But "complicated" doesn't begin to describe it. As Shane and Vann began to unravel the threads of the murder, it becomes clear that the real mystery - and the real crime - is bigger than anyone could have imagined. The world of the locked in is changing, and with the change comes opportunities that the ambitious will seize at any cost. The investigation that began as a murder case takes Shane and Vann from the halls of corporate power to the virtual spaces of the locked in, and to the very heart of an emerging, surprising new human culture. It's nothing you could have expected.

#fiction #horror #science fiction #books #currently reading #reading recs #book recs #reading recommendations #Book Recommendations #pandemic #apocalypse #apocalyptic fiction #pandemic reading #reading for fun #adult fiction #dystopia

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mamthew · 4 years

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I finished Persona 5 Royal, after 135 hours. My feelings on the new content are mostly very positive, though do I have a few issues with it. Here's a suuuuuper long write-up first about Persona 5 and then about Royal. This is gonna have full spoilers for both versions of the game, so keep that in mind if spoilers for either game bother you. Persona 5 is my favorite game of all time for several reasons. The first is how masterfully it's written. Not necessarily line-to-line (and certainly not in the English localization, which could've used a few more weeks of edits to make the sentences sound more natural), but in its structure, thematic unity, and use of allusions to achieve that unity. The first two-thirds of the game are presented through a complex and well-orchestrated frame device that's honestly just a treat to experience. It presents the player with a glance at each upcoming story beat without the context to understand it, then lets them piece together the context as they go, giving the whole game a sense of mystery even as the player inhabits the characters at the center of the mystery. It also uses concepts from Jungian psychology to tell its story, most notably character archetypes, which means players can use knowledge of the archetypes to better understand aspects of the characters and their stories. It's beautiful, and it means that I often fall down rabbit-holes researching the allusions made and finding the connections they have to the story. The other reason Persona 5 is my favorite game is much more personal, but it actually played a major role in my radicalization (or if you're uncomfortable with such terminology, political reawakening). The game released in early April of 2017, only a few months after Trump took office, and partway through my first semester back at school after my five year...break. The game is about fighting back against societal injustice. It starts out small, with a high school teacher who abuses his students, but moves up to people with increasingly greater power exploiting increasingly larger swaths of the population: a famous artist using his clout to steal his students' livelihoods, a mafia boss stealing money from the people of his neighborhood, a CEO overworking and underpaying his employees while jockeying for a political position, a government prosecutor who fabricates evidence to maintain her perfect record, and finally a member of the Diet running for Prime Minister who uses populist rhetoric but only cares about gaining personal power. As in previous games, each protagonist gains their powers by awakening to their Persona (essentially publicly performing as their true, unfiltered selves), but in this game, the process is physically painful, bordering on body horror. The act of tearing off the masks so tightly glued to the characters' faces is cast in a similar light to putting on the glasses in "They Live:" doing so is painful and frightening, but allows each character to see the world for what it is, without the filter of the justifying ideological framework. In the last dungeon of the game, the characters invade the physical manifestation of the justifying framework, which takes the form of a prison in which the prisoners beg to be left inside, as the idea of freedom from the prison terrifies them. A vein running from each of their cells sucks out their life force, vampirically, and directs that life force into the manifestation of the concept of hierarchical structures itself, portrayed as the holy grail - a reference to Marx's Capital. This holy grail - which to Marx was wealth - is revealed to be a false god created by the masses because they wanted a god. However, it grew so powerful that now the masses serve it, rather than the other way around. It created its own artificial collective unconscious, barring its subjects from participating in a true collective unconscious free of its influence. At the very beginning of the game, a voice directly tells the player they may only play Persona after agreeing that the events of the game are entirely fictional, and any similarities to the real world are entirely coincidental. The game will not start until the player indicates that they agree to those terms. That voice is revealed to be the holy grail itself, implying that to refuse to compare fictional works to the real world or "get political" about these stories is to submit yourself to the justifying ideology. That's some powerful stuff, and grounding it in real-life examples of exploitation while following characters suffering from that exploitation made it hard to ignore, especially in the wake of the 2015-2016 rise of Fascism and at a time when I was back to studying literary analysis. The game seems specifically crafted to induce a radicalization in its players. It has a scene in which the characters attain class consciousness. For a chunk of the story, the characters try to fight against manufactured consent, as they are framed by the media and authority figures as dangerous villains just for taking a nonviolent stand against rapists, billionaires killing their employees, and corrupt officials. The citizenry believes it almost unquestioningly. The protagonists are often visibly enraged at the exploitation they see - much of which is based on specific real-world events - and the internal logic of the story suggests that this rage is the only moral response. Every aspect of the game bolsters these themes of hierarchy, exploitation, and rebellion, giving the game a thematic unity unlike any I've ever seen before. Even the smallest NPCs have full storylines running in the background that highlight the ways even these nameless characters are exploited, and the ways they've been socialized to accept this exploitation. Every book, every song lyric, every reference to a food item, every damn fictional allusion in a game ABOUT FICTIONAL ALLUSIONS ties back in some way to that larger theming. The thematic unity of this game sings, and playing it was unlike anything I'd experienced before. This game, for me, defined Leftism. I didn't put down the controller a full-blown Communist, but it gave me the tools I needed to ask the necessary questions to discard Liberalism. I probably would have gotten there eventually, and the game probably wouldn't have had quite as powerful an effect if I weren't a literary/media analysis kind of guy living in the time I was in, but even now, three years later, the game reads to me like a damn revolutionary text. So I was honestly terrified of Persona 5: The Royal, which came out at the beginning of this month. It's a rerelease of the game with added story content, including a new dungeon, a new party member, the return of a deceased party member, and a new ending. That's a lot to add onto a really fun game with unprecedented thematic unity that also helped me to redefine myself and my positions on...literally everything. If they messed with this unity for the sake of adding unnecessary content, it would heavily alter the game's effect, and my own personal understanding of the game, forever. That's not to say that the game couldn't be improved. The localization was kinda shoddy, it occasionally drifts into male gaze shit (glaringly so in the 2D animated cutscenes, which makes me wonder if the animation studio had different ideas about the project than the devs did), there are two scenes which are virulently homophobic, and the devs had originally planned for another party member who they had to scrap for time. The two homophobic scenes especially have made it difficult to recommend the game, as I've always had to add the caveat of "...but it completely undermines its own central thesis twice for cheap laughs and it's disgusting." I wasn't sure, however, that a rerelease would fix any of these issues, and I was really worried that adding ~25 hours of gameplay after the dungeon about the justifying ideology and the holy grail would undermine too much of what made the game so revolutionary to me. There is no larger threat to humanity than the ideological framework justifying capitalism, so I worried that moving away from that for the length of a whole-ass Kingdom Hearts game would make the game less effective. From a storytelling perspective, the party member they advertised they would bring back to life is an unambiguous villain, and I worried that bringing him back would both undermine the sacrifice from his death scene and rehabilitate the character, neither of which I wanted. The new party member was not the character they had planned for and cut, and her story as it was advertised did not involve her being exploited by people in power in any way. Rather, she's a star athlete and honors student whose success was attributed to her sense of personal responsibility, which runs pretty counter to the game's themes. I also worried that adding a new dungeon worth of gameplay would mean getting rid of the part at the end of the game where the protagonist willingly turns himself in and spends several months imprisoned, so that he can testify against one of the villains of the game. The thought of losing that bittersweet ending definitely didn't sit right with me. As I said at the beginning, my feelings on the new content are mostly positive. Before getting into pure spoiler territory, I'll say there's no going back to the original now that this version exists. They redesigned every dungeon and boss fight, retooled the battle system, added a LOT more voice acting to scenes where there hadn't been any, added a ton of new scenes further fleshing out characters and the setting, retranslated the worse lines from the localization (it's still not perfect but it's much improved), added new gameplay mechanics and personas, added a bunch of great new music, expanded on Tokyo, and FIXED THE FUCK OUT OF THE HOMOPHOBIC SCENES. I now actually really like the two nameless characters who were in the original just straight up predators, as they've been rewritten into overenthusiastic drag queens who get excited at the thought of introducing nervous kids interested in drag to the scene. They improved on dungeon crawling, too: the newly added grapple hook mechanic introduces a fun verticality to the dungeon designs, stealth is more challenging and rewarding, and each dungeon has new optional collectibles. They reimagined the procedurally generated dungeon you explore over the course of the game, too, giving it more room types, more music, a currency unique to the dungeon, a merchant, and ways to level up money, experience, and item rewards from the enemies in the dungeon. As for the new story content, the extra 25 hours of gameplay is not...counter to the themes of the game. Instead, it's set up as a story about Revolution vs. Reform. The question it poses to the people of its now-too-content Tokyo is "would you join the Phantom Thieves?" which translates more to something on the order of "if these exploitative systems still existed, but didn't really hurt you or anyone you know, would you still care enough to fight against them?" The new villain co-opts the place formerly held by the Holy Grail and uses it to rewrite reality to one in which everything is basically the same, but almost everyone in the city has everything they want (with the notable and noticeable exceptions of homeless people and service workers). The central conflict, especially to the characters who have regained lost loved ones, is whether they should still fight for a better world if most people are fairly happy. Tokyo never ends up agreeing that they would join the Phantom Thieves, but the crew still end up determining that they must restore the real world, because a world in which people are still critical of the justifying ideology has a path to a better world, while one in which people are uncritical will never find that path. It's a complex and interesting take from the beginning, and even moreso when the game uses imagery from the mythologies of the garden of Eden and Prometheus. The other dungeons correspond to deadly sins, but this one instead corresponds to "sorrow." The villain is so afraid of his own grief and the grief of others that he refuses to allow anyone to take risks, even if success would improve the world. The three new confidant arcs are well thought-out and engaging, too, especially the arc with the villainous party member, whose actor absolutely chews the scenery in this game. In the new story, he's so angry about being forced into a reality on someone else's terms that he fights tooth and nail to return to the old reality, where he was at least able to die on his own terms. It's...not as emotional as the game wants it to be, but it's a really fun time. Each party member also gets a mini arc in which they come to terms with what they would lose by returning to the old reality, and acknowledges how much personal growth they would lose by staying. These culminate a new ending in which each party member finds a way to work to regain some of what they had lost by restoring reality, going their separate ways in the process. The new content has a bit of a Persona 4 vibe, in that it's much more personal and contemplative, and the characters find strength by maturing and uncovering avenues to personal growth. As Atlus has pretty consistently existed both in the shadow of Persona 4's popularity and with the pressing need to make up for Persona 4's failings, it's not a bad angle. I do have some minor issues with the new story. It still means that there is no downtime after the original final boss, so newcomers won't really have much opportunity to consider the implications of that dungeon and boss before being thrust into another conflict. Its ending is not quite as clear-cut as the original ending, either. The protagonist still turns himself in, but the story basically...switches back to that reality a week before his release, meaning it's not nearly as much of a sacrifice and it's a decision this version of the protagonist technically didn't make for himself. The situation is probably also clearer to people who've played the original game than to newcomers. The old ending is kind of "required reading" for fans; it's still the canon ending for Scramble where the new one is not, and the new one is more impactful to players who've already experienced the original ending. This creates a major predicament when recommending this game to new players. Do I tell them to purposely not fulfil the requirements to get the new ending, then replay a 130+ hour game a second time? Should they keep a save at around the 85 hour mark, so they can reload their save and retread the 20 or so hours of game they've already experienced to get to the new stuff? There's no good answer, which is irritating. At least the original ending is included in this version, so those are options, but it's frustrating that I can't just recommend one or the other without caveats that are also huge time sinks. I dunno how to end this, and it's much longer than it probably should be, so I'll say that this game is extremely important to me, and I'm impressed that Royal is not less important to me. I sure hope we get a release date for the worldwide release of Scramble soon.

#persona 5 #persona 5 royal

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mrswhozeewhatsis · 5 years

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A Woman of Letters (Getting a Feel for Sam Winchester) - Chapter 39

Summary: You’ve just opened an occult bookstore in Lebanon, Kansas, when you fall for a tall, handsome customer…literally. You soon find out that there’s more to the world than you ever suspected, including you. Discovering your heritage puts you directly in a witch’s crosshairs, though, so the Winchesters offer to take you in and teach you how to protect yourself. As you discover your own family history with the supernatural and your own hidden talents, you can’t help but wish a certain brother was as excited about your interest as you are.

Total length: 43 chapters, 70,247 words - Read on AO3 - Series masterlist

Chapter word count: 1132 words

Pairing: Sam x Reader

Warnings: Canon-level angst and violence

You

One afternoon, while you were trying to focus on a book Crowley had specifically suggested you read about the hierarchy of demons and the powers associated with each type of demon, Godfrey came by to do his usual daily cleaning service. As he was cleaning and gathering trash in the bathroom, he called to you and asked you to follow him into the bathroom so you could help him make up another shopping list.

“Miss Y/N, can you come here a moment and go over your supply levels and let me know what you might be running low on?” You looked at him questioningly, but got up and approached him, anyway. As you neared the bathroom, he seemed to speak in a stage whisper. “I, um, understand that as a human female, you might have need of certain supplies, if you know what I mean.” Godfrey turned a delightful shade of pink as you entered the bathroom and prepared to explain to him what you would need. No sooner were you out of sight of the cameras, though, Godfrey pulled a folded piece of paper out of his pocket and pressed it into your palm, before raising his voice again. “I understand that a woman’s needs can be rather specific, so if you could write down exactly what you will require, then I can be sure to get the right thing.”

You tried to keep the fake conversation going while opening the letter. “Oh, of course, Godfrey. Thank you so much for your understanding. Not many men would be so considerate.” You paused as you quickly read the note inside the paper.

I’ve been watching and hearing everything and we’ve got a plan to get you out. We’re not sure exactly when, but stick to your routine and you’ll be okay. If you understand, switch your window view to the beach scene. I love you. - Sam

Godfrey took the note from you and stuck it in his mouth, causing you to stifle a giggle. He then handed you a blank piece of paper and quietly whispered, “Feminine…you know?” You brought your brain back to the subterfuge at hand and quickly wrote down what you’d need, being sure to explain to him what the package looked like, even though you were both flushed pink and rolling your eyes. As he was about to leave, you gave him a quick kiss on the cheek, which caused him to grimace as he walked out the bathroom door. You took a second to compose yourself, then went back to your reading.

Sam’s coming! You tried to read, but kept moving your eyes over the same page over and over. After a few minutes, you put the book aside, got up, and went over to the window. With the push of a button, you switched the view from the city to the mountains to the beach scene again. You pretended to watch the waves for a few minutes, and then lay down to try and take a nap. If they were coming, you’d need to be well-rested and ready.

Much to your chagrin, you had to wait two days before you heard the ruckus in the hallway signaling that your escape was near. You were just finishing your breakfast when you heard raised voices in the hallway outside your door. You had spent the past two days considering what you could take with you as a weapon, and had come up empty, except for kitchen knives. It was no surprise that nothing Crowley allowed you to have in your suite could really hurt a demon. You grabbed one of the kitchen knives, anyway, hoping that stabbing a demon would at least slow it down. Once you had the knife in your hand, you opened the door to your suite to see what was happening outside.

The next few minutes were all a blur. In the hallway, Sam was fighting with two demons who normally guarded the throne room, while the guards for your door simply stood and watched. You looked nervously at the two guards, then decided to try to help Sam. As you headed towards the fray, before you could try to strike, one of the guards came around from behind you and stabbed one of the demons attacking Sam with an angel blade. You stopped in shock while Sam took out the other demon, staring up at your defender.

The burly demon looked down at you for a split second before speaking quietly. “You didn’t see that, I didn’t do that, now get out of here.” He and his partner both ran the other way down the hallway and disappeared. You turned around to look at Sam, and saw the relief in his eyes at seeing that you were all right.

“The deal was, you get out alive and we don’t tell Crowley who helped. Now, let’s go!” Sam grabbed your hand and you started running down the hall.

As you neared the throne room, a demon flew through the doorway and hit the wall, sliding down to the ground with a thud and a groan. Sam ran to it and thrust the demon knife into its chest, watching the orange flicker as the demon died. You both turned around and looked into the throne room to see Dean and Cas fighting more demons than they could possibly beat. When they saw you and Sam, both smiled for a split second before the men had another of their quick and silent conversations. Dean looked at the windows in the throne room, which you now saw were broken, and the horde of demons between the four of you and the windows. Some of the demons were fighting your boys, but the vast majority were actually trying to climb out the windows. No matter which mission the demons had in mind, they were going to keep you away from them. Some of the demons fighting to get out were killing each other to jockey for position, and there was already a pile of mangled demons on the floor below the windows. Other demons were simply using the beaten bodies as stepping stones for better access to the windows. You looked at the boys, and watched Cas smite two more demons at once while Dean pushed his angel blade into a third. As Dean pulled his blade from the body, he turned to you and Sam.

“Plan B.” Sam gave a quick sigh, but nodded. Dean and Cas went from trying to get into the throne room to running down the hall. This made you nervous, simply because you had never been down this hall past the throne room, and Crowley had told you what lay ahead.

Down that hallway was the entrance to Hell proper.

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attredd · 5 years

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NEW YORK -- On a quiet night in March, a mob leader was executed in New York City for the first time since 1985. The body of Francesco Cali, a reputed boss of the Gambino crime family, lay crumpled outside his Staten Island home, pierced by at least six bullets.Hours later, two soldiers in the Gambino family talked on the phone. One of them, Vincent Fiore, said he had just read a "short article" about the "news," according to prosecutors.No tears were shed for their fallen leader. The murder was "a good thing," Fiore, 57, said on the call. The vacuum at the top meant that Andrew Campos, described by authorities as the Gambino captain who ran Fiore's crew, was poised to gain more power.Cali's death was just the beginning of surprises to come for the Gambino family.Last week, federal prosecutors in Brooklyn charged Fiore and 11 others in a sprawling racketeering scheme linked to the Gambinos, once the country's preeminent organized crime dynasty. The charges stemmed from a yearslong investigation involving wiretapped calls, physical surveillance and even listening devices installed inside an office where mob associates worked.As part of the case, the government released a court filing that offered an extremely rare glimpse at the reactions inside a Mafia family to the murder of their boss -- a curious mix of mourning and jockeying for power. The case showed that life in the mob can be just as petty as life in a corporate cubicle."Mob guys are the biggest gossips in the world," said James J. Hunt, the former head of the Drug Enforcement Administration's office in New York. "You think they're tough guys, but they're all looking out for themselves. The only way they get promoted is by a guy dying or going to jail."While Fiore initially plotted how Cali's death would help him and his faction, he adopted a different tone when calling his own ex-wife a few days later, prosecutors said. He warmly referred to Cali as "Frankie" and seemed to mourn the boss as a man who "was loved." He speculated about the killer's motive, saying he had watched the surveillance tape from Cali's home that captured the murder.Vincent Fiore appeared ambitious, court documents showed, eager to reveal his connections to other gangs and organized crime families. About two weeks after Cali's death, Fiore bragged in another wiretapped conversation about how he could take revenge on students who had hit his son at school, a government filing said.Fiore talked first about sending his daughter to beat the students up.But he also had other options, he said on the call. His ex-wife's father was a Latin King, her nephews were Bloods, and her cousin was a member of the Ching-a-Lings, the South Bronx motorcycle gang.Vincent Fiore and the other defendants have each pleaded not guilty to the charges. A lawyer for Fiore did not respond to a request for comment.Despite decades of declining influence in New York City, the Gambino family, led by the notoriously flashy John J. Gotti in the 1980s, is still raking in millions of dollars, according to the government. Prosecutors said they had evidence that the family had maintained its long-standing coziness with the construction industry, infiltrating high-end Manhattan properties.The indictments accused Gambino associates of bribing a real estate executive to skim hundreds of thousands of dollars from New York City construction projects, including the XI, a luxury building with two twisting towers being built along the High Line park in West Chelsea.At the height of their power in the 1980s and early 1990s, the Gambinos and other organized crime families had a stranglehold on New York City construction, through their control of construction unions and the concrete business.Some of the defendants charged last week operated a carpentry company called CWC Contracting Corp., which prosecutors said paid kickbacks to real estate developers in exchange for contracts.Despite the scramble after Cali's death in March, the Gambino crime family continued to thrive through fraud, bribery and extortion, investigators said.The wiretaps quoted in court papers hinted at the crime family's capacity for violence. One of the defendants was recorded in April claiming that he had a fight in a diner and "stabbed the kid, I don't know, 1,000 times with a fork." Inside another defendant's home and vehicle, agents found brass knuckles and a large knife that appeared to have blood on it.Among the notable names in last week's takedown were two longtime Gambino members, Andrew Campos and Richard Martino, who were once considered by Gotti to be rising stars in the Mafia, according to former officials."John was enamored by these guys," said Philip Scala, a retired FBI agent who supervised the squad investigating the Gambino family. "He couldn't believe what they were doing. These kids were making millions of dollars as entrepreneurs."In particular, Martino has long been viewed by mob investigators as somewhat of a white-collar crime genius, former officials said. Prosecutors have previously accused him of orchestrating the largest consumer fraud of the 1990s, which netted close to $1 billion. One part of that scheme involved a fake pornography website that lured users with the promise of a free tour and then charged their credit cards without their knowledge.Campos, 50, and Martino, 60, each pleaded guilty in 2005 to their role in the fraud and served time in federal prison.But as soon as they were released, the government said, they returned to the family business.Martino is now accused of hiding his wealth from the government to avoid paying the full $9.1 million forfeiture from his earlier case.After Martino's release from prison in 2014, he still controlled companies that conducted millions of dollars in transactions, using intermediaries to obscure his involvement, the government alleged. This included investments in pizzerias on Long Island and in Westchester County, according to a person familiar with the matter.Martino's lawyer, Maurice Sercarz, said his client fully paid the required forfeiture before reporting to prison. He added, "The suggestion that Mr. Martino concealed his ownership of businesses and bank accounts to avoid this obligation ignores or misrepresents his financial circumstances."Campos, meanwhile, climbed the ranks to become a captain inside the Gambino family, according to prosecutors.Henry E. Mazurek, a lawyer for Campos, said the government's photos and surveillance footage of his client were not evidence of a crime. "The government presents a trumped-up case that substitutes old lore for actual evidence," Mazurek said.After searching Campos' home in Scarsdale, New York, a wealthy suburb north of New York City, investigators found traces of a storied mob legacy. In his closet there were photos taken during his visits with Martino to see Frank Locascio, Gotti's former consigliere, or counselor, in prison.Locascio is serving a life sentence. He was convicted in 1992 alongside Gotti by the same U.S. attorney's office that brought last week's indictment. Gotti, who died in prison in 2002, was found guilty of, among other things, ordering the killing of Paul Castellano in 1985, the last time a Gambino boss was gunned down in the street.On March 14, the day after Cali's death, Campos drove into Manhattan around 5:50 p.m. to discuss the circumstances of the murder with Gambino family members, seemingly unaware that law enforcement was tracking his every move.He parked near a pizzeria on the Upper East Side, according to a person familiar with the matter. As the night progressed, he met with Gambino family captains on the Upper East Side and near a church in Brooklyn. They stood in the street, chatting openly, but law enforcement officials could not hear the conversations.Several days later, Campos and Fiore drove to Staten Island for a secret meeting. A group of about eight high-level Gambino lieutenants gathered to discuss Cali's murder, a court filing said. In a wiretapped call the next day, Fiore complained that he had stayed out past midnight.Fiore said on the call that a woman had been at Cali's home the night of his death, pointing to her as a possible connection. Court papers do not reveal the woman's identity.Nobody within the mob family seemed to suspect the person who was charged: a 25-year-old who appeared to have no clear motive.This article originally appeared in The New York Times.(C) 2019 The New York Times Company

from Yahoo News - Latest News & Headlines https://ift.tt/2YXIu3L

#A Mobster's Murder #and the Jockeying to Move Up the Hierarchy

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makistar2018 · 6 years

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How to succeed in business by being a Taylor Swift fan

Fandom can be an expensive hobby, but there are also ways to get paid for your time and affection.

By Kaitlyn Tiffany Nov 7, 2018

Taylor Swift’s very popular snake jewelry. Big Machine Records

Twenty-two-year-old financial analyst Zainub Amir moved to New York City from Albany last June, around the time that her Taylor Swift news account @SimplySFans celebrated its seventh birthday on Twitter.

The account has 124,000 followers as of this writing, but when Amir started it at the end of eighth grade, there was almost no demand for it. She was alone on Twitter as a Swiftie, she says, with “maybe 30 other fans.” It’s that early adoption of the platform that she credits with her success, and with her permanent place at the top of the Swift fan account hierarchy — it’s too late for anyone else to get this big.

Now Amir has a full-time job and responsibilities to her employer. Also: responsibilities to the 124,000 people who depend on her for news, as well as the management and tour sponsors and brand partners for the biggest pop star in the world, which regularly ask her for help promoting awards shows, limited-edition Keds, and Swift’s every move.

“It’s hard,” Amir tells me, sitting on a corner sofa in her Midtown office building, after most of the lights have gone down but the granola bar wrappers and Lipton tea bags have yet to be scooped from the floor. “The thing is it’s, like, the same thing as texting someone while you’re at work; you just have to be really fast. The whole point of an update account is getting the news first.”

“EVERYTHING COMES DOWN TO SOMETIMES THE SECOND OR MINUTE YOU POST”

To help, Amir has push notifications set up from fan accounts on Tumblr and Twitter, for Swift’s friends and management and publicity team, and, obviously, for Swift herself, who has made a tentative return to social media in recent months after conspicuously vanishingand deleting thousands of posts last August.

“As soon as she posts, I make sure I put it on Twitter. You just have to be quick about it. After a while, it becomes second nature,” Amir says. She does not use Google Alerts, which are too slow. “Everything comes down to sometimes the second or minute you post.”’

That’s because Amir isn’t alone on Twitter talking about Taylor Swift anymore. There are dozens of update accounts, plenty of fans who are willing to take on the job of fandom as a second full-time position. And Swift is far from the only celebrity who draws this kind of cottage media industry around her.

Last summer, I spoke to 19-year-old Yucatán resident Armin Lizama, who runs one of the biggest Lorde fan accounts on Twitter and regularly helps professional music journalism outlets fact-check fan rumors and news items.

Last spring, Harry Styles fans organized to teach each other how to download VPNs and fake US streams of his first solo single “Sign of the Times,” hoping to game the Billboard charts. One account, @StylesPromoTeam, put out a public application to join them, which was longer than a traditional job application and required applicants to state whether they’d be able to dedicate up to 20 hours per week to the cause. This is just how modern fandom operates.

Most of these fans are not doing it to be compensated, but there is compensation to be found nonetheless — like any account with substantial followings, they can charge for sponsored posts and retweets; like any influencer a brand wants to woo, they can expect gifts and trips and special treatment; like any ambitious young person situated in an economy that celebrates optimizing every moment of your life, they can try to use hundreds of hours of self-managed, largely unpaid “fun” labor as a line item on a résumé.

“I don’t really care about how much money I make with it,” Amir says.

Nevertheless, she’ll readily call her account a business.

And as with any business, there are challenges. One is copyright: “Any time a video goes over 30 seconds and it has music or media, anything from Taylor or any of her sponsors, it usually gets picked up by copyright,” Amir explains. “Same thing with photos that photographers are taking, even if it’s Taylor’s own photographers with Getty Images.” They’ll get flagged and removed, and it only takes six or seven violations to get an account suspended, which is a challenge for accounts updating three or four times a day while an artist is on tour, or dozens of times a night when they’re performing and talking and raking in trophies at an awards show.

“Screen record has become my friend. Mainly when it’s YouTube or DirecTV Now, but I have to be careful, which is why I’ve resorted more to retweeting from the source,” she says. She tries not to push it, usually taking clips of around 10 seconds and asking permission whenever she can.

“You want to grow your reach as much as you can, but is it worth getting that copyright notice at the same time?”

All this is why Amir, like many of the other proprietors of major news accounts, has a separate account just for media, which she’ll retweet into her main account’s feed, giving up maximum engagement on her main page in favor of preserving it.

She’s had to learn how to streamline the process, trying to provide a good product without running herself off the road. “There are all these paparazzi pages you can go on and get the image itself, and then you have to delete the watermark,” she explains. “But it’s not worth [the effort] really, because someone’s just going to post it two seconds faster than you.” She’ll ask permission to repost GIFs and videos from fans at tour shows, but only if she’s sure they’re sharing something Swift hasn’t done before. She’ll engage in trending topics only if she has something to add, an image and a great quote, or a video clip short enough to not get pulled. “Otherwise, I’m better off retweeting from the actual source, even though I’m going to lose engagement.”

She had to figure all this out on her own, since other pages are competitors, jockeying for the same audience and the same engagement.

Swift is counting on her, for real. In 2012, before there were very many other major fan accounts, and before Swift’s team really used or understood Twitter, they asked Amir to be the official promotional account of the Red tour.

When Swift joined her favorite social media platform, Tumblr, in 2014, the account was run by her management and only followed five accounts — all update accounts, and one of them Amir’s. “I posted something about the fall, apple picking or something, and I had no idea anybody was reading it,” Amir recalls. “Taylor reblogged it and it was her first reblog of Tumblr, and she ended up adding this whole paragraph about how she loves the fall. So every fall, late August, September, I get so many notifications because people start reblogging that again and again and again. It’s a ritual.”

Being early to two platforms guaranteed that both Swift and her team would be aware of Amir, which means they regularly come back to her — to include her in special fan activities and to do promotion work. (She’s spent time with Swift in person three times in the past six years.)

“FOR ME, IT’S COMMUNITY FIRST; I DON’T REALLY THINK ABOUT THE MONEY.”

Amir says Swift’s management has a list of popular and reliable update accounts that it gives out to her sponsors and brands regularly dole out exclusive content or giveaway items to her and her update account competitors. Dick Clark Productions, for one, will fly fan account operators to awards shows to post updates live, as well as provide them with a stipend to support a vacation day in Los Angeles afterward.

“Either I get compensated through money or through free items,” Amir says. “Or it’s things like free tickets or perks or just being on the inside or being able to go to a release party. Sometimes it’s not directly money-related, but when it is, it’s per post or how many engagements it gets. That’s why stats or using Twitter analytics is so important — so you can say what your worth is. I’ve had it be $300 for retweeting someone before, because it’s a lot of followers and it’s huge engagement. I think the lowest I’ve done is $50.”

“It’s like another job, basically,” she says. But “it isn’t as stable as people think it is with a fan account like this. For me, it’s community first; I don’t really think about the money.”

Madame Tussauds’ Taylor Swift figure, revealed in 2014. Chelsea Lauren/Getty Images

It’s not all profit. “I bought the [last] album five times without really meaning to,” Amir says when I ask about how much fans typically spend to put their affection into practice.

Swift combated the ongoing industry-wide decline of album sales by selling two versions of a limited-edition magazine to go with Reputation last fall, each going for $20 exclusively at Target and each coming with another copy of the album. Buying extra copies of her album also helped fans improve their place in line in Ticketmaster’s controversial Verified Fan program, which sorted fans into a queue to buy presale tickets to her stadium tour.

“EVERY TIME SHE LETS YOU INTO HER LIFE, IT’S A NEW MARKETING SCHEME, BECAUSE IT’S A NEW PART OF HER LIFE THAT YOU DON’T KNOW”

“You want the magazine because you want to see into Taylor’s life; she had to have two different volumes for some reason,” Amir says. “You want the album for the code to put in your Verified Fan thing; that’s your first incentive. And your second is that you want to read these poems that Taylor never released to the world, or pictures that have never before been seen during her two-year [social media] blackout.” The Reputation merch was “trendier” and more expensive than previous Taylor merch, but “as a fan, you tell yourself that you’re just going to compromise and buy it, and you do it without thinking.”

She says she doesn’t want to criticize anyone, but she noticed that Verified Fan tickets were more expensive than regular sale tickets, and says she paid $160 (plus TicketMaster fees) for a decent seat, electing not to spend the nearly $800 it would cost to be in what Swift called “the Snake Pit” at the front of the stage.

“Every time she lets you into her life, it’s a new marketing scheme, because it’s a new part of her life that you don’t know,” Amir says. But again, none of this is criticism. Why shouldn’t a pop star also be a savvy business manager? Why wouldn’t intimacy with her be commodified? These are not contradictions, Amir argues. It’s also not a contradiction that she loves Taylor Swift and benefits financially from loving Taylor Swift.

Taylor Swift with Australian fans in 2012. Brendon Thorne/Getty Images

Because it involves people, business is almost always personal, but when it involves heroes, it’s even more so.

Amir is Muslim, and she says that made it difficult for her to watch Swift’s quiet refusal to engage with a swirling national debate about basic human rights in the wake of the 2016 election. “I really wanted her to say something, because she does say stuff at her concerts, or to you personally, and she’ll like things on Tumblr.” It’s not as if she didn’t know Swift was on her side. Still, “she never said stuff out there, outside the community, where it makes a difference.”

Swift’s longtime silence on political issues — which ended with an October Instagram postendorsing Democratic candidates for several key midterm election races in her home state of Tennessee, seemingly spurring a massive increase in voter registration in the state — was always in tension with her near-constant willingness to speak up on her own behalf. She has been more publicly involved in her business interests than any artist at her level, championing the 2016 battle against the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, which she argued gave YouTube a free pass on copyright infringement, and sitting at the center of the debate about Spotify (and music streaming payment practices in general) for years.

That’s a chapter she closed (somewhat awkwardly) during the lead-up to the release of Reputation last year, but she is still known for her litigious spirit, which she demonstrates by trademarking the names of her cats, attempting to copyright phrases like “look what you made me do,” and sending cease-and-desist letters to Etsy sellers who put her lyrics on homemade apparel.

In each of these cases, Swift isn’t really doing anything other artists wouldn’t (or don’t) do — but because she’s built a reputation as a ruthless capitalist, further news items that fit that narrative are easy to package. Each time she adds a brand to her portfolio — be it American Express or New York City — it looks cynical.

Amir doesn’t see it that way. Swift “reinvents herself just like companies innovate products, and that’s what keeps things exciting,” she says, swirling Swift’s musical evolution and personal brand metamorphosis and business strategy into one blanket compliment. She would understand, as an aspiring businesswoman who worked at a bank all through college, graduated early, moved to New York after interning at PR firms, was briefly the social media manager for a folk-pop duo, and is now looking for a way to blend financial analysis with the marketing skills she’s been honing since middle school.

“Taylor’s been a huge part of my life and the [fandom] community’s been a huge part of my life,” Amir says. “But you mature after a while; you get older. You can’t take days off work to be at an awards show.”

Vox

#taylor swift #fan account #vox #2018.11.07

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southsidelover · 6 years

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Vixen practice was still a foreign concept to her.

It felt a little bit like dress up, a little bit like preening, from one girl to the rest, all of them left jockeying for some kind of unspoken favour. A hierarchy of female anger that she’d never quite experienced, no Southsider having really pushed themselves into cheerleading. Even now, she only did it to make her newest friend happy, Cheryl Blossom standing at the forefront with her hands upon her hips and a scowl that graced her features as she spouted off about how she was disgusted with them all. It was funny to see her attitude oscillate between the softer girl she was when they hung out, and the anger that she portrayed for the world... thinking that perhaps, they were both her, complexes built upon complexes.

And regardless of the source, it didn’t make practice any easier, groaning as the music was brought to an abrupt stop, hands clapped as they finished a round of stretches to move back to the locker room. “Are you busy after this?” a glance shot the redhead’s way, head tilting just so as she exchanged her practice shorts for a pair of worn and well-loved denims, no need for her fishnets tonight, she had work, and she had a hell of a long shift ahead of her. Fingers left travelling through her pink hair with an unspoken weariness, trying to come to grips, herself, with the sudden force of balancing schedules and after school curriculars... even the play, something that Cheryl and Fangs both convinced her to try out for, was another vampire of her time.

Wishing that instead of work and practice, the two of them could instead grab a burger, could tune out of the frustrating day to day of class and school. A sarcastic little grin curling up on her lips as she shot her a look. “Can’t say I have a ton of time, but I could always use some fun company on the walk to work. What do you say, Blossom? Willing to take a walk through the terrifying Southside with little Toni Topaz?” a chance for them to actually talk instead of the constant back and forth that they currently translated their friendship into. School, practice, school, line reading. There had to be a chance for more, if they gave it a chance.

@cherylblcsscms

#( script ) &&. i write sins not tragedies #( cheryl blossom ) &&. my favorite part #( riverdale ) &&. bittersweet symphony #cherylblcsscms

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jisforjudi · 7 years

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'Queen Victoria always liked sex...' Judi Dench and Stephen Frears on making Victoria and Abdul

Jessamy Calkin

2 SEPTEMBER 2017 • 6:00AM

It was a story that was crying out for a film. Queen Victoria, old, fat, bored, widowed and still grieving, had pretty much given up and was slowly eating herself to death. Her dissolute son Bertie was impatient to get rid of her so he could be crowned Edward VII.

It was 1887, her Golden Jubilee year, and she was bracing herself for the onslaught of tributes and fealty from overseas royalty. Britain had ruled India for the past 29 years and as a gift she was sent two Indian servants, Mohammed Buksh and Abdul Karim. Karim, a clerk at the prison in Agra, was 24. He came over for a couple of months and stayed for a decade.

Initially his duties were as a servant, but after less than a year he had become the ‘Munshi’, the Queen’s teacher (she learnt Hindustani from him) and official Indian clerk. Victoria was Empress of India and fascinated by the country, but had never been there. She became besotted with Abdul: there were daily lessons, a salary increase, portraits commissioned and he introduced her to curry, which became a staple on royal menus.

As her infatuation increased, her family and the Royal household grew increasingly resentful. Racism was fairly endemic at the time, and Karim had started to get a bit uppity. The Queen put him in charge of the Indian servants, gave him his own cottage, shipped his wife and mother-in-law over from India, put him in his own carriage on the royal train, and his father – a medical assistant in the Agra jail – was awarded a knighthood.

Abdul was devoted to her, but hierarchy was everything in those days. There was a rebellion in the Royal household and a stand-off with the Queen. (Even her beloved John Brown, despite his closeness to Victoria, had always remained a servant.)

It was a narrative with a lot of charm but it was bound to end badly. And it did. After Victoria’s death, Karim’s house was raided by Bertie and almost all of the many hundreds of letters from Victoria were destroyed. Karim was packed off back to India, where his health declined and he died eight years later, aged 46.

But no one thought to destroy the Queen’s Hindustani journals, a product of her daily lessons with the Munshi. And when writer Shrabani Basu was researching a book about curry she became curious about its prevalence in the Victorian household, and equally curious about the portraits of the striking Indian courtier in the Durbar Wing at Osborne House.

She discovered that 13 volumes of the Queen’s Hindustani journals were kept in the archives at Windsor Castle, and asked to see them. Then, in Agra, she came upon Abdul Karim’s tomb and tracked down his relatives – which led to the inevitable trunk containing his journals, and a whole new light was thrown on the relationship.

When producer Beeban Kidron heard about Basu’s book on the radio, she couldn’t believe her luck. Cross Street Films, the production company she runs with husband Lee Hall (who wrote Billy Elliot), pitched for the rights and won. ‘We wanted to do it from the point of view of Abdul, the stranger looking at the strangeness of court. And to be funny and accessible,’ says Kidron.

Cross Street teamed up with other production companies, including Working Title, to produce the film. Hall wrote the script and Stephen Frears was asked to direct. ‘He’s brave and irreverent,’ explains Kidron. ‘And I felt he would get the humorous, fable-like take on the subject.’

And Frears, everyone hoped, might bring in Judi Dench to play Victoria. ‘Nobody else made sense,’ he says. They had worked together on Philomena (2013), and Dench had famously played Victoria in John Madden’s Mrs Brown, the 1997 film about her relationship with the Scottish servant (played by Billy Connolly). So it was a nice conceit that, 20 years later, Dench might play her again.

Did her heart sink or leap at the idea? It cautiously leapt, Dame Judi Dench tells me on the phone. For several reasons. ‘I have sometimes been back to re-examine something, but not in film, only in Shakespeare. But I did think Lee’s screenplay was really very good indeed, and I can’t resist Stephen Frears.’ She was riveted by the story, and had already done the homework in her last foray as Victoria.

She cites a particular scene, when, to the consternation of the Royal household, Victoria took Abdul to a remote little house called Glas Allt Shiel, on the Balmoral estate, where she used to retreat with Brown, and to which she said she would never return after he died. ‘They don’t understand anything, those stupid aristocratic fools,’ she says of her family in the film. ‘Toadying around. Jockeying for position… They couldn’t bear me bringing dear John Brown here. Yet I was happier here than anywhere in the entire world. Oh, I miss him, Abdul. And Albert… I am so lonely. Everyone I’ve really loved has died and I just go on and on.

‘No one really knows what it’s like to be Queen. I’m hated by millions of people all over the world. I have had nine children, all vain, and jealous and at loggerheads with each other. And Bertie’s a complete embarrassment. And look at me! A fat, lame, impotent, silly old woman. What is the point, Abdul?’

‘It must have been glorious to have somebody to talk to,’ says Dench now. ‘Somebody to learn from, and to exchange ideas with. And she was proprietorial with him; he kind of belonged to her – I’m sure that just having somebody to relax with must have been wonderful for anyone in that position.’

Abdul is played by Bollywood star Ali Fazal, alongside a stellar theatrical cast: Tim Piggott-Smith, Michael Gambon, Olivia Williams, Paul Higgins, Eddie Izzard – there is even an appearance from Simon Callow as Puccini.

Kidron and Frears headed to India to find Fazal. After the audition, Frears said, ‘I can see Queen Victoria being quite taken with him…’, and Fazal came to the UK for a screen test, his first time in the country. Frears instructed him to watch Peter Sellers in Being There as a reference.

‘I remember reading Victoria’s letters,’ says Fazal on the phone from India, ‘the ones that survived, and being unable to describe their relationship – was it love? Was it intimacy? Was it friendship, or maternal? There were letters she signed as “your loving mother”, or she would say, “I miss my friend,” and on one occasion, “Hold me tight.” Those are strong words for a monarch.’

There was no evidence that their relationship was sexual, but there was a romantic element to it. According to Frears, Victoria liked to be held: ‘Brown would lift her down from the horse and put his arms around her, and she liked that very much.

‘Anyway, she always liked sex. It was just the children she couldn’t stand.’

For all that Abdul was devoted to her, that doesn’t mean he wasn’t a chancer as well. ‘What appealed to him was the intellectual stimulation they shared,’ says Fazal.

‘But there was a manipulative side to him too, and I still believe he was an opportunist, though I think it was called for to be an opportunist in a world that was not yours, in a country that was not yours. You’re going to have to climb up the ladder with constant obstacles and people against you, and it requires a lot of balls to do that; you have to be a bit street-smart.’

One of the best things about the film is the glorious sets. The court routine would be for the Queen and the Royal household to spend the late summer in Scotland, at Balmoral, then return to Windsor for the autumn, and move to Osborne House on the Isle of Wight for the winter and Christmas, then back to Windsor in February.

In the spring there would be a European sojourn – Florence, say, or Nice. The film was shot in India and the UK. Windsor and Balmoral were recreated at Greenwich, Belvoir Castle and Knebworth, but the biggest coup occurred when the film-makers were granted permission to film at Osborne House, which has never happened before.

This was the Queen’s seaside holiday home, which she and Albert acquired in 1840 (and which was given to the nation by Bertie upon her death in 1901), an Italianate house with wonderful gardens. It added a whole new dimension to the film, and the actors were elated to be there.

‘It was glorious to be sitting at a desk and looking out of a window at the same view Victoria would have seen 100 years ago,’ says Dench. ‘Walking down those corridors and glancing about, you think, well the paint might have changed – but it was still really exciting.’

During filming, visitors to the house were treated to an occasional glimpse of Queen Victoria, or Bertie, which must have been surreal. They must have thought they had stumbled across a historical re-enactment, or an amateur pageant, except the actors were Judi Dench and Eddie Izzard, who had nipped down to the Durbar Room in full costume just to have a look.

Paul Higgins, who plays the Queen’s doctor, Sir James Reid, was the only cast member with a build slight enough to wear real Victorian clothing. He relished walking to the set from his hotel every day, taking the old chain ferry and striding up the hill to the unit base in the grounds of Osborne House.

‘I always walked to the house in Victorian clothes much like Reid would have worn, over lawns that he would have walked over as he chatted to the gardeners – he was very interested in gardening. It was such a great way to get into character.’

Alan Macdonald, who worked with Frears on The Queen and several other of his films, was the production designer. ‘Osborne House would have been the most difficult location to recreate because it’s based on an Italian villa, and within it they created a sort of new fashion, which is a departure from the ornate heaviness and subdued nature of Victoriana wallpapers and textiles.

Windsor Castle and Balmoral were tricky enough, but Osborne House is a whole other world that hasn’t really been seen on screen before – the colours are like Neapolitan ice creams and sorbets, and it was all about letting in light.’

A designer’s job, says Macdonald, is to reinforce the narrative tone of the film. ‘It’s not just creating rooms. Finding the location is a challenge, as is finding the furniture, or building a garden in Hampshire – but the real challenge is in creating this sort of jigsaw puzzle, putting all these pieces together, and reflecting some kind of psychological aspect of the story.’

English Heritage was happy to comply, because of the obvious benefits it will reap from tourism. But there were restrictions. ‘We had people from English Heritage saying, “Don’t step there; no, don’t sit there…”’ says Dench. ‘And if you wanted to move your glass slightly to the left, someone would have to put gloves on and move it for you.’

Some of the furniture was very delicate, says Macdonald. Too delicate to sit on. ‘So you might have a scene where 20 people are meant to be sitting in a room but only three people can sit down. So there’s a bit, for example, where Olivia Williams [Lady Churchill, Lady of the Bedchamber and friend to the Queen] looks as if she’s sitting on a chair but, in fact, it’s a sort of crate.’

One of Macdonald’s favourite moments was during an outdoor tea-party scene in Scotland (filmed in a glen where some of The Queen was also shot), in which the Queen and senior members of her household were having a miserable formal picnic at a table buffeted by the wind. A car pulled up during the filming, the door opened and a high-heeled boot poked out. Eddie Izzard.

He wasn’t required on set that day but, says Izzard, he likes to be where the action is. ‘Film is my first love and it was one of the first scenes we shot, and I just wanted to be there – so I drove myself up.’ It was a cold windy day and Izzard lay down in the heather to keep warm.

He looks like Bertie. How did his casting come about? It was the casting director who suggested him, and Frears went to watch him do stand-up. ‘My character’s interesting – very damaged by his upbringing, and his mother blamed him for the death of Albert. But he was the only one who could tell her to f— off really.’

Bertie was one of Karim’s chief detractors. ‘Victoria was on her way out; she’s eating herself to death – she’s going to go in the next couple of years and the throne will be Bertie’s,’ says Izzard. ‘And then suddenly she gets a whole new lease of life; she’s got something to live for. So you can see that Bertie would be pissed off.’

Izzard gained 26lb to play the part, and was given a beard and a cane. He relished working with Frears and was already a friend of Dench, who often goes to see his stand-up shows. Accordingly, he arranged a show to take place in the Isle of Wight during filming, to entertain all the other actors and raise money for charity.

‘It keeps me match fit, and we all had this great sense of community – we’re on the Isle of Wight for a month – so I thought it would be fun for the locals too. It’s like the circus coming to town for one day. Where I grew up, in Bexhill-on-Sea, the circus never came to town. So if I can ever make the circus come to town, that’s such a good thing to do.’

Dench attended this event, and it was if the Queen herself had arrived, says Macdonald. ‘She is perceived as regal, but she’s so warm and open and amusing and irreverent – not grand at all.’

It sounds like a very entertaining film to work on. The principal members of the cast stayed in a small hotel with 12 rooms. There was much playing of Scrabble and other games. And Dench made them all watch University Challenge.

Frears stayed elsewhere. ‘I went to a holiday camp, which I rather preferred, but I could hear their whoops of laughter while I was there. Judi is very good at all that – she’s Brown Owl. She looks after everybody.’

Dr Reid was a key character. He was in permanent attendance to the Queen, seeing her several times a day, and became her trusted companion. He was a Scot who hated Scotland. Higgins read his biography, Ask Sir James, in order to prepare for the role. ‘Apparently he was an exceptional doctor. Unlike some of her other doctors, he really kept up to date. Victoria gave him time off to travel to London and visit hospitals and keep in touch with technology and learning.

‘She came to rely on him and trust him, except when he told her not to eat so much and so quickly. She had a gargantuan appetite.’ (In one scene, Dench had to munch her way through 27 boiled eggs. Everyone was very impressed by this.)

Queen Victoria died in Reid’s arms on 22 January, 1901, at Osborne House. She was 81. ‘She was a monster, but she was also rather brilliant,’ says Frears. ‘I admire her more and more.’

‘I grew up being very sceptical of Victoria,’ says Lee Hall, ‘but when I read more about her, I found she was a much more interesting character than I had assumed and I really fell in love with her. She was more broad-minded than all the people around her.’

After her death, the Munshi was allowed to spend a moment alone with the Queen as she lay in her coffin. Then, on the orders of the King, came the raid on his house and the destruction of the Queen’s letters. He returned to India, and the land that Victoria had given him in Agra, a wealthy and titled man, and according to Basu, spent his last days sitting by the statue of Queen Victoria and watching the sun set over the Taj Mahal.

www.telegraph.co.uk/films/2017/09/02/queen-victoria-always-liked-sex-judi-dench-stephen-frears-making/#comments

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the part that worries me is the sentence One of the best things about the film is the glorious sets. Makes me think it’s going to be a stinker

#judi dench #stephen frears #ali fazal #victoria and abdul #1841 #2sep2017

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ericfruits · 5 years

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Redesigning the corporate office

FOR CENTURIES businesses have settled inside the old walls of the City of London. Its geography is the same. But inside the Square Mile’s temples of commerce the changes have been profound. At the start of the 20th century offices aimed to maximise efficiency by mimicking the factory layout with rows of supervised typists and clerks, as promoted by Frederick Taylor, an early American management consultant. In the 1960s less rigid Bürolandschaft (“office landscaping”) made its way across the Channel from Germany. The 1980s ushered in “cubicle farms”. Today open-plan offices and unassigned “hot desks” aim to flatten hierarchies and increase informality for many of the City’s 400,000-odd whitecollar workers.

A tour of three new offices in London illustrates the latest trends. Around 7,000 investment bankers are moving into the eight-floor, purpose-built European headquarters of Goldman Sachs, which has taken 18 years and £1bn ($1.25bn) to develop. Nearby, a branch of WeWork, a troubled startup (see article), rents out co-working space in an old City pile to 2,300 “members”, each of whom enjoys half the space that Goldman affords, and at a third of the price. Down Threadneedle Street the finishing touches are being put on 22 Bishopsgate, a 62-storey “vertical village” where 12,000 workers will soon reside.

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Room for improvement

What happens in buildings like these matters far beyond their walls. The corporate office is an engine of global growth. Across 40 developed countries some 200m people, one-third of the workforce, toil at a desk. Britain’s desk-bound workers take home 55% of all earnings. Technology and changing work habits are reshaping the life of desk-jockeys in the City and beyond—as well as that of their employers, who manage offices, and landlords, who own them.

Start with the landlords. Modern engineering allows developers to create better, more flexible spaces that tenants increasingly demand. Like everything else these days, buildings brim with technology. The Bishopsgate skyscraper will harvest 1m data points a day, to optimise use of resources such as air-conditioning, and offer glass that dims noise in open-plan offices. Now that lifts and toilets can be located on a building’s periphery rather than its central shaft, entire unobstructed floors are being built. Architects are told to enable staff to mix on floors and between them to foster creative thinking; staircases are now places to meet, not just something you walk down in a fire drill.

This allows developers to offer flexible spaces that tenants can adapt over the course of a 15-year lease. Goldman’s London home—which it developed and then sold and leased back for 25 years—is designed so that some outside walls can be removed and half the space sub-let should it reduce headcount in the event, say, of a chaotic Brexit. At 22 Bishopsgate tenants will have access to 100,000 square feet of flexible space run by Convene, a rival of WeWork.

All this means that landlords should expect to spend more keeping their buildings up to scratch, says Peter Papadakos of Green Street Advisors, a real-estate research firm. This may reduce the rental yield on offices from 5% today to perhaps 4%. More companies are fearful of being locked into new 10-15-year leases at a time when automation and the rise of temporary jobs make it hard to forecast future headcount. Some firms are opting for co-working spaces rather than leasing directly from traditional landlords. Co-working firms now account for about 5% of office space in London and New York. Most of their clients are small businesses. But HSBC, a big bank, will occupy 1,100 desks in WeWork’s new 6,300-desk London branch.

The landlords can still count on the co-working companies themselves to sign long-term leases. But they worry about the prospects for these leaseholders. Trouble at WeWork, which has lost over $2bn since the start of 2018 and is struggling to show it has a viable business model, is adding to the uncertainty. Either way, observes Nick Wright of CBRE, a consultancy, the old landlord-tenant model is being shaken up.

Life is changing for corporate tenants, too. Typically, companies with tens of thousands of employees will own their headquarters and take out leases for branch offices. Over time these obligations are substantial. Among 75 big listed service-sector companies in America and Britain, lease commitments over the next decade or so amount to $146bn. Annual rental costs amount to $5,000 per employee. Absenteeism and the constant flow of people mean that just 40-50% of desks are actively used during working hours. This inefficiency constantly draws bosses to try to save office costs, especially in a downturn, although the reality is that office spending makes up only a tenth of property and headcount costs, with the rest going on workers’ wages. Despina Katsikakis of Cushman & Wakefield, a property consultancy, warns that such stinting by firms can have an adverse effect on the wellbeing of their employees.

To optimise office use without killing morale, Goldman is therefore giving staff at its new London building options about where they work—at unassigned desks, private rooms and informal hangouts. Even the bank’s 100 or so partners now occupy offices that transform into meeting rooms when they are away. Such manoeuvres, the company says, have increased desk occupancy by about 20%. Even in places without 22 Bishopsgate’s anti-din technology, open-plan offices are easier to bear for distractible employees thanks to noise-cancelling headphones. As a result, companies need less space to accommodate the same number of workers.

According to the British Council for Offices, an industry body, space per desk in Britain has fallen by 10% over the past nine years, to ten square metres. “We don’t like the idea of animals in pens, but we’ve been happy to have people in them”, says Sir Stuart Lipton, the developer of 22 Bishopsgate. As companies reach the limits of densification, they must compensate cramped staff—the final group affected by the changing workplace—in other ways. WeWork, whose desks are a third smaller than a typical office worker’s, provides renters with ample space to drink nitro coffee, conduct impromptu meetings or play ping-pong. Offices have traditionally set aside just 3-4% of floor space for such fripperies. Occupiers now expect developers to provide at least double that amount of space. Staff in Bishopsgate have access to a climbing wall on the 25th floor (see picture). Goldman employs “workplace ambassadors” on each floor, who are responsible for staff welfare.

Office improvements are designed to make white-collar employees—and prospective recruits, many of whom expect to be coddled—feel fitter, happier and, employers hope, more productive. About 10% of a firm’s wage bill is lost to sick pay. A Harvard University study demonstrated that improving the quality of air, as Goldman and 22 Bishopsgate do, can boost occupants’ cognitive function. Access to natural light has also been shown to improve productivity. While a study by Andrew Oswald of the University of Warwick finds that productivity increases by 12% when people are happier. Unilever, a consumer-goods company, estimates that $1 invested in its “wellness programmes” returns $2.50 to the company. Goldman says that moving staff into new offices in other countries has improved their employees’ perception of their own productivity (it did not measure actual output).

There is work to be done. A recent worldwide survey of 600,000 office staff by Leesman, a data provider, found that 40% thought their office prevents them from working productively. Hot desks can be a curse (see Bartleby). London’s three new offices are not the last word in workplace management and architecture. But they offer a glimpse of the foreseeable future.■

This article appeared in the Business section of the print edition under the headline "Redesigning the office"

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activitytips · 5 years

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saadullah-faisal-world · 5 years

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celebritygossip-news · 5 years

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A Mobster's Murder, and the Jockeying to Move Up the Hierarchy

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tagamark · 6 years

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Masai Mara Game Report: February 2019

New Post has been published on https://tagasafarisafrica.com/masai-mara-game-report-february-2019/

Masai Mara Game Report: February 2019

Weather and grasslands

February was a dry and dusty month to begin with, strong north easterly winds would blow in the late afternoons. Late in the month on the 23rd and 25th of the month we received some heavy rainfall that had come through from the west side of the Reserve. This weather pattern that is from the west of the Reserve can often be with strong winds. A total rainfall of 81mm was received in the last days of the month. Humidity has fluctuated between 55 – 90%.

The Mara River had dropped to a very low level with many catfish being seen floating down the river and hippo densities were congregating into what was left in the slightly deeper pools. On the 23rd the area received 28mm of rain and this pattern must have affected the north/east areas of where the Mara River starts, because by the 24th of the month the river had risen considerably taking away many of the dead catfish with the flow.

Mara River hippos – photo credit Will Fortescue

Grass levels had started to look very dry and short, and in many areas on the open grasslands, grass levels have been grazed down very low. Since the rain in last few days of the month much had recovered enough to induce a green flush. Water levels in the north of the marsh had also improved with the recent rainfall although lower down the marsh byways are still dry.

On the plains:

Many resident zebra have been seen coming down from the east and congregating on the short grass plains south of the Musiara marsh. Good numbers can be seen on Topi plains, Silanga and Malima Tatu.

Zebra have also been filing down in the west and crossing the river at the main crossing points: there have been some good sightings of zebra crossing and the resident crocodiles were certainly active!

Topi have also been seen starting to congregate and males can be seen ‘rutting’ – west of Topi Plains and Malima Tatu have good sized herds. There are some large herds being seen congregating on posee plains in the south of the Reserve. Some females in these topi herds have given birth and this is considered very early for Topi and completely out of their normal breeding months which is generally September/October – the months that Topi and Coke’s hartebeest calve down. Male Topi form ‘leks’ that they hold and lure females: on lower Paradise Plains there are some small herds with male leks being seen. Topi prefer a good leaf structure and will be seen where the grasses are favorable. Generally speaking, Topi possess one of the most variable social and mating systems of all the antelopes. Coke’s Hartebeest will be seen in smaller herds and the lower reaches of the Bila Shaka is a good place to see Coke hartebeest.

Elephant in the early months of February were plentiful within the marsh; earlier on the Warburgia trees were fruiting which drew them into the camps. Governors’ Camp had good sightings and movements of elephant. A particular recognised breeding herd with many young calves, has been passing through the camp frequently – they appear to like passing through at meal times! Since the rain, elephant seemed to have moved out into the Trans Mara. A male elephant had been seen to collapse and later died in the evening of the 24th near the Double Crossing; the authorities are not sure the cause of death.

Eland are also in small herds yet well scattered across the open plains – they are varied feeders meaning they will graze and browse. Eland are very habituated on the open plains particularly if there is new growth of grass which has come through. The larger of the breeding herds is being seen in the east marsh grasslands – there are some larger dominant bulls seen on their own and not far from these breeding herds. Sexual dimorphism is well expressed in the eland that shows a larger and heavier body, a well pronounced dewlap and a heavy matt of hair on their forehead.

Giraffe are also being seen again whereas in January they were seen less seldom. Masai Giraffe are ‘catholic browsers’ and can travel long distances in search suitable browse fodder, whilst favouring the many acacia species. A bachelor herd of young males were seen for sometime between the camps and along the fringes of the riverine woodlands.

Giraffe being seen along fringes of riverine woodland – photo credit Will Fortescue

Cape buffalo will be seen in large breeding herds and again well spread out here in the Musiara areas; there are two large herds frequently seen – one is near the Bila Shaka riverbed and the other on the west fan of Rhino Ridge. Solitary males are commonly seen within the west marsh between the camps. Hippos have been seen spending more time out of water whilst feeding, or since water levels in the river has receded to such an extent, many hippo and in particular the males are pushed out to seek further refuges. They will rest in deep riverine growth to ward off direct sun as they have no epidermal layer and are sensitive to ultraviolet light. We have also seen some friction and unease between pods in the river: as water levels recede, pods encroach upon one another and this causes aggression between dominant pod males. Hippo fights between one another can result in deep wounds with those large canines that they posses.

Olive baboons are ever present along the riverine fringes of the woodlands, many young infants that have reached about six weeks old have started riding ‘jockey style’ on their mother’s backs. Olive Baboon social behaviour is very much a ‘matrilineal’ society. Within a troop of baboons there is a very complex hierarchy based on mother-daughter lines of descent and male strength. A female baboon is born into whatever rank her mother was – similar to that of a princess becoming a queen like her mother – and a male will establish their place within the troop by fighting one another for dominance. Because of this, female baboons stay in the same troop their whole lives and male baboons will leave the troop when they are mature enough.

Often associated with the hierarchy of Olive baboons are Impala: breeding herds of impala will frequent both woodlands and open ground and males form bachelor herds and will keep to the periphery of larger breeding herds. A fine sight is to see female impala running whilst throwing their hind feet high into the air, this is phenomena know as ‘empty kicking’. It is a spectacular sight expressing energetic enthusiasm. Females or ewes give birth after seven months gestation to a single fawn and then after a week will join the main herd with other fawns. Fawns together form a crèche. A good sized herd of males in varying ages can be seen close to Governors’ Camp in the east marsh grasslands. Unlike other kinds of antelopes, male impalas communicate vocally by ‘roaring’ at a very high volume. With a modified larynx, these roars from dominant males or rams can be heard up to 2 kilometers away, giving them a reputation for being one of the loudest and noisiest ungulates before the breeding season. Male impalas also produce a secretion from a gland on their foreheads to advertise their status to rivals and can be seen rubbing and thrashing their foreheads against brush and bush.

Impala on the Mara plains – photo credit Will Fortescue

Black-backed jackals are evident across all habitats and will be seen in monogamous pairs and also with older pups in tow. While these canids roam the open plains, Thomson Gazelles are also plentiful on the shorter grass plains. Some female gazelles have given birth and Jackals are one of the main predators that hinder the fawns. Grant’s Gazelles are also seen although in smaller herds and in coarse grass areas (they are more of a varied feeder to that of Thomson Gazelles), named after the Scottish explorer Lt Col James Grant in 1860-61.

Warthogs and their piglets are plentiful with lion and leopard feeding of them heavily. Warthogs live in sounders which include their offspring and one or two sows from a previous litter which act as nannies. Boars have started mating; they will be heard and seen chasing sows. The boars sport more warts on the long faces than the sows; these are in fact cartilaginous growths and act as buffers when sparring. Warthogs will also wallow in mud to get rid of insects and to cool down on a hot day. Like pigs, warthogs don’t have sweat glands to cool themselves. Warthogs also have padding on their knees: they kneel down to eat lower grasses and like all ‘suids’, warthogs will also be seen taking rumen contents from the remains of lion and hyena kills from that of herbivores.

Cape Hares are also being seen and can often be spooked as one drives around, although generally nocturnal, spending the day hidden in long grass or under bushes, with their ears laid flat. They are mostly solitary, the young, one or two are born above ground with fur and with their eyes open, compared with rabbits, which are born underground, naked and with their eyes shut. They feed on coarse vegetation, which is cropped close to the ground, leaves, roots, berries and bark. Hares and Rabbits are Coprophagous meaning they re-ingest their first dung pellet. Due to the digestive system of rodents and rabbits, coprophagy is necessary to supply many essential nutrients. Bacterial synthesis of nutrients occurs in the lower gastrointestinal tract in these animals where little absorption is on first ingestion. The eating of their feces later on provides a secondary method for obtaining these nutrients.

Spotted hyenas are still very prominent and in large clan numbers, the east marsh and Olare Orok areas have large numbers of Hyena, there is a den here with young cubs of varying ages. Spotted Hyena competes heavily with the resident lion prides. They scavenge and are completive predators that run their prey down similar to that of wolves and dogs, a large heart gives way to great stamina.

Larger Cats:

Lion:

Marsh lioness are nine in total now: Yaya, Spot, Dada, Kito, Rembo, Kabibi, Little Red and two of Yaya’s sub-adult females. Spot has two cubs – a male and female that are six months old and unfortunately Little Red lost her one cub – we are not sure what happened. Very sadly, Yaya lost her two cubs in January, it has latterly been reported that they were killed by two of the Paradise Pride lionesses, and not the male lion ‘Chongo’ that was originally suspected.

Rembo and Kabibi who are in the west marsh woodlands have four cubs between them; three are to Kabibi and one to Rembo – these cubs are three months old. Later in the month they have all moved to the Bila Shaka river bed area. Lioness Dada is still in the west marsh woodlands and is with lioness Kito; they have six tiny cubs between them. Kito’s cubs are estimated at about one month old, they have been hiding in a fallen tree – she has not taken them out yet. Dada’s cubs are now two months old. Unfortunately some aggressive baboons have pulled the tails off two of them – which is most likely the reason they have been undercover for so long. They have been feeding off zebra, buffalo, Topi and warthog.

Rembo & Kabibi with cubs – photo credit Moses Manduku

Dada and Kitos tiny cubs of which there are six in total – photo credit Moses Manduku

The six male lion coalition reside and monitor much of the east marsh, Bila Shaka and Topi Plains areas. ‘Chongo’ the male is more often seen in the Bila Shaka river bed. These six males have sired the cubs of the Marsh Pride lionesses; the most dominant of the six males, ‘Baba Yao’, has also sired the majority of the cubs to the Madomo/Ridge Pride and he is often seen with these females. On the 27th February, in the Bila Shaka area – Chongo the male was seen feeding off the remains of a Topi, which was most likely to have been killed by lioness Little Red.

The Madomo/Ridge Pride has five lionesses, two 2-month old cubs and also two sub-adult lionesses. They are being seen hunting and residing on Topi Plains and will also hunt in upper areas of the Olare Orok River. Earlier on in February they were seen hunting as far as the east Musiara grassland plains; this is a very active pride and has grown from three lionesses to a total of 19 members in just three years by two males – Lipstick and Blackie – both of which have now gone. Many of the older cubs have now left and ventured out of the Musiara area.

Leopard:

The female leopard Saba of the Olare Orok has two young cubs estimated at three months old. She is being seen very often hunting Impala, Thomson and warthog piglets. Her previous offspring who is 22 months old is also being seen in her home range.

Romi the female leopard has two cubs that are estimated at 7 months old – she is being seen frequently too and latterly she was seen hunting in the lower Bila Shaka river bed areas. This is a long haul from her normal haunts of the BBC campsite and woodland areas of the north marsh.

Female leopard Romi relaxing right outside Little Governors’ Camp – photo credit Will Fortescue

The female leopard Siri with her male sub-adult cub, is often being seen near the Chinese hill and also within the Serena pump house area of the Mara River. The male sub-adult cub is sixteen months old now so he should be old enough to leave his maternal mother and start life on his own soon. This male sub-adult is being seen more often on his own.

The large male leopard of the lower crossing area has been seen again, he has been named ‘Sujaa’ by the local guides, and during the migration of some years ago he had stashed over five yearling wildebeest into a Boscia tree by the cul-de-sac crossing points!

Leopard sighting near Governors’ Camp – photo credit Will Fortescue

Cheetah:

The five male cheetahs are still being monitored and seen in Hammerkop grasslands in the southern reserve; they also will cover large distances and can be seen in a few days as far as the Talek River and double crossing. They have been feeding off Impala, Thomson, young Topi and zebra foals and yearlings.

A single male has been seen hunting in the East marsh grasslands, the southern Bila Shaka area and also recently within the west marsh grasslands. He was seen recently near the ‘Lake Nakuru’ area.

Imani the female with three cubs estimated at nine months old has been seen earlier on in the month in the east side of the Murram pits and deep into the Olare Orok Conservancy, but she has been seldom seen by camp guides recently.

A single female is also being seen more and more: she has been sighted on Rhino Ridge and also near the Double Crossing. There are many Thomson gazelles and their young fawns here on these open grasslands. She has been seen latterly many times near the Double Crossing on the Olare Orok side in last week of the month.

There was a single male cheetah being seen on Paradise Plains and also in the lower Bila Shaka river bed, latterly he had moved again to the upper Talek area and has been seen to cross the Talek river and hunt in the southern reserve on the posee plains.

Mara Game Report by Patrick Reynolds

Post courtesy of Governors Camps

African Safaris by the Pioneers who Live in Africa

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