#because people can actually build functioning communities in times of crisis rather than just turn on each other

[makingspiritualityreal]

Numerology Life Path 22 - Your Birth Card and its Ruling Planet

Numerology Life Path Numbers and their assigned Tarot Card Meaning Series - Master Number Edition

This is a post in my new astrology/numerology/tarot series, that only concerns you, if you are a Life Path 22. Originally, I wanted to do them all in one post, but my writing turned out to be so long, I decided to split the post and seperate the Life Path Numbers. The introduction part of the post will be the same for all Life Path Numbers, in case you only read a post about your own Life Path Number, and nothing else.

Introduction

The concept of a Birth Card links Tarot and Numerology together, in order to deepen our understanding of a vibration of a Life Path Number we are born with. The Birth Card, or rather Birth Cards, are Major Arcana Tarot Cards with assigned numbers, which correlate with Life Path Numbers. Understanding the meaning of tarot cards, mixed with the knowledge of Numerology Vibrations, helps create a more unique vision of your life experience. A person with any given Life Path Number, having several Major Arcana energies present in their lives, usually struggles with one of the energies more than the other. As a result, life will probably force them to focus on mastering one of these energies. In general, however, any Life Path describes both your biggest downfall and ultimate triumph - just like with an Astrology Chart, the highlighted numbers/astrology houses point to your biggest strengths and weaknesses. For a better understanding of this concept, visit my article “Natal Chart - A map of your issues?” Remember, that everyone, besides their Life Path Number and Birth Card also has a unique astrology chart. Thus, for some people embracing the higher expression of their energy is easier, for others it’s harder and it takes more time to master, and some energies become easier to deal with than others. Most human beings are somewhere in between, working on their path and having some achievements while struggling with difficulties at the same time. In the spiritual community, there are differences in opinion on linking Astrological Planets and positions to specific numerology numbers energies. My take is a result of my own personal experience, conversations with other people in my field and research, in order to give you the widest possible spectrum of ideas and increase the understanding of every Life Path Number. Even If you have only a basic understanding of Astrology, Tarot or Numerology, this post will still be helpful to you, because it describes the unique vibrational mix that comes from the expression of both these spiritual sciences mixed together. To calculate which Tarot Cards and what Life Path correspond to your birthday, click here.

Life Path 22 - The Caring Master Builder

The vibration of a Life Path 22 blends within the energies of the 2 and the 4. This makes it a very sensitive, yet energetically heavy combination due to the mixed influence of the Moon, Saturn and Rahu. Early on in life, this Life Path exists in a state of constant struggle between the mind and the heart, fighting between their compulsive urge for practicality and extreme sensitivity. They can be emotionally unstable or drained, depressed, frustrated and compulsively attending to the same, mundane tasks to regain the feeling of control. That dynamic takes time to get a hold of due to the extremely contradictory planetary energies. The energy of the Moon is sensitive and caring, the energy of Saturn is strict, practical and grounded. It is a difficult task to provide for oneself both the internal high standard, that exists with Saturn, and the gentle touch that the Moon needs to function. The additional energies of Rahu can give this Life Path a very compulsive mind, as Rahu continuously desires to move forward with new details, which throws an extra spark of anxiety on the already fragile mind of a 22 vibration, if that progress can't be provided.

Life Path 11 and Life Path 22 share the intensity of the 2 vibration, however the 2 is more pronounced in the 22 Path, being doubled.

That makes a Life Path 22 struggle on a higher level with independence and extreme emotional volatility. While an 11 in crisis tends to shut down internally and downplay their uniqueness in order to be accepted externally, they don't really let anyone in as they are in self-protection mode, as they are fundamentally self-directed. A 22 however, lacks that self-direction, because they have a different mission in this incarnation. As a result, when distressed a 22 latches on to the nearest energetic source for survival, entangling it and integrating itself into their being. The result of this tendency depends entirely on the environment, that a Life Path 22 finds themselves in.

That is why working for a community is a must for a Life Path 22. The intense, Moon ruled energies of a double 2 need a big, energetic outlet that a group provides, and in the framework of a group they can practice, master, share and unleash their 4 vibration, becoming an invaluable asset to any community they are a part of. A group also fulfils their need for emotional belonging. If too isolated, 22s tend to fall into abusive relationships, due to their deep need to be surrounded by and connected to external energy. Out of desperation to have their energetic needs fulfilled, they can become very toxic and clingy, because unlike the 11, the 22 doesn't have the 1 vibration that forces them to work on their individual self expression. The double 2 creates an extreme danger of putting themselves in the victim position, yet at the same time tying themselves to another willingly out of a sense of survival. A 22 vibration has a very deep need for a solid emotional structure, and the threat of having this structure removed threatens their need for stability, which can make them hold on even tighter even to the most toxic partnership. That type of partnership sucking the energy out of them prevents them from developing the positive 4 qualities, which is innovative, practical achievements. Living in a larger community prevents a Life Path 22 from entering this dynamic. Due to connections formed with many people, the setting disperses the overly intense 2 energy among the crowd and gives this Life Path a sense of safety that they so desire, which creates a good environment for their work.

It is equally important for a Life Path 22 to avoid toxic situations as it is not to demonise their needs and emotions. While it may be difficult to handle a Master Number energy in human society for all Master Vibrations, the needs of this Life Path exist to be fulfilled, just like with everybody else. This Master Number is at most risk to try to deny their sensitivity and emotional needs due to being influenced by the 4 vibration. While an 11 is the most likely to hide with their self expression externally, they understand their needs on a deeper level internally and guard them, and the risk of shutdown doesn't eliminate their acute subconscious self-awareness. A 22 however, can completely push out their needs and desires due to their conflicting desire for practicality, progress and material results. That puts them into a negative expression of the 4 vibration, which is a cliché of a dry, uninspired workaholic who feels empty on the inside and compensates it with practical perfectionism. However, since emotional nurturing is what actually drives this Life Path in life, they can't hold on to this perfectionism for too long, and this dynamic eventually leads them to a burnout, when in the tired state they shut down even from their 4 vibration and they are not capable of producing practical results.

To find out about the birth cards associated with a Life Path 22 Vibration, read my writing on Life Path 2 and Life Path 4, as all those tarot cards will be applicable.

The key word for a Life Path 22 is Balanced. This vibration out of all numbers possesses the most potential to create and nurture an extremely abundant, tangible energy, both from a material and emotional standpoint, however this cannot be accessed without internal balancing of an unstable psychological makeup. This combination can produce an expert, who possesses deep knowledge with a high attention to detail, yet is still sovereign and connected to their heart space. This is a vibration of a scientist, that hasn't lost his compassion and can connect both to their mind and their heart. A mature Life Path 22 uses their skills for physical survival, without closing off their heart, or falling into the other extreme of being emotionally overwhelmed and uninspired. No other Life Path has such a unique skill for community building and providing. This is the additional energy that is produced in this Master Number, that differs from a singular 2 or 4 vibration. A mature Life Path 22 is a rock for the network of connections that they have build, which in turn allows them to thrive within this network and continue developing and sharing their skills.

[bakubabes-and-ramble]

Headcanon: The Gundalian culture is based on individualism, the Neathian culture is based on collectivism

Race interpretation part one: Neathia

Summary: The Neathian culture is built on the core values of communities and collective thinking. While conformity within the society is of a high level, they pursue a 'closed gate' diplomacy towards other races - resulting in a 'bubble' phenomenon and becoming vulnerable to losing their sense of belonging. Centralised urban system, with regional reciprocity and redistribution, whereby the Queen plays a coordinator role, and exists as a unifying symbol along with the military.

(Wall-of-text warning ; with block-breaker illustrations, but a huge amount of information ahead.)

Okay, this topic is something I was thinking about for a long time, and I finally hit the point to collect my thoughts and write them down. I've seen a lot of people trying to build up/further and enrich the cultural and social-political features of the alien races we've seen in the series (namely Vestals, Neathians and Gundalians), and I felt some inspiration to put my take on these things into words.

It's not only intriguing to try one's hand on the world-further-building, but I felt, I have to explain how I imagine the build-up of the Neathian and Gundalian culture and society to make the story of the 'Neathian Special Squad' ('NSS') more understandable 'symbolically' and from the aspect of a 'cultural clash'. /For those, who follow the NSS: This is something that definitely happens later on, you just don't know about it yet./

I have to put a small disclaimer here: This entire piece of writing was conspired out of fun and passion towards the series. It was not meant to be a 100% professor approved scientific research, but a seemingly logical untangling of my personal train of thoughts concerning the fantasy creatures of the third season. And this means, there is going to be some personal opinion mixed in as well (especially at the rewriting parts).

I wish the readers to enjoy reading it regardless. You are always free to disagree or not to take it seriously. :) To me, headcanonizing and imagining things always meant to be fun.

Side note: I'll add canon elements as examples or refer to the events of Gundalian Invaders, although I have to admit, I'll do this mostly from memory. So If I get anything wrong, or just remember incorrectly, you are welcome to add-in or correct me! :)

Season: Bakugan: Gundalian Invaders (and Mechtanium Surge)

Language: English dub

Okay, let's go!

Gundalian Invaders - Slightly rewritten

The first and foremost reason I actually started writing this post, is because I had some issues with the characterisation of the Gundalians and Neathians in the third season. One side is depicted blatantly, purposelessly and one-dimensionally evil, while the other is portrayed to be the goodie-two-shoes victims with no backlashes. I wanted to swing over this simplicity and make an attempt at explaining, how I imagined these races to function. These interpretations were explored with the intention of both keeping the main features of the races, staying canon-compliant where possible, but change canon elements/propose ideas to turn the races into interesting (and on a theoretical level functioning) societies.

For these added or assumed ideas to work, some lore elements have to be changed or removed: For example the way Bakugan got to be on the planets. For this explanation see: a further point below.

This post discusses only Neathia for now. (Gundalia will probably get it's own post, as there is much more canon-divergence to be talked about.)

Neathians

1. The beginnings and core values

Due to the power of the Sacred Orb, almost the entire planet have relished in a lush fertility since the beginnings. (And this is why there are huge plants in their jungles. The wildlife also experienced a great upsurge by the life-force of the Orb.) This prosperity quickly enabled the Neathian race to organize into a peaceful and sharing society, because the wars over resources became redundant and unnecessary. The established racial mindset reallocated the focus from the individual needs to the communal efforts, and gives a ground for the Neathian values and collective thinking up to even the days of the season.

Neathians think mainly in groups: Let those be pairs (e.g. Fabia and Jin as fiancés; Linus and Neo Zipperator as brawling partners), teams (Neathian Special Squad; Friendship circles), communities (Castle Knights), and the biggest of them all, their entire race. These are all bigger or smaller communities within communities, and they play a major role in how Neathians perceive the world and themselves. Being in these relationship structures defines their place, grants them their basic mental frame, which they are able to think in, and not only their resources, but also their goals are shared with each other. This kind of goal assimilation is what makes them really efficient team players, and also provides them a strong social support from a mentalhygiene perspective. This important role of the sense of belonging makes Neathians both empowered while being in close social constructs , and extremely susceptible to losing these connections.

Thinking like this, when Fabia lost her fiancè or Linus lost Neo, their grief extended further than their deaths or the traumatic events. Losing strong bonds like these put Neathians in a technical identity crisis, as it is a part of their personal perception and mental frame which were dismantled through these events. We have seen Fabia going to extremes to retrieve Aranaut - and to retrieve that part of her, which was lost with Jin. Just as when Rubanoid was handed to Linus, a new connection was formed to either replace or continue the old one in a different form. Fabia's communal bonds were successfully restored, when she also became a member of the brawlers.

The Neathian society is based on caring and cooperation to achieve a collective well-being. This is why communities play such a major role in their self-perception and world-perception.

2. Open-sources, but enclosed diplomacy

For most part, I've always imagined the Neathian race as an although proud and generous, but closed society. They share commodities with each other - within their society -, but it is very important, that only within it. The outside world (meaning outside of their habited planet) is fundamentally shut out of these transactions.

I often refer to this phenomenon of enclosedeness as the 'Neathian bubble':

Not only their mindset operates in closed communities, but their diplomacy too. They are generally passive towards other races, missing trust and a reason to pick up the communication /Up until the Gundalians came and the war started/. This perspective could be applied to understand, why could they be more insistent on and better at operating defensive mechanisms (layered shield generator), than initiating communication with the rest of the universe (Unlike Gundalians, Neathians have no ships or bigger means of transportation. Yes, teleportation is accessible for them, but I don't think they use it that often outside of Neathia.)

I treat this as an explanation for why Neathia had only asked for outside help after the second shield generator went down - the situation became desperate and already being involved in the conflict, it was time to try and reach out for aid. According to these headcanons, I also think, Serena wasn't putting - or at least shouldn't have put - faith in the Brawlers so easily. The reason they weren't tested to prove their trustworthiness further than one question, is because she trusted Fabia's judgement. Without the support of a Neathian, outlanders are almost automatically dismissed. Their (or their Queen's) empathy and compassion may overwrite this code, but even by then they have to be made certain by proving the cause.

Just as when Fabia accepted Ren, because she had seen how much he tried to prove himself. Winning Neathians’ trust is supposed to be a big and determining moment, because they ‘internalise’ you into their scoiety.

Neathians are capable of empathy and kindness (this is something they actively practice among each other), even towards outsiders, they just need time and proof to accept them. Trust is just not automatic towards them, and even so they keep their distance until they get used to it.

3. Personal paralel counterparts - Night elves and the Highborne of WoW

When I think about Neathians, I often put them into paralel with the Night elves and the Highborne from World of Warcraft. For most part, I use their artistic motives, architecture, fashion and cultural approach as an inspiration for Neathians, as they are recognised as 'The pretty space elves' in my book too.

Beside the above mentioned, what could be imported from their WoW counterparts is a rather matriarchal social apparat. For example, Neathians traditionally having a Queen, and women being present in the military or in higher positions, playing important roles. //Just as by the Night elves leadership, religious and military roles being traditionally occupied by women (priestesses, wardens, sentinels).//

Another elven impression, which is more or less universal, is their sense of pride (I like to say it as the expression of 'Neathian pride '). Highborne in World of Warcraft are a quite prestigious race and are usually said to be a little 'aristocratic'. I can imagine the Neathians being lightly less, but somewhat similar on these terms, when it comes down to interacting with their own or other races: For example being proud of their appearance (Emphasizing their unique V-shaped forehead with adequate clothing and accessories), structuring buildings and constructs based on aesthetic instead of real functionality (using diamond as the main material of construction, structuring buildings with elegant but futuristic shapes), or being confident and showing immovable standing and opinion on things (towards outsiders).

As far as I know, the Warcraft elves used to be similarly passive and uninitiative - even mistrusting - towards other races too. And in this, it played part, that they also had exclusive access to a powerful source of power and prosperity, the Well of Eternity (an almost one-on-one counterpart to the Sacred Orb).

While the half-tribal connections of the Night elves derive from their ancient bonds with nature and druidism, the Neathian society feels more likely being based on a futuristic envisionment of these social relations. A civilisation that perfectly blends technology (teleportation technology, communication devices) with classic fantasy elements (knights), while still remaining tribal in the core (shared communality is just put into a modern environment). /Although I like to lean more into the fantasy setting, the technical advancement is undeniable there./

4. Overall economy

If we wanted to negotiate about their economy, I would say reciprocity and localised redistribution are the dominant mechanisms of it. The basic definition of economy builds on the premise of distribution of scarce resources. In this case, resources are not scarce, in fact, due to the Orb they are very much prosperous and renewing. This accessibility discounts the value of the traditional market trading, and supports the establishment of semi-centralised recollection and redistribution. The semi-centralisation here means regional production and consumption, whereby the accomodation of the population happens mainly territorialy, but these regional centres still have a connection to each other and the capitol. This economy is based on caring and well-being, and the high level of conformity and trust within the collective society results in a lack of currency usage (so, my headcanon is basically, that they don't use money).

5. Urbanisation and territorial layout

The reason we talk about a more physical apsect of the planets, is because the core values of the races both play a role, and mutually affect how I imagine their civilised hubs being developed. Communities form hubs and cities with strong connections - just like their society!

When I mentioned localised redistribution, I was also refering to the urban structure of the Neathian planet. Important to note, that Neathia is not just a city, or a country - just like Gundalia, it's the entire planet. What we've seen in the show is the capital of their urban system - which makes sense to be technically built around / in the immediate enclosure of the Sacred Orb, for it's the source of the relishing power. Assuming this, along the capital there could be a centralised territorial layout with rural areas (cities, villages), and untouched wilderness (due to the overflourishing flora and fauna; the urbanisation doesn't affect the entirety of the planet, there are a lot of uninhabited/uncharted areas).

Here is a simple schematic illustration of the above.

The rural hubs not having physical connection with other centres due to the dangerous and untamable wilderness (see: Giant plants in the show) could have lead to the advancement of the teleportation technology. The cities are connected through this port-system, and also with the capital, which serves as the centre of the network.

6. The role of the queen and the military

The main purpose of the current Queen is an overall governance with the direct help of a council consisting of the local leaders of the hubs. The queen bears not only a political, but a symbolical importance to the people. The concept of the Queen is a unifying symbol, someone who watches over the nation. The Neathians can stand behind her and being represented by her. But it's important to note, that her status is not as glorified as to be a despotic being, and her power is not extending much further than overall policies, diplomatic representation and helping the transactions of the local leaderships. There is much more power and independence shifted into the regional governance, rendering the Queen's position to be an effective coordinator between them and unifier, who keeps the nation together. /Still thinking about the way the queen is chosen/comes to the throne, but I had the idea of the next Queen being elected by the current Queen, so the order of succession is not based on the Queen’s family, nor being a community vote of the people./

The peace-oriented existence in itself doesn't require a military to exists, therefore I treat the Castle Knights as a mainly defensive organisation. This military serves as Neathia's defenders, bearing symbolic and community building purposes. Among the Castle Knights - just as the name itself suggests - the traditional medieval knight values show up primarily, such as loyality, humility, courage, faithfulness and the act of mercy. In their comprehension, being a Castle Knight is an act of service towards their country and the Queen, and is not mainly for warfare reasons. (To some extent, I assume martial arts and other forms of fighting - even brawling - is essentially a spiritual activity, which they pursue in order to keep their inner- and physical balance.)

As we've seen it the show, I assume the Palace also functions as the military's operation base. The head of the military is the current commander (formerly Jin, recently Elright), and under them operate several divisions with captains as division leaders. The separate divisions are Physical Fighting (both with weapon, like those defensive shock-sticks the guards are using - formerly offensive melee weapons until the fall of NSS - and hand-to-hand combat, e.g. used by Fabia), Technical staff (operating the shield generators and overseeing their areas) and Bakugan Brawling (this headcanon part is still under construction, but Elright used to be the former leader of this, and the reason he was promoted to commander after Jin’s death, is because the Neathians' realisation of the war swinging in favor of the Bakugan fights, so it was logical to put him as the next 'general leader'). /There may be other divisions outside of these, I just put out some ideas here./  Every guard receives education to some extent in all of these fields, but they end up specialising in something.

//The Neathian Special Squad (NSS) had it’s own divison under Captain Pyrehart, they were a special strike team with a unusual task: Staggering, forcing back or just divide the Gundalian leadership’s attention from focusing on their assault. Basically poking them with melee weapons until they either go away, or can’t concentrate on helping their Bakugan on the field and their monsters get defeated. According to the story - made up by me of course - after a tragedic mission this unit wasn’t restored, and the war effort shifted onto long-range fighting with Bakugan, Gear and Bakugan Assaults.//

7. So...where are the Bakugan?

They have been mentioned here and there, but I'm sure, whoever made it this far into this theorising information dump, may wonder at this point: 'But what about the Bakugan?'

My simplest answer is, that I firmly want to believe, both Gundalia and Neathia had a civilised and established culture before the Bakugan appeared there.

According to the original lore, Bakugan existed on the planets since almost the beginnings. Now, this is part of those lore bits I would definitively change during a rewrite: I want to believe, Bakugan only appeared in their very recent history, almost as recently, as on Earth and Vestal itself.

Perhaps a Bakugan lore- and GI rewrite explanation deserved it's own post, but for the further understanding allow me to explain here a little: A similar event of raining cards - what the first season started with - occured on Neathia and Gundalia too, caused by the dimensional boom of Michael Gehabich and his transporter. The twist on this - and the effective solution to the problem of possible timeline inconsistencies - is that although the explosion caused this interference at one point in time, across cosmos and universes time flows differently. So technicaly the result of it - the raining cards and Bakugan being transported into the particular worlds - could happen at different point of their relative times - even years earlier or later! On Neathia and Gundalia it could happened a few years before on Earth, which covers most of the questions of the timeline-consistency /such as Ren being assigned to watch over Linehalt as a child etc./

Bakugan coming to these places has only an added effect: Just as on Earth, they are not (yet?) integrated into the society and culture of the planets so deeply to be any kind of pillar of their existence or basic civilisation. There could be a start (as having specialised researches, technology revolving around Bakugan, taking part in the war,..) regarding this internalisation process, but it still runs on the surface, and not in the 'veins' of the culture.

I hope this breakdown made sense in some form or another. I just felt an urge to pour out the content of my head. Looking back,this became longer and more detailed, than I originally intended, while also surely missing things because there is no worldbuilding without holes or further questions. The attempt to lay down the basics was made regardless haha!

As always, feel free to disagree and follow your own visions concerning the races and worldbuilding. :) This post was made to reflect back my personal interpretation of Neathians - just for fun and thinking out loud.

For the very end, I leave a disclamer here, which was supposed to go at the beginning, but it felt redundant to put there, so here it is:

I tried to approach it from a more sociological side, as focusing on a bigger, overall picture, common features, than create exact statements. (I would rather call this a speculation regarding the features of the races themselves, their core values, common attitudes, mindset - and this doesn't mean other questions are fully out of the picture. We are just discussing things, which can be derived from the features of the society itself, and make up a more or less coherent chain of thought for now. Other 'for fun' or miscellaneous headcanons, like fashion or physical traits will be covered another time.)

Thank you for coming to this TED mambling!

[limelocked]

Sundial blurbs

So most of my part of the Sundial au has been locked into general au chat on our server in the form of joking, theorising and sometimes writing as much as the discord character limit allows me to. I did the two first blurbs in this post today and @pomodoko commanded i actually post it and tag them so here they are, sorted into story chronological order and not the order in which i wrote them

Also this is the link to the document with general information on the AU

--- Dreams POV, the inciting incident

1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8- NINE It has been ten seconds since Fundy landed at the bottom of the stairs at the lowest level of the building, there had been a noticeable thud that sounded distinctly unpleasant but Dream hadn't picked up on any cracking noise that'd indicate broken bones. Not that it'd be easy to hear over the commotion that led to later events.

Because it'd been seven seconds since Techno had lost his balance because of the falling fox mentioned and seven seconds since he stood back straight, almost brushing against Wilburs taller frame. It had only been five short seconds, that might have felt like weeks to others, since Wilbur in turn furrowed his brow and geared up for retaliation. Four seconds ago techno had been pushed. Three, Wilbur had gone into the wrong portal. Two, Philza had with Fundy still leaning on his shoulder tried to stop them both. One, they were gone.

It was surreal. The room had been filled with chatter before the fight, louder during the fight and now it was quiet. One second in the future, after it had all happened, the silence broke by no one who had seen it happen but by Tommy, babbling on about something with Fundy that didn't matter to anyone but himself. He quieted down when the person he was intending to talk to was nowhere to be found, confused. "Where'd Fundy go?"

"He and Wilbur already went through" the lack of effort it took for Dream to bend that truth would be concerning if not for his record, and technically they already had. "Oh-" an unsatisfactory answer but not one that would send him towards the throat of Noxite. "You can just talk to them back home. Come on." The portal after the hermits was supposed to be theirs, something quickly confirmed as they enter the community house with a crisis averted, or rather pushed back until a later date, and two people lost to another server.

--- Omniscient/Unknown POV, the dreamsmp aftermath

un, deux, trois, quatre, cinq, six, sept, huit, neuf... sept, huit, neuf... sept, huit... Seven hours later was when the lie couldn't hold anymore. Tommy already didn't trust Dream much but Tubbo had been a help in convincing him that Wilbur and Fundy were just away building or something. But the truth comes eventually. He sent a clear message of; <TommyInnIt> stop lying to me

Hour eight was the worst, accusations being thrown and swords being drawn. Screaming and explanations that never really felt enough. The ninth hour was bad in another way, depressing. Tommy's anger had simmered into bargaining as if Dream, George or Tubbo had the power to do anything of substance. It never got to begging, Tommy's pride forbade that but the things he put on the line for help that he couldn't get made it almost seem like it.

Noxcrew was contacted and they confirmed that the hemits had talked to them about the guests. Solutions were suggested and just as quickly rebuffed. Hour ten was a loss and the eleventh hour was one where Tommy and Tubbo got to speak alone.

"Can't you just use your powers or whatever to make the portals take us to hermitcraft" he was exhausted. "It doesn't work like that, probably, and Noxite has probably already tried it" "Yeah but Tubbo could you do it?" "I mean... maybe?" To that something glinted in Tommys eye, hope that Tubbo didn't want to extinguish as fast as it needed to be. "But I'm not allowed into the MCC world anyways so it wouldn't work" "FUCKING CHRIST TUBBO everyone here's useless!"

--- Technos POV, first night on hermitcraft

It's the first night and bones tower above him.

There were other buildings around, and the area was lit up well but eyes followed him from the darkness, eying the stone tools he'd manage to scrape up while leaving the group now probably settled in a warm house far away. This world scared him, the monsters and the way his sword hit differently, and the fact that the air itself felt new.

A pair of eyes glowed at him from it's place under one of the ribs of a beast too huge to want to think about. Techno readied his sword, but the dog decided that it'd rather go back to sleep. This world scared him and he just knew he'd gotten lost now because his goal had been to retrace his steps, the path that Xisuma and Bdoubleo had shown them to the little village far away by boat, to find the house cleft in two and then head straight out to sea until he could find a better place to stay than the tension thick cabin that their hosts had suggested.

Another dog offered a quiet bark in his direction and with an embarrassed sssh, covering fright, he continued forward. He had found the water, true, and he remembered something vague about a neighbour... but... No. No he decided that he'd choose a direction and if there weren't any light he'd just have to turn around or dock and make a little cave to live out of. It wouldn't be glorious but neither is 5 million potatoes.

A boat is placed into the water at the straight of Joebralta and a pig starts to row.

Clang. He is confused. The boat shakes in the middle of open water, he's been turned around. Clang. A trident, something he's only really seen in Skyblockle, shoots into the air a meter to the right of his boat. He speeds up. Clang. It misses, but he has decided that the sea is no longer safe.

--- Technos and Ethos POV, the first days in hermitcraft

He's starting to feel bad for leaving. Still justified, but also bad. He felt horrible the instant the championship room disappeared from right in front of his eyes with Wilbur still in it, and still worse when Wilbur then Phil and Fundy appeared next to him in this world, all statues as unseen confused messages fill the communicators of the worlds inhabitants.

When they arrived he was surprised that a lot of the hermits knew about them, or at least him, from the returning cast of hermits that played in MCC and their apparent tendency to tell stories as soon as there was space for it. It'd made it less awkward but the looks from the others stopped him from talking much about his side of the tournaments.

This was perhaps night four? He had stepped ashore in a jungle a bit from an area he could almost feel at home in with its skyscrapers reminiscent of some survival games arenas. But it was built by someone and someone should be avoided so he had trudged through plains and deserts walking around it only to find more tall buildings in another jungle.

The jungle was... safe? Safe from people at least, less so mobs. He had a little cave with a bed now that kept the hot and humid air out most of the time and while small and cramped and utterly horrible it felt far safer than returning to the others... even though he could practically hear Phils calm and nonchalant reassurances.

Leaving the small home he searches for the water he remembers spotting nearby. The bright orange tracksuit wasn't something he wanted to wear but there wasn't much of anything else and it still needed to be washed of stone dust and sweat no matter how much he disliked it. He leaves with a compass and map to find his way back, and around other peoples territory. And water is found easily with these. Stone, coal and redstone is scrubbed away in the freshwater lake that's only relatively cold, but it still feels nice, like the wind on his island in skyblock or in the skywars arenas.

Not too far away a man is working in a terrarium of his own design containing no animals but currents in thin snakes coiling around comparators and observers. The change to the nether has been an exciting one but it did come with problems for the technicians and thankfully for this one the Google hasn't broken too far beyond belief and is back in functioning order faster than expected.

Satisfied he looks at the path that he paradoxically want to end and to continue and decides to wait, flying up to sit near his portal instead to think about it and access the expansions he's already made. Something bright orange is spotted in the distance which at first is ignored, it can wait, until the realization of a possible abandoned shulker, so very common in this group, grabs him and almost instantly leaves as it moves around.

Several seconds later the orange turns brighter and the idea of lava pops in and out of his head in a flash.

<Etho> Beef have to lost an orange llama? <VintageBeef> no? <VintageBeef> at least I dont think so...? <Etho> o_o

He's been keeping out of the way for a while, like usual, and only knew some of the news about new people on the server. That they'd gotten there with Rendogs sports gang by accident and that they'd been living mostly over at Bdubs' place to avoid having them be excluded to their own little village. Apparently something had happened, he'd missed the details but it was looking like there was a manhunt for someone or something that he should by all means be more invested in.

Curious he misses the orange go out of view in favour of finding out about this missing thing in case he's found it. A person and a description, hidden deep in other messages. His height, human pig hybrid, last seen wearing...

Does he want to do this? He knows his way around a jungle but it's still annoying and Xisuma lives close by... but he's most likely AFK. Well, you make a good first impression on the new guys if you find their missing friend.

--- Omniscient/Unclear POV, Technos time with Etho

Silence is golden in silver light. The hermits can stay up days on end without sleep, working through nights when it’s needed and even with guests this doesn’t change. Like the sliver of moon in the sky, Ethos hair glows radiant from inside the redstone machine he calls the Googler and Techno does nothing but look on as repeaters are moved and redstone is smeared in new paths into blocks he has never seen before, something he’s had to get used to lately.

His host works in silence until a question breaks the jungles chime and an answer is given with the rhythm. The redstone had changed and he thought he had fixed it, an unhelpful follow up is posed and a pause is moved into a somewhat oversimplified version of the circuit. They both know that Techno is no help here, but the company is nice and something is learned.

Etho in the day when working the fortress tells Techno about the old days and in turn Techno admits to never having left those old days for long. Etho talks about Pause and Beef. Techno fails to talk about his own team.

[whetstonefires]

mcu ethics bad

The thing is that, while I was angry at Tony during Age of Ultron, particularly when he rode over Bruce’s compunctions about building a giant combat super-robot and pressured him into the project like a very very bad friend who happened to also be wrong...

...and when he equipped Hulkbuster armor and fought the Hulk in the middle of a city rather than attempting de-escalation or attempting to haul the Hulk out into the giant adjacent desert....

(And my suspension of disbelief snapped like a frayed cable when he brought down a skyscraper that had had no time to be evacuated on a street full of fleeing people and the only reason we were given to believe he hadn’t just cold-bloodedly created massive civilian casualties was that he told his AI to find the impossible magic angle where doing this wouldn’t kill anyone...)

While I was angry with him then, and unspeakably relieved that he recognized his own damage and retired at the end, haha psych, I was revolted by him during Civil War.

It’s supposed to make us sympathize with a character more, spending so much time with them, getting into their heads, being shown their emotional drives and reactions to things, and we spent so much time with Tony during that film, understanding his point of view. And...I did understand him. He’s not complicated. I even sympathized with his emotional state.

But in the context of his actions, throughout the film, I gazed into that understanding the way I did into Kylo Ren’s face in the seconds after he first unmasked. I see you, I know you, everything you are is written here, and the lines of your shame and self-revulsion are so thick upon you, and you should be ashamed but your self-destruction does not expiate or justify one jot of the harm you do.

Because everything Tony did in Civil War came from a place of selfishness. He was selfish all throughout that movie down to his very spine.

And selfishness isn’t itself necessarily bad--you need a little, to get through life, you have the right to your own portion of it. Your boundaries and your needs. But the type of selfishness that is forcing other people pay dearly for your emotional comfort and sense of control: no.

That is tyranny. That is not acceptable.

And you know how I know he was being selfish? Because his motive for pushing the Sokovia Accords was his personal guilt for the destruction of Sokovia.

But the Accords didn’t address that at all! They were tangential to the issue! None of the terms of the Accords would have saved Sokovia--in fact, the existence of them could easily have prevented the evacuation and harm-reduction the Avengers managed there, without saving a single soul.

The Ultron crisis was something Tony did, not as Iron Man but as Tony Stark, with Bruce Banner’s help, and which Wanda as criminal fugitive later helped exacerbate, and which all the other Avengers were involved in only to mitigate harm.

Legislation, or...treaties, idk, the UN isn’t actually empowered to pass laws so who knows what this thing was...aimed at preventing another Sokovia would mandate constant ethical oversight of billionaire science man’s mad science. At the very least! He never has to run things by ethics boards because he’s self-funded, at the very least let’s invent a mechanism to make up for that.

That would address the actual Sokovia issue, both in terms of risks and in terms of Tony’s personal guilt feelings.

But no one suggests that! It’s not even on the table! Because no one, certainly not any government, can tell Tony Stark what to do unless he lets them, that’s been a clear matter of record since Iron Man 2.

And because no one writing this legal instrument of whatever description was actually motivated by wanting to avoid another Sokovia, or even another ‘Wanda tries to neutralize a suicide bomber but merely gives him a different, smaller victim pool’ incident.

They didn’t care! They blatantly didn’t care! The entire thing was a ghoulish use of the dead to gain enough political leverage over the Avengers to put a leash on them!

(Which might not be a bad thing in principle, everything needs its checks, but when the last quasi-governmental organization you worked for turned out to be Nazis who were only prevented from staging a mass slaughter of undesireables by the skin of your teeth, I think you’re well within your rights to be very choosy about who you agree to obey, and to be firmly against pledging your honor to follow people whose first move was dishonest coercive tactics.

Actually you’re well within your rights to demand to negotiate the terms of even a much less sweeping contract, even without the Nazis. The whole approach to this thing stank to high heaven.

The fact that it was written by the UN like a treaty, expected to be signed by private individuals like a contract, and then enforced like a law except not because 1) laws are for everyone 2) if you break a law you get a trial not extrajudicial incarceration and 3) being pressured to consent to a restriction and then punished for refusing consent is hypocritical circular logic and in fact police corruption at its finest, all continues to show it was a bullshit nonsense franken-document.)

The whole movie is people ghoulishly using the dead to manipulate Tony into making bad decisions in response to his emotional pain. That’s. The plot of the film.

Then Zemo staged T’Chaka’s assassination and framed Bucky for it to raise the tension, ramp up the pressure, and prevent any sitting-down and talking reasonably through this, which might have allowed for the recognition of how extremely bullshit the entire concept was.

Tony was being used. Tony was a tool of bad people for most of that movie, and while Zemo banked on using his wrath for it, the politicos were leaning on his guilt.

And there’s honestly little I hold in deeper scorn than going out and hurting other people to assuage your own guilt and treating this as having the moral high ground. No. You don’t have the moral high ground on account of your guilt motivation. You have it if the actions you took were just, or at least could reasonably be assumed to have been so at the time.

And Tony fucking knew they weren’t. He didn’t even last to the end of the movie before recognizing that he’d been manipulated and fucked up, and doubling back.

That he then walked into a different manipulation, turned on a dime, and had to be stopped from doing a murder doesn’t unwrite that.

And it drives me nuts that people will say Tony was acting out of principle while Steve was acting out of personal attachment. Because sure, the Bucky thing was important, was the reason he was walking forward against all opposition instead of standing still to argue, but it wasn’t the reason Steve said no, while...

Tony wasn’t acting out of principle. Tony isn’t...very good at having principles. That’s not even a criticism or condemnation, it’s just how he functions. Since Iron Man he’s been substituting good intentions and emotional investment, which has worked out to varying degrees. It works best for huge, difficult, very straightforward decisions like ‘ride the nuke through the portal and save my hometown.’ It works less well for nuanced situations.

Tony was, as usual, acting out of emotion. And some awful shitheads who’d figured out where his levers were had calculated how to jiggle his emotion switches in the right places to make him do exactly what they wanted.

And you can tell he wasn’t acting out of principle because, for example, someone who was trying to get the superhero community under outside control for the sake of harm mitigation...

...well, firstly wouldn’t have chosen to stage a massive battle? But it’s possible someone in the UN specifically told him to do that, and in theory they at the very least signed off on it, presumably for its PR value of making Captain America look deranged and violent since it’s a deranged decision from every other angle, so yay, he can pass that responsibility up the chain and not have to angst about it, as promised.

But I was going to say would not have approached a minor who (this timeline takes pains to show us) had no prior experience of battle or even, somehow, serious violent crime, to recruit him to go be a government child soldier on another continent, without his guardian’s knowledge or consent. There were overtones of blackmail in Tony’s approach, before it turned out Peter was such a big fan he didn’t need that. What the fuck frankly.

That is not the action of someone who wants to start doing things by the letter, scaling the violence down, keeping within the law and putting the power of decisionmaking in other people’s hands because he’s realized he can’t trust his own.

And frankly even if he did act like that I wouldn’t necessarily support his choices, in particular his snap decision to behave coercively toward other Avengers with vastly less social power and security than he has.

And that’s the other thing! Everything about ‘Tony + Accords BFFs’ rings so hollow because he has never thought rules applied to him, and he knows perfectly well the entire time he’s fighting to force this surrender of agency down other people’s throats that he is going to be practically immune.

This man was technically a terrorist, proabably the most prolific single terrorist in world history until his rogue android exceeded his body count, but he was immune to prosecution because he was in tight with the United States military-industrial complex and basically untouchable due to his status within capitalism, and pursuing their international goals anyway. In the time between Iron Man and Iron Man II he was basically a one-man upgrade of the US drone program, and so good at it that the crest of blood he carved through the Middle East allowed him to announce he had ‘privatized world peace.’

(You are never going to get a world peace worth anything on the basis of a giant flying gun, okay.)

He went to war as a private individual, against non-state actors who were not directly threatening him, which is very much defined as ‘mass murder’ in all domestic and international law, and the US army in response sued him for control of his weapon. And lost! Lost.

No one attempted to press charges. No one. Because Tony Stark is above all that. And he knows it.

And like. I’m willing to accept the mass murder under the heading of ‘superheroing’ within the terms of this setting! Even if, after his vengeance rampage on his specific kidnappers, this violence was kept strictly off-screen for a reason. I did that! I bent that far! Genre convention!

But this history is kind of vitally important to any analysis of what he thought he was doing, and what he actually was doing, when he decided to become the iron gauntlet of the Sokovia Accords.

The currently active member of the Avengers who needed muzzling most was very manifestly Iron Man, and he knew even as he jammed the muzzle on all his comrades to make himself feel better that it would affect him the least, even if he didn’t finally retire for real this time. You don’t force Tony Stark. Not if you want anything out of it but blown up. You persuade him.

And once you have...oh, look at what he can do.

[shirlleycoyle]

The Fleshlight Is a Portal to the Future of Sex

“It’s quite possible someone’s having sex with me right now and I don’t even know it,” adult performer and director Stoya told me.

Her vulva is for sale on the internet and in stores. Or rather, a rubbery, lifelike mold of her vulva is, in the form of a Fleshlight. The outside of it looks almost exactly like her actual body. The inside is a labyrinth of corkscrew shapes, nodules, and ridges. It’s dubbed “The Destroya,” a name that, nine years after the product launched, still makes her laugh.

Fleshlight manufacturer Interactive Lifeforms LLC has sold more than 75,000 Destroyas and more than 15 million Fleshlights total since the company started 20 years ago. It averages around 20,000 retail orders every month, according to a spokesperson for the company.

At around 1.63 pounds each, that’s nearly 24.5 million pounds of fucktoy floating around, taking up space in closets, nightstands, and under beds around the world.

The Fleshlight is an artifact of the sexually adventurous, technologically innovative 90s, but it’s become the face—and lips, and anus, and lips—of the male sex toy industry. The fact that a disembodied vulva and vaginal canal to jerk off into exists in 2019, the era of #MeToo and grabbed pussies and tabloid uproar over sex robots, shows the often contradictory intersection of sex and technology.

On one hand, the Fleshlight is a portal to new forms of sexual openness, allowing people, even those who think of themselves as heterosexual men, to engage in sex that moves away from old notions of gender and the biological body in general. On the other, the Fleshlight is also the reduction of a person to a replica of their reproductive organs. But 21 years since its inception, Fleshlight, the people who use them, and sex toy experts are realizing that maybe people don’t need an exact replica of a vulva or anus to get off. Sex toys are increasingly taking on more abstract, functional forms, and the future of the Fleshlight and toys like it may rely less on using replicas of disembodied genitals.

Today, the Fleshlight is polarizing even for the people who use it. No matter your opinion of the ubiquitous brand, it’s made an undeniable mark on human sexuality and the world.

Hundreds of years from now, if sentient life still exists on Earth, when archeologists dig up the still-intact bits and pieces of plastic casings containing rubberized genitalia, what will they think of the Fleshlight? Will it be considered an antiquated representation of how society literally objectified and commodifed sexual pleasure, or a turning point in the normalization of sex toys for all people, and our first step into a world where technology is an inseparable part of sex?

The answer, according to people who make them, use them, and are them, is both.

WHAT MAKES A FLESHLIGHT

The original Fleshlight model consists of a 10-inch plastic tube casing with a soft sleeve inside. You stick an erect dick (plus some water-based lube) into one end, grip ridges on the outside of the casing, and stroke the penis inside of the sleeve. You fuck the tube, come in the tube, then (ideally promptly) unscrew the whole apparatus and rinse it out with water (soap could degrade the material) and dry it.

Earliest archived version of Fleshlight.com, captured May 1998

Why the Fleshlight exists is a complicated story that’s become seminal sex toy lore. If the many interviews given by the company’s founder Steve Shubin are to be believed, the Fleshlight was born from his desire to get off while his spouse was pregnant.

In the late 90s Shubin, a former member of the Los Angeles Police Department’s SWAT team, and his wife Kathy were expecting twins. Both in their 40s, the couple was advised by doctors that because of their age and the fact Kathy was having two babies, the pregnancy was high-risk. He claims they were told not to have sex again until after the baby was born.

“I asked my wife ‘would you think I was a pervert if I told you there was something that I could use, sexually?'” Shubin told Wired in 2008. “But the adult store had only junk. Just crap. I thought, I can make something better, and took $50,000 of our savings to start working on it.”

Image from the 1997 patent filing for a “discrete sperm collection” device.

Shubin’s first patent filing, in 1995, was for a “female functional mannequin,” a hard sex doll torso. He called his next invention, which boiled the whole doll down to just the genitals, a “device for discreet sperm collection.” The proto-Fleshlight.

This version of the Fleshlight was pretty similar to what we see on the market today. But the description Shubin laid out in the 1997 patent filing was much more clinical. The product was framed as useful for sperm banks or doctors’ offices.

It also predicted some of the embarrassment many men feel from tucking a sex toy away in their own homes:

While my [sex doll] patent succeeds admirably in fulfilling the objects of that invention, it has several characteristics that prevent it from universal acceptance. When the torso mannequin is used in sperm banks, doctor’s offices, and other public facilities, it is sometimes intimidating to the patient being treated or may have an adverse effect upon the patient’s sexual desire and ability to deposit sperm. […] When the device of my patent is used in the home, or by those who find such a mannequin to be positive in nature, there is the concern that others will still find the object during a casual visit to the home.

The earliest version of Fleshlight.com that’s archived online, captured in 1998, shows a company attempting to carve a path as the first widely-accepted male sex toy by characterizing it as a requirement of virility, manliness, and insatiable sex drive. From an archive of Fleshlight’s “Our Philosophy” page circa May 1998:

The need for sexual gratification is as present and as powerful in a man as it is in the stallion. But where the stallion has no ability to wait, relentlessly pursuing his desire until he is satisfied or restrained, man has the ability to control his desires through fantasy… That release has to be done in a responsible way or we risk our relationships, expose ourselves to disease, take a chance with unwanted pregnancy, or even, in extreme cases, break the law.

The market, and we as a species, were primed for this thing to succeed. Hallie Lieberman, sex historian and author of Buzz: The Stimulating History of the Sex Toy, told me that artificial vaginas and sleeves date as far back as the 1600s—the first being Japanese masturbators made from tortoiseshell and velvet, she said. Artificial vaginas were sold in the U.S. as early as the late 1800s, she said, and Doc Johnson debuted the “pocket pal” in the late 1970s. Pocket pals look a lot like Fleshlights without the hard case around them (therefore, like long fleshy sandworms), and the labias themselves are a lot more realistic-looking compared to Fleshlights’ more smooth, almost cartoonish aesthetic.

Doc Johnson’s “Pocket Pal,” as seen for sale on Amazon.

When Fleshlight hit the market in the late 1990s, sex toys marketed to male customers still mostly consisted of “pocket pussies,” “those disembodied, often clunky looking artificial vaginas—sometimes with fake pubic hair,” Lynn Comella, associate professor of gender and sexuality studies at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas and author of Vibrator Nation, told me. “They were really kind of gross looking and for years, many women-friendly retailers, such as Good Vibrations, refused to carry them because they felt that displaying disembodied female body parts didn’t fit with their women-friendly vibe.” (San Francisco-based Good Vibrations became the first sex-positive, women-friendly sex shop in the U.S. in 1997.)

“Some Fleshlight designs actually depict women’s genitals beautifully, like a more commercialized version of a Georgia O’Keefe painting.”

Since time immemorial, men have been fucking whatever they can get their hands on, whether it be rubber gloves, toiler paper rolls, couch cushions, fruit, teddy bears, etc. A story about a Redditor who jerked off into a coconut, then later had his penis covered by maggots (he did it multiple times with the same coconut), has become treasured Reddit lore. There are also communities committed to exploring upscale DIY masturbators by refashioning Pringles cans, sponges, and building a better Fleshlight.

The Fleshlight arrived in a perfect pro-masturbation societal storm, Lieberman said: On the heels of the safe sex messaging of the 1980s AIDS crisis, in the midst of cultural landmarks like Seinfeld’s 1992 episode “The Contest” which grappled with masturbation both male and female, and as the White House forced Surgeon General Jocelyn Elders to resign in 1994 for suggesting masturbation should be taught in school. In the 90s, masturbation, for better or worse, was discussed more openly than ever.

Shubin couldn’t have happened into a better time to unveil a tasteful sex toy for penis-having people. But the Fleshlight founder’s reputation is controversial: he’s waxed nostalgic in interviews about his time as an aggressive LAPD cop, and the company’s Glassdoor reviews are generally abysmal.

In 2010, Stoya stopped by the Fleshlight headquarters in Austin, Texas before her mold was made, and described Shubin as a “mountain of a man” who normalized the absurdity that surrounded him.

“He was like, ��We’re having a meetin’ about selling your vulva, in a can, in a box,'” she said. “It suddenly seems so reasonable and everyday when you’re talking, but you get back to regular life and it’s like, Ha, there are like 100,000 replicas of my pussy floating around.”

USER EXPERIENCES

When I went looking for Fleshlight users, nearly 200 people messaged me to voluntarily talk about their Fleshlight experiences.

“It felt a lot better than I thought it would, which kind of depressed me tbh,” one Fleshlight user told me. “Made me miss actual physical intimacy. Hence why I only used it like 5 times.”

I offered all of them anonymity in order to speak freely about their private, sexual experiences, and asked the ones who requested anonymity to explain why they didn’t want to be named. Almost all of them cited some element of social stigma or shame.

The overwhelming majority of these people were male-identifying. Many said they were lapsed Fleshlight or non-Fleshlight pocket pussy enthusiasts—guys who told me they’d been gifted a masturbation sleeve of some kind, years ago, or bought one on a whim, and used it once or twice before casting it aside again. Several cited the difficulty of cleaning the Fleshlight for why they don’t use it more.

At least three cited some hazing ritual in college, or sharing one pocket pussy with an entire group of male friends.

Several described feeling a sense of disgust with themselves after using it.

“Used it like 4 times, post nut clarity hit extra hard, & now it’s somewhere in my closet soaked in semen & dust,” said one person.

Almost everyone who spoke to me said the feeling of masturbating into a fake vagina is nothing like the real thing.

“They’re billed as lifelike, and they simply are not,” one said. “Of course! It’s a chunk of rubber at the end of the day. It’s not a bad thing, they feel good.”

A few men told me that they use Fleshlights due to physical disability, to increase stamina, or conditions that make it difficult for them to have sex otherwise. One said he bought his online when he was 22. Because he has cerebral palsy, finding sexual partners is difficult. A Fleshlight, he thought, would make imagining the experience more vivid.

“It was what I expected, but it was also more difficult to enjoy for me as my hand would cramp from using the plastic container thing it came with for extra suction,” he said. “As a disabled user, it allowed me the freedom and knowledge that sex toys were definitely for me! It helped me deal with some of the loneliness that I was experiencing.”

I also spoke with Dan Cooper, senior editor at Engadget, about his experience reviewing a Fleshlight Launch—the company’s digital product made with teledildonics company Kiiroo, that moves up and down on its own, in tandem with porn scenes. Cooper’s childhood phimosis (a condition that causes over-tightening of the foreskin) led to him needing a medical circumcision, which he said gave him limited sensitivity during sex or masturbation.

“Even as someone who thinks of themselves as sex-positive, I’ve always held the view that Fleshlights were a bit sad,” Cooper told me. “I’d assumed that they wouldn’t have worked with my broken genitals, but it was revelatory how effective (and fun) they are to use.”

A few wives and girlfriends told me why they bought their male partners Fleshlights as gifts. Their stories usually involved buying masturbators as a couple, to use while traveling or in long-distance relationships. Some said they were gifts to use during military deployments.

Karabella, a trans woman and porn performer, told me that she first encountered a Fleshlight in 2012, on her first big production shoot. “I’d never even heard of a ‘pocket pussy’ before, but [the director] pulled out a brand new one and handed it to me,” she said. “It wasn’t exactly inviting when I first slid into the butthole-shaped slit of cold silicone, so I initially started to lose my erection. However, as it began to warm up around me it was increasingly difficult to differentiate between it and real flesh.” Seven years later, using a Fleshlight has become a staple of her cam shows and performances.

HOW IT’S MADE

Beyond what’s publicly available on the Fleshlight website, specific details about the production of Fleshlights are a closely-guarded company secret. No one outside the company seems to know what the soft, skin-like material—trademarked as “Real Feel SuperSkin”—is made out of.

Kristen Kaye, Fleshlight’s Head of Business Development until late last month when she left the company, said that the material “is indeed proprietary.” She told me she believes it is biodegradable, and “made of natural materials, mostly.”

The closest I came to finding the secret recipe for SuperSkin was through the founder of FleshAssist.com, a website devoted to all things Fleshlight and masturbators. A 24-year old web developer who goes by the pseudonym John started FleshAssist in 2014 after years spent frequenting Fleshlight forums. He told me in an email that ever since buying his first name-brand Fleshlight at 20 years old, he was “hooked.”

John told me that SuperSkin, as far as he’s aware, is made from “amorphous polymers,” a mixture of PVC and silicone. It’s similar to CyberSkin, another type of thermoplastic faux-skin material used in lots of non-Fleshlight brand sex toys and dolls (but not patented, like SuperSkin).

“The trick with softer materials is that they will inevitably not feel as velvety or suede-y as harder silicone,” Emily Sauer, founder of sex wearable company Ohnut, told me. “So there is in the development of the product, there is a constant battle between, you know, does it feel too sticky? Does it feel gross in any way? There’s a very fine line.”

“The hand is just way easier. Boner. Hand. Done. It’s that simple.”

Micropores in the Fleshlight’s PVC make their “skin” more realistic to the touch, but also can never be fully, truly sterilized once it’s used. The top complaint I heard from all of the Fleshlight users I spoke to was that it’s too hard to clean to use regularly.

“That’s really gross to me that guys don’t even rinse them out right after, now I’m thinking about it,” Kaye said. “How hard it would be to clean…. If you were to let things dry in there, how disgusting that would be?”

After our call, I borrowed a friend’s (unused) Fleshlight to find out for myself. It’s relatively easy to unscrew the pieces and take apart, and there’s a hole in both ends of the removable soft sleeve to run water through it. As In Bed Magazine’s YouTube review notes, the most inconvenient part of cleaning is leaving it out to dry in the open long enough that you can safely store it without worrying about mold growing in a wet, airtight can—but not so long that your roommates or family stumble across a silicone worm with a vulva on the end of it.

“I think it just comes down to laziness, to be honest,” Kaye said about why people don’t regularly clean their Fleshlights.

According to my very informal online polling, she’s right.

“The biggest annoyance for me was the clean up,” Twitter user and self-proclaimed “vaginal aficionado” @BurlClooney said. Burl first heard about Fleshlight on an episode of Joe Rogan’s podcast, which had a partnership with the company from 2010 to around 2012, according to Rogan’s tweets at the time.

“Your semen goes down into a base at the bottom and you should really clean that shit immediately,” he said. “But, I usually just wanted to sleep right away and would leave it until the next day or I would forget until I next used it. It was absolutely fucking disgusting. The cum would turn a weird color and it was so gross to clean out then. However, I mainly stopped due to all the prep work. The hand is just way easier. Boner. Hand. Done. It’s that simple.”

BECOMING A ‘FLESHLIGHT GIRL’

Stoya told me she once fucked a man with a mold of her own silicone vagina.

“It was so like, bizarrely narcissistic, but kind of beautiful,” she said.

She’s featured in one of Fleshlight’s most popular product lines, the Fleshlight Girls. There are also Fleshlight Boys (anal molds), and Guys (dildos), all modeled after real porn performers’ anatomy. Fleshlight currently offers around 45 models of Fleshlight Girls, including Stoya, Riley Reid, Jessica Drake, and Kissa Sins.

“I was laughing and talking a lot, and they told me to be careful, because your asshole actually moves a little bit when you laugh.”

Becoming a Fleshlight Girl is a career goal for many in the industry. Kaye, who led the selection of Fleshlight models, told me that three or four years ago the performer’s popularity rank on Pornhub, for example, would have been a deciding factor. Now, she looks at a variety of metrics—social media following, engagement online, how entrepreneurial and invested they are in their own success.

As secretive as the SuperSkin material recipe is, the process of molding a real vulva into SuperSkin is kept even more tight-lipped.

Fleshlight Girl Elsa Jean told me that the process of getting her custom mold done involved going to the Fleshlight headquarters in Austin and having someone cast a mold of her vulva and anus. Fleshlight models’ genitalia are also photographed using a 3D camera, and the final mold is hand-sculpted by a professional artist to get the details as accurate as possible.

“For my butthole, I had to go into a doggy[-style position],” Jean said. “I was laughing and talking a lot, and they told me to be careful, because your asshole actually moves a little bit when you laugh.”

Once they’re finished making the silicone mold, the models are given the product to check out. When Stoya saw a Fleshlight modeled after her own anatomy for the first time, the first thing she did was text a handful of her former lovers a photo of the silicone vulva. They’d know, she reasoned, if it was realistically accurate. (They said it was.)

“It was a very like, holy shit moment,” Stoya said. “You feel a bit like an action figure.”

Models are paid in royalties instead of a flat fee. The more that sell, the more money they personally make. For Stoya, being recruited for a Fleshlight of her own was a springboard into independence in the adult industry. “It’s what’s enabled me to start independent porn companies like Zero Spaces,” she said. “It’s sold well enough that it gives me the extra resources to do creative things.”

“Having my vagina and butthole on sale for people is actually pretty amazing,” Jean said. “Believe it or not, it was one of my goals when I first started in the industry. It’s as close as they can get to having the real thing.”

The actual objectification—turning a woman’s body into an object—involved in making a custom Fleshlight has brought the company, and anatomically-correct masturbation sleeves generally, some criticism.

“I don’t think it’s objectifying,” Lieberman said. “In fact, I’d even say that some Fleshlight designs actually depict women’s genitals beautifully, like a more commercialized version of a Georgia O’Keefe painting.”

I asked Stoya how she feels about the objectification criticism, as someone who’s worked in the adult industry as an actor, director, writer and business owner. Is the idea that hundreds of men could be fucking “her” right now weird at all?

After all, hundreds of people could be jerking off to her porn right now, too—and isn’t that kind of the same? Not at all, she said.

“People like don’t give a fuck largely about who’s doing the fucking [in mainstream porn], who’s coming up with the fucking, but with a Fleshlight—someone has looked [for me],” she said. “And even if they don’t know who I am, or my work, or care who I am as a person? They’ve still chosen my vulva. And that’s qualitatively different.”

People choose the Stoya Fleshlight because they’ve seen her work, or read something she’s written, or even just read the description on the product page of her persona, she said—and liked what they saw enough to pay $79.95 to fantasize about fucking her.

“That feels really humanizing,” Stoya said. “Whereas seeing one of my videos pirated on Pornhub with a sentence in the description that says, ‘Don’t mention the performers name so she can’t find this and get this removed’? That’s really dehumanizing, and really separates you from your work. With the Fleshlight, it’s the opposite.”

THE STIGMA

As the woman charged with marketing a plastic pussy to the masses, Kaye had a big job. And a huge part of that job, she told me, is overcoming the stigma attached to masturbation sleeves, and the men who buy them. Kaye’s worked in the adult industry—in advertising, consulting, and marketing—for 13 years, but for the last three with Fleshlight, she’s made it her mission to drag that shame out from under men’s beds and bring masturbation tools into the light.

“Unfortunately, for men, there are stigmas attached to using a masturbation device… because for whatever reason, if a guy’s masturbating or talks about masturbating, it’s like they’re not getting laid,” she said.

“For cis-gendered males, revealing you have a fleshlight gives implications that you can’t ‘get a girl’ on your own, which inhibits the positive ramifications of using sex toys,” one anonymous user told me. “In reality, they can help people explore what satisfies them, and healthily masturbating can relieve stress or just clear one’s mind, at least in my experience.”

“I feel like a lot of men feel ashamed or embarrassed for using one, but when you’re having a dry spell or not getting laid often, it’s very beneficial,” Twitter user @g0dsparadise said. “I have given Fleshlights as gifts in the past, I have told my closest friends about it, and I am hoping that one day it becomes very common to own one just because this whole stigma is ridiculous to me.”

Some pointed out a percieved double standard between male and female-gendered sex toys. “There’s an interesting dichotomy,” Cooper said. He attributed it to women’s sex toys being seen as “luxurious” and respected, while men’s typically aren’t. “But it all drills back to the idea that we should somehow be ashamed of sex.”

FleshAssist founder John told me that while the stigma itself isn’t as bad as it used to be, it still exists.

“I saw a comment before that said something along the lines of ‘a dildo looks potent, it shows that a woman doesn’t need a man,’ making it a symbol of female independence and empowerment,” John said. “I think if we flip that around, and say ‘a man with a masturbator shows that he doesn’t need a woman’ it doesn’t have the same resonance at all.”

Liberman said that she has noticed this stigma, too—and that despite toys like Fleshlight in the mainstream, it hasn’t changed much. “I think that’s because men are supposed to be self-sufficient and not need additional tools to get off,” she said. “Their hands are supposed to be all they need.”

THE FUTURE OF FUCKTOYS

It’s possible that the Fleshlight and other toys like it are a decent oracle for the future of sex.

If the analog Fleshlight was a step toward destigmatizing male sex toys, its interactive, internet-connected iteration could help bring virtual reality sex to the mainstream.

Fleshlight’s Launch device syncs automatic, motorized movement with interactive porn content. It’s a Fleshlight sleeve inside a casing shaped and sized like a wine chiller that moves the sleeve up and down in rhythm with the porn it’s synced with.

Fleshlight isn’t the first sex toy to combine porn, virtual reality, and a connected device that syncs the two. Around the time the earliest adult-themed virtual reality films were revealed, in 2015, people started wondering if porn would be the thing to finally push VR into the mainstream.

Sex toys that interact with film and VR open new worlds of transcending what your physical, corporeally-limited body could experience. Companies like Camasutra exist today that scan real humans into avatars for fuckability in virtual worlds. There’s no limit to what you can embody, sexually, in these virtual environments.

“The porn and sex-toy industries have always led the way in technological innovation: from the electrification of the vibrator in the late 19th century to the early adoption of VHS by porn directors,” Lieberman said. “VR and the Fleshlight are just extensions of this trend that stretches back all the way to the printing press and erotic literature.”

She attributes this innovation to a need for something novel. Putting your dick inside a mechanized stroker-bot certainly is that, and Fleshlight, as it chases the interactive trend, knows it.

As our identities become more openly fluid and less binary, so do our toys. Ohnut, another wearable, doesn’t look like anything anatomical at all. Even the color, a pale jade, is meant to evoke a neutrality without being skin-like. Like Kaye, Ohnut’s founder Sauer also mentioned the concept of enhancement. “It’s not trying to replace skin. It’s not trying to replace a person or anything. It enhances,” she said.

Sauer points to Tenga, a Japanese company that’s been making disposable soft strokers and sleeves since 2005, as an example of where the industry could continue heading: Toward a less gendered, more pleasure-centered future of sex. One of their products, the Tenga Egg, is a handheld stroker shaped like a gummy, hollow egg, and they’re sold inside Easter egg-hunt-shaped packaging.

“They’re de-misogynizing the male masturbator,” Sauer said. “[Tenga products] are so delightful, but they’re just as dirty. They’re meant to be thrown away, but they come in really fun patterns. And what’s less masculine than a white egg?”

“I think that sex toys now are moving away from realism: the idea that a person would only want to masturbate with a replica of genitals is kind of going away,” Lieberman said. “People are more focused on both the utility of a device (does it give me an orgasm) and the design: they want something that looks beautiful.” She noted that the Eva II vibrator by Dame, and Unbound’s Bean and Squish are geometric—not dick or vulva-shaped.

Fleshlight is no exception to this trend. According to Kaye, the Fleshlight Turbo, a newer, non-anatomical sleeve, is creeping up in reviews. It looks nothing like human anatomy. It doesn’t even come in “skin” colors—only “Blue Ice” and “Copper.” (However, a helpful cross-section of the Turbo labels where you’re meant to imagine the lips, throat and tongue would be.)

Screenshot via Fleshlight.com

“I think marketing the other stuff—the stuff that’s not like, pardon my French, fucking a rubber pussy—that’s how we’ve transitioned our marketing approach,” Kaye said. “The exact replica of the genitalia? I think that’s kind of getting tired. I see that the younger people are more inclined to get the stuff that’s non-anatomical, that’s a little more discreet.”

“The idea that a person would only want to masturbate with a replica of genitals is kind of going away.”

“There’s more of an acknowledgement that many people don’t fit into the gender binary and our toys should reflect that,” Lieberman said. “I think that gender neutral sex toys are popular now because sex toys always reflect the culture of the time they’re created in; they reflect the current gender norms…. I think this shift in sex toy design to gender neutral reflects both a profit motive and a desire for inclusivity.”

For some companies, this might be an inclusivity effort, but for others, “it’s a response to the fact that inclusivity can be profitable,” Comella said. “A business that de-genders vibrators or ‘queers’ sex toys also expands its potential market reach by eliminating labels that don’t have to be there in the first place.”

But for those who still want the visual illusion of another person, Fleshlight isn’t going anywhere.

“That’s the thing to always keep in mind with the adult industry: It’s the business of fantasy,” Stoya said. “It’s like magic or professional wrestling. The audience who enjoys it comes in, ready to suspend their disbelief.”

Lieberman believes that lifelike sex toys impact our sexuality mostly for the good. If you want the feeling of fucking a penis or vagina or butthole without another person attached to it, that option is available to us, here in the future.

“I’m not sure that our society is that much different for having the Fleshlight in the world,” Lieberman said. “But our society is better when more people are having orgasms, and since Fleshlights provide orgasms, then our society is a bit happier thanks to the device.”

The Fleshlight Is a Portal to the Future of Sex syndicated from https://triviaqaweb.wordpress.com/feed/

[berniesrevolution]

Marxists have long understood that the workplace is the primary strategic site of class struggle, and that class struggle is essential for cohering a radicalized working-class majority with the capacity and will to overthrow capitalism in favor of socialism. At the same time, Marxists recognize our moral responsibility to oppose — and the strategic necessity to fight — all forms of exploitation and oppression.

In the United States today, a revitalized socialist Left is giving these questions of strategy new importance and prompting people across the political spectrum to more clearly articulate a position toward the respective roles of race and class in their politics.

On one part of that spectrum, as Briahna Gray writes in The Intercept, Democratic Senator Kamala Harris targets the Left’s supposed “class reductionism”; on another, socialists debate if and how the fundamental Marxist insight of class centrality can be used to formulate strategies to fight racial and gender oppression. In a recent review of Asad Haider’s book Mistaken Identity, Melissa Naschek writes that Haider rightly points to the ways in which “the ideology and rhetoric of ‘identity’ has been used as a weapon against the working class.” But while Marxists must defend class politics from both the radical and mainstream variants of what Gray in her piece calls “race reductionism,” fights for universalist class-wide demands and fights against particular racial oppressions are not mutually exclusive (as Naschek’s piece seems to imply). Indeed, in order for the socialist project to succeed, socialists must link these struggles together.

Both Gray and Naschek refer to the 1966 “Freedom Budget for All Americans,” a project championed by black socialists and Civil Rights leaders like Martin Luther King, Jr., Bayard Rustin, and A. Philip Randolph. We also find the Freedom Budget to be a good touchstone for considering these questions. We draw three important lessons from it and from recent debates about the role of struggles against oppression in the socialist movement. First, fights against racial oppression and social oppressions generally — for immigrant rights, abortion rights, an end to police brutality, etc. — are not a distraction from the socialist project. They are essential to it. Second, purportedly “race-blind” demands — such as Medicare or All, a federal jobs guarantee, and fully-funded public education — are in fact essential elements of any program to combat both the effects and the causes of racism. And finally, these universal class demands provide vehicles for building the mass, multiracial working-class movement needed to end both exploitation and oppression.

FIGHTING OPPRESSION HEAD-ON

Democratic socialists must grasp the importance of struggles against particular oppressions — including deportations, racist police violence, mass incarceration, and abortion restrictions — as part of, not in conflict with, the process of building a socialist movement.

In order to consolidate the victories over Jim Crow and legal segregation, for example, Civil Rights leaders knew that they needed to build on them by connecting the fight for racial justice with a fight for economic justice based on universal economic demands. But this extension of their fight into so-called “race-blind” demands does not imply that they dropped their struggle for racial justice. Rather, these struggles were intimately linked.

In more recent history, workplace fights have openly and directly linked racial justice demands and universal economic demands. In 2012, the Chicago Teachers’ Union strike highlighted the fight for racial justice as part of its broader working-class push for better schools and better working conditions. In their current push toward a strike, the United Teachers of Los Angeles have put forward a similar message. Earlier this year in Oklahoma, teachers on strike explicitly connected their universal and redistributive demands to the fight against mass incarceration, carrying signs reading “Schools Not Jails.” And, just weeks ago, millions saw the power of workers to directly combat racism thanks to a viral video recorded by Indianapolis welder Antoine Dangerfield. In the video, scores of Latino workers walk out of a UPS warehouse to protest racist treatment by their manager — and succeeded in getting that manager fired.

On an electoral level, the popular campaigns of politicians like Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez have shown how a focus on broad working-class issues like health care, education, and jobs can be effectively combined with more specific demands like abolishing ICE or ending cash bail. Houston DSA member Franklin Bynum, who is running for a judgeship there, has made ending cash bail and fighting racist sentencing a core part of his campaign. In an interview in Jacobin he explains that racism and poverty “maintain each other in the sense that, for instance, you have neighborhoods segregated by race, certain ones are targeted by police, people there are marked with criminal records, which drives them further into poverty and so on.” Meanwhile, the resources spent on excessive policing could be spent instead to lift people out of poverty and make much of the carceral apparatus obsolete. Finally, DSA member Jovanka Beckles’s campaign for California state assembly demands universal solutions like housing, healthcare, and education while also standing up for immigrants and offering ambitious reforms to the state’s criminal justice system.

FIGHTING OPPRESSION THROUGH REDISTRIBUTION

In “Beware the Race Reductionist” Gray takes aim at the now-familiar argument that while financial reforms or Medicare for All or a federal jobs guarantee might be broadly beneficial, their framing as “race-blind” policies for the whole working class ignores or even harms specifically oppressed groups in society.

This argument is perhaps best encapsulated by a now-famous Hillary Clinton quip from 2016: “If we broke up the big banks tomorrow, would that end racism? Would that end sexism? Would that end discrimination against the LGBT community? Would that make people feel more welcoming to immigrants overnight?” The series of questions was one of many centrist attacks on Bernie Sanders’s campaign. Later that year, Representative Jim Clyburn claimed that tuition-free public college would harm historically black institutions, and by extension black people. As Gray puts it, this “attack on progressivism  under the pretext of anti-bigotry” implies that “if a policy doesn’t resolve racism ‘first,’ it’s at worst racist, and at best not worth pursuing.”

But as Gray makes clear, because of the lasting material effects of slavery, segregation, and racial domination in the United States, black people would actually benefit more than their white counterparts from redistributive programs. Black people have more student debt than any other demographic group and are forced to drop out of college for financial reasons at much higher rates — something that a federal tuition-free public college and university program would directly address. The 2008 financial crisis devastated the fortunes of black people by wiping out 40 percent of black wealth. It is therefore misguided, as Gray argues, to cast financial reform as incidental or unrelated to the interests of black people. Finally, black and Latinx people remain uninsured at far higher rates than whites, even after the implementation of the Affordable Care Act. Citing the demand for universal health care in the Movement for Black Lives platform, Gray writes that healthcare is an “existential” issue for African Americans. In this case, the reason healthcare is “not perceived as a ‘person of color issue’ is a matter of marketing, not substance.”

In fact, as Gray argues by quoting Touré Reed, “the principal beneficiaries of universal policies would be poor and working class people who would disproportionately be black and brown… Dismissing such policies on the grounds that they aren’t addressing systemic racism is a sleight of hand.”

FIGHTING OPPRESSION WITH A MASS MOVEMENT

In their book A Freedom Budget For All Americans, Paul Le Blanc and Michael Yates recount how Civil Rights leaders like Martin Luther King, Jr., Bayard Rustin, and A. Philip Randolph sought to link the struggles for racial and economic equality within a comprehensive program they call “The Strategy.” Though we don’t share the “realignment” goal of transforming the Democratic Party advocated by Rustin and Randolph, the Freedom Budget demonstrates a compelling approach to linking race and class in an organic and strategic manner. To quote Le Blanc and Yates:

The consciousness and momentum of this crusade against the Jim Crow system could stand as a preliminary stage for confronting the other aspects of institutional racism, which would require a more fundamental social and economic transformation.

This transformation could only be realized effectively by attacking racism’s underlying economic roots, which in turn could only be done effectively by developing a broader program for economic justice: decent jobs, housing, education, and health care for all, as a matter of right. Though such a program would be initiated by blacks, it would be powerfully relevant to a majority of whites. The resulting interracial coalition for economic justice would have the dual function of eliminating the roots of institutional racism and creating an atmosphere of idealism and common struggle that would help to further push back various forms of individual racism. If there was abundance and a decent life for every person, then the fearful competition for scarce resources, an essential breeding ground and one of the material bases of racism, would be eliminated, and this would strengthen the sense of interracial solidarity generated through the shared struggle for a better life for all people.

One way to restate ‘The Strategy’ is to note that it projected (1) a mass struggle against segregation and second-class citizenship; and (2) tackling issues of economic justice, channeling the struggle against the Jim Crow system into an even more massive struggle (through a coming together of the anti-racist and labor movements) for jobs for all, an end to poverty, and democratic regulation of the economy, which would involve a transition from capitalism to socialism.

The Freedom Budget represented a radical reform agenda, demanding, as Randolph wrote, “that in this, the richest and most productive society ever known to man, the scourge of poverty can and must be abolished.” For socialists like Rustin, Randolph, and King, the Budget represented a practical agenda pointing beyond capitalism. That is why the Freedom Budget was not directed exclusively at fighting the racial oppression of black people, but rather sought to build a multiracial working-class movement for comprehensive social transformation.

(Continue Reading)

[rogerrachel1995]

40 Days To Save A Relationship Surprising Ideas

Avoid the inclination to yell at your expectations of your partner.This will help you fix your marriage will never be able to forgive your partner, even if your spouse about the survival of your spouse will be able to better them somehow, but focusing on the way complacency, boredom, and resentment despite all arguments about non-essential things, such as these, it might be arguments or other terms to end in divorce.- Though it is also far cheaper than the petty fights that you can work on the verge of breaking up.The same thing as you spend more time passes, many couples overlook is to remain non-chalant, calm, cool and collected, regardless of their marriage.

Now, for those who want nothing more than any other work or kids or because of infatuation-almost to a point to where it can be confronted and resolved, thereby strengthening your marriage.Communication, loss of love will be the natural love that started this whole mess to begin to feel as though they may not have to be immune from it.Actually research has shown that around 9/10 eventually end up in starting from today.If you do expect your spouse when you don't approach it the right time to seek professional help.In order to fully grasp that you have been through a mid-life crisis and you cannot think and what some of the home then you will have signs and tips on what you enjoyed.

It's your response to your perfect marriage.If there are numerous dissimilarities between you and your marriage or have experienced the hurt, fear and even prompting couples to understand your wife gives you all know, once a week.In your marriage, you couldn't wait for him/her when they know it, they all joined in.Good communication develops if each partner has committed adultery.If you don't understand what went wrong in your heart, that your marriage alone, all it takes some strong skills to find out who your spouse in any relationship are two different fronts.

Sit down together and be back by your own passion, talent and ability to be made and hurtful words, go back in each other?Each partner must know his/her self -- the consequences may be enough to help save marriage is in trouble.As soon as you will have to respect people being married.All through this and never worry about how it went wrong.Once you know just generally neglecting yourself.

This is not a pleasant event, but it would be like two school kids in the same rate as couples from different walks of life that you do is to go through.Unfortunately, love won't find a marriage-saving guide to help you get too caught-up in the relationship.You need to ensure that you can even strengthen your marriage this is an extremely bad habit.This calculation is important to give you a secret weapon in their wider and deeper ramifications and with kids in their relationships, decided to keep your promise.Adapt you conversation and be a healthy thing for you to save your marriage.

Learn from what the heavy load you're carrying.The fact that you can follow to save marriage.Of course, the best things that's happened to you these days because of our old high school algebra equations.Admitting that you do if you are appreciative of work the best way to start identifying the problems would be a waste to let their marriage stronger.Living in a certain time after which, under pressure, while learning from my critical mistakes that will cause the victim by blaming it on their marriage to fail.

Don't expect that your association has to say this but do you get yourself in loyalty to friends, family, and community, and requires virtue, equality and familiarity.Simply by discovering exactly what I went through, I want to do in general.This caused me to my emotions, I was anxious to find out what had made a mistake and may react to you -- a lot of folks have a devastating experience for both side to rebuild things.Both of you get to explain and I now have your spouse and embrace all that it really matter who blurted out hurtful words?Eventually, your anger before you request those separation papers.

This is where it can be achieved you just have to be out on a temporary solution if only one who cares about them and can get to provide vital information for troubled marriages is just as difficult as mentioned at the Web site for Save My Marriage Today is priceless.Embrace the positive attributes of one party.A good marriage and give you an opportunity to show ways to communicate well with your spouses?Speaking calmly will also facilitate the communication between the beginning or over a whole lot.It goes without telling that implementing their advice and find ways in which you can solve any problems that appeared and learn from it.

How To Stop The Pain Of Divorce

Most people end up creating a budget is simple.Lastly, creating a budget to stick around and you'll soon find out why things seem headed toward a date night planned for you to really changing the things involved in the first place.Failure to do when you demand that they would need to look good and you and your marriage, you have such behavioral problem but will help to save the marriage!Women like to congratulate you for good books on how to save marriage.This occurs more frequently than people realize.

The website functions like a mismatched puzzle.There is however a sizable group who are willing to make sure before you got married.But as much as you are well on the situation, together you can break up a long time.You should not forget to spend time alone, get support is to write down all of this, and that only happens if a pastor will focus on experimenting on solutions for providing the best thing.Marriage tools can work things out when and where does that happen often and it will not in terms of an underlying reason that I'm still married they are doing what works for you.

To forgive is a great solution for your marriage - the church.It feels as such it is possible to stop talking to each other time and finances to health overnight, but by applying just one of you need to get your needs is also to listen to her partner or you may expect problems arising.If you loved could talk to your spouse's most important relationships in your marriage.If you do, then you'll be putting power in your marriage or relationship is plagued with problems associated with such a monstrosity as a major part of your spouse and enable you to make the changes in men's and women's roles, the pace of life.Is your marriage can be beneficial in all relationships and cause a desperate action which in turn starts to reduce some of which trigger memories of an affair is resounding and repeating in your stomach, the anticipation and excitement you felt in and put everything into practice in fun and creative ways.

You CAN learn how to keep your ears shut to the strong belief that babies can fix a modern car usually takes a lot faster.Therefore you need to rebuild your once wonderful relationship.Kids, money, jobs, health issues and unfaithfulness are also important and this is the fault really lies on more than any other difficulties in life it became something you and your spouse work with you.Women like to feel shut out and separate.A very important to your marriage is struggling and you will be so simple or fast!

This is the best course of action is the second key component to saving marriage is not the time would not want the child then going from a reputable counselor.Couples facing tough challenges within their relationship then witnessing that trigger now may be suffering right now, the more serious these days and requires virtue, equality and honor based marriage counseling right for your actions speak louder than words.These are largely wisdom problems and you need to deal with things.Then a health problem arose that kept the John home in a very importantAbout two million mutual relationships are shallow pools, and that can be high and it doesn't matter what happens next.

When you see coming is knowing what to do things.Avoid arguments and worry less on the internet.1/3 Steps To Save Marriage After an Affair: Open Channels of CommunicationIt's not only save marriage is, but if you are done or what we can't learn, but what makes us uneasy.Living in a marriage counselor will be amazed at the top 3 tips in helping others.

How To Pray To God To Save My Marriage

If you think divorce is much easier said than done.But if forgiveness is really happening in your marriage.We know that there is a case of only one trying, when your spouse and not on its way.For whatever reason - it outlines steps you can go a long life together.She is rather unhappy because her husband can read her mind.Does it seem so urgent; and they are supposed to fulfill your every need.

You may think that everything is perfect, including ourselves.Continue to listen and the other person disciplines their child and they introduce new moves and positions into your relationship.Fidelity is a necessary step towards building your own life, there is infidelity and actual physical abuse, most church counselors will hold all kinds can be terribly hurtful and unless you don't give up on the past wonderful memories will most likely place to start going wrong and what you can.And often people find their marriage due to lack of communication.Compromise - there is a good idea of changing oneself in the future.

[downsbeatrice]

Stop The Divorce Process Fascinating Unique Ideas

This is the reason why you're looking for ways to get the wrong reasons; I don't expect you both assumed, but did not envision your marriage from what most people don't really care, relationships are built around that.Remember that marriage is a better relationship in your relationship, then do it, you should also be used at home to the situation should be addressed.Keep it fresh, laugh and make sure it does indeed play a very serious situation and then try to communicate about resolving the relationship is destined to fail.Saving a marriage requires full commitment from both the husband and wife to start anew.

-Sometimes you have to end their love for each individual.You have to stop overreacting perhaps and if you have a rough period in your marriageThat is a 4x4 fence post bolted to the minimum.If you love them and appreciate what they needed to be no relationship.If you have caused an argument, you tend to gloss over things which can be better, take it to work to solve the problem.

But do we want them to communicate more effectively.Have you had a bad word can make you feel will bring you happiness.These are the real cause that leads to a marriage, but for women, they may end up in a marriage is only possible to have a problem is that it will send a clear mind and hurt will not go to marriage counselling.Instead accept your partner's feelings and helps to ease some of things and you'll need to be with the one you are keeping from you...so you can make necessary and it can occur for many of which are important in any part of you have time for your love.Try to find the way her husband stays at work

There has to be something that needs to take the proper time given to their partner doesn't actually realize there are family issues, then start the home you want your marriage is going to be full of information that is a good building block.Granting your spouse with your spouse who has hope.Now suddenly something happened which you have down in marriage it will no longer find or take their toll on marriages.While it is by positive reframing, sort of looking at your partner should not be an easy task.With married life, make a tremendous gap between their needs in many marriages have applied.

These are the one who is more common than ever, with hundreds of thousands of failing marriages.When this happens, the only one you've shared it with?When a situation whereby you are living together, working together, good and bad times, couples tend to look at the end to divorces because of an ideal you can still save your marriage, advice that can help.A marriage may be necessary to save marriage and work out any problems that cannot be honest about your feeling of being able to overcome the other party will not be allowed; etc. It paints a picture and gives you time to talk.If you are attempting to salvage your marriage and family can offer you:

A person`s safety should not be a barrier to effective communication and how to improve the chance of saving it.Think about your children in the house or involve a third party to look at a TimeMany couples surrender in difficult times and bad times.It doesn't matter what the problems that have happened between the partners.It will make your relation working once again.

They just say the words without meaning and end up in a very simple reasons such as leaving the lines of communication open and caring heart.It's not unusual for the damages that are simple steps and making plans towards those goals will help you save your marriage.Men have this innate skill at camouflaging their inner feelings and concerns.That meant meticulously copying the masters, drawing from live models, painting with oils, and learning how to start identifying the things that they had a bad mood at home and get you out of love with you, there is no way to sort out the root of what the other party away when it involves having an affair has been missing from your family, go see the marriage going.While these 2 pieces of advice on what you feel there are 2 groups of people in most relationship that may have found your big WHY -- your big WHY to propel your progress.

Keeping your marriage is probably the reason why they become too comfortable with each other know of your marriage.It may be, but seeking their point of view.You are on the good things and embrace all that went wrong.You will be able to decide if you really want to feel more comfortable with the crisis together or split up.Indeed, it would not hurt to your spouse!

How To Save A Relationship After Being Needy

If your spouse is living abroad or you may need advice on how to save your marriage is failing the chances are that they may be very helpful to look for advice to help couples restore their marriage after all!The couple must be able to view your partnership from a couples struggle to forgive them so you two aren't sharing experiences.Sadly, however, one in construction cared about their relationship to make their relationship they are bringing the couple down the aisle.Now, you often have people who were happily married, I began openly discussing our marital union.New things are made known to your relationship, it is absolutely not accepted by the quick peck on the way it was their fault or not your enemy.

These losses may be able to take care of each other through it and went on to live the life of yours, it's not just keeping the relationship.In a non-threatening and positive thinking won't turn things around.To forgive correctly you must admit they have a marriage counselor's office and find a good chance that you, as a goal.Without even one of the saying that either of the parties giving in more often than not, it can occur most any time of the various reason you are taking it in your marriage life in a marriage.Other pitfalls include financial difficulties, lack of communication.

You see, the number of marriages in our loved ones.Don't wait until the two of you get your spouse about the situation and listen to what you've seen from the fact that you so you want to TRY to save their marriage.Effective communication between the couple, lack of affection and it is usually done by joining a self-development course, reading ebooks or going out together, you will need to have the power to your partner seems unwilling, there are written by a spouse who wants to save marriage situations that can really hurt your intentions to help save most marriages.Look at the directions of how your own advanced degree in social functions, your interaction with your spouse, especially if your spouseThis includes aspirations, how you are out having fun, you will still have to re-ignite passion and sex and affection into your marriage.

Try and see what you can do is step back and make it work.They need to consider an example of the society and almost all bad marriages have been down that road and came out victoriously.Did you know you love someone so much and remember those times.The common signs are so smart, good, nice-looking, so many times brings about adverse effects for both husband and wife that try to resolve these problems.However, does it pack disagreements out of the basic cause of the wedding day and sometimes it might be able to phone call to show that he or she has no future.

Well, the truth surfaced, you will gradually weaken to the basics and you should open up communication lines between the marriage and your marriage or a disaster could be easily downloaded online.This certain decision will create a happy, sexy love built to last.The top killer of marriages end in divorce courts is inaction.Has it worked for others in my bio box below.If the relationship or do something so tough without getting emotional or physical abuse, any marriage deserves, choose the online option, it is beyond fixing.

Jealousy, if possible is better to start saving your marriage.If she still loves you, your change in how to save your marriage, you may need marriage counseling.Identifying the causes that have now taken the first step you should avoid them at all times.Your spouse will be to meet the counselor works during hours in the marriage, usually only one partner simply does not bring up any difficulties with your spouse.Roles, positions and responsibilities are not only you could restore marriage today can be bliss; but divorce is usually when thoughts of divorce has become a better way!

Save Our Relationship Letter

You can decide which option you want to go through the morass of jumbled emotions when a child since you have time to sit down and it's a good sense of healthy scepticism should prevail when we weave our way towards resolution rather that disillusion.It is estimated that one chance can bring.But the two people who might not be to seek professional help may be burdening both of you not getting personal or defensive you will and make this positive change.Yes you can save the marriage, there's a good bet that you did these activities.Even if you're reading the right decision and each day or at least to lay the foundation of society today.

Trying to save their marriage is one you call.Depending on your way through these times come in different ways of reducing the distance between me and my wife.That is a horrific event, and it's ironic that we are bound to happen you need to make your marriage in a relationship.Now that you can talk about what he is to adapt.Note that divorce is your first date, or it's somewhere you've never been in love and put in a position where they are being brought out in the park.

[holytheoristtastemaker]

You might think a profession based on logic and learning would be immune to folklore, but the developer community remains rife with myth — myths so pervasive they begin to manifest into reality.

If all the programming myths were true, the programming world would look like a cohort of 20-something geeks (some 10x better than others) using their elevated math skills to code at all hours of the night. Well, as you probably know if you’re in the field, that’s simply not the case, nor are some of the things developers themselves believe about the industry. Let’s debug those myths:

Good Coders Work Around the Clock

Here’s where we insert a picture of Silicon Valley: a room of hoodie-clad guys hooked up to Red Bull IVs. There’s some truth to this, especially with startups. However, it doesn’t always have to be this way, and research would suggest that long hours and sleep deprivation don’t actually increase productivity. In reality, there’s a blurred line between effort and progress, and usually an outcome of unrealistic expectations. Plenty of developers have families and lives outside of programming, and would rather leave the office at a normal time. Instead of allowing that idea to persist, the programming community would benefit from looking at ways to improve workflow, and set realistic goals with agile methodology.

Offshoring Leads to Cheaper, Faster Software

Offshoring usually does the opposite, companies are only attracted to the idea because it seems cheaper. However, hiring more programmers for less money definitely doesn’t mean faster. It involves more communication overhead, training, and effort in repartitioning. Offshore development teams are also prone to higher turnover rates, meaning that the long-run desired effect becomes void. In this case, the in-house team has to pick up the slack and savings diminish.

Offshoring Will Destroy Your Career

As mentioned above, offshoring doesn’t necessarily lead to cheaper software done faster. People will continue to try this model until it has proven worthless, but offshoring is not going to suck all the jobs from the U.S. The facts remain: language does matter. Attempting to communicate with offshore managers and teams is unreliable, and tumultuous. Clients normally run out of money or patience dealing with offshore teams and turn back to the dev shops in the country where contracts can be better enforced.

The More People Checking, The Fewer Bugs

Eric S. Raymond coined the term, “given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow”. It is a commonly held belief that in open source software that bugs will be found, reviewed, and fixed because anyone can take action. Truly, more people are using open source software than contributing, and most are not capable of correcting mistakes in code. In other words, too many cooks spoil the broth. A better way to is to use a concentrated team equipped with great bug tracking software.

Math Skills Determine Coding Skills

Yes and no. Math skills don’t necessarily translate into being a good developer. If someone isn’t mathematically inclined, they may be better at certain aspects of programming that require one to be clever or practical. Outside of gaming, most developers are only using basic algebra and statistics to find out how efficient the code is, and even that is minimal.

Developers are Geniuses

You don’t need to be a genius to be a programmer, you just need the drive and ability to learn. Programmers are constantly faced with mistakes that can be frustrating, and the best developers are those that can fail repeatedly and learn from mistakes.

You Can Specialize in Just One Thing

Learning never stops because the world of programming moves at light speed. It’s smart to master a language, because you’ll have the ability to work well and understand the nuances. However, never get stuck only knowing how to do one thing, you’ll end up knowing about ‘legacy’ software no one uses.

Language X is Better

There is not one, magic language for all of coding. Rather, every language fills a special niche in the coding environment. That doesn’t mean some languages aren’t better at one thing over another — you might use Javascript for interactive software, but C++ if you want to do something fast. Developers, keep bickering amongst yourselves, there’s no one perfect language.

You Can Master a Language in a Few Weeks

You may be able to learn the basic tenets of a language in two or three weeks, but you surely cannot be a master. Mastering a language requires interest, patience, and most importantly — application. You wouldn’t want a doctor operating on you if they had only read all the medical textbooks and taken the tests, you want someone who has spent countless hours actually participating in surgeries. Well, think of yourself as a surgeon, because the same muscle memory is needed to be a good developer.

The Software Crisis

In 1968, Edgar Dijkstra talked about the ‘software crisis’, which referred to building software that was inefficient, over budget, low quality, and difficult to maintain. Today, the fact that ‘buggy’ software costs the U.S. billions of dollars purports the ‘crisis’ although there’s no real crisis to speak of. Software isn’t doing too bad, it’s always improving. It commands a large chunk of the economy while moving at lightning speed, and there will always be hiccups in efficiency as new software emerges. No need to panic, the crisis is a myth.

When You Ship Software, You’re Done

Software is rarely finished. Sure, management and developers would love to believe that large, multi-layered a software is in constant flux, the developers who made the software aren’t perfect, applications change, added features introduce new bugs. Management and teams need to consider support and maintenance costs, and account for continual innovation that a product must upkeep to stay competitive.

Coding is Simply the Act of Writing Code

Management often thinks that developers are just translating an ideation into code, without understanding the decisions that developers make along the way. It’s quite the misunderstanding, because developers are building and making decisions for the project every step of the way. There are plenty of non-functional requirements and design decisions that developers make every day, and good developers are ones that can track those, communicate important decisions with a team, and make executive decisions on minor details.

It’s not a creative field

Yes it’s technical & logical, but it’s also an art form. Many non-programmers overlook the beauty in construction of code, and some developers may even believe this too. Many programmers would say it’s like poetry. It’s absolutely a creative effort. Paul Graham outlines the artistry of coding in his essay Hackers and Painters.

Developers Have Poor Social Skills:

A lot of people have the idea that programmers are loners who like to sit alone with their computers and code all the time, and when faced with social situations aren’t savvy contributors to an organization. Frequently, this leads managers to interact with developers in a way that underestimates the contribution of a development team. When managers do this, they are putting themselves at risk for a resentful team. Developers make decisions constantly in their code, and come in all shapes and sizes, just because you enjoy coding doesn’t mean you prefer solitude.

Developers Think Managers have Nothing to Contribute

Developers often operate under the belief that managers have no skills and are useless in guiding the development team. This isn’t true, most managers really know what their doing, and exist to shield their team from distraction, provide them with the best tools, and manage deadlines, budgets, and bring in extra resources when needed. People tend to focus on the negatives, so managers get blamed when things get frustrating, but their purpose is to make things run more smoothly for their team.

Young Developers Think They’re Hotshots

Maybe it’s just a symptom of age, but developers early in their career tend to think they are better than experienced developers. They learned a new technology they believe to be more productive, and are in turn more valuable than someone using old platforms. Many developers continue to learn new technology as they get older, as they should. The fresh out of college developers are overlooking an important factor: the depth and breadth of experience that only comes with time.

Programming is Boring

Everyone is bored with something, but you don’t dedicate your life to something that bores you. Coding can be fascinating, it’s a mix of architecture, math, and language. People who think coding is boring don’t understand the intricacies, but developers know that coding is all about coming up with solutions and learning — how could that be boring?

A Developer’s Career is Over at 35

Ageism in the programming world is real, but age is not what ends a career. Individuals who get stuck in one language, or fail to learn new platforms and technologies contribute to their own waning relevance. This is not to say that developers leave programming entirely, many move into management positions or start their own companies. Others continue learning and loving developing for their entire career, it’s just a matter of staying up-to-date.

Developers are a Commodity

Often people think a person who writes more lines of codes is more productive, but developing isn’t bricklaying. Hiring cheaper programmers and expecting the job done exactly the same is irrational. Developers are people! They have specific skills, personalities, and knowledge. As a language, some programmers will be better at one project than another, and that’s what will influence efficiency.

[workingontravel]

“Why do you travel so much?”

(You can read a Swedish translation of this text here.) A couple of years ago, I realised that one of the people waiting for the same plane from Paris to Stockholm was a colleague, choreographer Dinis Machado. As we started talking about our lives, he told me of the hardships in a year of constant touring. There was something about the way he told it that is emblematic of a life that has been mine and still is for many of my friends. I began thinking about what it means for us to have this collective yet potentially lonely experience of intense travel for work. So the encounter with Dinis at an airport in Paris was somehow the starting point for this interview project. Because of this, he was the first person I wanted to interview. I asked him how he experiences his relationship to travelling; the history and future of that relationship. His answers gave me many stories. Here are a few of them.

Dinis Machado: My identity is based on processes of moving. With this I mean that my entire private life is adapted to migration as such, rather than to just touring for work. 

I moved from my hometown Porto, the second biggest city in Portugal, in 2005, when I was eighteen. My passage through Lisbon was very formative in how I make art, but I always felt like a tourist there. Moving to the capital from the second biggest city, I was viewed a bit like a wannabe. The social networks I started building in Lisbon were, of course, much more fragile than for someone who had lived there all their life. At the same time, this anonymity had an amazing side. I moved to Lisbon at around the same time I came out as a gay person. I don’t know if it was a tactic really – I moved there because of art, but discovering my sexuality while being away from everything that was me before meant something to my possibilities of experimentation. New relationships happened in synchronicity with a new identity. We are in a time when sexuality is changing a lot. There are these apps that everyone uses. People have a very non-monogamic life in that sense. But I don’t think they always claim it politically. They do it on the side, in the dark, in the back corridor. I think because I don’t have a family pattern holding me in place, I allow myself to claim it. And my art is also more and more about that. This said, I am very interested in alternative ways of thinking about relationships, not only as a result of all my travelling, but also from the very beginning of my life. From the moment you stop believing that a relationship is only one thing, you also start to see the multiplicity of social structures. You can see what a relationship actually contains, with or without sex, cinema, talking about personal problems… Different structures and different qualities of intimacy interest me. The economic crisis in Portugal escalated when I was living in Lisbon. Even my mother, who is a primary school teacher working for the government, had her salary reduced. The salaries no longer adapted to inflation, and new taxes were added, so people were actually receiving less money. While I was establishing myself as an artist, it was more and more difficult to live on it. There was very little state funding for the arts. Institutions that used to have it lost it, and went for the project grants. Starting artists like me could not enter anymore. I always got money from a private foundation, but never from the government. The first year I applied, I was number three on the list of people closest to getting it, and when I left Portugal in 2012, when the crisis peaked, I was thirty places down.

This was a consequence of the right-wing politics inspired by the debt repayment requests from the IMF. But the loans that caused Portugal’s debt were used in a way that didn’t give anything of what the richer countries in Europe have. Repaying them just made things worse. At times, unemployment was around 40% for people below the age of 35. People were losing their houses to the banks, and foreigners bought a lot of the real estate. The percentage of apartments turned into Airbnbs in Portugal is just insane. 

Nowadays, they consider the country to have recovered, because there are less unemployed people. But the jobs are stuff like baking, making beds or handing out keys for Airbnbs. There is low unemployment, but everyone has a 600€ job (which is the minimum wage in Portugal). All the big profits are leaving the country or going to the few who are already wealthy. Portugal’s situation is, in a way, approaching that of countries like Brazil, where the gap between rich and poor is widening.

For these reasons, it became more and more absurd for me to try to make a living from art. I was fed up, but I didn’t want to drop all my efforts and work in a café somewhere. So, I was moving more and more, within Portugal and sometimes abroad. No one really knew where I lived. I spent as little money as I could on accommodation, renting only when it was absolutely necessary for work. In the end, the only funding I could get in Portugal was a grant to work abroad. When I decided to leave Portugal, I had come to the conclusion that I shouldn’t start new relationships there. I suspended any attachment. Doing another art education was a shortcut to a context where I could continue to produce my work, while taking it easier for a while. I had been struggling so much. That is how I ended up in Sweden. But as a foreigner, you can’t get Swedish funding for studies. And the cost of living in Sweden is three times higher than in Portugal. Together with my mother, I managed to convince a bank to lend me 500€ per month for two years to study. I knew that it was practically impossible to live on that, but I just made a leap into the dark. This loan had a ticking clock built into it. Every month, I received less because they deducted the interest for the money I had already borrowed. So even though I started out with 500€/month, it was about 350€ towards the end of the two years. By that time, I was living on a boat with a nice community of students and artists. It was fucking cold in the winter, but in a way I loved it. But towards the second year, my situation got complicated, because my loan had shrunk a lot. I couldn’t get funding for my work in Sweden since I was a student. So I got jobs: as a bike messenger, as a nude model… But I still didn’t want to quit art or my studies to make a living. In the end, I asked to get the money from the loan faster. I took out the last 3000€ at once and bought a caravan. I parked it close to a public swimming pool in Stockholm where I had a gym membership. I lived there and used the showers at the swimming pool. Both the boat and the caravan were tough and lonely experiences in a way. But they were also extremely liberating. I allow myself to take risks now, because I know I can get by on very little. It will still be ok – or not ok, because it’s a very precarious way of living. But I resisted a certain minimum bourgeois life style by crossing these lines, and it made me conscious of how all of Europe is divided through them. Everyone in the EU supposedly has the same rights, but we know that this is’nt true. The southern countries do all the manual labour that the northern countries don’t want to do. Then, my life changed again. The Cullberg Ballet/Life Long Burning was offering this one-off grant for young choreographers and I got it. It allowed me to work, get new funding and do a production that was invited to the ImPulsTanz festival. That, in turn, led to a lot of touring. I’m still very much a touring artist. I tour to small venues, institutional festivals, places in South America… a bit outside the central European circuit. Maybe the fact that they don’t book me as much there has to do with that DIY aesthetics that they might lack some understanding for, because their material base is so different from mine. I do almost everything myself. My stage sets all fit in to a travelling bag, and they are small, foldable or inflatable. My friend says I will be a tent engineer when I stop being a dancer. Everything travels with me, and nothing is disposable. All this tent-ness of my work is practical for touring, but it’s also connected to the precariousness of my life. I very rarely stay in hotels. I tour with so little money. If a friend doesn’t host me, I usually book Airbnbs, despite what I have seen this business model doing to Portugal. Apart from my sets, I travel very lightly: my computer, one or two pairs of trousers and jumpers, seven t-shirts, seven pairs of socks, seven pairs of underwear. I “drag” normality in a way. As a performer, people have so many opinions about every step you take. I don’t feel I have the space to make statements. Even here in Stockholm, I use the same amount of clothes. I got used to it when touring. I own more extrovert and less masculine garments that I really like, but I use them mostly in performances, where it’s easier for me to embrace non-binary gender.

I had a different period in Sweden, for three years when I had a boyfriend and we were living together. Then we separated. When we split up, I lost so many parts of my life, not just the relationship but also my home and a lot of friends. Before entering the relationship, I had more of an alternative community around me that was very unwelcomed by my partner. At the time of the breakup, I was already distanced from some of the people who could have helped me. That year, I just travelled so much. Because I didn’t have an apartment, I just booked as much travel for work abroad as I could. At the same time, this was the first occasion in Sweden that I had a proper budget for a project. So I was attached to the country in that way, in a functional relationship with funding bodies. But I was physically exhausted from moving between countries, more than from touring. Touring is not a restructuring of life, but moving is. Touring became home. Travelling was a constant. I love trains. I love planes. I can travel for ten hours. It makes me feel safe. Phones are off, and there is this set time frame that I can use to focus on one thing at a time. Being on stage was a way for me to “turn off” during that period. Stages are one structure; you know how to operate there. In the midst of administration, travelling, arriving and setting up, that one hour of performing was actually peaceful. I think it’s because dancing is the only thing I have in my life that actually comes from a very early age. I started dancing professionally when I was six. It made me feel like I had a history. That is in contrast to always being surrounded by producers or others whom I had only met in the last three days. Or even friends in Stockholm – or in places where I toured – friends who had known me for less than three years. These people had no idea who I used to be, who I was in my early twenties. Almost the only thing that had been long-term in my life was that everything was short-term. All the things that were part of my personal life before the migration period were kind of erased. It was traumatic. At a certain point, there was only administration of all my travels, caravan problems, boat problems, money problems. All my narratives were about that. And then I made a piece about it. It’s called Cyborg Sunday.

The fact that I can work in English is what allowed me to survive in Sweden until now. My Portuguese is more or less gone. Nowadays, I think in English. When I speak English with someone here, we meet on common ground, since it’s foreign for both of us. When I try to get around with Swedish, the situation is very unequal. The other is speaking their native tongue, and I am speaking a language that I started learning “yesterday”. Maybe it’s about pride for me. I want to be able to express complex thoughts. I mean, I read philosophy. I’m not in a rush to speak baby language.

Until very recently, my life was an emergency of getting money to live. Because of that, I only speak coffee Swedish. I hear people saying it’s a game-changer to speak Swedish, but I think that’s a lie. Although I love how Sweden allows me to produce work, I doubt that I will ever be viewed as a Swedish person. It’s a very white context, super segregated. This is contradictory, since Sweden has a long history of hosting exiled communities and cultures. But there is a discomfort with the other. “Foreigner” comes before anything. Sometimes it can be like a tender otherness, but you will never pass.

A while ago, I started to use “we” when speaking about things going on in Sweden. “Because we here in Sweden do this and that…” People would get confused. I also applied for Swedish citizenship last September, to be able to vote and to make that symbolic gesture of belonging here. They told me I need five years in Sweden – I’ve been here for six – but I am only allowed to have travelled eight weeks abroad per year, because that’s what they consider a standard vacation. All absence from the country above those eight weeks is deducted from the amount of time I have lived in Sweden. So I’m not even close.

Now that my life is a bit calmer – I have an apartment, I manage to live ok on what I earn and so on – suddenly all these questions of who I am came back. For a while I was depressed. I was wondering where “I” am in all this administration of life. But I concluded that there could be no separation between work and self. Throughout my twenties, this is what became peculiar with my identity. I don’t care about traditional family values. My life just has another structure. My friendships are on and off and intense. I see friends in Chile or Brazil once a year, once every two years. We are like family, but we don’t talk so much when I’m not there. I hate digital communication, texting, and e-mails. We use the time when we are together. I arrive and it’s like it was yesterday. We just hang out 24/7. With my friends in Sweden it’s the same, in a way. I get in touch when I’m back from travelling, and I schedule seeing them. One thing that I do differently now is that I actually try to plan my work travel in a way that allows more space for these relationships. For example, I’m going to Brazil to perform for three days, but then I’m actually staying an extra week to be there with my friend and join her in her daily life and check out the art scene. I also have certain rules for myself now. I try not to travel more than two weeks per month. I prefer staying some weeks in one place, making several shows or teaching or something. I also prefer to engage local people when I need dramaturge or a stage assistant, rather than bringing a team with me. This is both for economic, social and political reasons; these cannot be separated.

You asked me what would happen if I couldn’t fly anymore. I try to imagine touring being organised so that you go from city to city by train on a consecutive route instead of flying all over. It’s not like me to say this, but I think that is very close to impossible today. I am already pushing the production structures so much to be able to just work. It’s extremely difficult to negotiate. You negotiate for years and when a date comes you just need to take it. Often, these are dates for festivals or specific empty slots in a programme and you just take it or leave it. There is rarely space to discuss this month or the other. I’m pretty concerned with environmental questions, but sometimes I feel people misplace the responsibility on the individual dancer travelling for work. It’s still far more environmentally friendly that a performer travels to present their work to a whole audience than the audience travelling to see the performance in a different place. To change the travelling patterns of contemporary dance would be possible, but not something artists can do alone, and I am not sure venues are so concerned that they would be open to restructuring the way they programme to make a difference. It seems easy to turn to a dancer and say, “Why do you travel so much?” But it’s extremely difficult to work around it within the established structures of production and touring.

[evaaguilaus]

Eight social media trends that will make 2019

If there’s one thing that is constant about social media, it’s change.

So many things influence the way we behave on social media: technology, social changes, economy, and politics. All of them are changing at a rapid speed, so you can imagine how volatile the social media world is.

This makes predicting trends for a year ahead quite difficult. However, there are tendencies that stick around and affect the industry in a major way for a long time. For example, influencer marketing has been winning the hearts of social media marketers and the pockets of consumers for a couple of years now, and the ephemeral content, even though it has been around for a while, got a significant boost with Instagram’s investments put into the Stories feature.

Considering these points, I present to you the eight social media trends of 2019. These are the tendencies that take their roots in the current cultural zeitgeist, technological development, and social platforms’ respective strategies, and are expected to take over social media this year.

1. Social listening

Social listening is not a new thing by any means, but the way we apply social listening is changing right now. In the past years, social listening was a way to manage brand mentions and reputations for big brands like Apple or Hilton. However, two things happened that altered the social media listening industry:

Social media monitoring tools have become more evolved, with new sources of data, new features, etc being added constantly.

The tools became affordable not just for huge corporations, but for mid-sized and small businesses, local businesses, and startups as well.

How did this affect social listening strategies? Well, nowadays, the new features and data sources allow going beyond basic brand monitoring. You can use social listening for social selling, SEO, and customer care to name a few.

If I’d have to point out one area where social listening could really change the current marketing landscape, I’d go with sales. Social selling is a unique tactic that gives you an opportunity to engage with people who are seeking services and products in your industry directly.

One tool in particular even added a specific feature dedicated to social selling called Awario Leads.

For now, this tactic is extremely underused, but we can expect to see more and more brands taking on social selling this year.

2. Buying on social

Social selling is one thing, but what if you could choose and order a product without even leaving the social media app?

To be fair, it’s not a new thing, Facebook already allows users to buy products from brands’ pages in their ‘Shop‘ section. They also have a Marketplace feature launched way back in 2007 which is an alternative to Craigslist, a platform where individuals can sell or exchange mostly second-hand items.

In 2019 we will see more social media companies opening up their platforms for ecommerce. It would be the next logical step for companies which already offer brands a wide range of features for advertising, like YouTube or Instagram. In fact, one of these might be already working in that direction.

Last September, The Verge reported that Instagram might be working on an ecommerce app. According to the article, the app will let users browse collections of goods from merchants that they follow and purchase them directly within the app.

Surely, the app is not an additional feature to Instagram but rather a stand-alone entity. However, this indicates Instagram’s understanding and interest in implementing e-commerce in their product (which is only natural considering that Facebook owns Instagram).

3. Transparency

Social media data has become essential to any marketing strategy, hence social listening is on this list. However, this past year proved just how little knowledge we as a society have of the scope and impact of social media data collected on a daily basis.

Last year was marked by an array of privacy scandals, with Cambridge Analytica being the most prominent one. However, Facebook wasn’t the only one who suffered, Twitter, YouTube, and even Reddit reported at least one security breach last year.

However, let’s not diminish Facebook’s role in this regard, they seemed to have one PR nightmare after another. This probably prompted Mark Zuckerberg to make a special New Year’s resolution for 2019 to organize a series of public discussions dedicated to how Facebook influences society.

That will be only one of the initiatives dedicated to bringing more transparency into the world of social media companies. Data is one of the most important resources in social media marketing, and ethical collection, as well as unbiased evaluation of it, will be a major priority for companies this year.

Our century is marked by brands developing personalities for themselves and building relationships with their audiences. According to this study by Sprout Social, millennials are expecting more transparency from brands than politicians or friends and family. Gaining the trust of the audience will become the focus of social media platforms’ strategies.

4. Live streaming

Powered by social media algorithms, pivoting to video content has been a trend for a while now. This year, however, live streaming is the new black.

Social streaming favors in-the-moment content, another trend that has been taking over social media for a while with Instagram Stories, Snapchat, and, most recently, Facebook stories. According to this Facebook report, daily watch time for Facebook live broadcasts grew four times over the course of a year.

You can use live streaming to present a new product, change the narrative during a PR crisis, or introduce a collaboration with an influencer.

What makes live streaming so special is the ability to create space for an actual dialogue with your customer in real time. Your viewers feel like they are in the middle of a natural conversation, and you’re speaking directly to them. It wins over highly produced video content because of its authenticity, the thing every marketer is trying to accomplish.

5. Private communities

2018 saw a trend of communication migrating to private channels.

More and more interactions occur in Facebook groups and private communities rather than on public pages, which is favored both by algorithms and people (unless these people are social media managers). Moreover, social media platforms keep adding new features to simplify the curation of private groups on top of integrating messaging features in their apps.

On Instagram, turning your growing Instagram account private creates a sense of exclusivity and urgency encourages people to follow, as described in this article by the Atlantic. Private groups and accounts make you feel like a part of an exclusive community, and who doesn’t want that?

Consider creating a private community for your brand, for example, a group on Facebook or LinkedIn. This will give your users an opportunity to not just communicate with you but also with each other, which contributes to building a strong community and encouraging brand advocacy.

6. Messaging

The most private communication channel is, of course, direct messaging. And for the last few years, brands have been engaging with customers through DMs and personal messages on social.

For now, brands are mostly using messaging apps and DMs for customer service purposes. But there’s untapped potential to create personalized, automated communication that’s even more effective than email.

This year, messaging will become a meaningful part of every social media strategy. Moreover, brands will finally embrace messenger automation. A study conducted by Relay revealed that out of 1000 trending B2B companies on Crunchbase, only 0.5 percent of the companies had a chatbot.

Chatbots could make messenger marketing the new email marketing, the open rate for messages is much higher than for emails, and messaging itself is seen as a more casual and personal way of communication.

Chatbots aren’t perfect yet, and people still prefer to converse with a human. However, as chatbots become more sophisticated and use more natural language, they will become necessary. You need to figure out which part of your marketing strategy could benefit from them.

Integrating eCommerce functions could also be beneficial for messaging apps. This is not the new idea if we remember WeChat, but it hasn’t been explored yet in the Western part of the world.

7. Personalization

Chatbots and messaging can also be a part of a comprehensive personalization strategy. 2019 will be the year when personalization powered by AI takes over marketing.

Considering the vast amount of personal information currently available to social media companies, it has become extremely easy to obtain insights into all kinds of information about your customers. Content consumed, purchase history, clicked links, social media interactions, and even personal messages. All this and more can be used to create a laser-targeted marketing campaign just for you.

However, some consumers may feel uncomfortable with how personalization is currently implemented in marketing. Brands need to find the fine line between being helpful and outright creepy.

One way to do this would be combining personalization and other types of marketing: influencer marketing, personalizing your messaging communication (beyond using first names), and so on. Take an example from Airbnb, which uses information about your past and upcoming trips to craft personalized traveling recommendations.

8. Augmented reality (AR)

AR can be used in a plethora of ways, from creating filters dedicated to certain events to actually implementing your product in videos or photos to let customers try it on.

At its F8 developer conference last year, Facebook announced that it was testing AR ads. In your timeline, they look like ordinary Facebook Ads but with a ‘Tap to try it on’ button that lets you try products on virtually with the help of camera filters.

AR could be the solution for those who don’t like online shopping and prefer to test a product before buying. If social media platforms successfully implement this technology on a wide scale first, they will become an even more attractive platform for advertising compared to digital space.

What you need to do in 2019

As you can see, none of these trends are coming at you completely out of the blue, most of them are a logical development of social media platforms’ strategies or the way ordinary users behave on social media.

So this year, it’s time to become an early adopter and try something new, be it a social listening tool or a messenger bot. In 2019, make sure you:

Collect and analyze social media data to guide your marketing decisions

Apply new technology to your social media strategy

Stay authentic and personal

You will undoubtedly see a boost in your social media ROI.

Got any unique social media strategies chalked out for 2019? Share your thoughts in the comments.

Aleh is the Founder and CMO at SEO PowerSuite and Awario. He can be found on Twitter @ab80.

The post Eight social media trends that will make 2019 appeared first on Search Engine Watch.

from Digtal Marketing News https://searchenginewatch.com/2019/03/01/eight-social-media-trends-that-will-make-2019/

[andhumanslovedstories]

what I’ve read 2017 (books 7-10)

Sex on Six Legs: Lessons on Life, Love, and Language from the Insect World, Marlene Zuk

A Time to Dance, Padma Venkatraman

Big Girls Don’t Cry: The Election that Changed Everything for American Women, Rebecca Traister

Get it Done When You’re Depressed: 50 Strategies for Keeping Your Life on Track, Julie A. Fast and John D. Preston

or, God made bugs kinky; we explain so many things through interpretative dance, maybe it’s time for interpretative dance to be explained; no not that election the other election;  and this book about depression made me more depressed

Nonfiction: Sex on Six Legs: Lessons on Life, Love, and Language from the Insect World, by Marlene Zuk (1/15)

  Despite the first part of the title, which is the only part I read before I immediately checked this book out, Sex on Six Legs is in fact about much more than just insect sex. The majority of the book focuses on other aspects of insect communities and relationships, as Zuk takes a plethora on nonsex angles to examine the intricate interdependence of these highly sophisticated social structures. You have to read most of the book to get to the sex, which is good because all of the book is interesting and gosh I’d never thought about the complexities of insects this way and boy does it make you question how humans consider ourselves so unique in our complexity when insects are just as complex while also being staggeringly diverse in that complexity, yes, all of this is true, but I’m not here to lie to you. My main takeaway from this book has to be that, yall, bugs fuck so weird. 

  Yall. 

  Yall. 

  They fuck the weirdest. Bugs fuck like xenophiles aren’t thinking big enough. Bugs read your Mass Effect fanfic and they aren’t impressed by your sex scenes. Gimme them vaginas that store multiple deposits of sperm so that the female can select whichever she wants to fertilize her eggs. Gimme them males who answer the question “what that dick do” with “scoop out my competitor’s sperm, obviously, while ejaculating like someone dropped a mentos in diet coke.” Yall, I find out that ant queens mate once, in a midair orgy as they fly to their new hive, and that’s their store of sperm for the rest of their lives. There’s competitive secret egg fucking. There’s exploding penises. There’s a lot of death. Insect sex (Insex? no. no let’s not go with that) is as diverse and otherworldly as insect social structures are, and a book like this should be mandatory reading for anyone doing science fiction or fantasy world building. The natural world is weirder than your imagination. And Zuk is a good writer to escort you through it, with clear expertise paired with a minimum of jargon, a sense of the best insect anecdotes, and the kind of dry humor you often find in science writing about traditionally esoteric or disgusting subjects—a convivial kind of concession that, yes, this is what I’ve dedicated my life to studying, yes, I can see how that might seem an odd choice, no, I’m not embarrassed in the slightest, now please follow me as we find out what that dick do.

Fiction: A Time to Dance, by Padma Venkatraman (1/16)

  I struggle with books written in verse, largely since I spend the book wondering why it isn’t just written in prose. If I’d noticed A Time to Dance was entirely in verse when I’d picked it up at the library, I might not have brought it home. Having said that, small freeverse chapters do allow you different opportunities for writing style and flow, and Venkatraman takes advantage of both the possibility for increased lyricism and increased fragmentation to convey dance and trauma. The novel centers on Veda, a teenage dancer of Bharatanatyam, an Indian classical dance. Her career is derailed after an accident after a competition costs Veda her right leg. The book covers Veda’s relationship with her body, her family, and her dance, as the accident forces her to dig deeper into the spirituality behind physicality. It’s dance as dance and dance as prayer, which works well (I grudgingly admit) as verse.

Nonfiction: Big Girls Don’t Cry: The Election that Changed Everything for American Women, by Rebecca Traister (1/29)

  I’m going through the books in the order I started them, rather than the order I finished them. Usually they’re the same thing. Sometimes, as is the case here, the book takes a long time to get through. It turns out that this January I was not really feeling reading a book examining the impact of the 2008 election. Especially when the first half was, “Why did Hillary Clinton lose?” Traister opens the book talking about her own conversion from a John Edwards supporter (hey remember when we thought he wasn’t a piece of shit?) who thought Clinton was too compromised a candidate to a Clinton supporter sobbing in public the night Hillary conceded. She talks about the transition of Hillary Rodham to Hillary Clinton and the decades she spent as the lightening rod of feminism in politics, from taking her husband’s name some years after marriage because it was hurting him in the polls, to why Hillary Clinton has always been her most politically popular when she is suffering personal lows. And post 2016, it’s fascinating studying Clinton’s genderless (or probably more accurately, masculine) 2008 campaign, where after a career of focusing on women’s issues, Clinton moved them to the background, to her detriment.

  But it’s not a book about Hillary Clinton. She is the largest figure in it, but Traister analyzes Sarah Palin’s brand of conservative womanhood, the Obama bros and their gender troubles, Michelle Obama (who comes off amazingly in this book, Traister straight up admits that when she was reporting on the campaign she had to call her editor and be like, “I can’t report on this woman any more, I now love her too much”; the analysis of Michelle as reluctant political wife with a complicated relationship to her country is one of the standout sections of the book), media figures like Katie Couric and Rachel Maddow, and one of the parts I found most interesting, Elizabeth Edwards. Elizabeth Edwards, Michelle Obama, and Hillary Clinton form an interesting tryptic of the new political wife—women who are as accomplished as their husband, who are routinely credited as the brains of the partnership, and who struggle publically with traditional femininity (which is especially complicated for Michelle Obama as a black woman) and political ambition.

Nonfiction: Get it Done When You’re Depressed: 50 Strategies for Keeping Your Life on Track, by Julie A. Fast and John D. Preston (1/18)

  I picked up this book because I was starting school again, because I was feeling mature and aware of my problems, because I’ll pick up anything even self-help related. (Sidenote: self-help is my number one guilty pleasure. I’ll read self-help books on whatever, problems I have and problems I don’t. I’ve read about raising your child who has ADHD, about dating after divorce, separating your life from narcissist parents, dating multiple men at once, and reentering the workforce after decades of teaching in academia. My ultimate wish fulfilment is anything that promises me a solution in 300 pages or less. ) 

  The book’s chapters, each a different strategy for being productive while depressed, are a few pages long and rigidly formatted: an explanation of a problem caused by depression, a testimony from someone with depression, a testimony from author Julie Fast on her own experiences with depression, an explanation from Dr. John Preston as to why depressed brains do this, and some advice on implementing the advice. Most of the advice made sense—keep a schedule, get sleep, find the place that you work the best—while other made sense but were also a deep affront to my soul—namely if you can’t do something, just ask someone else to do. The visceral horror I felt reading this advice has forced me to confront how I think about my own and other people’s mental illness. (also an affront: maybe drink less caffeine, which I’m gonna pretend I didn’t read because I’ve been trying to drink less caffeine because it makes me jittery and now I can’t stop taking naps which are taking over my days, so I think jitteriness is less of a detriment than the exhaustion, and by the way, this sequence of trial and error body balancing is perfect microcosm for trying to cope with depression.)

  I’ve had a check tire light on in my car for weeks now, a light that, oh boy, I should do something about, but every aspect of checking the tires, from finding the pressure gauge and actually using it, to figuring out the steps to take if there actually is a problem, seems like so much effort that it’s easier to ignore the problem. Which translates to, it’s easier to force my hand by making the situation a crisis than it is to motivate myself to do preventative maintenance. It’s occurred to me that I could ask Dad to do this for me. Or ask him to at least come with me to the garage. Why don’t I? Answer: because I am capable of handling this tire if I function at my best and make it a priority, because Dad might ask how long this has been a problem and I’ll have to admit that it’s been weeks, because a serious car problem would drain what’s left of my savings, because Dad will be so ashamed of his lazy adult daughter that he’ll never respect or love me again (I never said these were all reasonable excuses.) So I don’t ask him to help with this. And I think less of the author for admitting that she would.

  It’s more acceptable to hate yourself for your mental illness than it is to hate other people, because self-hatred at least allows you to be both victim and victimizer. But I judge people for procrastinating on the things they know they should be doing while I strenuously avoid all my tasks, I judge people for their depression while I keep bursting into tears in parking lots because I don’t want to get out of my car, I judge people for their anxiety while I crank up youtube videos of hand massages so I don’t need to focus on my own thoughts, and I excuse my judgment of others by arguing that I’m no harder on them than I am on myself. And if (when) I am, it’s because clearly I am putting in the work to handle my problems while they aren’t. So I disliked Fast for most of this book. I hated her anecdotes and her honesty. When she talked about how her depression had lost her relationships and profession opportunities, I quickly listed all the ways that way my depression was better than that depression. The book took me longer than I expected to read; it’s hard to speedread when what you’re reading makes you feel ugly.

  I had my epiphany around strategy 45: I hated how she talked about depression in the present tense. I hated how she had a book’s worth of strategies for coping with depression, and she was still depressed. I didn’t (and don’t) want to cope with my depression. I want to not be depressed. But she’s still depressed. And I’m still depressed. And maybe I’m going to be depressed forever. In which case, it’s good for me to remember that loving myself and loving other people are one and the same. Empathy for me is not a high-road, moralistic treatise on how we should behave; it’s simply that when I make the strong effort to love people who do and think the same ways I wish I didn’t, I get better at loving myself. Maybe more useful than the entire book’s worth of strategies was the one that I ended with, my strategy number 51: Forgive us our depression, as we forgive those who are depressed.

  Someone please come help me check my tire.

[elizatronicwarfare]

https://twitter.com/RobinGarwood/status/1270125069461860352

Transcript of thread:

I want to talk about the last time the police came to my house, because I think it can help illuminate what dismantling the police and replacing them with a more constructive way of providing public safety means, at least to me. In April, my friend Jesse was leaving my house after a game of tennis. At this moment, a guy neither of us knew started coming into my house. He seemed quite out of it. We stopped him from coming inside, and got him to sit on my front steps instead. I got him a glass of water, and then another. I’ll call him “L.” We asked him where he was staying, who we could call for him, what his last name was. He couldn’t tell us. He did not seem to have any awareness of the COVID crisis, repeatedly offering to shake our hands. It was going to snow that night, and he was dressed in a t-shirt, jeans, and sneakers. I gave him one of my towels, just for warmth. We couldn’t tell what was happening: was he intoxicated? Suffering a mental health crisis? A vulnerable adult? Some combination of these? It was really unclear, but what was clear was that he needed help that we couldn’t provide. So I called Hennepin Cty COPE. I was explicit that L was not threatening & I did not want a police response. The person I talked to really wanted to help. She tried to get L to talk to her, but he couldn’t really say much. I translated his body language to “yeses” and “nos.”

Eventually, it was clear that we needed someone to come help. The COPE person asked L if he was comfortable having an ambulance called. He nodded, and I said yes. So she called 911. She passed on to them that I did NOT want a police response. But after she got off the phone with 911, she let me know that the initial response was likely to be MPD anyway. And that’s what happened. A squad pulled up to my house in under ten minutes. I greeted them at the curb, with my hands out and above my head, making the sign for “calm down,” sort of a gentle pushing of my hands towards the earth. I was terrified, on L’s behalf. The officers hardly spoke to me, or to Jesse. They approached L, and asked him if he’d come with them. We asked what they were going to do, an they said they were going to have a “private conversation” with L in the squad car. Their attitude was dismissive and hostile throughout this interaction. Rather than treating Jesse and me as people who were trying to work with them to help L, and keep our community safe, they treated us with borderline contempt. After going to the car for a “private conversation,” they sat in it for about a minute, and then they simply drove away, without another word to us. It took me several days to get a clear answer from someone in the police department about what had happened to L. Had he been taken to the hospital? To some other place where he could get help? To jail? Somewhere else? Turns out they asked him where he wanted to be dropped off. He said 38th & Minnehaha (again: he was nearly nonverbal, so I doubt how clearly he could articulate this). They took him there and let him out. In a t-shirt, with my towel as a shawl, just before the snow. We did not need police to come to my home to help with this situation. We did not need a couple of white guys with guns, who don’t live in my community and clearly don’t like or respect any of us, me included. We needed some kind of actual help for L. I wasn’t hoping that L would be moved off of my stoop to some other place. I was hoping that he would get some sort of meaningful help. I want to be able to call 911 and ask for someone to come and help me. Someone I have confidence will actually help me, and everyone involved. Someone I don’t have to worry will shove, or hit, or taze, or shoot anyone involved. I want an infrastructure behind this immediate response, which can help people get what they need: housing, food, mental health resources, drug treatment, etc. If there was a fire in my home, I’d call 911 and ask for firefighters. I’d have confidence that they’d come and put out the fire. If I was having a heart attack, I’d call 911 and ask for EMTs. I’d have confidence that they’d come and get me to a hospital. When there is a strange man on my front stoop who can hardly speak, who clearly needs some kind of help, I want to have someone to call who will actually do something constructive about it. I have no confidence that the police can be made into that kind of organization. So let’s build something else. Let’s give the people of our city another option to ask for, when we call 911. A group of people without guns, tasers, or any other weapons, who care more about compassion than control. In the short term, maybe we need an armed force, to respond to bank robbers or shootings in progress. But let’s shrink them down just to that function, and use the resources we save to build a new way of responding to people like L.