#i thought i wrote pdf as a follow-up and got over it but i guess the fuck not

[cheswirls]

no idea why ywr/iwf has gotten an influx of kudos over the past week but its been both a compliment and an irk tbh

[lwt28brave]

LT2 masterpost

If it was up to me, we would get an autumn or winter EP. Since it’s not up to me at all, here, enjoy this post with everything we know so far of LT2, which is to say, not much at all. Everything here is hypothetical. I’ll be updating every time I see something relevant. A little disclaimer that while this is a masterpost (kinda), it could be read as discourse (duh, it’s also a theory), AND it’s also by me, and you shouldn’t expect me to be serious at this point.

Due to me restraining myself, there’s no reference to any of the times he’s mentioned his guitar skills and him improving but I hope you know I cried every single time.

I’m also linking my old pinned here. It was written before AFHF and around the free merch thing that didn’t lead to much, but I still think I made some good points.

Possible tracks:

Copy of a Copy of a Copy

Change

Faith in the future??

369??

Possible names:

369

Faith in the future

When is the album coming out?

Your guess is as good as mine

Friday 28th of January 2022. Almost two years after Walls. It’s a Friday. It’s a 28th. What else can I say?

Here you can find @want-to-be-loved timelines for every month.

Here you can find @berlinini’s timeline of what Louis has been up to this year (2021).

The rest is under the cut. And here you can find a PDF version where Tumblr can't tell me how many pictures I can add.

2020

He said back on May 2th 2020 he wasn’t writing anything new yet.

(x)(x)(x)

Interestingly enough, he’s said many times after that that the album’s not ready cause he has no new experiences to drawn from. I won’t call him out because he does it himself.

May 4th. He liked a tweet from DMA’s Johnny Took saying they had to go write together again. Louis has been credited as an influence for them and (kind of) participated in their previous record, so I’m assuming he meant for their music and not his, but you never know.

Nothing(literally nothing??? how did we survive) until 11th of July. We all know what happened that day. We all celebrated it. Nonetheless, that’s not what I’m talking about here.

(x) So, by the beginning of July 2020 he was working on concepts and ideas for the new album. That was fifteen months ago. I know perfection takes time but…

Brief summary of important things that happened from then until the next mention of new music:

Louis left Syco!!!! 10 days later he rescheduled the tour for the first time. He followed Matt Vines on Twitter, probably so we could publicly shame him into doing something. Also, the 10thanniversary. He followed more people I wish he hadn’t.

Then more nothing until September. Not even a single tweet. The first merch drop was on the 28th of August but he just RT’ed the tweet. He first mentioned Free my Meal on the 25th of September. Then on October 1st Walls hit #1 on a lot of countries and Louis was incredibly happy and excited about it ^^

And then, that same day, October 1st, 2020, he dropped this bomb:

(x)

He also said it was too soon to be sharing new lyrics with us (x)

And, obviously, this tweet which is actually what made me start this whole post. I would hope you know mate.

(x)

He also told us he was cooking "banger after banger" and that he was incorporating more social themes into his music (x)(x) (I believe any social issue is a political issue but that’s not the point rn).

COPY OF A COPY OF A COPY?!?!

These next paragraphs are brought to you by my mind not remembering things and me not having any links. I’m assuming COACOAC came from those writing sessions that supposedly happened in October. Or in LA but I have no idea if he actually was in LA at any point other than a Daily Mail article putting him there on December which would have been too late, but I do remember that someone said he was in the studio in LA last autumn???? A rumor. Maybe. IDK. Did I mention already all of this is very hypothetical?? Well, this is it. I can’t even remember if this was October or November or what. So, take this with a grain of salt.

I’m also… taking the liberty to assume, if you must, that Copy wasn’t meant to be a Walls reject because it sounds more mature and darker and it has a vastly different tone that Walls songs. I know he’s said that song probably isn’t getting into the album, but I want to have faith (in the future) that I’m getting a studio version. (But also, Louis, if you’re reading this, first of all GET OUT OF MY BLOG second of all, please don’t ever feel pressured again to add a song to the album because we have already heard it before. It’s your art and it should always be under your own terms).

So yeah, I believe that Copy is either one of those four songs (then imagine the other three??!!) or was written around the 1st of October date.

---End of the Intermission---

Then not much important (other than sharing more about Marcus Rashford fight against food poverty and the 2nd merch drop) until he announced the livestream on the 24th of November. (x)

It wasn’t until a few days before the livestream date we even thought again about new music (jk, I know we’re always thinking about new Louis’ music). So, December 9th/10th, 2020. Nine months ago. We got our first taste of new music!

He made sure we knew Copy of a Copy of a Copy isn't a cover! (x) (x)

(x)

Ok, so that’s it for 2020. (I feel like I’m missing something from September 17th because tweet was deleted but maybe he was still talking about cucumbers. We might never know. Unless I understand how Tumblr tags work). Expected, cause Walls was released in 2020. We needed to let it sit for a while.

2021

Another Summary: Louis third tweet of the year was telling the UK government off. So was the fifth. What a good beginning. On the 26th of January, he said he prefers pancakes over waffles. I hope he meant pancakes other than his own. More importantly, he tweeted the infamous “you lot read into things too much”. Don’t get me started, Tomlinson. Don’t. Then the 31st came around and Walls was one. He tweeted this. How wise. And Project Defenceless happened!!

15th of February!! Who cares about Valentine Day when the next day we got this? ♥

(x)

(x)

So…AN EP?? AN EP?? PLEASE RELEASE AN EP.

“I’m sure I will have something out this year but unlikely that will be the album”. Unlikely but not impossible. Also. A single would be good. This is the second time he mentions releasing something in 2021 and he sounds surer about it than the first time around.

He also said that he isn’t sure we will get a studio version of Copy. And that the best bridges from Walls to LT2 are Walls, OTB, KMM and Copy. Can’t wait!

Then we jump to March 6th when he announced he was going to create his own management company. “Sometimes action is needed first to encourage the motivation and belief”. As we can tell he was already manifesting some stuff which will lead us to the numerology stuff/Tesla… kidding. Or not. We might never know.

On the 22nd of March he answered some questions:

He told us music was still his main focus ♥ mwha. (x) I included this tweet to guilt-trip him into giving us music in case he’s reading this even after I told him to leave. ILY.

(x) I’d love to get a visual EP this autumn. Just saying. It sounds like a lovely concept.

(x)

…next (I will get into it, I promise. I’m just mad).

On the 25th he left for Mexico until April 10th. You could assume it was just for the documentary where we got ten seconds of footage or admit the obvious: LT2 its a Mexican baby!!

On the 26th (so, not so far apart from that first 369) we got the first Faith in the Future mention: (x)

Back then we were innocent people who had no idea what was coming upon us. We still have no idea because what the fuck does he mean with these. Please explain. I have one braincell and I don’t use it enough for this. I’m linking some theories.

On the 30th of March he confirmed he was already working on the documentary. So AFHF was already on the works. Will it take this long for us to get the Veeps numbers? We also got this tweet: "Got a decent chorus idea down" (x).

Same person that got the “something out this year” exclusive. If you know something share with the class. Also. Is this Change? I feel like this could be Change but I also assume he wrote Change after hanging out with his friends or being in Doncaster. But who knows.

(x) And the second mention to 369.

(x) 15th of April. The second "Faith in the future".

On the 19th of April he announced that he had something BIG for us later on the year which turned out to be the Away From Home Festival ♥♥ (x) I love him so much.

Then on the 28th he announced the 369 merch drop (which it’s probably the Walls drop? Except that the TOU and KMM ones were “drop 1 and drop 2” and this was drop 369 which, again, makes no sense) but we still don’t know what 369 means.

Into May’ 21 we go.

He rescheduled tour again. And dropped another bomb (x).

He announced he has signed with BMG as an independent artist by RTing this tweet on May 10th. The article also says that he’s already working on writing and recording LT2. The timing… we don’t know. What this deal involves… we don’t know either. Bear with me here because I have a lot to say about this.

I think the deal is only a distribution one, but that BMG are interested in Louis and what he (us) could bring to the table. They were either present at the festival or watching it, but officially they had no involvement at all with it (everything is credited either to Louis own company, 78 Productions, or Charlie Lightening’s company). That’s the case for both giveaways too; the vinyl one and the tickets for the festival.

I think it would be an unbelievably bad move not to test the waters with BMG now or soon-ish. At least a single, to see how it performs. Due to the circumstances, it’s obvious there’re certain limitations on place but I want to see how they push it, whether the radio play exist this time around and if the song is playlisted and promoted and all that… I would also love to know, since it says he signed with BMG UK, but it also states it’s a global deal, how things are going to go on the US and other countries.

Yes, yes. I know those are all questions and no answers. But I know the same as you, sadly. If any of you know more than you’re letting on… again, share with the class.

Where was I? Yes, on the 25th of May Louis had a great day writing (x). Since the first time he had mentioned he was officially writing to this date there’s almost eight months. And I believe he was writing before October’ 20.

He followed Robert Harvey that day and, on the 28th of May (why is it always the 28th???) he was spotted at the studio for the first time.

June was an interesting month for the fandom ♥. Lots of LHL content which I will love and cherish for the rest of times. On June 4th, June 9th, and June 10th he was spotted at the studio, but I believe he was there more days.

(x)

This was posted on June 6th and captioned Studio. Charlie also shared it with “Mega tunes being put down, can’t wait for this @louist91 #louistomlinson #LT2” as the caption. This gives me 2019 (Elton-Joint) vibes. I like it. Feels like we’re getting closer to something.

He added the Milano date on the 9th too which I’m mentioning because I’m going alone. Anyone wanna go with me please? I’m nice and I never eat anything before a concert so you can have my food. On other news. It didn’t come home.

During July he was at the studio at least three days too. Probably more. Feels like more with all the fan pictures we got. Or was that June? Anyway, July 1st and 9th we got some videos from Robert Harvey and wearesuperhi, which is who Louis has been working with the most, that we know of. I don’t know for sure they’re from that day. And on July 5th we got an article and lots of pictures of Louis looking really good outside the studio.

On the 12th of July the first fans started getting the free, 369 bucket hat and print. We still don’t know what the purpose was other than to thanks fans. Maybe that was it. I want answers and I still think it relates to a future project (see theories above), but it could also just be a bridge with the Walls breaking.

He didn’t tweet about anything interesting for a while, mostly because he lost his phone (he either throwed it in the air or smashed it who knows). Then on the 29th of July he announced the festival!

I’m glossing over it because there’s already been a lot of talk about it (rightfully) and while it was a wonderful thing, it doesn’t have much to do with LT2.

Let’s talk Change!

On August 3rd he tweeted this about the setlist.

(x)

And this (x) on the 28th! I can’t stand him.

We didn’t get it, obviously. Because who was going to get that. But we read too much into things. Alright.

On the 16thof August Dave Gibson shared this post tagged #LT2 with the eyes emojis 👀👀👀. I believe this has to do both with Change but also with whatever else came out of that Mexico trip.

(x) Last relevant tweet related to LT2 is this one.

So, on the 30th of August we got Change and we cried, and we know that Change is going in the new album. He said it. With those exact words. He also said he was “getting a feeling for it”. This has to meant he already has a general idea of the vibe of the new album and what’s going in it!!!!!! (Right? RIGHT?).

Anyway, let’s go back a few weeks because some other things happened on August. He was at the studio a few more times. Or it was suggested that he was there. On the 17th and the 18th. (Why was it so time-pressing to be at the studio instead of rehearsing for the festival? There was no studio at all on the documentary. Which makes sense, but again, then why?).

On the day of the festival we got another mention of Faith in The Future that made me feel part of a cult ngl. The words were flashing on the screen for less than a second. Okay.

And then he tweeted those words again after watching the livestream/documentary on the 4th of September (x). This is what makes me suspect it's either the name of the album or of the single.

On the same day, we got some interesting quotes about LT2 on the documentary.

“Soon I’ll have to think about me second album, which in my head I’ll get the tour out of the way and then I’ll address that. So, I hadn’t really given it much thought, to be honest”.

“When every day is the same is hard to feel creative and it’s hard to have any kind of proper inspiration”.

“As season started to come back, I started writing again and it was great and some of these songs turned out alright”.

And I think this is it. I might be overlooking some important details but that’s what we know and what we don’t know.

So. Conclusions. That’s what you missed on Glee. I do believe the album is, if not mostly done, partially there. And yes, this post is pointless and never-ending but it’s all in here if you need to tell Louis “Hey, you said this, mate”.

[marksinn]

Passion Project: Inspiration

I don’t think I’m starting at the beginning with this post. Keep your eyes peeled for later posts that explain what I’m doing and why.

After a month of thinking about, sketching and painting designs, I have finally done something. Essentially, recently watching two films has pushed me into action, and a part of me is ashamed to admit it. There isn’t a word count or any typesetting to curtail my thoughts here, so strap in.

When I created this brief I figured I’d draw a million wee skateboards, colour a few of them in, then fling my favourites into Adobe illustrator and make them look good. From there I would take the 5 best up to the skatepark and ask some of the patrons there which designs stood out to them. Next, I would adapt the three front-runners and create sweet PhotoShop mockups that would show what my designs would look like as skateboards. If I had the time, inclination or money by the end of the project, I would have the design laid onto a real skateboard (I’ve been looking to buy a new one for some time) and then be proud of myself.

So I’ve drawn some wee skateboards. Then I started upscaling the designs onto the floorboards of my loft:

This was an exercise to let me see how small things need to be adapted to be blown up. Skateboards can have any level of detail that you like on them, I hadn’t considered this until I was trying to draw a semi-perfect triangle for the traffic cone, or until I was using chalk to recreate four cubes. It’s also been fun to work with different media on chipboard - I have learned that most kinds of pencil, paint, chalk and charcoal do not like being used on chipboard. Decorating paint, however, has no such issues. Thanks, Dulux!

And so, with a few of these under my belt, I decided to try some digital designs. So I jumped into Illustrator and totally ignored my sketchbook, coming up with three designs that were all inspired by the day I had just had. The top design, I’ll focus on last, for reasons that will become apparent (unless you follow me on Instagram, where you’ll already know that it’s an absolute hit, with over 19 likes already!). I was told by a guy at the skatepark that he likes decks with very basic designs, just a colour or two, nothing overly detailed. Another skater told me that he often likes the basic wood background with one small emblem or sticker just beside the wheels.

The duo-tone design felt nice, I’m usually one for over-complicating things. I definitely have an attitude of “If there’s more in it, there’s a greater chance someone will find something they like”. The first colour choice put my girlfriend in the mind of a hand-bag she had seen photographed in the arms of Carrie Fisher - it was designed to look like a Prozac pill. So I changed the colours up, and added the separating black lines and textures to give it some subtle character. I then went full meta with the Minimal design. And, if I’m being honest, I’m incredibly happy with how it looks like a wee character. Expect to see that making a comeback in the very near future. But the top design is what really got me going. 

I’ve recently been watching...

...Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse, and have been loving Miles Morales’ multiple hobbies of graffiti, mixing beats and saving his neighbourhood from a variety of dangers. 

I then went to the cinema to see In The Heights, telling the tale of the Latin community during a blackout in North Manhattan. I found myself wrapped up in the romance, tribulations and music of the cast, and was felt oddly proud of Lin Manuel Miranda - who wrote this as a stage-musical while he was in college, had a modicum of success with it, then went on to create Hamilton, one of the most important musicals of our time. With the success of that particular show taking the entire world by storm, he was given the opportunity to make his old, relatively only semi-popular play into a blockbuster film. You can’t help but be inspired by someone like that.

I often find towards the end of a film I’m inspired by the characters’ journeys: be that from zero to hero, from lonely to loved or from rags to riches. Then I walk out and carry on with my normal life doing normal things. And as the hero of the story’s dreams all came true in the closing minutes (sorry for the spoiler, but it’s a musical, they rarely end in despair), a thought floated across my mind:

I’m utterly sick of being inspired

Now, to my credit, I did figure out in the car home that ‘tired’ would be a far more fitting and rhythmic word to use in this sentence, but this was a mentality that I found resonated really strongly with me. I’m very good at being inspired, I think most people are. We hear stories of people starting their own business, achieving some sporting brilliance or overcoming a personal hurdle and we say “Wow, isn’t that inspiring?” or

“It really inspires you to go out and make a difference!” or

“They are such an inspirational speaker!”

Then we go off about our day, not acting on the inspiration, and, for the most part, remaining uninspired. So I decided to act. 

I did some very quick research (/acquiring of images of graffiti) in order to get the right shapes and textures to create a spray paint effect in Illustrator. I did some very quick research (/confirming the colours) of South American flags, taking the blue and red used in flags of the home nations of Miles Morales from Spider-Man and Usnavi from In The Heights. And I created the top design.

YES! I had been inspired and I had drawn a wee picture to show that - I had acted on my inspirations!

Then I looked to my left and spotted three, blank skate decks that I had bought on a whim from Re:Ply (a wonderful wee company who do a great deal of charity work supplying boards to people who need them, selling boards to people who can afford them, and for a very reasonable fee, providing unusable decks to people who want to use them for artistic purposes). I realised I hadn’t acted on my inspiration, I had just drawn a few pictures of skateboards with the eventual aim of PhotoShopping them onto other pictures of skateboards.

So I took myself...

... into the city centre with a shoddily prepared speech: “I’m looking for some cheap, small cans of spray paint. I’ve no idea what I’m doing, or if I’ll be good at it, so don’t want to invest too much into this.” Hiding behind this self-deprecating shield I barged into multiple art-, pound- and model-shops and pleaded with the staff to help a young idiot out. Amazingly, a very kind shop assistant pointed me in the direction of Fat Buddha, a clothes shop I’d always ignored as it seemed a bit to “...” for me. I don’t know what it seemed, but I knew it wasn't my kind of shop. Happy to prove me wrong, the guys in there were super helpful and they helped me buy my first cans of spray paint. 

Now I’d spent money...

... and as a skinflint, that meant I had to get use out of my purchases. I had tricked myself into being inspired. Inspiration led me to the drawing, inspiration had led me to buy decks and the paint, now inspiration had to make me spray paint.

I’ll stop yammering on now. Essentially, I had planned on creating some analogue designs then digitising them (I’m guessing I should do a post on my brief, yeah? Might just upload the PDF to save me talking more), but then I found that I was doing the complete opposite. Genuinely accidentally. I had played with a few typefaces from various websites to get fonts that represented the ideas I wanted. The top one was semi-stolen (I can’t use the word ‘inspired’ any more in this post) from the end credits of In The Heights. The larger font is something of a nod to inspirational quotes you see on Facebook or on glittery frames in B&M.

I printed those out and cut them into stencils (very impressed that my digital boards have been drawn to a workable scale, thanks Maths). And after putting down a tack-layer (GRAFFITI JARGON (I think)) I sprayed the whole lot in blue.

Next, I tried to get a little fancy. Using cardboard blockers to create straight lines I added stars* (borrowed from the Puerto Rican flag) and made the bottom stripes vaguely reminiscent of America’s Old Glory.

I peeled the lettering off, and I’d done it. I may have to explain the overtly-negative inspirational quote to people, but to me it’s a clear sign that there’s no point in just being inspired, and that’s all I wanted.

A weight I didn’t know I was carrying was lifted from my shoulders. The plan was to possibly end up with a self-designed skateboard. And now I have one.

*Yes, I know they’re crosses.

[yubsie]

Fanfiction tag game

Thanks for the tag @kanerallels!

how many works do you have on Ao3?

18 (includes one podfic I contributed to)

what’s your total Ao3 word count?

35,309 (Guess who mostly writes oneshots!)

what are your top 5 fics by kudos?

She Likes Umbrellas (Discworld/Sandman crossover, 115 kudos, Death/Death)- Discworld!Death throws a party, meets Sandman!Death and they discover they’re against all odds capable of having romantic feelings

How to Detect When Your Captain’s Expecting (Star Wars: Rebels, 80 kudos, Kanan/Hera)- Ezra figures out that Hera is pregnant... and so has literally everyone else

How Ezra Got Banned from Recon Missions (Star Wars: Rebels, 66 kudos, Kanan/Hera)- Ezra catches Kanan and Hera kissing. Everyone else is confused because they were already married when he came on board. I swear I haven’t built an entire brand on Ezra’s poor observational skills.

That Can Be Enough (Star Wars: Rebels, 66 kudos, Kanan/Hera)- Sabine immediately assumes Kanan and Hera are married upon joining the crew. Kanan and Hera decide maybe they should do that actually.

Baby’s First Petition (Star Wars, 48 kudos, Organa family gen)- Tiny Leia brings Bail a formal petition against the horrible injustice that is naptime

do you respond to comments, why or why not?

I usually try to! Comments make me happy and I want to engage with that. Sometimes I forget, but I’ve been pretty good about it lately.

what’s the fic you’ve written with the happiest ending?

Most of my stuff tends to end pretty happily as long as you don’t think about death doing them part eventually. Maybe How to Detect When Your Captain’s Expecting since I AUed away most of the doom?

what’s the fic you’ve written with the angstiest ending?

I guess probably Hand Me Downs. The angst isn’t inherent to the ending, but knowing just how much things are not going to work out with Leia’s baby looms a bit more over it than some of the other eventual doom. It’s hard to write “Building a better galaxy for our children is hard but it will be worth it!” type narratives post-RotJ when we know the sequels are going to happen.

do you write crossovers?

Mostly with Sandman because the Endless are just... endlessly crossoverable. I’ve written Sandman crossovers with Discworld (see above), but also Doctor Who, Harry Potter and Firely.

have you ever received hate on a fic?

Nah, the drama I got wrapped up in was on the TF.N discussion boards, not directly on any fanfic.

do you write smut? if so, what kind?

I have one piece of Adama/Roslin smut from BSG floating around on Livejournal somewhere that never got cross posted to AO3. It’s pretty vanilla. It’s not really something I tend to get struck with ideas for.

have you ever had a fic stolen?

If I did I never found out

have you ever had a fic translated?

No, but someone did a podfic of How to Detect When Your Captain’s Expecting which was really neat.

have you ever co-written a fic before?

Started to once but it never got very far. 

what’s your all-time favourite ship?

It’s a tossup between Kanan/Hera from Star Wars: Rebels and Zoe/Wash from Firefly. I have a dynamic I like and I promise it doesn’t HAVE to end in death!

what’s a wip that you want to finish but don’t think you ever will?

I mostly write oneshots these days. The fic I wrote way back in the day about Wes Janson’s childhood will haunt me forever but it’s something I wrote way too long ago to ever touch again.

what are your writing strengths?

I’m really good at writing dialogue and I have a distinctive narrative voice to the point that several friends are pretty sure they could pick my writing out blind.

what are your writing weaknesses?

Descriptions are the bane of my existence, if I’m not careful I end up with a bunch of disembodied eyebrows in a blank room. Also somewhat related, fight scenes are the devil.

what are your thoughts on writing dialogue in other languages in a fic?

Look I used the same PDF of Chinese phrases as everyone else in the Firefly fandom.  I’m fine with it in a genuine bilingual scenario as long as people switch languages in a way that rings true for bilingualism. 

I don’t tend to use Mando’a but that is entirely my Feelings about one Karen Traviss seeping through.

what was the first fandom you wrote for?

Technically it was Digimon, but the first ones that actually got posted online were for Star Wars.

what’s your favourite fic you’ve written?

Ask me to pick a favourite child why don’t you? She Likes Umbrellas and How to Detect When Your Captain’s Expecting have both left me with the need to follow up from them (Full blown Kanan lives and establishes a very different Jedi Order AU to come) so they might be the best answer.

I do like being tagged in these things but I can never figure out who to tag in turn so... have fun?

[chappedandfadedvds]

Dec 13th, Sunday 13:32

oh no, guys!!

I was out all day and just got back home to realise that I didn’t set the time when to publish todays’ clip... it just sat there in my drafts... so could everyone reading just imagine to be teleported back to this very early afternoon?

I’m so so sorry!! 😰

__ __ __

Hey Jens,

I know this may be a bit out of the blue as I hadn’t contacted you for over two years. I hereby do not ask for forgivness if any shape or form. A lot had happened and for a while it was close to impossible to have contact outside of work. Obviously it doesn’t excuse my absense. I am pretty confident that I may even not have written you yet, wouldn’t it have been for Helena.

Your mother was also the person to give me this email-address, I hope you aren’t too cross with her. She meant well.

I am very positive you aren’t interested to read of anything that had happened to me since our last meeting in 2016. Already four years have passed. It doesn’t feel that long ago. But obviously you may feel different about that.

So where to begin? 

Helena wrote me a long text, detailing the main events of the last year and her diagnoses. I had to read it a couple of times for it to settle. It still feels surreal to have to accept her leaving earth that early. I am most sorry for you. I wish I could have been of more support from the very beginning. But now I have the chance to do something and I hope you will consider my offer.

She told me of Lies and that she no longer lives in Belgium, which leaves you at home with your mother and Lotte. I can barely imagine how very hard that Must be on you. I do hope you have enough people who can take care of you, when you put your energy towards your family.

There isn’t much I can do from my position here. But be assured that I already signed the documents to waive my choice of guardianship over Lotte. You mother was strictly clear that that was your preferred arrangement and I am in no position to interfere in your affairs at home. So they should be on their way and at yours rather soon, hopefully in time early next week. Just in case, I attached a pdf scan. Should you need anything else, please do not hestitate to ak.

I also hadn’t forgotten that you turned 18 and unfortunately I haden’t yet congratulated you. I would like to do that now, even if it may seem shallow. But I send you all my best wishes and do genuinly hope that you will find success and love along your way. I am proud that you have the strenght in you to get through such a difficult and exhausting time and I believe with all my heart that you will make it to the other side.

Regarding my mentioned offer:

I want you to be able to persue your goals in life. Surely you must have some dreams about the future you’d like to see come true. It isn’t much, but I am obviously sending money into your mothers, and now your, bank account, for Lotte and yourself since our separation. And if you would allow me to increase the amount by whatever the house or the corresponding insurances may cost, I’d be more than happy to do that. As well as money for university. A good education takes you far in life.

This is not the greatest help of course, I know this. And I hope that you’ll understand that I can’t just leave my work behind, but I am already areaging to go visit Helena in January. I have to see her before I nay no longer have a chance, and she as well asked me to.

If you, for some reason, want to meet me as well, it would make me quite happy to see you too. I understand though if that is out of question for you.

I hope to hear back from you, so we can discuss the reality of help I can provide and anything I may have forgotten to bring up. I didn’t wanted this to get too long.

You’ll find my mobile number in the document as well, but as I said, a signal is a rare occurance.

With kindest regards,

Hendrik

— 

Jens, who had been hunched over his laptop for the better part of the email, leaned back, resting his head against the wall behind them on the bed.

Reading the long message hadn’t helped to clear up any conflicting emotions he had felt since the notification had arrived a couple days ago. Jens had expected the worst and the best simultaneously, and what he actually had received left him uncertain about the right reaction to such a message. Was it anger or gratitude?

„So? What does it say? Is it bad news?“

No it wasn’t really, was it? If it wouldn’t have been for the sporadic contact with his father, and the suddenness of this mail, Jens perhaps would only have a more positive attitude towards it. However it wasn’t that simple unfortunately.

Jens hadn’t told Robbe about the content of the mail or why he hadn’t opened it yet. But when he had announced that it had been his father, Robbe hadn’t asked anything else. Instead he had draped an arm around his back, before putting his attention on his phone, promising not to look. Jens trusted his best friend to keep his word and had thus quickly opened the message. Before he had a chance to change his mind.

That didn’t meant that the boy snuggled to his side wasn’t curious.

„I don’t know. I honestly don’t fucking know. I’m glad to hear from him, but I am so pissed about the way he wrote it. For example: Already four years have passed. It doesn’t feel that long ago. But obviously you may feel different about it.“ Jens read out loud, ending on a heavy sigh. He probably could have just quoted everything but that would be bringing up topics that Jens wasn’t ready to share.

„Or this bullshit of three sentences: I also hadn’t forgotten that you turned 18 and unfortunately I haden’t yet congratulated you. I would like to do that now, even if it may seem shallow. But I send you all my best wishes and do genuinly hope that you will find success and love along your way.“ He continued, almost mockingly, huffing an unamused laugh when he reread parts of the mail. „Like, fuck him. What am I supposed to do with that?“

„Seriously? That’s why he wrote you?“

It was very nice to know that Robbe seemed a little pissed off by it as well. It definitely validated Jens‘s belief, that this was a shitty thing to write given their history.

„No.“ Jens sighed again, this time a little deflated. His eyes darted briefly towards his best friend, feeling rather timid as he contemplated how to formulate his next words.

„I needed a signed document from him for the thing that is stressing me out.“ As if he couldn’t be anymore vague. „And my mom was so kind to get into contact with him first. So he basically just let me know that he send it off and attatched a pdf as well. That’s something I guess.“

„I see.“

Robbe’s second arm sneaked around his stomach, thus wrapping him into a tight embrace, as he rested his head against Jens’s shoulder.

„I think I would have preferred him to just let me know about the document and leave out the whole other stuff.“ Jens replied, leaning his own head into of his best friend’s.

He felt Robbe nodding, while his fingers stroked his back gently in an attempt to comfort his best friend.

„What did Lucas think?“ He asked Jens, receiving a soft snort in return.

„Nothing yet of course. I opened this for the first time here with you, dumbass.“

„Right. Sorry, my bad!“ Robbe shrugged a faint pink on his cheeks, as he instantly realised the his mistake at the same time Jens answered him.

„I think I’m glad that he wrote me. At least I know that he supports me in some way and I‘m not simply indifferent to him. It would have been worse, had I needed to chase him down for weeks to get the documents.“ Jens quietly said and swiftly closed the laptop. He pushed it away from them. Jens would definitely talk to his mom and perhaps let Lucas read the mail later on his own.

Robbe sat silent next to him. 

„He offered to pay for stuff if I needed him to. Don’t ask me why. But it feels shitty. It is good to have, and I may take him up on it. But it is not what I really need.“ I’d rather have him around, back then and now, Jens finished his thought unspoken.

It was the truth something that felt hard to say out loud. He wasn’t unaware of the fact that he close to never spoke about his father. It wasn’t an important part of his life for years now. He wasn’t even sure what people thought about his father, his friends included. He had met them all way after he left. Did they assume he was dead? No one ever had directly asked Jens before. At least he couldn’t remember anyone had before. There were only a couple of pictures that excist in his home that showed him, and they were almost all a decade old.

“If you want my opinion despite only getting the tiniest details from you, I’d tell you to straight up take the money. My father is always a little stingy if I need more for a month. So if your father offers you something, say thank you and accept it. It is the very least he can do for you. Don’t feel bad or sorry about it, as he should do much more for you. Honestly.”

Jens sat up straighter at his best friends words, Robbe following suit as the unwrapped themselves from each other. It definitely sounded like a shitty thing to do, but then so was the offer. Perhaps Jens would just as Robbe had told him. Why not?

“And if you don’t want to spend it on yourself, use it for Lotte or take out your boyfriend or help your mom with the bills. Whatever.” Robbe added and then shuffled of the sofa, as his phone was ringing on the desk calling for his attention.

Jens watched him, not paying much attention to anything but his thoughts and feelings regarding his father. He was glad that he had come to his best friend who simply accepted Jens withholding most of the details and still helping out. He appreciated it so fucking much.

“Alright, we’ll be there in fourty minutes, I think... yea... sure... okay see you then!”

Robbe told the person on the phone, his best friend’s hand reaching for him to pull him rather clumsy off the bed. Jens laughed at the sorry attempt. Robbe just wasn’t strong enough. But he gave in the second the other boy glared at him.

“Come on. Mayo is already on his way and I’m gonna text Aaron. You can bring your laptop and everything, or you can come back here later to get it.”

“Nah, I have to pick up Lotte at seven from her best friend’s place.” Jens replied, getting up while he packed everything as fast as he could around an impatient Robbe, searching for his missing board. As if a whole fucking skateboard could just vanish?

Seriously how did Sander managed to endure this daily?

Jens must have said that last question out loud, because he was hit in the chest, luckily not by the found skateboard, but by one of Robbe’s loose scattered sneakers.

__ __ __ tagged: @odi-et-amo85, @tayspots

[therockerfromspace]

What the hell is going on with the Grammys - a massive master post.

 Buckle up; this is a mess.

So as we all know, Grammy nominations came out on Tuesday. And... whew there’s a lot to unpack. So this master post is (hopefully) going to explain all the different strands of this. 

A disclaimer before we start: this is in no way bashing the artists who have been nominated. I am sure they all work immensely hard and although they submit themselves, most of them have 0 say in the nominations process. For the love of God - we’re not going after any individual artist. 

(also, just for clarity and conciseness: this post is going to focus on the “Big 4″ in terms of nominations - Best New Artist, Record of the Year, Song of The Year and Album of the Year). 

So - Best New Artist. As a category I’m happy with all the nominees - the criteria is weird as hell though (basically you can just keep submitting yourself up to 3 times? and it doesn’t matter how far into your career you are? ok I guess). I’d love for Phoebe Bridgers or Megan Thee Stallion to take it personally, but I’m happy with all the nominees. It’d be nice to see Blackpink get an acknowledgement but they could end up getting nominated next year because of eligibility dates. So yeah, no major issues with Best New Artist. 

Just to clarify before we move on - Wikipedia has better definition of the difference between SOTY and ROTY so I’m just going to paste it here:

Record of the Year is awarded for a single or for one track from an album. This award goes to the performing artist, the producer, recording engineer and/or mixer for that song. In this sense, "record" means a particular recorded song, not its composition or an album of songs.

Song of the Year is also awarded for a single or individual track, but the recipient of this award is the songwriter who actually wrote the lyrics and/or melodies to the song. "Song" in this context means the song as composed, not its recording

ROTY: Record of the year ... it’s very safe. Rockstar, Say So, Everything I Wanted, Don’t Start Now, Circles and Savage were all expected. The Black Pumas song is an outlier but normally there’s a couple of smaller songs on the nominees list so not a complete surprise. Black Parade is also a bit of a turnup - it’s a great song and obviously had some momentum this summer but wasn’t huge . I was surprised not to see The Weeknd in this category (more on that later); would have nice to see BTS on the list but again, not shocking. 

SOTY: A mix? I guess? Most of it is overlap from ROTY - but there’s a few different songs in the way of Cardigan, I Can’t Breathe and If The World Was Ending. Personally, I’m really happy that Cardigan and I Can’t Breathe are in there - my personal favorite would be I Can’t Breathe Winning. “If The World Was Ending” ... was there I guess? So congratulations. 

AOTY: Oh boy. AOTY is a mix. So the less surprising inclusions: Folklore and Future Nostalgia. I do genuinely believe it’s a tossup between those two now as to who wins AOTY - I’m going to give the edge to Taylor right now because she’s won it before for Fearless and 1989 but I’m not sure the Recording Academy would give it to her 1 in 4 years ish consistently. Then again, Taylor is a Grammys darling and 2nd highest Metacritic score of the nominations, so it wouldn’t shock me. I’m shocked HAIM are nominated in the best possible way (it’s my personal AOTY), but the rest ... I’m stunned by. Djesse Vol 3 is also great but I don’t think it has a shot; Chilombo was good but not brilliant, Black Pumas got in with a deluxe version (yes it’s a good album, but it’s going to be close to 2 years old by the time the Grammys roll round), I’m not a massive fan of Hollywood’s Bleeding but Post Malone’s commercial impact can’t be denied. Coldplay is the one I find most bizarre - it wasn’t a particularly good album nor did it stick around commercially. So yeah - it would nice for HAIM to take it (I think they have a shot of pulling a “Golden Hour” and taking it home) but I’d be shocked if it didn’t go to Taylor.

So. Yes, there were some snubs - I thought Harry Styles would get a SOTY nomination, I was also expecting BTS to sneak into a couple of categories; Phoebe deserved an AOTY nomination and Rina Sawayama deserved some recognition. However. 

WHERE THE FUCK IS THE WEEKND?

The Weeknd not getting a single nomination. How? No matter which way you look at it, Blinding Lights, should be up for ROTY or at least in the Pop categories. OK, so After Hours isn’t going to be one of the all time great albums, but you can’t look at that list and think “hmm, yes; they’re all objectively better than After Hours.” Because they’re not. That’s a fact. The Weeknd has spoken out against the Grammys in the past (which I’ll come to in a minute), but the truth of the matter is is that the Grammys are institutionally biased. Let’s roll back to 2015. In 2016, the nominees for AOTY were 1989, Beauty Behind The Madness, Sound & Color, To Pimp a Butterfly and Traveler. Thinking about this in terms of critical success, the Grammy should have gone to Kendrick for “To Pimp A Butterfly”. It went to 1989. Ok, so 1989 is a great album! and commercially, was the biggest selling album that year. So from, that (and the following year, where 25 won over Lemonade) we could deduce that the Grammy focuses on the album that’s made the most commercial impact. HOWEVER: if we carry this logic into 2021, none of the nominees make any sense. Surely if they did, then only Folklore and Future Nostalgia would be on their. No matter how you look at it, After Hours straddled the line of being inescapable for a year and of getting great reviews. It should have been nominated for AOTY and that’s the bottom line of it. 

So why wasn’t it?

Probably The Weeknd criticizing the Grammys previously didn’t help. But according to that bastion of news, TMZ, he was given the choice between performing at the Grammys or at Superbowl. The Weeknd negotiated, and agreed to do both. He was announced to be performing at the Superbowl on 12th November (link: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/entertainment-arts-54921206) . Grammy noms come out on the 24th, TMZ reports he was given the choice between Superbowl and Grammys about 8 hours after the nominations (https://www.tmz.com/2020/11/24/the-weeknd-ultimatum-grammys-super-bowl-performance-snub/) . Then, The Weeknd tweets this maybe an hour later (https://twitter.com/theweeknd/status/1331394452447870977). To add insult to injury, he went from being in “negotiations to perform” to no nominations. Now that’s a kick in the teeth.

A day later, the president of the Grammys, Harvey Mason Jr. does an interview with Variety (https://variety.com/2020/music/news/grammy-harvey-mason-weeknd-snub-show-1234839208/). Gives a load of non-answers as expected. But he does talk about the Grammy committee. 

We don’t know much about how the Grammy voting process works. If you’re a member, you listen to the songs in the categories and then vote. BUT THEN. The top 20 songs/albums go to the committee. There’s 20 people on the committee - some with direct links to labels and artists. So they could hypothetically pick songs ranked 15-20 and nominate then. Which is why I think The Weeknd was majorly snubbed. I think The Weeknd got into the top 20 in all the categories he was nominated in and the committee overruled. That’s my theory anyway. The Grammys have been problematic for years - but since I’ve been following then from 2015ish - they’ve been accused racism (lack of BAME winners), sexism (remember the “well women should make better music” comments in 2018 https://variety.com/2018/music/news/grammys-so-male-women-recording-academy-president-neil-portnow-1202679902/) and then the mysterious ousting of Deborah Dugan at the start of last year (https://www.vox.com/2020/1/26/21082057/2020-grammys-sexual-harassment-corruption-recording-academy-deborah-dugan-rigged-nominations). 

When Deborah Dugan was fired, she alleged sexual misconduct and voter corruption in the academy. (If I can find a copy of the original PDF I will, https://www.theguardian.com/music/2020/jan/22/suspended-grammys-chief-deborah-dugan-alleges-sexual-misconduct-in-recording-academy). But honestly the article speaks for itself. The grammys are corrupt, and not a true measure of artistic integrity. 

So, as much as I find them fascinating - let’s not give them any more weight then they deserve. If your fave has a nomination, great! If not, it doesn’t make them any less of an artist. 2020 has been a fabulous year for music, so let’s concentrate on that. 

It’s impossible to cover every aspect of the Grammys in one tumblr post, and well done if you’ve made it to the end. If anyone has any questions, I’ll try and answer them to the best I can. 

Thank you so much for reading! And Happy Thanksgiving, remember to donate to Native people today if you can - here’s a link to some places to donate https://twitter.com/MsKellyMHayes/status/1332000439378784261 !

[1955-1975]

Who’s your favorite full metal jacket character and why?

i am going to be a normie and say joker but not just because he’s the protagonist, and a lot because of the book (which i maintain is better than the movie, sorry stanley).

joker is a GREAT vietnam war movie protagonist for a few reasons, imo. the first is that the vietnam war was kind of a ‘media war’ in the sense that on US turf it was very much about the reception of the war based on how journalists portryed it, and joker as a combat correspondent is almost a personification of US presence in vietnam.

the second is that in the movie we see him as an observer, and a lot of the time things sort of happen around and near him, rather than to him. in a way the lens of his camera is a filter through which he sees the war; he’s distanced from it in an almost childlike way, by those glasses which are absolutely not regulation (they should’ve been thicker rimmed i think, and definitely should’ve had a strap), his mickey mouse watch, his impressions, and the fact that he wrote for his high school newspaper, and the peace badge, which was a kind of childish adherence to nonconformism out of spite. now, i know matthew modine was in his late 20s during the filming of this (this is one of the things i think the movie got wrong; they were all WAY too old and should have been late teens/early 20s at most), but i do think the movie does a good job 

the third is more obvious if you take the book (and also a couple deleted scenes) into account. spoilers incoming!

(in case you’re curious to read it, the short timers is available as a PDF for free here, since it’s out of print everywhere else and physical copies are pretty $$$)

so, in the book, most of the events are the same, with a couple differences that i think are actually vital to the story. the first thing is that early into the second ‘half’ (i.e. in vietnam), joker attempts to refuse a promotion from corporal to sergeant:

Captain January picks up a manila guard mail envelope and pulls out a piece of paper with fancy writing on it. "Congratulations, Sergeant Joker." He hands me the paper. TO ALL WHO SHALL SEE THESE PRESENTS, GREETING: KNOW YE THAT REPOSING SPECIAL TRUST AND CONFIDENCE IN THE FIDELITY OF JAMES T. DAVIS, 2306777/4312, I DO APPOINT HIM A SERGEANT IN THE UNITED STATES MARINE CORPS... I stare at the piece of paper. Then I put the order on Captain January's field desk. "Number ten. I mean, no way, sir."

(cool that we get an almost full name for him here too – interestingly james t. davis was the name of one of the first americans to die in vietnam, in 1961.)

one of the scenes that IS in the movie is the one where lieutenant lockhart sends joker to phu bai and saddles him with rafterman. sometime after this in the book, rafterman is run over by a tank and killed, and crucially the end of the movie is different: they’re slowly being picked off by a sniper, shot in non-lethal areas to force more of the squad to come out and try to save the others, and eventually cowboy hands control of the squad over to joker, and runs out himself, and is obviously instantly shot up. rather than run out after cowboy, joker mercy kills him.

WITH THOSE EXTRA SCENES IN MIND here’s my theory and the reason i think joker is the most compelling character: his whole character arc in the book is about him being given some sort of responsibility and trying to refuse it, but when he’s saddled with it anyway, it leads to the death of an american soldier, who is killed NOT by a vietnamese person but by an american – private pyle by his own gun (and more esoterically by american military conditioning/training), rafterman by an american tank, and cowboy by joker.

i guess my point here is that joker as a character is interesting to me because he’s neither a hero nor a villain. he’s an observer who consistently attempts to refuse responsibility which would place him more centrally in the story, which is such an interesting position for a protagonist. even in the movie, without the additions of those scenes i mentioned, his final act is not to defeat the sniper, because he fucks up and drops his gun; his final act is to shoot a little girl who is dying and in pain. in contrast to a lot of other war movie protagonists, it’s not his story, but he’s obviously central to the story because he is the protagonist, and the person you follow throughout it. that’s a really difficult needle to thread.

he’s a pretty strong allegory for the soldier in vietnam; not the US military as a whole, which is a different thing entirely, but an individual soldier or marine, who often just wanted to get through his one tour and rotate home, who didn’t want responsibility, who were more often than not just a bunch of kids in way over their heads, who, in order to survive, either had to change completely (like, idk, animal mother, and like the botched transformation that ultimately kills private pyle) or shirk responsibility to avoid putting themselves in danger. i have a lot of thoughts about how fmj as a movie could be improved but i do really like that last scene, the contrast between a bunch of teenagers singing the mickey mouse song while surrounded by the fire and brimstone of war – it’s a perfect distillation of the contradictions that make full metal jacket so interesting, i.e. the duality of man.

also i think matthew modine used to be very hot

[speckofglitter]

crush culture - crs

- requested by @animejaem -

Word count,, 2k

Genre,, fluff, not that angsty but still kinda emo i guess

You absolutely hated crush culture. Every single one of your friends had spent the majority of their teenage years hung up on a guy or a girl that they thought was ‘the one’. Ultimately none of those relationships ever lasted. You didn’t understand why people would waste their time trying to make someone else fall for them when they would have to deal with heartbreak sooner or later. Having to be in a romantic relationship with someone just felt too suffocating anyways. In short, you didn’t understand everyone’s obsession with romantic love, forcing chemistry when they knew the equation wouldn’t add up in the end. You were content with your love for your friends, family, role models and hobbies. You didn’t mind feeling lonely once in a while.

You throw on a yellow hoodie, blue jeans and converse on, grabbing your bag as you get ready for another grueling day of college classes. You were majoring in visual communication. As soon as you got to class, you looked for your friends chaeyeon and eunbin who usually saved you a seat. You spotted them in the middle of the lecture hall, sliding between seats to reach them. On your way, you accidentally bumped into someone.

‘Oh i’m so sorry’ he immediately apologized, reaching down to pick up your fallen belongings.

‘No worries.’ you smiled at him, walking off to go join chaeyeon and eunbin. You greet them, taking out your notebook. Throughout the entire lecture, you noticed someone kept giving you looks. As you turned to your right you saw the same boy you had bumped into immediately put his head down, blushing furiously. You giggled, amused at his shyness. Chaeyeon immediately poked your leg with her foot.

‘Hey, what are you laughing at?’ she smiled at you, taking a sip of her iced coffee.

‘Oh nothing, it’s just that i bumped into this guy earlier and i saw him staring at me. What a cutie.’ you laughed, looking back at him to see him eagerly taking notes. You had never seen someone look so interested in a marketing lecture before.

‘I’m pretty sure everyone would agree that raesung is cute you’re not special sis’ she retorted following your eyes as she shamelessly winked at raesung who just smiled back.

‘Wait, you know him?’ you tilted your head, confused.

‘Oh my god y/n you must live under a rock. Raesung is well known on campus. He has a youtube channel and he posts covers. He’s an amazing singer, rapper and dancer. In conclusion, you just met an icon and it seems like he likes you.’

‘We just met, i highly doubt it. Besides i’m not interested in dating anyone. I will check out his channel though’ you retorted, turning away from chaeyeon’s nosy ass to pay attention to the lecture again.

-

You were in your bed about to go to sleep when you decided to search up raesung’s channel name ‘gongjuboi’. You had no idea what that meant but as soon as you listened to his music, you realized the name didn’t matter because damnn this boy was talented. You stared out of your dorm room window, wondering if you would ever be this talented. You had decided to study visual communication against your parents’ will but you didn’t seem to be improving much since classes had started.

-

The second time you met raesung was at the campus bookstore. You were looking through the racks of books on visual communication for your next assignment when you both grabbed a book at the same time. He immediately took his hand off, apologizing.

‘I’m so sorry you can take it’ he muttered.

You recognized him immediately, ‘you know, for a youtuber you’re really shy in real life huh? It’s really fine you can have it raesung. I’ll probably illegally download a pdf or something’ you commenting. You waved at him before walking away, your platform doc martens clunking away.

Raesung’s heart was beating so fast he could probably use it as a beat for his next song. You had watched his videos.

Raesung was the complete opposite. He was a hoe for romantic love. All of his songs had been inspired by someone that he either had feelings for or at least a crush on. He was the type of person who went to sleep and dreamt of falling in love. It was now happening all over again, because of you.

-

Raesung was at the studio, dark lighting looming over him as he finished up a song. It was about you. He had been producing the track for 2 hours and writing lyrics for 1 hour. He recorded the track, immediately uploading it onto his youtube channel.

Meanwhile, you were in your room getting ready for bed. Fridays were usually the start of the time of your life. For you, that meant eating pizza in your bed as you caught up on the latest episode of grown-ish before falling asleep. You mindlessly scrolled through your subscription feed as you got a glass of water. Your finger came to a stop as you saw the raesung’s username appear on your phone. You immediately clicked on the video, curious to see what magic he had made.

The song was slow and sensual, his voice giving you chills as he sang the words. The lyrics dripped off his tongue like honey.

‘Let’s take our time tonight girl, above us all the stars are watching.’

You heart was beating fast as the song came to an end. You were completely unaware of how you had gotten into this mess. You thought you were loveproof. Maybe you had thought wrong. It wasn’t just physical attraction. You had always known raesung was attractive. He was tall, he had a charming smile and an athletic body. But now… now it almost felt like there was a gravitational pull between the two of you. You had never felt this way before. A fire was brewing inside of you and there was nothing you could do about it.

‘There's no reason to hide, what we're feelin' inside’

Those words resonated in your mind the entire night. That night, you fell asleep with someone on your mind for the first time.

-

The next morning you decided to act like last night had not happened. You got dressed, getting your camera and strolling out of your dorm, steps bouncy as you looked for a target. You had an important assignment for your advertising class and you were determined to make it amazing. You were thinking of going for a vintage style ad. You went around the city, taking photographs and videos of various things. As you walked in the art building, you came across an old television with a broken screen. It looked nothing like the perfect and ideal image that a vintage ad would want and yet you decided to take a picture of it. It reminded you of yourself.

After a few more hours of the same ritual, you decided to head home and start editing your project. You settled on a completely different vibe, using the television as a background as you edited the words ‘crush culture’ in a retro font on top of it. You were really liking how it looked but it was definitely not enough to impress your professor. You needed audio. You thought of what would fit the concept, your mind immediately wandering to raesung’s voice. You placed your head in your hands, ruffling your hair. You were frustrated that you would have to see him but it was the obvious choice. You decided to call him before you could change your mind.

He picked up after three rings.

‘Hey, who’s this?’ he asked brightly.

‘Um hi, this is y/n. I just wanted to ask you a favor if that’s ok with you…’ you trailed off.

‘Oh y/n? um yeah sure whatever you want.’ he coughed out.

‘So i have a project to do for my advertising class and i would love it if you could narrate my ad. I listened to your music and i think you have a beautiful voice’

Raesung paused for a second, shocked. He wished you could feel how fast his heart was beating right now.

‘Thank you.. And um i’d love to narrate your project. Do you have like a script or something?’ he questioned.

‘Well i have an idea but i wanna know how you feel about it. How about we meet up at 5pm at the campus café?’

‘Sure, see you there y/n.’

-

When you got to the café, raesung was already sitting down, scribbling intensely in a notebook as he sipped what you assumed was a matcha latte. When raesung wrote, he had a special kind of hunger in his eyes. His fingers moved fast, almost like he was typing. You sat down across from him, waiting for him to notice your presence. You peeked over at his notebook.

‘The girl with the heavy steps’ you cocked your head, reading aloud.

‘OH MY GOD YOU SCARED ME’ he yelled out, rushing to close his notebook.

‘I’m so sorry you just looked so focused.’ you laughed heartily.

He smiled, scratching his neck nervously.

‘So… my concept is about crush culture. I’ve never really understood the concept of dating. I feel like i’ve been surrounded by couples that had their relationships and were happy for a while but they all eventually ended. I feel like love is so temporary that i’m not sure there even is a point in dating at all. All this love just seems so suffocating. I want to express that idea in my ad.’ you explained, taking a sip of your black coffee.

Raesung listened attentively as you spilled your guts out to him.

‘Well, i had no idea you were so skeptical of love. I don’t personally agree with everything that you said but i think i know how i can make the audio for the ad. Is it okay if i take you to my studio?’

‘Of course.’ you jumped up from excitement, sliding your bag over your shoulders.

-

Raesung got straight to work as you arrived at his studio. He sat in one of those rolling chairs, scribbling a few notes in the same notebook while you got your laptop out working on the editing. A short 30 minutes later, he was finished.

‘Ok, i’m gonna sing the song i wrote for the ad, just let me know what you think’ he explained.

You nodded, sitting patiently as he got in the booth, ready to record. You fell into a trance as you watched him sing. You literally couldn’t take your eyes off of him.

‘I’m not falling for you, cause this baby is loveproof.’

You slightly shivered as he glanced at you while singing this particular line. As the song came to an end you smiled, clapping loudly.

‘That was… everything i wanted and more. Thank you so much.’ you complimented, excitedly grabbing raesung’s hands.

‘Thank you. So i’ll send you the recording and we can look at the final product.’ he replied, blushing as he realized you were still holding his hands. He looked down at your hands on top of his. You followed his gaze, promptly putting his hands down.

You watched the final product together, the both of you amazed at how good you were at your different art forms. Your vision had finally come together.

‘Thank you again raesung. I’m positive this is one of my best works and i couldn’t have done it without you. Especially since the message behind it was kind of personal…’ you mumbled nervously.

‘No problem. I love working with you. But i just wanted to say, love isn’t always temporary. I hope you find someone who can make you feel like you deserve to be loved everyday.’ he gently stated.

‘Like you?’ you whispered.

‘HUH? ME?’ he yelled out, confused at your sudden question.

‘I mean, you’re the only person who’s ever made me feel like romantic love was worth it. I’m sorry if you don’t feel the same, that would just be confirming my original hypothesis anyways.’ you sighed out.

‘No no i do feel the same. That’s why i was so surprised. I’ve liked you since i met you. Since you walked away from me with your loud ass boots. Since you laughed at me in marketing class.’ he chuckled.

You smiled up at him, squishing his cheeks before you leaned in and kissed him. Raesung was your first kiss and it was a lot better than you had expected. He held you like a prized possession, lips sweet like cherries. Kissing him felt like summer. You weren’t used to feeling like this. You’d never felt so alive.

-

heyo hope you guys like it 🎀🌹love you all 💖✨

••

masterlist - requests are open !!

- ya girl tiyi 💖

[ktaebwi]

Dispatch ‘Dicon’ Magazine - BTS Issue (Full Translation)

KRN - ENG © ktaebwi Do not use for commercial purpose. Credit properly when reposting & re-translating.

Download PDF: MF

“People around me are very proud of me. They tell me “BTS indeed”, “You’re BTS” a lot. All of these are thanks to ARMYs.” (V)

“I want to be someone’s pillar of support*, I want to be your eternal singer. So I can’t lose you guys. If you go further away, I’ll pull you closer. I don’t know how to do it or if it works or not, but I’ll strive to not let go of you. Again, thank you and I love you.” (Jungkook)

(*literally “big person”, “great man”)

“When I look at ARMYs supporting me from backstage, when I look at us performing on stage, when you’re happy listening to me singing, I feel the biggest happiness.” (Jimin)

“Let’s not get weary and go together for a long time. Because we won’t even after 10 or 20 years.” (Suga)

“I’ll prove it again and again. Trust and follow me.” (Suga)

“If our music can be even a little source of help in your life, your dream, then our existence is worth it. In the future, there’ll surely be pain and trials, but I know well that there are many people who believe in us and like us. So we won’t be hurt when it pains us, we won’t be sad when it upsets us, we won’t fear when it scares us. This is how BTS will be.” (RM)

“Bloom like a rose, flutter like a cherry blossom, fall like a morning glory.” (J-hope)

“Only you need to know how hard you work.” (Jin)

“I’m your fans too. A fan who silently supports the loneliness, the battles and the life you’re going through. I send you my letters written with music and notes from behind the stage and at my studio. Hope you’ll read that sound that is me missing you.” (RM)

BTS, road to the sea

“Someone says my spoon is dirty” <MIC Drop>

They weren’t dirt spoons at first. Dirt, scattered by prejudice, covered them.

(*In the spoon class theory, dirt spoon is considered the lowest class in the society)

The rapper title is a luxury to you guys <We Are Bulletproof Pt.2> You have no power, I know you must have done something shady <Two! Three!> Small company’s idols with nothing special was my second name <Sea>

Suga said, “I didn’t want to get hurt, because it means losing to prejudice. I didn’t want to be upset.” The dirt spoons’ voices were heard. Mockery started. They didn’t throw it away, they buried it deep. They then met ignorance. They didn’t spit it out, they engulfed it. Ridicule poured down. They stood up against it with blood, sweat and tears. They are BTS.

LA November 2017, AMAs. The Chainsmokers introduced the 16th performance. The second-to-last performance, right before the ending.

“We are going to announce next performer. They are international superstar. Here’s BTS, which is having huge fan over here.”

Mnet M COUNTDOWN, June 13th 2013. BTS appeared. Their debut single was ‘No More Dream’, but they could no longer dream. Reality was reality. The company’s head, Bang Shihyuk, was met with doubts. “Isn’t he a ballad composer?” The name BTS was ridiculed. “They’re going to become cannon fodders.” The company, Bighit, was taken pity on. “They will never make it with a company this small.” And their genre, hip hop, was the subject of mockery. “Idols doing hip hop? What kind of nonsense is that?” In fact, it was bitterness from the start. “I thought the sea was here but it turned out to be a desert”. The first desert they faced was the trainee days. Dicon’s first question, too, is about their trainee days.

(Dicon) Seven members came together. No, seven dreams came together.

RM: I wanted to tell people my stories, with my voice, in front of many people. This was the start of my dream.

SUGA: Billboard, AMA... None of them was on my wishlist. It was too far away. It was a goal impossible to achieve. At that time, everything I ever dreamed of was for many people to listen to my music.

JUNGKOOK: Nothing was certain. Those days were so vague. I didn’t even know how to dream. The future? I only looked forward and ran.

V: Just becoming a trainee made me so happy already. Learning was fun. I could even dance every day. I spent my days working hard. At that time, the present was more important to me than an unseen future.

JIN: My dream was to hold a concert. I wanted to become one with our fans through our songs.

JIMIN: Meeting senior singers felt amazing to me. I wanted to become like them. They were so awesome.

J-HOPE: My goals were always clear. To stand on stage, to become the best, but first, it was to survive. Trainee days were a continuous survival game. If one comes in, another drops out. I had to endure in between. But...

But the ideal was the sky and reality was the ground. It wasn’t easy, like what their song said.

I thought the sea was here but it turned out to be a desert Small company’s idols with nothing special was my second name Countless of times edited out from broadcasts Being someone’s fill-in was our dream Some people said our company was small so we wouldn’t make it <Sea>

J-HOPE: It wasn’t easy having to part ways with my fellow trainee friends. They were like my family. That reality pained me so much.

RM: There were times I felt unsure about my future. Like my life is not +, nor it is 0, it’s just −... The thought that ‘oh, we’re still preparing only’ tired me out.

JIMIN: When I saw a wall showing up in front of my eyes, it felt like no matter how much I do I still couldn’t work it out? The wall of reality was higher than I thought. But still, I had no thought of giving up.

JIN: I started learning the choreography properly in preparation for the debut. I felt distressed because it didn’t turn out the way I wanted. I kept getting scolded too.

JUNGKOOK: At that time we went through an enormous amount of practice, to the point that it was hard to handle it. But after we debuted, I felt like, like I’m a frog in the well*? I blamed myself that I was lacking too much.

V: For me, dancing was fun. No matter how hard practicing was , it’s something I like so I could endure. If anything, it was having to live away from my parents that was hard for me. I’ve been living away from them for a long time so I miss them.

SUGA: The cheapest meal they have near the company costed 6,000 won ($5.59). A 300,000 won allowance was nowhere near enough to live for a month. I took up a delivery part-time job alongside MIDI lessons. I had a car accident then. My shoulders were badly injured. I thought of giving up but... The members stopped me from leaving. The company also waited for me.

Suga also express his agony at the time through rapping.

The root of my creations has tasted the world’s sweetness and bitterness Those days trying to sleep on the bathroom floor now become memories Grabbing my shoulders crushed in a car accident during a delivery part-time job and debuted In front of whom are you all pretending you have had it hard <The Last>

They had each other. They are each other’s strength. Thus, You Never Walk Alone. Seven members walked together, encouraging each other.

RM: I remember I once said ‘Shouldn’t we at least perform at Olympic Gymnastics Stadium once before we die?”.

JIN: Namjoon’s always like that. He holds each of us and shouts out fighting. It motivates us a lot. I like laughing together with our members. It’s the reason why I could endure.

J-HOPE: The seven of us were chosen. Since then, we only looked forward and ran. We trusted and relied on each other. We shed blood and sweat together. We decided to try no matter what result comes and motivated each other.

JIMIN: The members told me. ‘I really hope you would go together with us.’ That’s the power of the words. I was able to work even harder. I already had a goal in my mind that is to go together until the end, so I didn’t give up.

V: It was hard, of course. It was inevitable. But I wasn’t the only one who had it hard. None of us didn’t have it hard. That’s why I gained strength even more. We gained strength from looking at each other.

SUGA: That’s true. The members were the reason I could make it through those days. They are the best stimulant. When the members practiced, I composed songs. It was also when I wrote the beats for ‘Tomorrow’ and ‘Agust D’ (mixtape).

JUNGKOOK: It was the day of the showcase. After coming down from stage, i felt emotional. I wasn’t the only one who felt so. We hugged each other and cried. I remember that day.

These wings sprouted from pain but they head towards the light Even if it’s hard and painful, if I can fly, I will Will you hold my hands so that I will no longer be afraid Because if you and I are together, we can smile <A Supplementary Story: You Never Walk Alone>

June 12th 2013, they stood on stage for the first time as BTS. It was the birth of BTS. On the stage they desired so much, they rapped and ranced. They could endure even the wounds.

When I rap and dance on the stage that I desired so much, I feel that I’m still alive It was worth enduring the tiring and exhausting commute Because my people are watching me It was worth enduring even when my body hurts Because the cheers are surging in <Born Singer>

RM: I couldn’t think of anything. My thoughts were full of ‘I have to do well’, ‘I have to pull this off’, ‘I have to end this’, things that we planned. Our first stage ended like that. From the name, hairstyle, even the sunglasses, everything was a standing joke. Hurt? Maybe it’s because I tried to forget it, I don’t really remember it well now.

SUGA: When the response rushed in ‘Where did those kids come from?’, I was totally excited. I wasn’t really hurt by criticism. I heard a lot of it from before debut so...

J-HOPE: I only have good memories of the debut stage too. I got to stand on the stand I wished for so much. I still can’t forget that thrill. The cheers of people who didn’t know us still show up vividly in my mind. The problem was the next day. I guess I was too excited. I made a lot of mistakes during ‘Music Bank’ rehearsal. I remember being scolded a lot...

JIMIN: I didn’t have time to think about people’s stares and reactions. I thought if I work a little bit harder, I would get a little bit better. I practiced while monitoring.

JIN: I continued to observe even during other senior singers’ stages. And one more thing is, I envied of the support from (their) fans.

V: I don’t remember much the hurt I got back then. I already forgot everything. More than anything else, I was fascinated by the fact that I appeared on TV. I remember calling my grandmother and parents to ask if they had seen the music program.

JUNGKOOK: There was a lot of hate comments. But I have to admit, because I was lacking a lot then. If anything, I clenched my teeth and practiced even more days and nights. I would come to the practice room whenever I can.

What could be their next goal? They said it was “to survive”. In reality, they had to survive.

JIN: There was a lot of groups debuting around the same time as us. We couldn’t ease ourselves yet just because we made it to the stage. There were many times we didn’t get to perform the whole song too. Every time it happened, we felt really upset. We practiced even more desperately. We thought as long as we have the talent, we wouldn’t be pushed out.

SUGA: Competition at music programs was really fierce. We wanted to keep making music, so we wanted to stand on stage.

J-HOPE: I think it’s the same for every trainee. We were really desperate. Everyday, we thought that we had to survive on this stage.

RM: We had to show ourselves in a short time. We had to draw people’s attention. We were also well aware of the fact that there’s no next time. We had no choice but to prove ourselves.

JIMIN: It felt like tapping at the ground to go up? I couldn’t see anything in front me of. It wasn’t something possible with passion only. But still, the only thing I could do was to push myself endlessly. Like ‘this is no big deal’...

V: I met and part ways with many friends in my trainee days. I had to survive from there.

JUNGKOOK: I don’t know what kind of confidence I had. ‘I will become something’, ‘We will become something.’ I was certain.

If you can’t fly, run Today we will survive If you can’t run, walk Today we will survive If you can’t walk, crawl Even if you crawl, gear up <Not Today>

Their practice room stank of sweat. Their performances were excellent. Their rap was resonant. That’s how they stood out.

JIN: We were different from the start. It’s not our strategy to stand out, we only wanted to do music. More than anything,I trusted our members and followed our company. I wasn’t afraid.

SUGA: Yes, we weren’t afraid, but people were afraid of us.

RM: I have been rapping ever since and I love music, so I believed I could deliver it better than anyone else. Looking back now, there are many times I did not but...

J-HOPE: We didn’t compare ourselves to other groups. We did our own things. It can be shocking (to other people), but I hoped that shock left as strong ‘impression’ to them.

JIMIN:  We wanted to talk about the concerns teenagers had, because they were also ours. Hip hop was the best kind of music to showcase our thoughts.

V: I believed our strength is that we’re different from others.

JUNGKOOK: At that time, my top goal was the team. I couldn’t cause trouble to them. My ultimate task was to do good at my role.

Damn hip hop pride, idol rapper? Cut that bullshit They say my nature’s still that idol shit anyway and ignore me Give their principles to the dog and mock my name You all who only know to cloud the issue and ignore How you kill me? <BTS Cypher Pt.1>

BTS fought, with themselves. Like what V has said. “It’s important that we do well. I was certain that that way, we would be recognized.” In the end, the boys were right. Prejudice went away. Of course, it. was. no. coincidence. There was a reason.

RM: It didn’t change right away. It changed little by little. I think it’s from after ‘I NEED U’.

JIN: ‘MIC Drop’. A stage that many people said to be cool.

SUGA: ‘DNA’ stage at AMAs. It changed misunderstanding to understanding.

J-HOPE: There’s a song called ‘Born Singer’. It shows ourselves and our thoughts.

JIMIN: I recommend ‘Save ME’.

V: ‘MIC Drop’.

JUNGKOOK: ‘I NEED U’, ‘Dope’.

'Dicon' picked Jungkook's solo song 'Begin'. The background of this song itself is sincerity. Producer Bang Shihyuk asked them if they had any stress. Jungkook said, "I don't. I went (to Seoul) not knowing anything when I was only 15. It's what I really wanted to do so..." And he continued. "My only stress is that the hyungs I'm living with have to go through a hard time. I don't know about everything else. It pains me the most seeing them stressed. I hope they won't have to go through a hard time." He cried. Bang Shihyuk PD cried. J-hope cried. RM cried. Jin cried. Suga cried. V, Jimin too cried. And Jungkook sobbed.

That's how 'Begin' was born. Only, it wasn't just the beginning of Jungkook. Below are answers from the older members.

RM: I can never forget how Jungkook cried and said 'My stress is that the hyungs are stressed'. Jungkook doesn't usually express his emotions so it hit me even more.

JIN: It reminds me of how Jungkook cried in front of Bang Shihyuk PD. I felt sorry but also proud of him, and he also looked cute.

SUGA: We were stressed of course. Exhausted even. So every time I listen to 'Begin', I feel odd. But if I watch Jungkook's solo performance, I only have one though that he's cool.

J-HOPE: I'm proud of Jungkook. He tells his own story through his dance and song. It's a song that shows Jungkook's energy greatly.

V: I still remember what Jungkook said while crying. That story is reflected fully in the song.

JIMIN: We gain strength even more thanks to Jungkook. It's the 'Begin' of all of us.

When I was fifteen, I had nothing The world was too big and I was too small Now I can't even imagine How I used to have no scent and empty I pray Love you my brother Thanks to my brothers, I had feelings and became me <Begin>

The dark night passed and the morning shone bright. What could be their motivation? One certain thing is, it's time to raise thumbs up.

RM: Faith. I always try to show that my faith wasn't wrong. Maybe that's why I always attempt something, because I want to prove (my faith).

SUGA: Pride. Our fans like our music and wait for our stage. I wanted to give them pride.

JIMIN: I had a goal that I want to achieve. By my side, there are the members and the fans that are always together with me.

JIN: The reason we could endure through it is thanks to our fans. They gave us love so I couldn't disappoint them.

J-HOPE: That's correct. Our fans are our biggest motivation. When I look at fans who love our music, I feel that I'm still alive. Thanks to them, we could become who we are now.

V: Thus, 'ARMY'.

JUNGKOOK: I wanted to bring them good performances and music.

In the end, every story concludes with ARMY*. It's always like that. Every conversation with them ends with ARMY. Of course, the ending of 'Dicon' should be ARMY too, shouldn't it? "If we are together, even the desert becomes the sea" was especially heartfelt.

(*literally "gi seung jeon ARMY". "gi seung jeon gyeol" (起承轉結) is a kind of writing structure, with 起 representing "the introduction", 承 "the development", 轉 "the twist", 結 "the conclusion". "Gi seung jeon ARMY" is a word play based on "gi seung jeon gyeol", meaning it ends with ARMY.)

RM: 'Can the desert become the sea?' is my endless self-doubt and self-examination that I have been holding since predebut. It was the biggest answer to that question. I couldn't help tearing up knowing their love for me.

JIN: I wonder when they prepared it to move us this deeply. I was so thankful. My tears couldn't stop.

SUGA: Lately, I'm more easily moved to tears. Perhaps it's a sense of security, or fear, or happiness, or sorrow. These complex emotions just flood in.

J-HOPE: The fans' events never fail to give me chills. I know their devotion and sincerity, so when that energy's conveyed (through the events), the synergy explodes. They moved me greatly. I'm always thankful to them and love them.

JIMIN: If I could express how I felt then in words... I would be able to write a few books. That moment made me realize 'that's right, our fans are always by our side'. I'm so happy that I keep tearing up.

V: When I read the messages the fans send, I think of the hardships I went through. Sometimes it also makes me sad, the thought that we're finally seeing the light.

JUNGKOOK: I could feel everything on that stage. ARMY's breath, voices, ARMY's cheers, tears. I'm moved greatly every time I see the fans. I made a great decision becoming BTS...

So, letters to ARMY?

RM: I'm learning about the meaning of 'us'. It's like there's no longer 'us', just the many moments of 'you' and 'me'. I want to learn about the true meaning of 'us', where we are truly together, with ARMYs. I hope each and every one of our members can mean 'us' in that sense to ARMYs. We may be living somewhere in the world, doing different things. But we are breathing together through music and performances. I want to comfort them through all the loneliness and solitude that humans can't help but embrace, and live in this world together. That's what I want to do.

JIN: Thanks to ARMY, my time at where they said to be the desert felt like I was at the sea. Thank you for making me happy. I love you.

SUGA: It feels like I’m flying so high. I see so much and so far away. I thought I would only feel happy above the clouds, but sometimes when I look down, I feel scared. I take courage from the fact that we’re flying together. I’m afraid of falling, but I’m not afraid of landing. Thank you for being with us. I’m forever grateful and love you.

J-HOPE: Thank you for always supporting and loving us. I’m happy to become your hope.

JIMIN: ARMYs. I believe you know how I feel when I look at you. I can take a step forward thanks to having you beside. I’ll work hard to show you more and give you bigger love. I love you.

V: I hope you won’t get hurt and your every day will be filled with happiness only. I really love you.

JUNGKOOK: I’ll always be here. ARMY can come to see us whenever you miss us. And you can leave whenever you have to leave, or whenever you want to. But please remember this one thing only. I’ll always be here.

Thank you, for letting me be me For letting me fly For giving me wings For folding up the me that's once wrinkled For breaking the me that once felt suffocated For waking the me that once lived in only dreams When I think of you, my sky clears up So I throw away all my sorrow Thank you, for becoming 'us' <Save ME>

To 'Dispatch', it's not the end until it wraps up. The same for 'Dicon'. This page hasn't end yet. There's no room for doubt when it comes to BTS. Like The Chainsmokers said, they're ISu. International Superstars. Should you be jealous of their success? No, failure brings experience. These spells by BTS are their encouragement dedicated to all challengers in the world.

RM: Sometimes we have to erase many things so we can fill them up again. I always chant 'do it' to myself. 'Believe in myself and just do it'. Not 'do well', but 'just do it'. It'll turn out well after.

J-HOPE: Believe in yourself and move forward. It's the first step to success.

JIN: I always chant 'I am the best' to myself. I believe in myself and support myself by thinking 'It's okay, I can do well'. You'll do well like magic.

SUGA: The world has never let us dream, nor has it ever taught us how to dream. They say it's your fault, but it's not. Don't blame yourself. It's okay to lean back when you're tired. If someone's tired, become their pillar of support. This is the reason why I started making music. I hope our music can become your little source of strength.

JIMIN: If you have a goal you really need to achieve, don't look back. Don't hesitate, give it a go first. If you have a path you want to follow, follow it. That way you won't regret.

V: You may fail, you may fall, you may despair. It's natural. Just don't give up no matter how much you fail, fall, despair. If the thought of wanting to give up crosses your mind, I hope you'd overcome it and stand up again. Even if you can't trust yourself, do it for the people that put their faith on you.

JUNGKOOK: Don't regret things in the past. First, look at the reality and think about what you can do. Arrange what you need to do in order and resolve one by one. At some point, you'll get what you wish for. We'll support you too. Don't feel tired.

Everybody say NO! There's no later Don't be trapped in someone else's dream We roll (we roll) We roll (we roll) We roll Everybody say NO! It's now or never You haven't tried anything yet <N.O>

Tomorrow, keep walking We are too young to stop Tomorrow, open the door Too many things in front of our eyes to close it Follow your dreams like breaker Even if it breaks down, oh better Follow your dreams like breaker Even if it falls apart, oh Don't turn back, never <Tomorrow>

“We stood up again. Before we knew it, we were already running. Awaiting us on that road was the dream of seven boys.”

“When ‘Begin’ was made, Jungkook told us in tears. ‘When I was a kid, I wanted to sing and dance. Seeing hyungs go through a hard time is the hardest for me.’ Hearing him say that, we all cried.” (2016)

“We weren’t tired because there were seven of us. No one stopped. Then came the debut day. Criticism flooded in before the cheers ended. It felt like dreams, passion, hard work were all powerless.”

Episode #1 “Being able to hold a concert itself is happiness.”

Who could ever guess what spectacular events were awaiting. Just one year ago, it was simple. Rap Monster shared, “Finally, we get to hold a concert at Gocheok dome. We will show you the best performance we can bring.” BTS was excited, and so was Jimin. Excited at the mere thought of standing on stage. “Being able to hold a concert itself is happiness. I’m practice to show you better performances.” Jungkook showed expectation. “I’m even more excited about this concert. We’re more relaxed compared to past tours. I think we’ll get to interact with fans through this stage. Suga was focused. “There’s a lot to pay attention to in the concert. We have to match to the smallest details. My goal is to wrap up without making any mistake.” No one could expect what grand events were waiting for them one year ago, even a year ago. They were just doing their best to complete the current tasks. And three months later, they flew to Las Vegas, where Billboard award ceremony was held.

Episode #2 "ARMY sent us here."

Billboard Music Awards. 'Top Social Artist' nominee. Their rival is pop star Justin Bieber. "They're going up against Bieber? Anyone can see Bieber would win for sure!" After all, Bieber took home trophies for this category the last 6 years.

Finally, Billboard award ceremony. "They're going up against Bieber? What about Bieber's fans?" Numerous fans surrounding the Magenta Carpet. They were shouting BTS' name. Blasted there was the song 'Fire' It was foretelling that they would win.

BTS was well aware, that the Billboard red carpet is the flower path fans laid for them. RM said, "I only think of fans of course. ARMYs made this 'Top Social Artist' award (possible) for us." Jin added in, "Yes, that's right. ARMY sent us here. We'll work harder. We'll continue to do our best in the future. Thank you." "I don't even know what surprise awaits anymore now. We made it here thanks to the support from ARMY. I wonder what is waiting for us ahead..." Yes. Like Jimin said, Billboard was the start for these international superstars.

Episode #3 “Actually, we are really nervous.”

May 21st 2017, V had a stomach ache. Finally, it was the day of BBMas. They were the first idol group to be nominated for ‘Top Social Artist’ category. At MGM Hotel in Las Vegas, Nevada, V was nowhere to be seen. He showed up a little bit later. “Sorry, I had a stomach ache so I was late.” V’s image was (somewhat) chic and cool, so it was unfamiliar seeing him shy. But it was heartwarming. We asked if he was nervous. The members all said in chorus. “Actually, we are really nervous. We just pretend to be relaxed. We’re so nervous.” 2017 Billboard Music Awards red carpet, Jungkook was clutching his handkerchief tightly.

“(After debut) What we faced was indifference, cold shoulder, ridicule. Dreams couldn’t exist in the night of the desert. The road ended. We sat down, but we didn’t give up.”

Episode #4 "Hello."

If you ask about BTS' DNA (habits), we will unhesitatingly pick 'greetings'. Formula of greetings, commandment of greetings, providence of greetings, evidence of greetings...

First, 'formula' of greetings. J-hope asks "Have you eaten yet?". A totally untrendy (?) greeting. That's why it's even more affectionate. He takes care of even the youngest staff's meals.

'Commandment' of greetings. Take a look at V. On the last shooting day for DNA jacket photo, V left early due to another schedule. He asked the manager to greet for him through Kakaotalk. "I had to leave without getting to greet you. Thank you for your hard work." (From V)

Jimin knows the 'providence' of greetings. "Our fans really like the photos (Dispatch) took." So Dispatch worked harder to take better photos. Doesn't matter if it was a white lie or not.

RM showed his concern instead of greeting. "The waiting time's getting longer. You must be feeling bored right?" Jin showed up with his game console. "Can I sit here and play games for a bit?" He added. "Shall I explain this game to you?"

Suga composes music at night. His days and nights are reversed. Sometimes, he would off and suddenly wakes up. "There was a heavy traffic jam right?" He wasn't sleep talking. It's the evidence of greetings. Jungkook adds, "It must be tough for you having to come all the way here."

“We must cross the desert to reach the sea. We walk again to find another desert. We move forward, together.”

Episode #5 “LOVE YOURSELF 承 Her”

What BTS has to surpass, is BTS. So did they outdo themselves? September 2017, a month of continuous tough schedule. More than a week of time was spent to shoot the jacket photo and music video. They put their heart into every shot. On the last day, they attempted to film an one-take shot. It would show a continuous opening starting from V to J-hope, RM. Just one misstep, one second of losing focus and it would be an NG. The movements needed to go smoothly. Again, it was the last day of shooting. They couldn’t help but feel tired. But BTS laughed, thanks to the oldest and youngest member. The older, Jin, and the younger, Jungkook, chatted and teased each other, even showing slapstick gags. Laughters rang through the tiring day. ‘LOVE YOURSELF 承 Her’. BTS made it. They set records.

Episode #6 "We had the photo of our life at LA airport."

That photo was nowhere near a life shot. It was bare taken, out-focused due to being pushed by foreign fans. But J-hope and V gave thumbs up and added it was "the best photo". We were embarrassed. Calling a lucky shot 'the best photo', it was probably their way of thanking for covering their news at LA. We know that this is their kindness. BTS' kindness. It was their heartfelt words that made us drop our weapons, take off and throw away our 'bulletproof vests'.

Episode #7 “You will watch our performance right?”

“You will watch our performance right?”... What confidence they had. An AMAs performance on top of that. We asked their order. “When is your turn?” “We don’t know too.” They replied cheerfully as if it was of no importance. AMAs director wanted BTS to have a collaboration stage. Like the one Psy had with MC Hammer, they wanted BTS to perform with famous stars. But BTS politely declined. “The seven of us are the coolest on stage.” This is BTS’ pride. They have been together for seven years. They shed blood, sweat, tears, and the fruit they bore was the AMAs stage. The DNA that is matching steps just by looking into the eyes. America went wild. They were blown away by their synchronized choreography, charmed by their live singing. This was the start of international superstars.

T/N: - The quotes are from various sources: concert ending ments, album thanks to, Twitter posts,... not from this interview itself. - Episode #8 is about records BTS set with ‘LOVE YOURSELF 承 Her’, so I didn’t translate it.

[condensed-theorem-shop]

some anecdotes, an odd poem, and incidental history

(1) some anecdotes

The other day, I was trying to find the text of an old childhood favorite poem of mine, and google just wasn’t turning it up.

This happens to me pretty regularly. My early poetry was almost entirely from the Oxford Book of Poetry for Children, which is fantastic and gorgeously illustrated and full of the most eclectic selection of poems imaginable.

It’s got all sorts of nursery classics, of course, from Carroll (“...If seven maids with seven mops/Swept it for half a year...”) to Silverstein (“Nobody loves me/Nobody cares/Nobody picks me peaches and pears...”).

Then there’s the classics that maybe aren’t so obviously for children, like Dickinson (”I’m Nobody! Who are you? Are you -- Nobody -- Too?”) and Yeats (“The silver apples of the moon,/The golden apples of the sun”). Those seem reasonable enough once you put them with the others; “I’m Nobody! Who are you?” goes opposite Shel Silverstein’s “Nobody loves me,” with a cute silhouette of a little boy, and it seems as natural as anything to cut your teeth on Dickinson.

And then there’s the weird ones. These leave you wondering, as an adult, why someone put them into a book of poetry for children -- but as a child you don’t see anything strange about it, of course. And I tend to think it’s one of the great strengths of this book that it does include these; children have weird dark things going on inside their heads, and giving them words for those isn’t a bad thing. Still -- I wrote weird stuff, as a kid (like I don’t now, but), and it’s not hard to have some guesses why, once I look back on excerpts of what I was reading:

‘I wish the wind would blow through you,’     said Meet-on-the-Road. ‘Oh, what a wish! Oh, what a wish!’     said Child-as-it-Stood. ‘Pray, what are those bells ringing for?’     said Meet-on-the-Road. ‘To ring bad spirits home again,’     said Child-as-it-Stood. ‘Oh, then I must be going, child!’     said Meet-on-the-Road. ‘So fare you well, so fare you well,’     said Child-as-it-Stood.

‘The years passed like shooting stars, They melted and were gone, But the path itself seemed endless, It twisted and went on. ‘I followed it and thought aloud, “I’ll be found, wait and see.” Yet in my heart I knew by then The world had forgotten me.’ Frightened I turned homeward, But stopped and had to stare. I too saw that signpost with no name, And the path that led nowhere.

Yeah -- weird childhood. But fantastic -- both the childhood, and the poems. The latter really stuck with me. It didn’t hurt that they are all of genuinely excellent quality, though different kinds; obviously you can’t exactly compare Robert Louis Stevenson against Blake against “Solomon Grundy/Born on Monday...” head-to-head-to-head, but none of them are anything like bad at the thing they’re being.

Plus, it’s just really quotable poetry. Especially if your whole family’s grown up on it, so that everyone speaks the same language. I’m not sure a month of my life has gone by where I didn’t recite at someone --

Don’t Care didn’t care, Don’t Care was wild: Don’t Care stole plum and pear Like any beggar’s child. Don’t Care was made to care, Don’t Care was hung: Don’t Care was put in a pot And boiled till he was done.

(What can I say; nothing takes the wind out of a teenager’s sails like reciting that to them when they’re in the middle of a fit of pique.)

Or someone will get started off on nagging someone else with “A man of words and not of deeds/Is like a garden full of weeds/And when the weeds begin to grow/It’s like a garden full of snow,” and by the end the entire family will be reciting together for “And when your back begins to smart,/It’s like a penknife in your heart;/And when your heart begins to bleed,/O then you’re dead, and dead indeed.”

(I did mention it was weird poetry.)

There’s always late risers to be teased with “A potato clock, a potato clock/Has anybody got a potato clock?” Anyone tagging along at someone else’s heels can expect to hear “I have a little shadow that goes in and out with me/And what can be the use of him is more than I can see.” Breakfast is accompanied by the eggs poem, with quips for every way you can have them done (scrambled: “I eat as well as I am able,/But some falls underneath the table.”) Sleepy small children get “the Sugar-Plum Tree/In the garden of Shut-Eye Town” recited in full, if they’re lucky. And of course adorably bossy tiny people get tolerant recitations of “James James/Morrison Morrison/Weatherby George Dupree/Took great/Care of his Mother,/Though he was only three.”

All that to say, then: growing up in my house, this particular poetry gets under your skin. You find yourself thinking in it, at odd moments. You have quotes on the tip of your tongue and you’re not quite sure where they’re from.

So you go look them up, because it turns out that not everyone in the world knows what you’re on about when you start in on “The King asked/The Queen, and/The Queen asked/The Dairymaid...” And that one, it turns out, is Milne, and really everyone should know it; and later you discover that other poems are Blake or Lear or Yeats or Farjeon (and go “oh, that’s why I liked that one so much, no wonder”); and it’s weird and delightful to find out that these childhood poems of yours are actually the great classics of English literature.

So, yeah, half the time when you go look a poem up, yeah, it’s Auden or Wordsworth or someone, that would explain why it’s so good. (And, yeah, maybe this is why I find theories about ‘the canon is only considered so great because it is the canon’ less than compelling; for half the Great Authors out there I can remember finding them vastly, insistently fascinating well before their names meant anything to me.)

But then the other half of the time, you go look it up and it turns out there’s -- nothing. No one’s ever heard of that author. The full text of the poem isn’t even on google. And so you’re left with these lines that are written as deep in the quiet parts of your mind as this was the funeral of Hector, tamer of horses, only where you expect there to be a shared cultural construct: nothing.

The Terrible Path is one of those. It clung to my brain enough for me to end up making a setting inspired by it. It’s dark and eerie and bizarre, and the sum total the internet has to offer about it is a link from Trinity College that’ll let you download a PDF of the text. I’m not sure why it’s not better-known than it is; I’m no lit critic, but I really think it merits it.

It turns out, the one I was trying to find is another, though this one I at least have a bit of an explanation for.

(2) an odd poem

I ended up having to look it up in the same hard-copy book I read it in the first time, however long ago that was. (How twentieth-century of me, I know.) In this case, that wasn’t technically The Oxford Treasury of Children’s Poems, it was The Oxford Treasury of Story Poems, which has a slightly different selection but is much the same in spirit.

The title is Count Carrots; the author is Gerda Mayer; the one-line note says only from a Bohemian folk-tale called Rübezahl. It’s sandwiched in between Bishop Hatto (the exciting, child-friendly tale of the Wrath of God exacted in the form of the titular bishop being eaten alive by rats) and The Lady of Shalott (Tennyson, also surprisingly weird and dark).

The poem reads like a children’s poem; it’s written in a light, conversational tone. Free verse.

He’s the giant of the mountains; they call him Count Carrots. How he hates that nickname. Let me tell you how he came by it. Well -- there was that princess who -- Persephone-like -- had strayed from her companions. Perhaps you know the story.

(As far as I can tell, that right there? That’s the only place that’s been put online. This poem is nowhere.)

You can probably guess the basic outline of the narrative, just from that quote. The execution, though, is -- something else. The giant gets these odd little humanizing touches --

Some say he brought her gifts of precious stones to tempt her to love him. This is untrue, he was simpler than that. He brought her, I think, bilberries from the forest, baskets of raspberries, mushrooms, many sorts, which Bohemia excels in, and clumsy importunings, day after day.

And there are beautiful morsels of description, serving no purpose at all but to be there:

The fact is -- to paddle your feet in a mountain stream, shallow and fast and cold as molten ice, water which rushes and swirls over white pebbles, -- to paddle your feet in this on a hot day is pleasant and delightful: to wash in it, day after day, indubitably cold. So the princess had discovered.

The tone, already, is getting strange. This should be straightforward -- kidnapped princess, evil giant -- but there’s something bittersweet about every part of it: about the giant who’s really trying to please her, about the homesick princess, about her parents --

‘What shall we tell them at home?’ And who will comfort ever the queen in tears, the king in despair?

And then it gets weird.

The princess is lonely. The giant brings her a basketful of carrots from his garden, and explains that they’ll be magically transformed into “whomever, whatever, you wish.”

The princess wishes up her puppy and her friends and her retinue, and she’s happy again. (“She was gracious to the giant. She didn’t see much of him.”)

Then, on the third morning, they start to wilt -- her horse first, then her friends -- stumbling, their flesh shrunken, pale, complaining of headaches, dead in a ditch -- and, finally, carrots again.

(This is -- kind of horrifying, right? It’s not just me?)

The princess goes to the giant. The giant promises to bring her fresh carrots each day, to replace them as they wilt. This satisfies her for a while, but then she feels uneasy, so she comes up with a clever escape plan: she worries aloud that the giant might run out of carrots, and begs him to count them. While he’s distracted, she wishes up a pair of horses and a companion and rides home.

The ending is about as bittersweet and strange as you’d imagine from the rest:

Henceforth, the giant was called Count Carrots by all; a nickname he hates, as I told you at the beginning. Woe to him who so calls him in mischief. Let the impudent traveller, shouting his name, beware.

When I was small, I called his name into the forest: ‘Count Carrots! Count Carrots!’ then leapt into bed, half in fear. He didn’t come for me though. Could it be that perhaps he forgave me? He loves children, they say. -- May the forest stay green for him ever.

(3) incidental history

If you’re anything like me -- which, I acknowledge, is a bit of a leap -- this leaves you with two questions. One is: what was up with that poem? And two is: why has the internet never heard of it? (There are, after all, all sorts of poem archives online. Why does this one show up nowhere?)

I don’t have a really good answer to either question, but I have one answer, which split between them makes for maybe half an answer to each.

That answer is in the author. Gerda Mayer: Jewish, Czechoslovakian, born 1927.

It doesn’t take much to do that math. She was eleven in 1939, at the start of World War Two, whereupon Czechoslovakia was not such a good place to be a little Jewish girl. Gerda was (though one hates to use the word) lucky enough to find a place on a Kindertransport to England.

She’d stay in touch with her parents, writing them letters -- them still in Nazi-occupied territory, her off in England. Mayer, much later, writes about the experience:

I am on a raft and they are in a choppy sea. I am eleven, possibly just turned twelve, and they cry out to me -- though in the politest possible way -- ‘If you should happen to have a lifeline or lifebelt on the raft, if it is not too inconvenient...’ It is a forlorn hope. Their heads bob on the surface and the waves grow higher and higher.

Reading an excerpt from one of her mother’s letters, you can see what Mayer is talking about:

Under no circumstance do I want you to bother your benefactors who have already done so much for you; but if you should meet someone who strikes you as particularly kind...

Little Gerda never was able to find someone particularly kind. Her mother would die in Auschwitz; her father, in a camp somewhere in Russia. Mayer writes:

My father went hiking without pass- port or visa and was                                   intercepted My sister went mad my mother went into that Chamber trusting                                   in God God picked the bones clean they lie without imprint or name dear                                   mother

By this time, at eleven-or-maybe-twelve, Gerda had already been writing poetry for some time, and shown a distinct talent (though notable, perhaps, only to her parents as yet). Her first poem was written at age four (as any number of biographies available online attest), and saved by said parents in a “Baby’s Diary”.

(None of the online sources include a copy of the poem, as far as I can tell, but full scans of the diary are available online via the Center for Jewish History Digital Collections. My German might be up to the task of translating a four-year-old’s poem, but unfortunately it is definitely not up to deciphering her father’s cursive. If anyone else wants to give it a shot, pages 117 to 124 are dated from 1931-2, when she would have been four, so it should be somewhere in there.)

In any case, Mayer herself says that her poetry suffered severely as a result of the change in language. In a letter written at the request of, and published in, a poetry magazine, she says:

I was born in the Sudeten, the once-German-speaking part of Czechoslovakia. I came over at the age of eleven and, as I was surrounded by English speakers, my reading had caught up with my own age group before three months were out. In any case, I was reading Browning’s Pied Piper to myself and, came the summer holidays, What Katy Did. Conversely, my mother, in a letter from Prague, fretted that my German was deteriorating. If I had caught up linguistically, poetically there was a time-lag. My first English poem, written at the age of twelve was no better than one I had composed (in my pre-literacy days) at the age of four (proud parents had entered this into my ‘Baby’s Diary’) and a poem I wrote at the age of sixteen was on a level with one I had written at the age of eleven, just before leaving home.

This seems to me the most satisfying explanation available for why Mayer never became more famous than she has. It really doesn’t seem to be a lack of skill; the introduction to her Wikipedia article has Britian’s poet laureate praising her as a fine poet “who should be better known.”

Rather, Mayer is limited by writing in a second language (and one she learned late, at that -- eleven is old to be learning a new language). She compensates for this to some degree for writing children’s, and childish, poetry, where maybe a gift for vivid imagery and tone can compensate for the linguistic handicaps of writing in a second language (poetry! in a second language! I can’t get over how impressive that is to do at all).

Hence we have Count Carrots, which is effective partly because it’s really an adult poet, writing about adult topics, but using the format of children’s poetry; hence also we have commentary on her repertoire like this from Peter Lawson:

Although some of Mayer’s poems are aimed specifically at children, other collections feature what Peter Porter describes as ‘children’s rhymes for grown-ups’. Such poems juxtapose, in the lilt of nursery rhymes, the tentatively self-assured perspectives of children with adult knowledge of the murder of innocents in the Holocaust.

And Mayer absolutely makes this work for her. A characteristic ‘children’s rhyme for grown-ups’:

Grandfather’s house rose up so tall, Its steps were like a waterfall It had a deep stairwell, as I recall.

And down the banisters slid my mother, And her sisters, and her brother, And many a child, many another.

The banisters wobbled and down fell all. Down down, down, and beyond recall. And so I was not born at all.

Better it is not to have been, Than to have seen what I have seen. So deck their graves with meadow-green.

Or again:

The children are the candles white, Their voices are the flickering light.

The children are the candles pale, Their sweet song wavers in the gale.

Storm, abate! Wind, turn about! Or you will blow their voices out.

Mayer gets compared to Plath (doing her an injustice, I think, but I’m not overly fond of Plath) and to Blake (much fairer, in my opinion). But she’s nothing like as famous as either -- will probably never be famous, except for her story -- and I think that can be chalked up to the linguistic hobbles she’s working under.

But those don’t prevent her from writing truly great children’s poetry -- and Mayer knows that, and the Oxford editors, evidently, knew that, because the strange beautiful haunting Count Carrots somehow made it into my book of children’s verse.

[artkarthik]

My First Kickstarter Project: Golu Boxdolls!

Secret Origin Story

We have this festival in South India called Golu. This is celebrated by displaying clay dolls that represent the various aspects of life and culture in the traditional South Indian society (sort of like the nativity scene during christmas). So families build these steps and arrange their collection of gods, temples, dancers, weddings, villages and so on, some collected over several generations. 

Having lived outside India for the past decade or so, I've always always wanted to celebrate this festival at home but since we didn’t have access to the traditional Golu dolls, we were a bit puzzled about how to proceed. 

Then we hit upon the idea of calling our friends over and making our own boxdolls out of discarded materials together!

The first year, I made a Brahma doll out of a milk carton, with one face on each side of the box. I felt this had some potential, but didn’t quite know what to do with it. 

The second year, I made a Ganesha and folded it’s ears out of the box, giving it a more 3D look. I felt that perhaps this could work as a book. 

The third year came around and I made a Garuda, with magnificent wings folded out of the box from behind. This time I was sure there was some potential to this, but I wasn’t quite sure how to handle the complexities of pitching it to a publishing house to make a book out of it. And If i self published, I wasn’t sure how to handle all the logistics. 

The fourth year arrived and it was one week before Navratri, the festival of nine nights, which celebrates all of the Goddesses in India. I came across a project on Kickstarter which had a completely digital offering: someone was designing paper models for Dungeons & Dragons, which the supporters could just print out and assemble themselves. This sort of set of a lightbulb in my head. Would it perhaps work as a Kickstarter project? Its sort of ironic that it took four years of stewing in my head and it all fell into place within a matter of minutes and I was able to launch it as a Kickstarter project within a week. 

Campaign Setup & Progress

Mon 18th Sep

I wrote down what my project was about and why I was doing it, specifically asking myself the question, "why was this so important to me?”. 

I decided on a goal, which I set to a modest goal of 500EUR for 10 Golu Doll Blueprints. My backers could download these, print them and have fun assembling them on their own. 

I also made a list of reward tiers that I could offer, starting from 1EUR (which could get you one doll) up to 25EUR (which could get you a custom avatar doll).

Tue 19th Sep

I Decided on what dolls I’d make for the initial offering. For this I decided on the 10 most visually unique, iconic and appealing characters from Indian mythology: 

Brahma-the God of Creation

Ganesha-the Elephant God

Garuda-the Eagle God

Hanuman-the Monkey God

Narasimna-the Man/Lion Avatar

Shiva-the God of Destruction

Krishna-the 8th Avatar of Vishnu

Lakshmi-the Goddess of Wealth

Durga-the Goddess of Power and 

Saraswati-the Goddess of Wisdom & Learning

For stretch goals, I decided that I would add 1 new design for every 50EUR that exceeded the main goal

Wed 20th Sep - Sat 23rd Sep 

This time was spent fervently dreaming up designs for all of the Boxdolls and pulling them out of my imagination using a combination of Illustrator and Photoshop. 

Sun 24th Sep morning

I created the previews of all the campaign rewards and stretch goals

Sun 24th Sep afternoon

I realized that I now had to record a video for my Kickstarter campaign. The guidelines suggested that campaigns with videos tend to do better, because the audience can see that there’s a real person behind the campaign and could relate to their cause a lot better. I wrote down a basic script with my thoughts and feelings and started rehearsing it in front of my laptop camera. The first few takes were terrible cus I was very nervous, but after the sixth or seventh take I loosened up a bit and unclasped my hands to actually use them while I talked, which helped quite a lot. 

Sun 24th Sep night

With all of the components ready, there was nothing really preventing me from launching it, but I kept deliberating over it, navigating from page to page, re-checking everything and constantly making adjustments. In the end, I decided that I had done enough tweaking and I should just take the plunge. I closed my eyes and hit “Publish”. 

I opened my eyes and nothing had happened. Well, I got an email that my project was published, but that was it. But then my first backer came in within the first 20 mins. I checked it and it was for 1EUR, the first reward tier. Had to start somewhere, I guess. I shared the campaign on Facebook and went to bed. 

Mon 25th Sep

The first marketing messages start coming in with magical offers to magnify my social media presence and give my project more visibility. In exchange for a small fee of course. This whole magic marketing angle felt like it would take away any potential learning experience along with the fun and freshness of a new project. I declined their offers. This was followed by six more offers for giving me publicity, each one claiming to have the best network and that the others out there were terrible. I ignored them. 

I checked later that night and found that the campaign was already 20% funded. I was genuinely surprised that folks were interested in this. I shared an image of the Garuda Boxdoll with my backers on Kickstarter. 

Tue 26th Sep

The campaign was now 35% funded. Progress! I assembled the Ganesha and Hanuman dolls and shared them to Instagram, Facebook, Twitter and Tumblr, asking people to check out the project. 

Wed 27th Sep

I had a weird dream that the project had gotten more funding but then I woke up and realized that this was just silly. However I was shocked to see that in fact, it had! My original FB post had gotten more likes, comments and shares. The project got some big backers and was now at 60% funding. 

Later that evening, I printed and assembled the dolls for Narasimha and Krishna and shared them as project updates.

Thu 28th Sep 

I got my first fake spam phishing mail. It had an offer from a nice sounding person offering to feature me and my project on their blog. All I had to do was to send them some pictures and click on a link where I could answer three questions about my project. Clicked on it and nothing happened. Clicked again and a popup was blocked. It slowly dawned on me that this was a phishing attempt, looking to either collect some data from me or make me download a virus. I marked the mail as spam and reported it on kickstarter, enlightened but disappointed that there were so many people trying to leech off of honest campaigns. 

By that evening, the project got a sudden boost and reached 85% funding

Fri 29th Sep

The project was at 93% funding

Sat 30th Sep

The project was at 97% funding as more pledges poured in

Sun 1st Oct

One final push from a benevolent backer pushed the project to 100% funded in under 7 days! 

Mon 2nd Oct

I created the Boxdoll design for the first stretch goal: Kali, the Goddess of Time & Destruction

Thu 5th Oct

One backer cancelled their pledge and the project dipped below the goal. A little saddened by this, I started researching more Facebook groups related to arts and crafts promotion to share the project on. 

Friday 6th Oct

One new backer had pledged in the highest reward tier and the project was back to being fully funded at 103% 

Sun 8th Oct

A Kickstarter marketing expert reached out to me to inquire about my project, congratulated me on getting fully funded, and then asked if I was interested in overfunding beyond my stretch goal. I was quite thrilled by his interest and said that this was a small project and that I was happy with the funding and while I'd be thrilled at meeting stretch goals, it wasn't a huge priority for me. Sharing the project with people who were interested and giving my backers a great product was always on the forefront of my mind. Unfortunately this was not the answer that the marketing guy was looking for and stopped answering my messages after that, which was a little disappointing. 

Tue 17 Oct

The project was fairly quiet for over two weeks until one more backer made a pledge, taking the project to 106%

Wed 18 Oct

One more backer made a pledge in the highest tier, taking the project to 110% funding, unlocking the first stretch goal: Kali!

Mon Oct 23

On the last 24 hours, the project got one more backer in the highest tier, pushing it to 115%. I designed and posted the 12th and last stretch goal doll for Vamana, the dwarf avatar

Tue Oct 24

To get through the last stretch, I posted additional photos of the dolls. With 4 hours to go, one more backer supported, pushing to 117%

3 hours to go, one more backer pushing to 119%

15 mins to go, one last backer pushing project to 121% unlocking the second stretch goal: Vamana!

Campaign ended successfully! 

Wed Oct 25

I sent out the survey questionnaires to all backers, asking the backers in the highest tier what they’d like their custom avatar to look like. The responses started trickling in slowly as I got to work with the rewards.

Thu Oct 26

I finished designing the final Boxdoll blueprint in PDF format using Indesign

Fri Oct 27

I sent out the Boxdoll blueprints to all backers, hoping they would have as much fun assembling the Boxdolls as I did designing them!

Sat Oct 28th

I started sending out the custom avatars. I had a lot of fun putting in tons of detail in these to make them come to life.

Special Highlights: King Bhumibol of Thailand, Cloud Strife from Final Fantasy and Napoleon Bonaparte 

Some interesting metrics

The project ended at a modest 606€, at 121% funding, with 26 backers, involving 12 mythology Boxdolls and 20 custom Avatar Boxdolls!

41% of backers came via Kickstarter’s organic search (wow!)

50% of backers came via facebook (a lot of friends stepped up, sharing their love and support, for which I am eternally grateful) 

4% came from Instagram (a little disappointing, there seems to be very little way of garnering any sort of interaction with your audience)

4% came from linkedin (a little bizarre but true) 

The Project video was played 193 times and watched all the way to the end 65% of the time

Special Thanks

And last but not least, I would like to give a very special mention of thanks to the following amazingly lovely backers who made this project possible:

Willie, Nak, Clare Wieck, Liss C Werner, Emilee, Karen Wetmore, Bharat Pathiavadi, Linh, Christoph Philipp, Pati Keilwerth, Nate Guerin, Kristina Broens, Kinn Chan de Velarde, Julie Petrytus, Vaishnavi, June Osti, Conlan Rios, Edward Puckett, Maya Shin, Pascal DESBAR-ATS, Mark Pulse, Derek Kocher, Grisan Kv, Steph Parker, Emanuele Libralato & Sudeshna Pantham! 

Now Available!

For those of you who missed it, the dolls are available for purchase at

http://www.artofkarthik.com/papercraft/boxdoll1

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1668251757/boxdolls-indian-mythology

Onwards to the next project! 

[topicprinter]

So you have a brand/business/startup that you think should test some Influencer Marketing? I agree, you probably should. In the past two years, depending on the project, almost nothing that has had a cheaper CPM (and sometimes CPI) for my clients than Influencer Marketing, but it’s taken me nearly 500 total engagements to figure it all out (you can google my username if you want to see my LinkedIn or verify me)A while ago it was the total Wild Wild West of Advertising, with rate fluctuation looking at like 300% for the same sized audiences. Brands were paying ridiculous rates to Influencers who built their followings with mostly bots and booty shorts, but that’s dying down now, and what’s left after that dust settles is an extremely authentic way to grow your brand, convert and literally influence people to use/try/buy your stuff. With that, I wanted to take the time to write out what I’ve learned about how you can do your own Influencer Marketing tests, even with minimal budgets, yourself. Firstly, I want to say, there are three major ways you can go about Influencer Marketing:​DIY (which is the purpose of this post so I won’t elaborate on what that means yet.Going through an agency like God and Beauty (I recommend them)Using a platform like Influence.com or the similarly named influence.co.The difference between these strategies basically is more money investment vs. more time investment for you and your team. For instance, if you go through an agency, they’ll do the heavy lifting for you from start to finish, but you’ll need to pay a decent percentage of your total budget to get that assistance. Agencies are also great if you’re starting out because you can benefit from people who have been in the trenches (like Kyle at G&B) for thousands of posts since the inception of the advertising channel. Basically, if you’re a bootstrapped, self-funded company, you’ll need to go the DIY approach, and my entire near 15-year career has been dedicated to helping early-stage businesses so, why stop now! Let me tell you how to do your own Influencer Campaign:Step 1) DiscoveryThe first thing I always do is develop a keyword list that I want to use to discover Influencers who will have an audience of our target users. For this exercise, I didn’t spend a ton of time developing this list, but I would obviously suggest you research this in-depth with more time. Let’s say I’m a healthy food delivery startup focused on affluent 25-45-year-olds. I won’t name any names, because they’re not paying me, but just pick one in your mind. Assume that after I wrote out all the keywords, I searched dozens of terms in the channels I want to advertise on and found these 5 to be the most accurate:Develop Influencer Keywords:“Healthy”“Medicine”“Wellness”“Fitness”“Organic”For the sake of this exercise, let’s imagine these 5 terms are super targeted to our users based on significant research. I’ll source and develop lists of Influencers for each term,(for this exercise I’ll just show 1 each) to test out an engagement and identify which “community” or keyword focus is best for us to scale up with this strategy.Identifying InfluencersI then go to various Social Media platforms, and/ or Influencer Platforms like Aspire, HeartBeat, Influence.co etc and search for users based on these keywords. Each user should have a solid blend of these three metrics:​Audience - How many total followers.Engagement - How active are followers.Activations - How many directly ask followers to purchase?Beyond the 3 mentioned above, do they have the audience your company wishes to target? This can be ascertained by looking at the keyword relevance of their profile, posts and their content. Their location is also important if your business is focused on specific geographies.Average Post EngagementThen I’m looking at the average engagement of their posts.This sheet has the formulas I use for determining the engagement ROI of an influencer before I engage them.FYI the rest is dummy content but shows you an example of the metrics and KPIs I look for.I’ve found that much of my Influencer Marketing success has come from smaller Influencers under 100k followers, not only because they have more engagement, but because they’re also less saturated, and have more interest in large partnerships including cross-platform and multipost campaigns.For this exercise, I’ll suggest larger partnerships with large Influencers only.Previous ActivationsThen I’m looking for previous activations that they’ve done with similarly aligned brands. I want to see SOME activations, showing the type of content and the average engagements but I don’t want to see too many. I like to look for at least one post a month but not more than 1 post a week.If they saturate too much then their “influence goes down quite a bit.'' Now, you also need to test various channels. You may already know that Instagram works best for your business organically, but I also like to look at a few other outlier platforms like Pinterest and Youtube or even industry-specific forums for test engagements, or if Influencers have diverse audiences across multiple platforms we can test cross-platform multi-post engagements as well. For the sake of this exercise, I’ll just pick 5 relevant Influencers on Instagram.Here are the 5 Influencers I chose in 2 minutes for the above keywords:See original post for photos:​Note: You would want to try several other search terms, even with multiple words.Step 2) PitchSo if I am not dealing with an agency or a platform I start with a very simple cold outreach message like the email below:Or via DM to get their email and add them to my list of Influencers: 📷📷​See original post for photos:Take a moment to brainstorm and see if you have something valuable to offer the Influencers besides just cash. Many of them will say no to anything besides financial reward, but some ideas of other things to offer are below. Reach out to them with short succinct messages that are valuable and your response rate will be decent. Focus on Influencers who are not doing a lot of paid posts as they’re more likely to be interested in other value.Other Things that are valuable:-Free merch-Giveaways-Content Ideas-ExclusivesThe pitch then becomes more focused on collaboration with strict guidelines for content to ensure success. What I’ve found with Influencers is that the larger their audience, the lazier they tend to be, so we want to make it exciting by pitching large partnerships, but also hold them accountable with strict guidelines so they can’t “slack off” on the content creation, often trying to reuse content they’ve already created…The bottom line for all of my influencer pitches is how can I make an engagement with my brand more valuable to their audience than other brands that reach out to them. We want them to feel like this is valuable for more than just financial reasons...so coming at them with creative ideas and fun ideas that will delight and impress their followers will be best at helping them be ok with not getting a big paycheck. This is especially true for the under-100k Influencer.Also, if you have an upcoming event you can invite them to, it’s even better. Influencers love free stuff and that means swag, and party/event invites too, so if you’re doing an event or launch party you can invite all press and all potential Influencers and the pitch becomes something like this:📷See original post for photos:Note: the average response rate of an invite is like 75% for me..vs 35% for other messages.Step 3: CreateThe secret tip to having a successful Influencer Marketing campaign, is having control over the content. The more guidelines you give the Influencer the better the outcome. In my experience, content like the below works best...that is created solely to promote our product, with product placement in the post, showing the influencer using it, and actually believable. This is ideal. To have maximum engagement we want Influencers who would actually use the product.📷On the other end of the spectrum, a poor Influencer post is often just a random photo of just the Influencer, with the focus on the Influencer's sexuality/body and even other products in the post.📷See the difference in the total engagements between the above posts, now guess what? The influencer in the second image has a larger following (slightly) and we paid both engagements the same amount. So know exactly what you want them to do ahead of time. It helps to create a PDF kit that you can just email them as you sign them up. This entire process should only take a week’s worth of work for everything from sourcing, messaging, following up, PayPaling them etc. You can easily start off with 20-30 of these and see how it works for your business before scaling up to larger Influencers, and working with Agencies and bigger platforms/engagements at scale.As I’m writing this I’m wondering about all the negative comments I’ll get from other Digital Marketers out there who still shun the thought of engaging in Influencer Marketing. But the data doesn’t lie, for certain brands, with certain target demographics, this stuff really works, and the key is knowing how to do it. I hope this helps you scale your business. If you’ve got questions please comment below. You can also reach me by Googling my username.See original post for photos:

[richmegavideo]

The Indie Publisher Trying to Turn the Mueller Report into a Bestseller

Robert Mueller's recently wrapped investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election may not have brought down the president, but at least it will produce a bestseller. So far Attorney General William Barr has only made public his own four-page summary of the Mueller report, infuriating Democrats who want the whole thing to be released—a debate some in the book world are watching very, very closely. Public appetite for a longer report has been growing for months, and perhaps thinking of the massive cultural impact and sales generated by Ken Starr's report on the Bill Clinton scandal in the 90s, multiple publishers have preemptively announced plans to publish the Mueller report.

"As far as prepublication buzz goes," David A. Graham wrote in the Atlantic this month, nothing "can match the expectations attached to the Mueller report."

The Washington Post and Scribner teamed up to publish the report—more specifically, an "e-book within two to three days of the report and the paperback in five to eight days"—all the way back in February. They'll be competing with Skyhorse, whose president and publisher, Tony Lyons, said over email that he plans to release a bound book within seven days of the report's release. (Skyhorse's version of the report will be paired with an introduction by famous lawyer and Trump defender Alan Dershowitz, while the Post's version will include an introduction and supplemental material from the paper's reporters.)

The most recent publishing house to announce it was putting out the report is the independent Melville House—which, having been founded only in 2001, already has a lengthy history of transforming such reports into book form. (Examples include Senate Intelligence Committee Report on Torture, The Climate Report, and Federal Reports on Police Killings.)

VICE called up Dennis Johnson, the co-founder of Melville House, to discuss the process of creating books from these sorts of documents, and why he's selling one with no introduction or additional context.

VICE: When did discussions about publishing Mueller's report begin? Dennis Johnson: We had been talking about doing this at least a year ago. We got an ISBN, and we designed a cover, and all that. We have a track record of doing a lot of these government reports, and this, of course, would be the biggest one we've ever done. We had our eyes on it from the start. So we've been waiting, too, all this time. I think we're going to be waiting a little while longer, we'll see [laughs].

How quickly could you get the book out until the world, if—whenever—it does go public? If, say, it dropped tomorrow, I think we could get it out in ten days.

Do you expect it sell well? Oh, absolutely. We've done very well with these sorts of things, and if you look historically at some of the really big ones, like the 9/11 Commission Report or the Starr Report, those are books that sold in the millions, if you take in all the different editions. And that's kind of encouraging, too: There's good civic interest in these books.

What happens if it's not all made public? You don't really have a plan, other than to have a team ready. We've done it before, with the torture report, so we know the production issues. You put the printers on alert, the shipper, the warehouses. You have it ready to go. As I said, we've done quite a few of these books, from the torture report to Ferguson and the federal report on the police shooting to the Supreme Court on marriage equality—we just did the climate report in January. We have not only a team ready to go on this, but one that's very excited. They feel this has real meaning. It reminds you why you're in the business of books. You just have to sort of wing it, and use your publishing instincts. And fly by the seat of your pants.

The possible issues are: One, that they don't release it at all; two, that they release it, but it's redacted; and, three, they release it in segments—and so on and so on. It can also be, like, 5,000 pages long. So all the numbers so far, from the three publishers who have said they were going to publish the book, we're all putting up our best guesses.

For us, the trickiest thing would be if they release it and it has a lot of redactions. Because redactions are very hard to replicate properly in a well-made book. And the torture report is a good example of that: When they released the torture report on a Friday afternoon, during the Christmas season, nobody saw it coming, and it was heavily redacted. It was released by the government as a PDF that was barely readable, and it was so badly made it was nearly impossible to do a search on it. So we had to completely remake that document. You can copy out text easily enough, but for a redaction remark, there's no typesetting a redaction. We had to figure out how to recreate that.

How did you? Well, there's no typeface that has a black square like that. We actually had teams of people literally working around the clock, and we were all sitting there with rulers, measuring character spaces from the original—because if you look at redactions, often enough you can figure out what might have been redacted by the length of the redaction. So we wanted to measure that by character spaces, and that was only doable by hand. That's obviously a slow process.

How long did that project take you, then? That, from start to finish, was three weeks.

And that wasn't even preemptive, right? Like you literally had no real idea the torture report was coming out? Nobody knew when it was going to be released, and it was at a terrible time of the year. It's busy time of the year. Stores are filled with books. None of the big houses wanted to do it, and none of us saw it coming—but we made the decision, immediately, to do it. There was a lot of coverage of that, too. We had reporters embedded with us and stuff. It was quite an ordeal. In many ways, we've already had this experience.

The other thing is, it's important for us to make a good book. What we found out with the torture report was that we had to really make it an easy-to-read and searchable digital book, in addition to a print book. You get a certain expanded readership with a print book, which the government will basically only do if you send them a lot of money, like a manuscript of it; otherwise, it's just this thing online that nobody would really read.

When I was a kid, in the 60s and 70s, my parents had the Pentagon Papers in our library, just because they thought it was an important book—so that's, in a sense, why you want a print book. But we also wanted to do a digital book, so that people could really read and use that document. And later on, we heard from all kinds of academics, the ACLU, Amnesty International, who thanked us for making it searchable. It was much easier for them to coordinate and do research. It's important to make these sorts of things right—and there will be a lot of knockoffs.

You're publishing this without any sort of introduction to frame it, unlike Scribner and the Washington Post, as well as Skyhorse. Why? As the attorney general, William Barr, just showed, it's a mistake to give these things any kind of an apparatus, or a summary, or an introduction. You are digesting it for people, and you're giving it a certain bias when you do that. And we have never done that. We have always believed that the documents should speak for themselves—that the readers should be given the respect that they have the intelligence to comprehend this document, and develop their own thinking about the document. We really feel that we're just doing a public service, and trying to get it out there, and to let people make their own assumptions.

All of the criticism that you're seeing of AG Barr's report now kind of shows you how these things can go wrong. You need the real document. From a publisher's viewpoint, I find it kind of curious, too—because now you've got an edition that's branded by Jeff Bezos's Washington Post, or you've got another one that's branded by Alan Dershowitz, who's a Trump supporter, and why would I get that if I'm not a Trump supporter?

I don't think those are necessarily good publishing decisions. They're certainly not good civic-minded decisions.

So the main differentiation, for you, is that it's a public good, and you're not so much in direct competition with these other publishers? Absolutely. I think we are publishing the book the best way it can be published—and I'll say that in extent to the format as well. We're very excited to be doing this as a classic American-formatted mass-market paperback.

It's your first one in that formar, yeah? Yes. This kind of speaks to my personal background: The paperback—part of the reason it developed was to get the book out to a wider audience, in particular children. Making them more affordable to young people, and getting the classics out there. That's what a paperback always represented to me.

If you wanted to disseminate it to as many people as possible, this all seems to me the right way to do it.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Sign up for our newsletter to get the best of VICE delivered to your inbox daily.

Follow Alex Norcia on Twitter.

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from WordPress http://www.richmegavideo.com/the-indie-publisher-trying-to-turn-the-mueller-report-into-a-bestseller/

[richmeganews]

The Indie Publisher Trying to Turn the Mueller Report into a Bestseller

Robert Mueller's recently wrapped investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election may not have brought down the president, but at least it will produce a bestseller. So far Attorney General William Barr has only made public his own four-page summary of the Mueller report, infuriating Democrats who want the whole thing to be released—a debate some in the book world are watching very, very closely. Public appetite for a longer report has been growing for months, and perhaps thinking of the massive cultural impact and sales generated by Ken Starr's report on the Bill Clinton scandal in the 90s, multiple publishers have preemptively announced plans to publish the Mueller report.

"As far as prepublication buzz goes," David A. Graham wrote in the Atlantic this month, nothing "can match the expectations attached to the Mueller report."

The Washington Post and Scribner teamed up to publish the report—more specifically, an "e-book within two to three days of the report and the paperback in five to eight days"—all the way back in February. They'll be competing with Skyhorse, whose president and publisher, Tony Lyons, said over email that he plans to release a bound book within seven days of the report's release. (Skyhorse's version of the report will be paired with an introduction by famous lawyer and Trump defender Alan Dershowitz, while the Post's version will include an introduction and supplemental material from the paper's reporters.)

The most recent publishing house to announce it was putting out the report is the independent Melville House—which, having been founded only in 2001, already has a lengthy history of transforming such reports into book form. (Examples include Senate Intelligence Committee Report on Torture, The Climate Report, and Federal Reports on Police Killings.)

VICE called up Dennis Johnson, the co-founder of Melville House, to discuss the process of creating books from these sorts of documents, and why he's selling one with no introduction or additional context.

VICE: When did discussions about publishing Mueller's report begin? Dennis Johnson: We had been talking about doing this at least a year ago. We got an ISBN, and we designed a cover, and all that. We have a track record of doing a lot of these government reports, and this, of course, would be the biggest one we've ever done. We had our eyes on it from the start. So we've been waiting, too, all this time. I think we're going to be waiting a little while longer, we'll see [laughs].

How quickly could you get the book out until the world, if—whenever—it does go public? If, say, it dropped tomorrow, I think we could get it out in ten days.

Do you expect it sell well? Oh, absolutely. We've done very well with these sorts of things, and if you look historically at some of the really big ones, like the 9/11 Commission Report or the Starr Report, those are books that sold in the millions, if you take in all the different editions. And that's kind of encouraging, too: There's good civic interest in these books.

What happens if it's not all made public? You don't really have a plan, other than to have a team ready. We've done it before, with the torture report, so we know the production issues. You put the printers on alert, the shipper, the warehouses. You have it ready to go. As I said, we've done quite a few of these books, from the torture report to Ferguson and the federal report on the police shooting to the Supreme Court on marriage equality—we just did the climate report in January. We have not only a team ready to go on this, but one that's very excited. They feel this has real meaning. It reminds you why you're in the business of books. You just have to sort of wing it, and use your publishing instincts. And fly by the seat of your pants.

The possible issues are: One, that they don't release it at all; two, that they release it, but it's redacted; and, three, they release it in segments—and so on and so on. It can also be, like, 5,000 pages long. So all the numbers so far, from the three publishers who have said they were going to publish the book, we're all putting up our best guesses.

For us, the trickiest thing would be if they release it and it has a lot of redactions. Because redactions are very hard to replicate properly in a well-made book. And the torture report is a good example of that: When they released the torture report on a Friday afternoon, during the Christmas season, nobody saw it coming, and it was heavily redacted. It was released by the government as a PDF that was barely readable, and it was so badly made it was nearly impossible to do a search on it. So we had to completely remake that document. You can copy out text easily enough, but for a redaction remark, there's no typesetting a redaction. We had to figure out how to recreate that.

How did you? Well, there's no typeface that has a black square like that. We actually had teams of people literally working around the clock, and we were all sitting there with rulers, measuring character spaces from the original—because if you look at redactions, often enough you can figure out what might have been redacted by the length of the redaction. So we wanted to measure that by character spaces, and that was only doable by hand. That's obviously a slow process.

How long did that project take you, then? That, from start to finish, was three weeks.

And that wasn't even preemptive, right? Like you literally had no real idea the torture report was coming out? Nobody knew when it was going to be released, and it was at a terrible time of the year. It's busy time of the year. Stores are filled with books. None of the big houses wanted to do it, and none of us saw it coming—but we made the decision, immediately, to do it. There was a lot of coverage of that, too. We had reporters embedded with us and stuff. It was quite an ordeal. In many ways, we've already had this experience.

The other thing is, it's important for us to make a good book. What we found out with the torture report was that we had to really make it an easy-to-read and searchable digital book, in addition to a print book. You get a certain expanded readership with a print book, which the government will basically only do if you send them a lot of money, like a manuscript of it; otherwise, it's just this thing online that nobody would really read.

When I was a kid, in the 60s and 70s, my parents had the Pentagon Papers in our library, just because they thought it was an important book—so that's, in a sense, why you want a print book. But we also wanted to do a digital book, so that people could really read and use that document. And later on, we heard from all kinds of academics, the ACLU, Amnesty International, who thanked us for making it searchable. It was much easier for them to coordinate and do research. It's important to make these sorts of things right—and there will be a lot of knockoffs.

You're publishing this without any sort of introduction to frame it, unlike Scribner and the Washington Post, as well as Skyhorse. Why? As the attorney general, William Barr, just showed, it's a mistake to give these things any kind of an apparatus, or a summary, or an introduction. You are digesting it for people, and you're giving it a certain bias when you do that. And we have never done that. We have always believed that the documents should speak for themselves—that the readers should be given the respect that they have the intelligence to comprehend this document, and develop their own thinking about the document. We really feel that we're just doing a public service, and trying to get it out there, and to let people make their own assumptions.

All of the criticism that you're seeing of AG Barr's report now kind of shows you how these things can go wrong. You need the real document. From a publisher's viewpoint, I find it kind of curious, too—because now you've got an edition that's branded by Jeff Bezos's Washington Post, or you've got another one that's branded by Alan Dershowitz, who's a Trump supporter, and why would I get that if I'm not a Trump supporter?

I don't think those are necessarily good publishing decisions. They're certainly not good civic-minded decisions.

So the main differentiation, for you, is that it's a public good, and you're not so much in direct competition with these other publishers? Absolutely. I think we are publishing the book the best way it can be published—and I'll say that in extent to the format as well. We're very excited to be doing this as a classic American-formatted mass-market paperback.

It's your first one in that formar, yeah? Yes. This kind of speaks to my personal background: The paperback—part of the reason it developed was to get the book out to a wider audience, in particular children. Making them more affordable to young people, and getting the classics out there. That's what a paperback always represented to me.

If you wanted to disseminate it to as many people as possible, this all seems to me the right way to do it.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Sign up for our newsletter to get the best of VICE delivered to your inbox daily.

Follow Alex Norcia on Twitter.

The post The Indie Publisher Trying to Turn the Mueller Report into a Bestseller appeared first on .

The post The Indie Publisher Trying to Turn the Mueller Report into a Bestseller appeared first on .

from WordPress http://www.richmeganews.com/the-indie-publisher-trying-to-turn-the-mueller-report-into-a-bestseller/

[swipestream]

Sensor Sweep: Celtic Fantasy, Donald Wollheim, Creepy Magazine, Hideous Creatures

Popular Culture (Men of Violence): Historical fiction special! Vikings! Roman soldiers! Pirates! Swash-buckling soldiers of fortune!68 pages, all colour, packed with reproductions of rare and unusual paperbacks.Articles, reviews, interviews and features on Casca, Gardner Fox, Henry Treece, Talbot Mundy, Rosemary Sutcliff, Rafael Sabatini and forgotten cover artists.

        Fiction (DMR Books): Awhile back, Dave Ritzlin here at the DMR blog asked me to recommend some good Celtic fantasy fiction. Today being Celtic New Year’s Day, it seemed appropriate to start off the New Year with a list of quality Celtic fiction.

To be honest, I can’t say that I like the vast majority of the fantasy which has been marketed or labeled as “Celtic.” As the late, great Steve Tompkins noted long, long ago, “cheapjack Celticism” has reigned o’er the land of Celtic fantasy since at least the 1980s. Languid, matriarchal tree-huggery tends to be the order of the day in most “Celtic” fiction, with the authors in question either being pig-ignorant of Celtic history and culture or cherry-picking to suit their (boring) take on the subject. 

  Fiction (DMR Books): Don Wollheim died on November 2, 1990, leaving behind him a sword and sorcery legacy that has never been matched. In the rarefied Valhalla of S&S editors/publishers, Wollheim sits enthroned at the high table. He debuted or “broke out”–as in, “their first big splash in the paperback market”–more enduring and important characters in the S&S

  pantheon than any other editor/publisher. It is as simple as that.

  Anime (Walker’s Retreat): Any Space Opera taking queues from Japan will not fail to acknowledge the Macross franchise. Starting in 1982 with Super Dimension Fortress Macross (which many of you known as the most popular part of Robotech), this is the #2 Real Robot franchise in Japan and has been since its debut (following the king that is Gundam). The consistent presence music as a power unto itself, the love triangles that drive the relationships, and their combination in the form of music that has now had inter-generational influence in anison and J-pop (and brought about the rise of Living Goddess Yoko Kanno).

  Lovecraft and Gaming (Yog-Sothoth.com): My latest scrape of the internet reveals that Hideous Creatures: A Bestiary of the Cthulhu Mythos for Trail of Cthulhuhas been released. Kind of. Hideous Creatures… is officially on pre-order at Pelgrane’s web site, but an article comment reveals that you’ll receive the PDF as soon as you place the pre-order for the print edition. – That means it’s out. – The content is there for you to purchase and peruse now; the fact it’s digital bits rather than the 352 page hardback doesn’t alter the content (just the way it may be consumed). If you’re after a new bestiary of Cthulhoid creatures then have a look at Hideous Creatures… Pelgrane promises you something a little different.

Books (Atomic Junk Shop): Your Favorite Book Cover:

Oh my God that is an awful question for someone like me. I can’t decide. It really depends on the genre and the artist and what kind of mood I’m in that day. The best I can do is narrow it down to a few favorite artists. I think the artist that perfectly captured the spirit of the story more than anyone else is Gino d’Achille with his covers for the Edgar Rice Burroughs Mars books.

Fiction (Frontier Partisans): I was in the mood for some fun, for a read that strums the right chords but isn’t related to a project or anything that feels like work. That can be a problem for me. I tend to put way too much weight on my choices of fiction. Pondering this in preparation for Running Iron Report podcasts, I realized that I kind of expect a novel to rock my world, always seeking that visceral hit that I got when I was young and a novel would go to my head like strong wine. Chasing the high and most often finding myself dissatisfied.

It’s why I read very little fiction these days. I really don’t read just for funanymore. And that’s just stupid. I needed to get out of my own way and simply enjoy a yarn.

Over the weekend, I kept running across an author named Jonathan French and a book titled The Grey Bastards.

  Comic Books (Paint Monk): Robert E. Howard is best known, and deservedly so, for Conan of Cimmeria, but he was a prolific author who wrote in several genres. While he arguably created the sword and sorcery tale, he also hammered out a staggering amount of pulp fiction, including westerns, boxing stories, detective yarns, and horror tales.

One of his best horror works was “Out of the Deep”, posthumously published in Magazine of Horror #18in their November 1967 issue.

  Fiction (Tellers of Weird Tales): Before Spider-Man and Superman, before Marvel and DC, even before comic books, there was the word superhero. (1) My hypothesis is that the word and the concept originated in the 1890s, give or take a decade, just as so much of our popular culture originated at that time. In order to test my hypothesis, I have used an online search engine/database/index of newspapers dating to the nineteenth century. I can’t say that the newspaper articles I have found were actually the earliest occurrences in print of the following words. Even if they’re not, my guess is that they’re close, as ideas, concepts, and memes seem to arise at a certain time, often in a certain place, and in a certain society or culture.

  Cinema (Sacnoth’s Scriptorium): John Boorman’s Lord of the Rings

In 1970, The Lord of the Rings was everywhere, its eco-friendly escapism dovetailing neatly with the communal mindset of the post-Woodstock era. A film was inevitable, and rights-holder United Artists turned to John Boorman, a British director with a passion for Arthurian fantasy and – more importantly – a moderate hit under his belt in Point Blank. Joining forces with the young screenwriter Rospo Pallenberg, Boorman turned out a script that covers all three books, runs to 178 pages and is, without question, one of the weirdest documents in existence.

  Comic Books (Pulp Archivist): In 1947’s Writer’s Digest, Stan Lee, then editor of Timely Comics, writes in his “There’s Money in Comics”:

One point which I can’t stress too strongly is: DON’T WRITE DOWN TO YOUR READERS! It is common knowledge that a large portion of comic magazine readers are adults, and the rest of the readers who may be kids are generally pretty sharp characters.

  Comic Books (Paint Monk): Few comics had the impact on me that Creepy did. The first issue I got my hands on was issue 4 of the magazine, dated August of 1965. I hadn’t even been born yet when this issue dropped, but I happened upon it at a flea market we used to visit when I was a kid and remember vividly seeing that Frank Frazetta cover for the first time.

  Gaming (Niche Gamer): Publisher Skybound Games has announced they’ve cancelled the planned physical release of Hollow Knight.

The August-announced retail version of the game is now longer happening. Here’s a statement from Skybound:

“We are saddened to share that we’ll no longer be working with Team Cherry to bring Hollow Knight to new platforms. We absolutely love the game and wish Team Cherry continued success. We look forward to seeing what’s next for them.”

Here’s a rundown on the game:

  Popular Culture (Kairos): Author JD Cowan offers a grim prognosis on the fate of pop culture based on Hollywood’s manifest inability to connect with its audience.

The Predator is a shallow, spiritually dead movie of stolen imagination and rehashed ideas with a message that could only have been thought up by someone too pathetic to grow up beyond adolescence. And it was written by someone who was there when the original film was being made. And not a talentless man, either. He wrote the original two (and best) Lethal Weapon films as well as Kiss Kiss Bang Bang. He knows action and how to give the audience what they want.

    Sensor Sweep: Celtic Fantasy, Donald Wollheim, Creepy Magazine, Hideous Creatures published first on https://medium.com/@ReloadedPCGames

[nedsvallesny]

Alleged ‘Satori’ IoT Botnet Operator Sought Media Spotlight, Got Indicted

A 20-year-old from Vancouver, Washington was indicted last week on federal hacking charges and for allegedly operating the “Satori” botnet, a malware strain unleashed last year that infected hundreds of thousands of wireless routers and other “Internet of Things” (IoT) devices. This outcome is hardly surprising given that the accused’s alleged alter ego has been relentless in seeking media attention for this global crime machine.

Schuchman, in an undated photo posted online and referenced in a “dox,” which alleged in Feb. 2018 that Schuchman was Nexus Zeta.

The Daily Beast‘s Kevin Poulsen broke the news last week that federal authorities in Alaska indicted Kenneth Currin Schuchman of Washington on two counts of violating the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act by using malware to damage computers between August and November 2017.

The 3-page indictment (PDF) is incredibly sparse, and includes few details about the meat of the charges against Schuchman. But according to Poulsen, the charges are related to Schuchman’s alleged authorship and use of the Satori botnet. Satori is a variant of the Mirai botnet, a powerful IoT malware strain that first came online in July 2016.

“Despite the havoc he supposedly wreaked, the accused hacker doesn’t seem to have been terribly knowledgeable about hacking,” Poulsen notes.

Schuchman reportedly went by the handle “Nexus Zeta,” the nickname used by a fairly inexperienced and clumsy ne’er-do-well who has tried on multiple occasions to get KrebsOnSecurity to write about the Satori botnet. In January 2018, Nexus Zeta changed the login page for his botnet control panel that he used to remotely control his hacked routers to include a friendly backhanded reference to this author:

The login prompt for Nexus Zeta’s IoT botnet included the message “Masuta is powered and hosted on Brian Kreb’s [sic] 4head.” To be precise, it’s a 5head.

This wasn’t the first time Nexus Zeta said hello. In late November 2017, he chatted me up on on Twitter and Jabber instant message for several days. Most of the communications came from two accounts: “9gigs_ProxyPipe” on Twitter, and ogmemes123@jabber.ru (9gigs_ProxyPipe would later change its Twitter alias to Nexus Zeta, and Nexus Zeta himself admitted that 9gigs_ProxyPipe was his Twitter account.)

In each case, this person wanted to talk about a new IoT botnet that he was “researching” and that he thought deserved special attention for its size and potential disruptive impact should it be used in a massive Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) attack aimed at knocking a Web site offline — something for which Satori would soon become known.

A Jabber instant message conversation with Nexus Zeta on Nov. 29, 2017.

Nexus Zeta’s Twitter nickname initially confused me because both 9gigs and ProxyPipe are names claimed by Robert Coelho, owner of ProxyPipe hosting (9gigs is a bit from one of Coelho’s Skype account names). Coelho’s sleuthing was quite instrumental in helping to unmask 21-year-old New Jersey resident Paras Jha as the author of the original Mirai IoT botnet (Jha later pleaded guilty to co-authoring and using Mirai and is due to be sentenced this month in Alaska and New Jersey). “Ogmemes” is from a nickname used by Jha and his Mirai botnet co-author.

On Nov. 28, 2017, 9gigs_ProxyPipe sent a message to the KrebsOnSecurity Twitter account:

“I have some information in regards to an incredibly dangerous IoT botnet you may find interesting,” the Twitter message read. “Let me know how you would prefer to communicate assuming you are interested.”

We connected on Jabber instant message. In our chats, Ogmemes123 said he couldn’t understand why nobody had noticed a botnet powered by a Mirai variant that had infected hundreds of thousands of IoT devices (he estimated the size of the botnet to be about 300,000-500,000 at the time). He also talked a lot about how close he was with Jha. Nexus Zeta’s Twitter account profile photo is a picture of Paras Jha. He also said he knew this new botnet was being used to attack ProxyPipe.

Less than 24 hours after that tweet from Nexus Zeta, I heard from ProxyPipe’s Coelho. They were under attack from a new Mirai variant.

“We’ve been mitigating attacks recently that are about 270 gigabits [in volume],” Coelho wrote in an email. “Looks like somebody tagged you on Twitter pretending to be from ProxyPipe — likely the attacker? Just wanted to give you a heads up since that is not us, or anyone that works with ProxyPipe.”

From reviewing Nexus Zeta’s myriad postings on the newbie-friendly hacker forum Hackforums-dot-net, it was clear that Nexus Zeta was an inexperienced, impressionable young man who wanted to associate himself with people closely tied to the 2017 whodunnit over the original Mirai IoT botnet variant. He also asked other Hackforums members for assistance in assembling his Mirai botnet:

Some of Nexus Zeta’s posts on Hackforums, where he asks for help in setting up a Mirai botnet variant. Click to enlarge.

In one conversation with Ogmemes123, I lost my cool and told him to quit running botnets or else go bore somebody else with his quest for publicity. He mostly stopped bugging me after that. That same day, Nexus Zeta spotted a tweet from security researcher Troy Mursch about the rapid growth of a new Mirai-like botnet.

“This is an all-time record for the most new unique IP addresses that I’ve seen added to the botnet in one day,” Mursch tweeted of the speed with which this new Mirai strain was infecting devices.

For weeks after that tweet, Nexus Zeta exchanged private twitter messages with Mursch and his team of botnet hunters at Bad Packets LLC in a bid to get them to Tweet or write about Satori/Masuta.

The following screenshots from their private Twitter discussions, republished with Mursch’s permission, showed that Nexus Zeta kept up the fiction with Mursch about his merely “researching” the activities of Satori. Mursch played along, and asked gently probing questions about the size, makeup and activities of a rapidly growing Satori botnet.

9gigs_ProxyPipe (a.k.a. Nexus Zeta allegedly a.k.a Kenneth Schuchman) reaches out to security researcher Troy Mursch of Bad Packets LLC.

Early in their conversations, Nexus Zeta says he is merely following the visible daily Internet scanning that Satori generated each day in a constant search for newly infectable IoT devices. But as their conversations continue over several weeks, Nexus Zeta intimates that he has much deeper access to Satori.

In this conversation from Nov. 29, 2017 between Nexus Zeta/9gigs_Proxypipe and Troy Mursch, the former says he is seeing lots of Satori victims from Argentina, Columbia and Egypt.

Although it long ago would have been easy to write a series of stories about this individual and his exploits, I had zero interest in giving him the attention he clearly craved. But thanks to naivete and apparently zero sense of self-preservation, Nexus Zeta didn’t have to wait long for others to start connecting his online identities to his offline world.

On Dec. 5, Chinese cybersecurity firm Netlab360 released a report on Satori noting that the IoT malware was spreading rapidly to Chinese-made Huawei routers with the help of two security vulnerabilities, including one “zero day” flaw that was unknown to researchers at the time. The report said a quarter million infected devices were seen scanning for vulnerable systems, and that much of the scanning activity traced back to infected systems in Argentina, Columbia and Egypt, the same hotspots that Nexus Zeta cited in his Nov. 29 Twitter chat with Troy Mursch (see screen shot directly above).

In a taunting post published Dec. 29, 2017 titled “Good Zero Day Kiddie,” researchers at Israeli security firm CheckPoint pointed out that the domain name used as a control server to synchronize the activities of the Satori botnet — nexusiotsolutions-dot-net — was registered in 2016 to the email address nexuszeta1337@gmail.com. The CheckPoint report noted the name supplied in the original registration records for that domain was a “Caleb Wilson,” although the researchers correctly noted that this could be a pseudonym.

Perhaps the CheckPoint folks also knew the following tidbit, but chose not to publish it in their report: The email address nexuszeta1337@gmail.com was only ever used to register a single domain name (nexusiotsolutions-dot-net), according to a historic WHOIS record search at Domaintools.com [full disclosure: DomainTools is an advertiser on this site.] But the phone number in that original domain name record was used to register one other domain: zetastress-dot-net (a “stresser” is another name for a DDoS-for-hire-service). The registrant name listed in that original record? You guessed it:

Registrant Name: kenny Schuchman Registrant Organization: ZetaSec Inc. Registrant Street: 8709 Ne Mason Dr, No. 4 Registrant City: Vancouver Registrant State/Province: Washington Registrant Postal Code: 98662 Registrant Country: US Registrant Phone: +1.3607267966 Registrant Phone Ext: Registrant Fax: Registrant Fax Ext: Registrant Email: kenny.windwmx79@outlook.com

In April 2018 I heard from a source who said he engaged Nexus Zeta in a chat about his router-ravaging botnet and asked what kind of router Nexus Zeta trusted. According to my source, Nexus Zeta shared a screen shot of the output from his wireless modem’s Web interface, which revealed that he was connecting from an Internet service provider in Vancouver, Wash., where Schuchman lives.

The Satori botnet author shared this screen shot of his desktop, which indicated he was using an Internet connection in Vancouver, Washington — where Schuchman currently lives with his father.

“During our discussions, I learned we have the same model of router,” the source said. “He asked me my router model, and I told him. He shared that his router was also an ActionTec model, and sent a picture. This picture contains his home internet address.”

This matched a comprehensive “dox” that someone published on Pastebin in Feb. 2018, declaring Nexus Zeta to be 20-year-old Kenneth Currin Schuchman from Vancouver, Washington. The dox said Schuchman used the aliases Nexus Zeta and Caleb Wilson, and listed all of the email addresses tied to Nexus Zeta above, plus his financial data and physical address.

“Nexus is known by many to be autistic and a compulsive liar,” the dox begins.

“He refused to acknowledge that he was wrong or apologize, and since he has extremely poor opsec (uses home IP on everything), we have decided to dox him.

He was only hung around by few for the servers he had access to. He lies about writing exploits that were made before his time, and faking bot counts on botnets he made. He’s lied about having physical contact with Anna Senpai (Author of Mirai Botnet).”

As detailed in the Daily Beast story and Nexus Zeta’s dox, Schuchman was diagnosed with Asperger Syndrome and autism disorder, and at one point when he was 15 Schuchman reportedly wandered off while visiting a friend in Bend, Ore., briefly prompting a police search before he was found near his mother’s home in Vancouver, Wash.

Nexus Zeta clearly had limited hacking skills initially and almost no operational security. Indeed, his efforts to gain notoriety for his illegal hacking activities eventually earned him just that, as it usually does.

But it’s clear he was a quick learner; in the span of about a year, Nexus Zeta was able to progress from a relatively clueless newbie to the helm of an international menace that launched powerful DDoS attacks while ravaging hundreds of thousands of systems.

from Technology News https://krebsonsecurity.com/2018/09/alleged-satori-iot-botnet-operator-sought-media-spotlight-got-indicted/