#if you find a certain one in your curriculum boring then read it either way! give its chance and time. not everything in life should be

[blorbosexterminator]

What do you think about the compulsory reading discourse: that students should be given easier to read books (ya books ) instead of classics? (the reasoning: because the students will find those classics boring and won't even read them)

I find it ridiculous, to be honest. It sounds exactly like should we only give kids Macdonalds because they won't like actual food? And it's obviously more ridiculous coming from literal adults ruminating on the horrible teachers that dared make them study classics. The idea that teenagers are too dumb to grasp any book slightly more complex than a ya love triangle with each character having one and a half trait with the groundbreaking theme of authority=bad is too demeaning and infantalizing.

Plus, what's a better time to read difficult texts other than when professional adults are literally being paid to help you grapple that text? When you're going to have to write about it (and thus understand it on much deeper level)? And discuss it with other people and get to hear more views into it, under the guidance of professional adults who nudge you in the right directions? I neither understand the insistence of literal adults that they were too stupid as teenagers to understand the Great Gatsby nor current teenagers who are currently crying publicly about it in the same breath as complaining that they should be "given" a voice and no one takes them seriously. I mean, if you can't understand a piece of somewhat complex fiction and insisting on your right to not even try, who would?

During the years of Middle and High school, I read a lot of YA fiction, most of what was popular at the time, John Green, the Dystopian YA genre, those fantasy novels, etc, you name it, I also read a lot of better, more established fiction, as well as, obviously, the compulsory readings I had in school, both established classics from my native country and British/American classics, Shakespeare, Shaw, Dickens, etc. I enjoyed both. I can barely remember anything of the YA fiction I read, honestly speaking, it was fun the moment of its consumption but that's it, there is no substance and at some point, the more better things you read, you'll be done with an author talking down to you, you'll aquire a taste for more refined things. YA fiction isn't the devil on Earth but humoring teenagers' institence that they are too bored by any complexity that requires their attention and curiosity and willngess to understand people that don't belong to their age group nor superficially share the same interests they do, and who are complex beings with complex thoughts and desires that don't easily fall in one group or the other and to dig for depth and profundity where they are sure to find it, then that's a sure way of raising a bunch of entitled empty-headed craps who take pride in their idiocity.

[mimicofmodes]

“The Ladies Waldegrave” by Joshua Reynolds, 1780 (NGS NG2171)

I’ve complained before about two very big pet peeves of mine - corset stuff and Regency women being dressed in 1770s-1780s clothes - but one that may dwarf them because of how frequently it comes up in historical and fantasy fiction is the oppression of embroidery.

That’s probably putting it a bit too strongly. It’s more like ... the annoyance of embroidery. Every character worth reading about knows instinctively that sewing is a) boring, b) difficult, c) mindless, and d) pointless. The author doesn’t have to say anything more than “Belinda threw down her needlework and looked out the window, sighing,” to signal that this is an independent woman whose values align with the modern reader, who’s probably not really understood by her mother or mother figure, and who probably will find an extraordinary man to “match” her rather than settling for someone ordinary. To look at an example from fantasy, GRRM uses embroidery in the very beginning of A Game of Thrones to show that the Stark sister who dislikes it is sympathetic and interesting, while the Stark sister who is competent at it is boring and conventional and obviously not deserving of a PoV (until later books, when her attention gets turned to higher matters); further into the book, of course, the pro-needlework sister proves to be weak-willed and naïve.

Rozsika Parker, in the groundbreaking 1996 work The Subversive Stitch, noted that “embroidery has become indelibly associated with stereotypes of femininity,” which is the core of the issue. "Instead embroidery and a stereotype of femininity have become collapsed into one another, characterised as mindless, decorative and delicate; like the icing on the cake, good to look at, adding taste and status, but devoid of significant content.” 

Parker also points out that the stereotype isn’t just one that was invented in the present day by feminists who hated the idea of being forced to do a certain craft. “The association between women and embroidery, craft and femininity, has meant that writers concerned with the status of women have often turned their attention towards this tangled, puzzling relationship. Feminists who have scorned embroidery tend to blame it for whatever constraint on women's lives they are committed to combat. Thus, for example, eighteenth-century critical commentators held embroidery responsible for the ill health which was claimed as evidence of women's natural weakness and inferiority.”

There are two basic problems I have with the trope, beyond the issue of it being incredibly cliché:

First: needlework was not just busywork

A big part of what drives the stereotype is the impression that what women were embroidering was either a sampler:

sampler embroidered by Jane Wilson, 14, in 1791 (MMA 2010.47)

or a picture:

unfinished embroidery of David and Abigail, British, 1640s-50s (MMA 64.101.1325)

That is, something meant to hang on the wall for no real purpose.

These are forms of schoolwork, basically. Samplers were made by young girls up to their early teens, and needlework pictures were usually something done while at school or under a governess as a showpiece of what was being learned - not just the stitching itself, but also often watercolors (which could be worked into the design), artistic sensibility, and the literature, history, or art that might be alluded to. And many needlework pictures made in schools were also done as mourning pieces, sometimes blank, for future use, and sometimes to commemorate a recent death in the family. A lot of them are awkward, clearly just done to pass the class, but others are really artwork.

Many schools for middle- and upper-class girls taught the making of these objects (and other “ornamental” subjects) alongside a more rigorous curriculum - geography, Latin, chemistry, etc. At some, sewing was also always accompanied by serious reading and discussion. (And it would often be done while someone read aloud or made conversation later in life, too.)

Once done with their education, women generally didn’t bother with purely decorative work. Some things that fabric could be embroidered for included:

Jackets 

Bed coverings and bedcurtains

Collars and undersleeves 

Pelerines 

Neck handkerchiefs and sleeve ruffles 

Screens

Upholstery

Handkerchiefs

Purses, wallets, and reticules

Boxes

Book covers

Plus other articles of clothing like waistcoats, caps, slippers, gown hems, chemises, etc. Women’s magazines of the nineteenth century often gave patterns and alphabets for personal use.

(Not to mention late nineteenth century female artists who worked in embroidery, but that’s something else.)

You could purchase all of these pre-embroidered, but many, many women chose to do it themselves. There are a number of reasons why: maybe they wanted something to do, maybe they felt like they should be doing needlework for moral/gender reasons, maybe they couldn’t afford to buy anything - and maybe they enjoyed it or wanted to give something they made to a person they loved. That firescreen above was embroidered by Marie Antoinette, someone who had any number of other activities to choose from. It’s no different than people today who like to knit their own hats and gloves or bake their own bread, except that it was way more mainstream.

embroidery patterns from Ackermann’s Repository in 1827 - they could be used on dresses, collars, handkerchiefs, etc.

Second: needlework wasn’t the only “useless” thing women were expected to do

Ignoring the bulk of point one for now and the value of embroidery - I mentioned “ornamental subjects” above. As many people know, young women of the upper and middle classes were expected to be “accomplished” in order to be seen as marriageable. This could include skills like embroidery, drawing, painting, singing, playing the piano (as well as other instruments, like the harp or the mandolin), speaking French (if not also Italian and/or German), as well as broader knowledge and abilities like being well-versed in music, literature, and poetry, dancing and walking gracefully, writing good letters in an elegant hand, and being able to read out loud expressively and smoothly.

This wasn’t a checklist. As the famous discussion in Pride and Prejudice shows, individuals could have different views on what actually made a woman accomplished:

“How I long to see her again! I never met with anybody who delighted me so much. Such a countenance, such manners! And so extremely accomplished for her age! Her performance on the pianoforte is exquisite.”

“It is amazing to me,” said Bingley, “how young ladies can have patience to be so very accomplished as they all are.”

“All young ladies accomplished! My dear Charles, what do you mean?”

“Yes, all of them, I think. They all paint tables, cover screens, and net purses. I scarcely know anyone who cannot do all this, and I am sure I never heard a young lady spoken of for the first time, without being informed that she was very accomplished.”

“Your list of the common extent of accomplishments,” said Darcy, “has too much truth. The word is applied to many a woman who deserves it no otherwise than by netting a purse or covering a screen. But I am very far from agreeing with you in your estimation of ladies in general. I cannot boast of knowing more than half-a-dozen, in the whole range of my acquaintance, that are really accomplished.”

“Nor I, I am sure,” said Miss Bingley.

“Then,” observed Elizabeth, “you must comprehend a great deal in your idea of an accomplished woman.”

“Yes, I do comprehend a great deal in it.”

“Oh! certainly,” cried his faithful assistant, “no one can be really esteemed accomplished who does not greatly surpass what is usually met with. A woman must have a thorough knowledge of music, singing, drawing, dancing, and the modern languages, to deserve the word; and besides all this, she must possess a certain something in her air and manner of walking, the tone of her voice, her address and expressions, or the word will be but half-deserved.”

“All this she must possess,” added Darcy, “and to all this she must yet add something more substantial, in the improvement of her mind by extensive reading.”

Mr. Bingley feels that a woman is accomplished if she has the ability to do a number of different arts and crafts. Miss Bingley feels (or says she feels) that it goes beyond specific skills and into branches of artistic attainment, plus broader personal qualities that could be imparted by well-bred governesses or mothers. And Mr. Darcy, of course, agrees with that but adds an academic angle as well.

But what ties all of these accomplishments together is their lack of value on the labor market. A woman could earn a living with any one accomplishment, if she worked hard enough at it to become a professional, but young ladies weren’t supposed to be professional-level good because they by definition weren’t going to earn a living. All together, they trained a woman for the social and domestic role of a married woman of the upper middle or upper class, or, if she couldn’t get married, a governess or teacher who would share her accomplishments with the next generation.

(To be fair, almost none of the trappings of an upper-middle/upper class male education had anything to do with the kind of career training that college frequently is today, either. Men were educated to know the cultural touchpoints of their class and fit in with their peers.)

There are reasons that an individual person/character might specifically object to embroidery, but it was far from the only “useless” thing that an unconventional heroine would be required to do against her inclination by her conventional mother/grandmother/aunt/chaperone. Embroidery stands out to modern audiences because most of the other accomplishments are now valued as gender-neutral arts and skills.

“The Embroidery Frame”, by Mathilde Weil, ca. 1900 (LOC 98501309)

So, some thoughts for writers of historical fiction (or fantasy that’s supposed to be just like the 19th/18th/17th/etc century):

- If your heroine doesn’t like embroidery, she probably doesn’t like a number of other things she’s expected to do. Don’t pull out embroidery as either more expected or more onerous than them. Does she hate to sit still? I’d imagine she also dislikes drawing and practicing the piano. Would she prefer to do academic subjects? She probably also resents learning French instead of Latin, and music and dancing. Does she hate enforced femininity? Then she’d most likely have a problem with all of the accomplishments.

- If your heroine just and specifically doesn’t like embroidery, try to show in the narrative that that’s not because it’s objectively bad, and only able to be liked by the boring. Have another sympathetic character do it while talking to the heroine. Note that the hero carries a flame-stitched wallet that’s his sister’s work. Emphasize the heroine’s emotional connection to her deceased or absent mother through her affection for clothing or upholstery that her mother embroidered - or through a mourning picture commemorating her. There are all kinds of things you can do to show that it’s a personal preference rather than a stupid craft that doesn’t take talent and skill!

mourning picture for Daniel Goodman, probably embroidered by a Miss Goodman, 1803 (MMA 56.66)

[alicanta77]

How to adult: writing a resume

A resume is quite possibly the most important thing when applying for a job. Statistics show that an employer can decide within 6 seconds if they want to throw out your resume or not. I’m not saying that to scare you, I’m saying it so you know how important it is, and that you don’t rush this part of the application process or not spend enough time on it. 

In the UK a resume is called a CV which stands for Curriculum Vitae which in Latin means “course of life”, and in contrast, resume in French means “summary”. In the UK a resume and CV are the same things, but that may differ around the world and it’s good to check what it is that your employer is asking for. 

Layout

The layout will be the first thing that your potential employer will see, and that is what is going to need to differentiate you from other candidates. Whether someone is willing to put the effort into making their resume look appealing, says a lot more about them than you may think. If it’s boring or a mess, employers may think you’re lazy and wonder that, if you can’t put the effort in for something like this, what can you bring to the job?

First thing to remember: appearance is important

I’ve attached photos of a layout of my CV, and added false information so that you guys can get an idea of what I mean. (i will elaborate on what you can put in each section later on)

How to write it

When you are writing your resume and talking about yourself, remember, you are the most perfect person for the job and a fantastic individual. You need to make yourself seem incredible. Use words like “driven, optimistic, professional etc.” to describe yourself, and, if you know what job your applying for, cater your resume towards them. For example, if you’re applying for restaurant or bar work, then talk about how you’re good at acting under pressure and capable of learning things quickly. Know what the challenges of the job may be and put in qualities that would make you be able to deal with them.

An employer will always see and read a CV/resume before they meet you. This means that this is their first impression of you as a person, and it already needs to impress them. This begins with the layout but also continues very much through the writing.

Use some more inventive words to describe yourself rather than sticking to stereotypical ones, especially if you’re applying for a competitive job. Employers will be looking for someone who stands out from the crowd due to their resume. This doesn’t mean use a thesaurus on every word and make it sound ludicrous, but do try to expand the vocab you’re using. 

Check multiple times for spelling or grammar mistakes. Then download grammarly and have that check it for you. Then get someone else to read it. Then check it again yourself. The last thing you want is a spelling error or typo, this could make your employer think that you were too lazy to even proof read, or that you’re not as professional or thorough as you make yourself sound.

DO NOT LIE

I cannot stress this enough. If you don’t have experience in a certain area, do not lie and say that you do. I have gotten work as a waitress/bartender without having any waiting or bartending experience. Apply for jobs where experience is either not necessary or listed as preferred. That way they won’t throw out your application simply because you don’t have experience. 

If you don’t work well under pressure, don’t say that you do. Instead list a different quality, talk about how your dedicated to doing things correctly and like to make sure that things are done to the best of their ability. Or say how you work best with a team around you where each worker can support each other.

But do not give your employer the impression that you’re a master mixologist or as calm as a rock if you’re not. You’re not a sims character, you can’t master a skill in two days and you can’t cheat your way out of a stressful situation. You’re going to make mistakes, you’re going to get stressed and you’re going to receive a lot more support if you’re honest about being stressed in a new environment.

Do not waffle. Keep it short and to the point. This is who I am, this is why I’m great, this is what I’ve done, this is why you should want me. Simple.

If you waffle, you risk boring your employer with too much information. List things that are relevant. If you’re applying for a job as an Operations Manager, no one wants to hear that you used to play netball when you were 16. That only matters if you were captain of a team as that shows leadership skills. 

Your employer does not care about every little thing you’ve done in your life that may possibly be of relevance, they care about why you can do the job you’ve applied for, and if they have to dig through loads of unnecessary information to find that, they may not want to put in the effort. Try to write nothing more than a couple of lines to each paragraph.

What to include

As I said before, attached above is a layout of what my CV looks like. It is up to you what sections you include, but again, try to not to keep it too long, and make sure it’s tailored towards the area you want to work in. I applied for hospitality (restaurant and bar work).

In the photos I have briefly written about what you can write 

Professional Summary:

This is a chance for you to sum up you as a professional. This should be tailored towards the job field you are applying for. Make yourself sound perfect. Everything you say should make them want to hire you. Never list weaknesses, they will probably ask about them in the interview. If you want to say “Can be stubborn but...” or “Struggles with organisation but...” don’t. Seriously, NO. You can explain that in person, but never waste the small space you have to talk about why they shouldn’t hire you. 

Skills:

This I bullet pointed to change up the layout. It’s a chance to list one or two more skills that make you suited for the job without taking up too much space in your professional summary. You can list some of the same things you’ve already listed, but make sure that over 50% of them are new. If all you can name are the same skills, your employer will think that that’s all there is too you. You should not run out of reasons as to why you’re perfect for the job. 

Experience:

Any experience you have should be listed here. When applying for a first job especially, it doesn’t matter if it’s relevant or not. Any experience is good experience, especially when you’re young. Make sure to list the company you worked for, the date you worked and the location.

Include a small description of what you did in that job. Make sure it is no more than a few sentences, and that should be about your part of the job. Don’t talk about what the company does, talk about what you did for them.

This section can also include any interning you do, so if you’ve done work experience, put it here as interning. Same as before, include the date and location of where you worked. If you interned for a short amount of time, such as a week, then just put the month and year e.g. Intern - 04/19

For first jobs, this section can be nerve wracking. Just take a deep breath and think back over you life. You’ve always done more than you think. 

Education:

Your school/uni. Include the name, location and any exams that you took there. You will also want to list the grades you received. Whatever your most recent exam was, list those subjects individually with their grades and any others just list the grades. e.g. GCSE - 2018 (A*-B) A Levels - 2020 - Maths (A) English (A) French (A)

The above is obviously tailored to England, so that may differ depending on the exams you take and it would be best to check that with someone who understands your education system.

Volunteering:

Any volunteer work you’ve done can be listed here. Try not to overload it, and keep it concise. Same as before, include the title, date and location and a sentence or two about what you did. If you were a school officer, put that down, or captain of a sports team then put that down. Also talk about your duties such as, organising team meetings, running sports drills, being responsible for a group of people etc.

These do not have to be related to the job your applying for, but the qualities that they should you have, do need to be.

Overall

Keep it short and to the point.

Use an eye catching layout.

Only describe yourself positively.

Do not lie.

All experience is good experience.

And most importantly: You are perfect for the job, now make them believe it.

[bastillia]

Rough Landing

Part 2 of First Lesson

Summary: Commander Ren has a few more things to teach you.

Rating: Explicit

Words: 8.4k

Warnings: cockwarming, overstimulation, threats during intimacy, inappropriate use of the Force, oral sex (ROUGH, m receiving), unsanitary sex location, public(ish) sex, kinda exhibition kink, no aftercare, uhh bit of cumplay

A/N: Whew alright I know it’s been 3 months, but we’re picking up pretty much right where we left off. Thank you all SO much for the love on part 1. And huge thanks to my incredible friends who have supported me, beta read, and helped me conquer my stuck points. I couldn’t have pulled this through without y’all. Enjoy!

***

There was plenty to like about being in space. For one, it was absolutely quiet. 

Perfectly soundless. Unfathomably endless. In a way, the void between the stars had always been your perfect aegis; a blank slate to nurture everything you’d hoped to become. It held power in its silence, and possibility. It was calm, dark, vast-- it was home, for as much or little as you knew about the word. 

If you thought about it, living aboard the roving flagship of the First Order had always given your life more or less a perfect structure. Most of the time, you didn’t even mind the predictability of it. Your days were purposeful and productive. If, sometimes, just a little boring. But, that was okay--you liked the quiet.

And you were never ever taking it for granted again.

“Stop moving.” Kylo Ren’s voice broke through the growing rumble of the hull. It was only the sensation of gloved fingers tightening down into your hip bones that finally alerted you to the fact that you were squirming. Again. You grimaced.

"I'm trying." 

Friction from the gathering atmosphere punched the craft into a sharp rattle, and your heart struck your sternum as the controls lurched underneath your palms. Your fingers cinched down tight, the lack of circulation in your knuckles settling into a dull throb as you continued to wring the contoured grips, as if you could strangle some desperately needed assistance out of them that way.

Fuck.

Breathe.

You could do this, you just had to stay calm--think about home, about the tedium of whatever meeting was probably going on right now. About how all eyes would be on you if you were there, about the dumbstruck look on General Quinn’s face when you presented that fucking perfect dossier you’d compiled on some key New Republic official he’d been trying to track down for months.

Yes, think about that.

Not about the sweat beginning to break out across your skin, the unnerving rattling around you growing louder and louder. Not about what was still sheathed inside your twitching cunt, stretching you, demanding that your body yield to its presence.

Warm echoes of your last orgasm flared up with another clattering vibration of the atmosphere. It felt almost trapped within you, an electric refrain to the adrenaline melody that pounded your veins now. Your floor muscles quivered tight with it, eliciting an approving twitch from within your walls as Ren’s fingers flexed into the bruises on your hips. 

It was incredible, really. How time had begun to feel almost obsolete until now. It had passed abstractly in the quiet serenity of space as you’d sat filled to your limit, feeling nothing but the commander, his breathing, the omnipresent ache of his cock. Your world nothing but an aroused haze-- stirred every so often by a subtle buck of his hips, a kiss to your neck, hot breath in the hollow of your ear whispering don’t move, don’t you fucking move. Good girl. 

Your thoughts snapped back to the present with a vaguely wistful pang as the hull gave another violent shake. 

Atmospheric entry. What was that, week five? Six? Of the TIE pilot training program? It was on the phase-3 test, you were certain. And you’d put credits down that none of the novice pilots had ever experienced the added curriculum of a cock shoved inside of them.

A warning squeeze stilled another involuntary shift of your hips.

You gritted your teeth against your discomfort, instead trying to let the adrenaline form a whetstone to sharpen your senses.

Breathe.

You could do this. You were way beyond just some novice trooper, you were a fucking lieutenant general of the First Order.  And what did you do to earn that rank? You adapted. So, fucking adapt.

A jolt slammed the craft, and your muscles locked up as the head of Ren’s cock speared something tender and abused deep inside you. The ship squirreled under your grip, leaving you paralyzed as the movement of it set off every panic alarm in this new and untested region of your brain. Without missing a beat, two huge, leather-encased palms came up to wrap over your shaking hands, steadying you with remarkable certainty as they coaxed the vessel back under control. 

“Focus, lieutenant." There was almost an amused purr in Ren’s throat, his voice low and close, utterly lacking in any kind of concern. Your pulse gradually came back down, and with it, your fear curled into a flicker of annoyance. If he was going to mock you, he could at least use your proper title.

You know.

The one you’d worked your ass off for.

The drag of fingertips across the bare skin of your upper thighs jolted you. Your body felt hyper-sensitized, like the sudden touch ignited a cascade of fission that couldn’t seem to find equilibrium anywhere. It fractured your brittle composure in two, just as the roaring blaze around the viewport flared again with a powerful tremor that kicked your heart back up in a sudden panic. 

Sweat lined your palms, adrenaline congealing and turning to acid in your veins. You felt your nerve slip.

"Com-commander, s-sir, I--" 

A hum. “Control yourself.”

It was only two words, but each one cut through your rising panic like a blaster shot to the sternum, rattling you to a realization. 

Control. 

That was the test all along. He’d laid it right out in front of you, challenged you to a game with incredibly fucked up stakes, and he was drawing his hand. Taking a seat at a proverbial Sabacc table, stretching out his chest and waiting for you to either bet up, or lose your nerve. The ante was rising, piece by piece as he silently tested the parameters of your breaking point. 

But he wouldn’t find it. Not like this.

Fresh determination fixed your grip around the shaking controls. It was even enough to keep you from reacting this time when a dull pain lanced under your skin, his teeth catching a tender spot where he had marked your neck some time before. He growled. You tucked that card up your sleeve. 

“Decelerate.”

His tone had shifted quieter in a way that made your ears prick, snapping your attention away from the dull ache of your insides. It sort of stunned you, actually, into something of a quiet curiosity. 

His hand reached around you to swipe at a holopad on the console. An altimeter blinked to life, just before the soft heat of his lips returned to your ear.

“Drop to this zone.” He pointed to a region on the display. “Remain there until we get closer." 

Remnants of panic still swam somewhere in your blood, but you managed to draw a careful breath and nod your understanding. Your ante was still on the table, you told yourself. But perhaps he’d decided that challenging you could wait. For now.

Refocusing, you caressed the controls. The ship banked beautifully, intuitively at your will, before lurching a final time as the thrusters hit a stable layer of atmosphere. 

Beneath you, clouds floated in gossamer ribbons over the calm air, as tattered and thankful for its mercy as you felt. Farther down, the dim moonlight breathed monochrome shapes into being, half-swallowed by the murky vapor of shadow between them. Droplets condensed on the viewport as you dropped through the thin cloudbank, skittering shyly outwards and allowing the shapes to solidify into the oppressive grid of a cityscape.

Slowly, you could begin to make out vague details. Industrial sectors, shipyards, scrappy comms towers. The occasional twinkle of speeder headlights creeping between dilapidated buildings, and--

Your gaze snapped back to the holopad on the nav console, a deft swipe of your finger bringing up your coordinates. The planetary code blinked neutrally back at you, but the unmistakable string of numbers harpooned you with a bolt of clarity that had your ribs tightening down around your lungs. A question resurfaced from the bottom of your memory, curling up to slither coldly along the back of your neck. 

“Commander?”

“Hm.”

“Why, um--” You faltered. 

In truth, there was no reason for you to ask. The answer was already swimming around in your gut, acquainting itself with the sour feeling of dread that settled there. Waiting for your brain to analyze it while at the same time sitting in an insidious state of knowing that didn’t need to reach your head at all for you to feel its weight. 

You swallowed, and adjusted your grip. “Why a TIE fighter? Why didn’t we bring the command shuttle?” 

A pause. He reached around you, flicking a switch on the main console, and the Silencer’s headlights shuttered off with a resounding click. “We may need to leave quickly.”

For the first time since leaving the Supremacy, you felt something familiar settle inside of you. Deep and quiet, like the way sound doesn’t travel in space. It was the same, utterly instinctive feeling that took over every time you managed to get yourself in over your head-- when a negotiation turned volatile, when an unforeseen flaw surfaced in a mission strategy mid-execution. Those moments where the fixed parameters of your training ended, and the only thing left to take the pilot’s seat was your own intuition. 

But this time, there was something else there with it. It glowed within the powerful shroud of calm, thrumming quietly, filling you with something potent and restless and--exciting, that you couldn’t quite place.

Real, physical danger was not something you had much direct experience with. The various moral complexities associated with putting others up against it at your command, you had come to know well. But you were here now. Facing it in the flesh, not protected by the reinforced hull and ion cannons of a Star Destroyer. 

You were here, looking down on the dark streets of Corellia, a planet so lawless and foul and flat out fucking dangerous that the First Order had all but given up establishing a presence here long ago. Even the New Republic’s ties here were thin.

A tightness struck through your chest as you very suddenly realized that it was only a matter of time, now, before you were going to have to--

“Drop lower.” The commander shifted to tap something into the nav console. A flight course lit up the holopad, leading to a destination marker just a few klicks ahead. “Land here.”

The sector you entered seemed somehow even darker than the rest as you brought the Silencer down over the shadowed streets, hints of crumbling walls and rusted vents just barely illuminated by the occasional weak street lamp. No headlights, hardly any ground lighting--you were no ace pilot, obviously, and it took your full concentration just to maneuver the ship between the vague silhouettes of broken antenna towers, avoiding them where their spindly shadows jutted up from the rooftops. You jumped when Ren’s hands enveloped yours again.

“Right here.” He guided your hands, expertly swinging the craft around and into a hover above a dim alleyway, empty and lined on both sides with large, abandoned-looking industrial structures. Your pulse jumped. He released your hands, a finger drawing your attention to a switch on your right, then flicking it casually. “Landing gear.” 

The hull rumbled and thumped. An array of green lights flashed to life in what you could only assume was an indication of the ship’s readiness for landing. If only you felt the same. Your hands were frozen on the controls, your mind simultaneously racing and completely blank. You waited dumbly for guidance, heart hammering, shallow little breaths trapping themselves high in your throat. 

“Relax.” Ren’s voice permeated to your bones as both arms slid around your stomach, liquefying your fear into a trembling plea. 

“P-please, Commander, I d-don--” You cut off with a shiver when his lips met your neck, his hips beginning to rock in a slow, enunciated rhythm that had your cunt immediately bearing down with need as you felt him harden. “Fuck, p-please, I don’t know how t--... h-how to--”

Your eyes rolled back as a hand slid down between your legs, the leather pad of his finger finding your clit stiff and sensitive, its touch featherlight. A hum rumbled under your shoulders. “Your intuition, lieutenant. Feel it, don’t think.” 

Maker help you, there were a lot of things you could fucking feel right now. Namely, your commander’s cock slowly massaging your walls, lazy in its rhythm. Your grip on the controls banishing the circulation entirely from your knuckles. His fingers sliding down your slit, spreading as he reached the root of himself, shamelessly feeling the obscene way your body yielded to the thickness at his base. The lust that erupted low in your belly in response. The panic that was rising as you remembered your task, its sharp tendrils threatening to reach your head and overwhelm you. 

Control yourself.

A turbulent breath shook some air back into your lungs as your tiny inner voice of reason managed to surface again. Collecting yourself, you let it expand, pushing each distraction away one by one as it went. Focus, it reminded you. Remember the card up your sleeve, get through this round. 

You tethered your awareness to the ship, to the curve of the controls against your palms, to the way they extended like a continuation of your own neural circuits to command the sleek metal beast encircling you. A steady, downward press of your hands, and it purred its obedient response, settling slowly towards the ground below.

“Good girl,” Ren said. “Just like that.” 

There was something--a tiny flicker of mischief in the shadows of his voice. Maybe you would have caught it quicker, but your tunneled focus left you one fatal step behind him, too slow to anticipate his move. His hand shifted, easily finding your raw clit against his fingertip, and pressed down--hard.

Electric. Everything was electric. Your vision doubled, the shredded remnants of your nerves shorting out and screaming against the paralyzing flood of sensation, ripping a ragged gasp from the bottom of your lungs. Maker, don’t scream, don’t fucking-- 

A shift of his finger and your hips jerked, an involuntary movement of sheer desperation for escape that carried right through your whole body and into the ship.

One wing dipped to the side, and it was only the sharp trill of a proximity alarm that managed to blast through to what was left of your reflexes just in time. A curse cut the air through your lips, your shaking hands grappling the controls into a clumsy counter-correction that swayed the craft wildly as you wrestled it back to center. The rocking slowly stilled, the ringing in your ears no longer from the alarm, but your own pulse bludgeoning your temples. Ren simply chuckled, and released your clit.

“Commander.” A few rapid blinks cleared the blur from your vision, but oxygen was still painful through the panic in your chest, leaving you frustratingly breathless. “With all due respect, sir, do you want me to crash your ship?”

“You won’t.” The smirk was audible in his voice. “Or is my confidence in your aptitude misguided, lieutenant?” 

A slew of unkind words lashed themselves to your tongue, fighting for freedom with the fuel of indignation that scalded your throat like bile, but you swallowed both, smothering your thoughts into silence. Stay calm. Maintain control. You drew a tight breath. “No, sir.”

“Mm. Good.” He rocked his hips firmly up into you, and a pitiful little noise clutched in your throat. “Then land my ship, and perhaps your proficiency will be rewarded.”

Desire shot up your spine like a flare, igniting at the base of your brain and rocketing your thoughts clear past apprehension and ahead to the promise of relief. It was enough to allow bravery to wriggle back into your fingers, your hands finding the wherewithal to resume their task even as your lungs stalled in anticipation of another distraction. 

But none came. 

The relief that flooded you was immediate and powerful the second you felt solid ground settle under the landing gear. The hull groaned around you as the craft came to a full rest, wheezing like a fathier after a hard gallop, and you, its master, just thankful to have survived the race. But there was one more hurdle for you.

“You know this part.” Ren gestured vaguely to the console, still alive with various lights and indicators, many of which, no, you certainly did not know anything about.

Your eyes darted back and forth a few times before it hit you. Of course. The ignition sequence.

Presumably, to shut the fighter down, you would just need to… to do it backwards? That seemed like the logical course of action, at least. Stars, how long ago had you even taken off? The Supremacy already felt like a faint memory, the edges of its shape scattered through a hazed prism, each facet reflecting nothing but incandescent pleasure and the blinding heat of Kylo Ren. 

But you had to remember. This was--you hoped--the final test, and there was no way you were going to fail. Maker, what was wrong with you, you were better than this, just think. The last thing he turned on had been…

Thrusters.

Right console, three switches. Bring all of those down. The roar of the ion engines quieted, taking the vibration of the hull down to a faint rumble. Okay, good, next was--

Ignition. Yes, ignition: off. Much quieter now, and stars, when was the last time you breathed? Fucking breathe. Okay, next. 

Compressor: disengaged. Auxiliary last.

Everything went black as you killed the main power. Your breathing seemed to echo around in the stillness of the cockpit, your cunt twitching to life in acknowledgment of what was now pressing harder than beskar steel against your guts, amplified by the darkness. It was almost as if the power from the ship had never really shut down, but simply transferred into your own body instead, flicking your ignition switch and bringing your arousal roaring back to life with a vengeance.

Every line of the commander’s body against you was lighting up your awareness, filling the sensory void with his presence, the unbearable stillness of him. What had he meant when he said he’d reward you? You’d learned his lesson, yes, and passed every fucked up test he’d thrown at you to prove it. For that, you could commend yourself. 

But if there was one lesson more poignant than the rest, one that now stuck like thermal sludge to every crevice of your understanding, it was that his next move could come at any moment--and not always in a way you could anticipate. 

This seemed like one of those moments.

A shift of his chest under your shoulders made you jump, one arm reaching up somewhere you couldn’t see to flick a control, and the hatch cracked open with a hiss. The night air flooded the cockpit, all but drowning your racing thoughts as it drew in like a cool sigh to kiss the heat in your cheeks. Your head fell back, lungs gratefully accepting the damp and oddly foreign relief of atmospheric oxygen, even as the scent of it stuck in your mouth. It was thick, leaden with rain and crude fuel, but you hardly cared. It felt divine.

Beneath you, an impatient grunt and a single squeeze to your thighs brought you back to the present with a tiny flicker of alarm. 

“Out.” 

Your muscles froze. 

“But, I--” Whatever you might have expected out of this moment, that was possibly the last thing you could have prepared for, and your brain was fumbling spectacularly in an attempt to process the one word. 

Did he actually mean that? Was this another test? You didn’t even feel like you could move right now, let alone clamber out of the ship with your whole body aching and clenching as it was. And you were so full, and he was so hard, and now you were nearly trembling with need and--

And you took too long to act. 

Wide hands locked around your waist, and then everything shifted--he was picking you up. Holy shit he was strong, he hoisted you upwards in one effortless motion, throwing your world into a blur. The only thing you distinctly registered through your disorientation was the feeling of his hard cock pulling along your tired walls, finally popping free for you to flutter and clench around nothing for a moment before your bare ass came down on the lip of the cockpit. 

Cold metal bit your flesh, a harsh and unforgiving contrast to the warm lap you’d grown accustomed to. Fuck, everything was dark. But hearing him shift underneath you had you hurriedly swinging your legs around to jump down.

And... the ground was a lot farther down than you thought. 

You landed hard. Hard enough for your knees to buckle, and you stumbled against the hobble around your thighs in a clumsy attempt to keep yourself upright. But before you could lose your balance you were moving again, being yanked by the arm and slammed back hard against the ship.

A huge, black mass crowded in on you, looming and pressing you back against creaking durasteel, the metal still warm under your shoulders as the ship settled from flight. Your heart slammed against the commander’s advance, eyes darting through shadow. 

In the span of a shared breath, his mouth crashed down on yours, open and wanting and hungry in the darkness, and everything inside of you detonated.

The heat of his mouth was dizzying. You mewled into it, the feeling of him so strong and warm and everywhere, tugging at your hips, tongue sliding past your teeth. Your hands gravitated upwards for any leverage they could find just to pull him closer, to taste him deeper. A low, rumbling sound scraped the bottom of his chest and two huge hands encircled your wandering wrists, easily plucking them off of their feverish course and slamming them up beside your shoulders instead. 

His exploration of your mouth grew brazen as he pinned you open, crushing you against unyielding steel, even taking a moment to suck at your bottom lip before his hot tongue was licking deep into you again, stealing your breath and coaxing soft sounds from your chest in its wake. 

An immobilizing sensation locked your arms in place, keeping them tight against the ship even as his touch slid along your arms and around to the front of your torso. The extra sensations hardly even registered through the feeling of his mouth on yours until you realized you still couldn’t move while he was cupping your face with one hand, the other leather-encased palm flattening over the confines of your uniform, squeezing at the soft swell of your breasts hidden beneath. 

A low growl into your mouth, a shift of pressure up your sternum, and then his fingers found and curled over your pressed collar. With one purposeful tug, the material popped open, and you gasped.

"Commander," you broke the kiss, your head spinning as his breath immediately blazed against your neck instead. His movements were impatient, uncharacteristically clumsy in their urgency as you felt the material of your top continue to separate all the way down to your cleavage. “Commander, w-we--”

Fuck, it was impossible to think, everything in your brain felt thick with a vibrating fog. You could feel tiny points of rational thought trying to take form, trying to remind you of where you were, of why this was risky. But they were like infant stars peeking through a hungry nebula, unable to solidify before being swallowed again. 

"Fuck, w--” His tongue slowly rode the curve of your jaw, and stars, what were you even going to say? “W-we sho-shouldn’t-" 

“Shouldn’t what?” he purred, smooth fingertips trailing slowly down the bare plane of your sternum and sliding under the open edge of your coat.

A soft whine was all you could muster, broken thoughts dissolving on your tongue the moment he cupped the curve of your breast and scooped it free of your neckline, pushing the fabric aside to let your nipple peak up against the open air. 

The empty street was quiet enough that your breaths seemed to ricochet as they tripped softly over each other, sliding along the walls of the alley and joining the soft buzz of a flickering street lamp farther down. Stars, anyone could be listening-- watching, for all you knew. In a city like this, it was impossible to anticipate the stakes. Rife with the sorts of creatures who took refuge in shadow, even the darkness seemed to betray you, leaving every inch of exposed skin glowing as if the dim moonlight had suddenly adopted all the strength of a Tatooine sun. 

Your heart raced. You scrambled to clutch at the caution left within yourself, for any remaining instinct that would tell you that this was wrong, that you shouldn’t be going along with this. 

But you found no purchase. Your inhibitions were dissolving through your fingers-- dwarfed in Kylo Ren’s shadow, smothered under his hands, the power of his presence atomizing any need for your guarded reluctance and casting it into obsolescence. 

And as you surrendered, suddenly every eye that might be watching, every ear that could be tuned to your pleasure just around a shadowed corner, was like a hit of fucking spice. The thrill of it arched your back, coaxed bolder sounds from your chest that bounced daringly off of the bullet-scuffed duracrete to fade into the darkness of the alley.

Ren gave voice to it first, a growl breaking through the roar between your ears. 

“You’re enjoying this, lieutenant.” A swift yank of your undershirt revealed both of your tits to the damp air, and the chill of it settled wonderfully on the thin sheen of sweat that had gathered under your stiff uniform. The sigh that melted through your lips was as much confirmation as you could provide him. 

“Filthy thing.” His voice was a darkened hiss as he roughly took both of your breasts in his hands. “You’d let me do anything, wouldn’t you? Right here in the fucking street.” 

There was no doubt that he could sense the pleasure soaking your thoughts with every passing second, the heat coiling up through your body, breaking you into soft trembles against the solid seams of durasteel.

Stars, this was wrong. 

But there was something about it--about being pinned up, shameless, tits bared and groped in the middle of a dirty Corellian backstreet like some cheap outer rim whore, that had you feeling freer and fucking hotter than you ever had in your life.

Yes.

He could do anything. Take anything. And right now, you’d fucking give it to him. 

Your teeth sank into your bottom lip, head nodding in desperate submission as your fingers wiggled against their invisible bonds. It was like your body was coming alive for the first time, finally catalyzed to its transition state, now burning and shifting and begging silently for him not to fucking stop touching you. 

“I want to know, little whore--” His hand spread over your bare collarbones, the wide junction of a thumb and forefinger pressing the base of your windpipe. A gasping little moan left you as his lips brushed your jugular, heat striking up through your belly and all the way into your neck when his other hand urged your thighs apart to tease your slit. "I want to know just how far you can take me down this pretty throat."

Everything in you shuddered, and your unrelenting bonds were probably all that held you up against the sudden lack of support that your knees offered. Kylo Ren pressed the tip of one thick finger inside you, barely curling at your soaked entrance. 

“Do you think you can swallow my cock, lieutenant?”

“Fuck. Yes, yes sir, please.” The breathless response left you before you even registered what you were saying, so thick was the need enshrouding your brain. It muddled your hearing, put everything else on a sensory delay to the pulsing heat that slid down and coiled up in your core.

And that’s why you almost didn’t catch the gritted command before the strong presence of his body suddenly drew away from you, leaving your head spinning. 

“Get on your knees.”

The Force evaporated from around your forearms. The loss of physical support nearly made you buckle, your body sagging against the fighter and leaving you to clutch at a ridge of metal for balance. You’d heard him, vaguely, but your brain still felt spectacularly slow. You were having trouble remembering which way was up, blinking against the low light, and the small hesitation was enough. 

In a flash of movement, his saber cleared the clip on his belt, cracking the air in two as it ignited in his hand and leveled to heat your neck. 

"Now.”

For a second, everything was extraordinarily still. Your lungs, your mind, even the faint drizzle of mist seemed to suspend in the air, vaporize around the searing plasma, and equilibrate into a deathly quiet.

The red aura vibrated in your immediate periphery, engulfing your retinas and casting everything around it in near-total blackness, unwavering in its proximity as the cold street pressed your knees. 

A very marked shift took place in the state of your awareness as you knelt, waiting-- feeling. Everything was hazy and warm before, but now. Oh, now, everything was hot, and sharp. 

The snap of plasma echoing through the empty street sounded somehow both hushed and magnified. The gravelly bite of duracrete into your knees was both painful and electrifying. And all you could do was sit here and accept the way Kylo Ren drank you in, just hold absolutely still and let the tip of the saber rotate to your front, the light of it illuminating your bare chest.

And, fuck. Oh, fucking Maker-- 

You were wet. 

Every beat of your heart was an enunciated hit to your core, giving your arousal a wicked edge that cut into every last molecule of your body. Your cunt ached more with every pulse, and yet Ren just held there, his breaths shaking the damp air between you as he gazed at your naked tits under the light of a weapon that could kill you in half an instant.

You were possessed, the danger and thrill of it flooding your skin with intoxicating fire, and in a moment of what might have been either immense bravery or unfathomable stupidity, your hand began to move. 

Very, very slowly, it pulled along your belly, fingers twitching to splay downwards. The saber heated your knuckles, following as you guided it all the way to the apex of your thighs, where you paused. And then you sat back on your heels, spread your knees as far as they would go, and curled your hips forward, letting the crimson light gleam off of the wet shine of your cunt. 

“Fuck,” Ren rasped from the shadows, something delirious and urgent unearthing itself from the gravel of his voice. Somewhere beyond the snapping hum of the blade, you heard the slick sound of leather moving over flesh. “Fuck- touch yourself. Sh-show me--”

But you were already moving. Your fingers slid into the wet heat of your folds, tender with arousal, the flesh plumped up from abuse. You dragged your slick all over yourself, spreading for him, pulling up to circle your neglected clit and letting out a soft sigh at the relief that saturated you in a deluge. 

The cool air did little now to temper the exquisite heat that flooded your body as you pleasured yourself openly for him, whimpering when you felt a familiar swell prime itself deep within you. It brightened with every practiced curl of your fingers, blooming outwards to rival the lightsaber that illuminated you steadily, and it wasn’t long before your thighs began to clench, your hips rocking against the movement of your hand while heady gasps punched your chest, that luminous heat coming closer and closer to a blinding apex.

You began to flutter, tightening with closeness, but the blade shot up under your chin, freezing you in the one movement. 

“Don’t cum.” 

Your heart slammed in your throat, every muscle locking into place where it was. You could feel errant sparks biting your skin, daring you not to move or speak.

And then darkness swallowed you, a hiss of steam resounding as the saber abruptly disengaged. The lingering imprint of it marred your sight, and you gasped when the whirl of movement in front of you turned into a large hand snaking into your hair, hips crowding your face, and the warm, solid length of Kylo Ren’s cock pressing against your cheek. 

You whined, stiff muscles liquefying as you turned your mouth towards it, moisture already welling under your tongue. But his fingers tightened at your scalp, stopping you.

“See what you do to me, little thing?” 

His other hand gripped around his base, letting the weight of his cock thump against your cheek once, twice. Fuck, he was so hard, and if you thought he was big before, it was even more obvious now that he was pressed right up against your face, so close to the soft heat of your mouth.

You nodded and whimpered, letting your cheek brush against his erection, still damp with your own slick. He rocked his hips forward, and the sheer breadth of his stature dwarfed you as he pressed in closer, until your face tilted and your jaw rested up against the hard plane of his adonis belt. Heat seeped into your cheekbone, radiating from the saber hilt strapped deftly back to his hip, like a warm sun to the earth and smoke of his body. 

An absolutely crippling wave of desperation crashed through you then, pulling an audaciously loud moan up tight through your chest that morphed into a pitifully sobbed out, “Please.” 

The hand in your hair gave a firm tug until you were looking straight up his torso, the glint of his eyes just visible to your adjusting sight. He held you there, his strength commanding, voice slipping like dark matter through his vocal cords when he spoke. 

“Are you going to let this whole filthy fucking city hear what a little whore you are?” He rocked your head back and forth by your hair, turning your neck muscles to liquid. “Begging for my cock?” 

You bit your lip, too far gone to deny or assent. Perhaps caution would still be the smart thing, but stars--you didn’t fucking care any more. You’d let every wretched street rat on Corellia hear you beg for him, if it came down to it right now. 

Not trusting yourself to answer verbally, you simply let your mouth fall open so that your wet tongue could drag over the tiny slip of exposed skin above his groin, never once taking your eyes off of his shadowed face. Your reward was a thick groan and a twitch of his cock by your cheek, shooting a hot spasm into your core. Ren huffed out a tense breath. 

“Keep that fucking mouth open.”

He drew back and pumped himself, long and slow right in front of your obediently waiting tongue, black glove squeezing almost too roughly along his shaft until a thick bead of pre cum wept from his slit. Your brow pinched upwards as saliva pooled behind your bottom lip, threatening to drip down onto the duracrete, seep into a blaster hole and add to the memory that this roughened street would keep of you, so soft and wanting, incongruous next to its grit.

Ren stepped forward, obliterating your thoughts as finally, finally, he rested his thick head on your tongue, removing his own hand and letting you test the full weight of him in your mouth. Your moan was almost a sob when you closed your lips and dragged your tongue across his frenulum, letting him feel you, swirling the pre cum from his tip before sliding him deeper into the hot depths of your mouth. 

“Fuck, good girl,” he hissed, resting both hands in your hair, but not controlling. You took him another inch, tongue working to lubricate your path, satisfaction unfurling when his chest heaved at the feeling. The taste of him shot a primal fire through you, equal parts sharp and masculine, the remnants of your own cum leaving a tang on your taste buds. 

Arousal careened through your belly, and you couldn’t help but dip your hand between your thighs, fingers finding your clit stiff and sensitive as your tongue passed over a thick vein.

But he caught your movement, and your hands were immediately wrenched upwards by an invisible strength, both wrists flying up and into the waiting grip of Ren’s palms. You squeaked.

“Impudent thing,” he growled, and wrapped your smaller hands around the base of his cock, securing your grip with a warning squeeze before carding his fingers into your hair again. “Keep them there.” 

You gave a tiny nod and a shallow whimper, briefly mourning for your aching clit yet almost instantly distracted again by a twitch of his shaft on your tongue. Relaxing your jaw, you took him further, letting him begin to feel the tight silk of your throat.

“Fuck--” every muscle in Ren’s body seemed to go rigid enough to rival the durasteel frame of his ship, and his fingers clenched tighter into your hair. “Yes, take it--” he hissed as you slipped back an inch and enveloped him again, relaxing to take him deeper.

You found a steady rhythm like this, gradually acclimating to the feeling of intrusion. It became a little easier with each appreciative sound you drew from the commander, arousal permeating your body’s natural defenses and slackening them, even as your throat began to protest the moment you got about halfway down his cock.

But as hard as you tried to ignore the sensation of breathlessness, your lungs still screamed for air. You got maybe eight or nine good strokes in before your lips drew off of him with an obscene pop, slick hands taking over to work his length while you gasped a few starved breaths. 

It would have been easy to stay like this, jaw slack, lips plump and wet, simply marveling at the hard and beautifully flushed appendage in your palms. But then a finger tapped twice under your chin, breaking your daze with a wordless command that struck an immediate response--your eyes flicked up. 

“Are you determined to test my doubts in your capabilities, lieutenant?” He laid a flat palm under your jaw and ran his thumb over your blushed lips, leather slipping lewdly over saliva. “Or must I teach you everything?”

Your heart struck your pelvic floor, dread and excitement charging up like a shot from a plasma cannon. “N-no. I--” Heat surged into your face. “I me-mean, I, uh--” Fuck, it was stupid to think you were somehow out of hot water. He expected more. Always, always, expected more, and now you were going to have to play your cards carefully. You swallowed against the thundering of your pulse. “I c-can take it, Commander, ple-please--”

“Can you?” He wiggled your jaw slightly in his palm, face tilting until a sliver of moonlight slanted across it like a translucent scar. You tensed, resisting the urge to shrink. “Or should I have selected someone more adequate?”

The plasma charge inside you flared, fusing atoms of dread into something deadlier with the affront. Your teeth gnashed, tension breaking your body into trembles under the strain of caution. “N-no, sir.” A muscle in his face twitched. “Please, I was... I w-was just--”

“Perhaps I should return you to General Quinn,” he said. “I’m sure he would be more than accepting of such inferior talents--”

You lunged, and in a single, smooth stroke, you swallowed his cock straight to the base, your body heaving its protest with a soundless convulsion.

A noise strangled in Ren’s throat, and a firm hand slid around the nape of your neck to hold you there, gagging and completely stripped of any capacity for breath. 

It probably would have been too much for you to handle, were it not for the hot sparks of indignation that quickly soldered each fissure in your resolve. Each one forced you to soften, to accept the agonizing incursion, if nothing else just to prove that you could. 

Relax.

Tears welled as you glanced up, funneling all of your willpower into sacrificing your need for breath. Movement was impossible with him holding you there, but the huge hand on the back of your neck spasmed, and your opportunity struck.

Doe-eyed, you gazed up and swallowed, letting your pharynx flex and ripple around the thick head of him just as hot tears spilled over to soak your cheeks, and one hand curled around to cup him by the balls.

You could almost hear something in him snap with the choked roar he let out, and it made your chest swell even as both of his hands coiled roughly into your hair and locked your head back. You met his stare, fire in your own, and gave him a challenging squeeze. In less than a second, your hands were no longer your own, seized by the Force and shackled down to your thighs, just before his hips drew back and oxygen smacked your lungs with a less than pretty sound. 

He gave you no time to recover before his cock was gagging you again, his rhythm punctuated and slow, each thrust forcing submission from your body. Gravel shifted under your knees as you trembled with all of the muscular tension that you redirected away from your jaw, the coarse pain of it serving as a welcome diversion from the intense sensation of having your throat fucked.

Relax. Control yourself.

Wetness began to streak your face, tears and saliva converging on your chin, and the vague thought shimmered in the back of your mind as to what you must look like right now: a slutty mess completely at your commander’s mercy, drawing choked breaths only when he allowed it, tongue fluttering soft and wet under his thick shaft while your clit fucking throbbed between your legs. But from the broken sound that Ren let out as he watched another violent gag roll through you, you’d have thought it was the hottest thing he’d ever witnessed. 

His grunt bottomed out into a snarl as one hand slid out of your hair, his palm turning outwards while two of his fingers began to curl in a salacious motion.

The fluid sensation of the Force coiled and rippled across your clit at his command, its motions just like your own fingers but even better, making your eyes nearly roll back in your skull. Ren gave a knowing hum as your moan was choked down into your throat by another thrust of his cock, and a bend of his fingers sent a toe-curling rumble over your swollen bundle of nerves. 

“That’s it, lieutenant.”

The sound of his voice slid down your body, settling low in your belly where your orgasm was starting to simmer again. Even the ache in your jaw began to meld into your pleasure, making your head swim and buzz with the renewed promise of climax.

Ren’s breathing started to crack and falter, coming in half-formed curses through his ribs as he continued to steadily fuck your mouth, and it was clear that he must have been leaning on the edge of closeness for some time as well. You could feel it in the way his cock pulsed on your tongue, the way his stomach began to tense and flex.

Fuck, the thought of it--Kylo Ren, this grand enigma steeped in poise and brutality, a man who could obliterate life with a flex of his hand, was about to pull you apart by the threads, shatter you into pleasure with that same power and cum down your fucking throat. 

The wave of arousal that slammed you was almost maddening, and it was all you could do to flatten your tongue over your teeth and swallow thickly around his cock once more before everything was coiling up tight and fast inside you. 

His voice shot you to the precipice with a gritted out, “Fucking whore, let me f-feel you cum--”

There was a moment before it hit, like the way a seismic charge pulls in all of the sound around it into a single devastating point, and then with a choked sob you shattered, pulses of ecstasy ripping through your body while your cunt spasmed and wept its bliss onto the street with each unrelenting surge of the Force at your clit, wringing convulsions from you until you began to shake from the intensity of your orgasm.

You blinked the fresh tears from your eyes just in time to see Ren snarl above you, jaw tight and hips stuttering as the tension in his body threatened to snap, echoing in a rough pull of your hair. Pain seared your scalp as he pulled you off of his cock just in time for the first jets of his release to coat your tongue.

He groaned, a harsh sound that rivaled your surroundings in its sheer impurity, and he wrenched your head back further, working his length while thick ropes hit your open, gasping mouth, splattering your lips and chin with his bitter taste. He was grunting, swearing, panting through clenched teeth, and then--

Your name. Not your title, not a mocking belittlement of your rank, but your name, cracked through his lips, a desperate sound half-buried in the delirious stream of filth.

Before you could even process what you just heard, he sharply released your hair and stepped back, your invisible restraints dissipating and leaving you to crumple over on yourself, gasping and trembling and painted in cum. 

Slowly, through the ring of pleasure and shock in your ears, you rubbed your sore jaw, before using your fingers to gather the warm mess around your lips. But just when you were about to slip them into your mouth, his voice stopped you, a graveled whisper from the shadows.

“Look at me.”

Breathless, you looked up, suddenly conscious of how plump and stained your face felt as the cool air began to dry the tears on your cheeks. Ren had already adjusted himself to decency, but your walls still fluttered with aftershocks of pleasure at the sight of his huge stature, swelling with deep breaths like a sated, black tide under the moon. You gazed at him in the dim light, holding his stare while you dipped your slippery fingers into your mouth and dutifully sucked the cum off of them, admittedly letting your tongue lick out along your knuckles just a little more than you probably needed to. 

Ren’s nostrils flared, and he took a few strides in your direction. When his hand came out towards your face you flinched, but he simply curled his fingers under your chin and slowly passed his thumb over a spot on your cheek that you had missed, expressionless as he pushed it through your parted lips. He watched you like this for the smallest moment before he drew away again.

Your mind felt blank; wiped and recalibrated by the staggering intensity of whatever your life had become over the past few hours. Exhaustion settled on you with the weight of a freighter. The one thing still tethering you to reality was the sensation of oxygen drawing in and out of your lungs, sweeter now than it had ever felt in your life despite the taste of grease and rust in the air. 

Stiffly, you began to readjust your clothing, pulling your undershirt and coat back over your breasts before beginning the painful process of climbing to your feet. As shaky and sore as they were, your legs somehow supported you, and you managed to wrestle your pants back up over the curve of your ass, only fumbling a little to secure them around your waist. 

For some reason it was only after you were covered again that you even thought to look around the alley, a brief pang of fear seizing your ribs, but it was just as still as when you’d landed. Just as empty, just as quiet. Maybe even moreso.

You glanced back around to Ren where he stood by the connecting beam of the ship’s wing, still and ruminative, a sleek device raised in his hand. After a moment, he pressed a button and spoke into it.

"Report."

A crackle of static peeled through.

“Have eyes, dropping in,” you could faintly hear the voice on the other end say, and a spear of alarm jabbed you back to sudden alertness. Ren's eyes flicked to you, his face stone. 

“Clear to land,” the commander returned through the commlink, before tucking it back into his pocket. 

Your heart pumped uneasily against your ribs, your face surely a canvas of confusion. Ren cast you a blank look before grabbing a metal ridge on the ship and smoothly disappearing into the cockpit again. 

Okay, this was getting unnerving. But the whine of an engine snapped your attention to the sky, where a standard-issue TIE fighter was descending with predatory swiftness upon the alley, its headlights killed, swooping into a hover just behind Ren’s Silencer. Half-shielded by the wing already, you recoiled instinctively into the shadow of it, as if you could find safety in the way it jutted forward like a protective talon.

You jumped when heavy boots hit the ground next to you again, looking up to see a masked Kylo Ren. He watched the other fighter land, standing silently as its cockpit popped open with a whisper of hydraulics. A shadowed figure leapt out, and you took a few steps backwards as it strode in your direction, vaulting the wing-support beam of the Silencer in a smooth motion before coming to a halt in front of the commander.

“Ren,” a dusky voice rasped through the tinny filter of a vocoder. He was masked as well, similar yet altogether different from the commander he addressed; rougher-looking, shrouded in strange black armor. As you stared, his head quirked, the mask tilting to settle on you. “Who’s this?”

[wallythayer]

How to Reclaim Your Attention Span

Cal Newport, PhD, doesn’t have a Facebook or Twitter account. He gets news mostly from his local newspaper and National Public Radio. An accomplished academic and author, he provides no contact form on his website, purposefully making it difficult for people to reach him for interviews.

In the age of endless stimuli, Newport, an associate professor of computer science at Georgetown University, believes in cultivating an ethic of “deep work” — focusing on one cognitively demanding task at a time. While his personal commitment to depth poses challenges for journalists hoping to quote him in an article, it’s reaped professional rewards. In the decade since obtaining his BA, Newport has earned a PhD, published four books, written numerous peer-reviewed papers, and earned a tenure-track position at an elite university. 

“The ability to stay steady on one target and ignore everything else operates in the brain’s prefrontal regions,” writes Daniel Goleman, PhD, in his best-selling book Focus: The Hidden Driver of Excellence. Specialized circuits in this area allow us to tune in to what’s important (the person we’re having a conversation with in a busy restaurant) and tune out what isn’t (the conversation at the next table). 

While our attention is powerful, it’s also fragile. It “continually fights distractions, both inner and outer,” explains Goleman. 

The way we use our attention also shapes and controls our reality. “If we don’t consciously choose where we want to direct our attention, there will always be something in our path to misdirect it,” writes former Microsoft and Apple executive Linda Stone, who coined the term “continuous partial attention” — the idea that we pay partial attention continuously out of a desire to not miss anything, always on the lookout for something more interesting than what’s before us. 

While paying close attention can be challenging, there are actions we can take to strengthen this capacity and lay the groundwork for becoming more attentive.

Get Emotional Support

Focused attention is a component of cognitive ability, but it also involves our emotions. 

“Emotional cues are not only ubiquitous in our lives and environment, they are also strong distractions, often interfering with our ability to both -accomplish tasks and maintain equanimity,” writes Richard Davidson, PhD, in his best-selling book, The Emotional Life of Your Brain. 

The power of emotion to affect our ability to focus led the neuroscientist to include attention — along with resilience, outlook, social intuition, self-awareness, and sensitivity to context — as one dimension of what he calls the brain’s “emotional style.” Our emotional style dictates, with some consistency, how we respond to our experiences, and it is governed by specific, identifiable, measurable brain circuits.

Like all the factors comprising emotional style, attention lies on a spectrum, with narrow focus on one end and distraction on the other. If you tend to be hyperfocused, you might find yourself so involved in a project or one side of an argument that you miss the bigger picture. If you land on the unfocused end, you may find when you read the final words on a page that you’ve forgotten what was written at the top. 

There is also more than one type of attention. Davidson describes selective attention as the capacity to focus on certain features of an environment and ignore others. It’s a key building block of self-awareness. 

Another type — open, nonjudgmental awareness — involves the ability to recognize signals from the external environment, as well as any thoughts and feelings that pop up in our brains, without getting stuck on any one stimulus. 

Fortunately, even if we tend toward hyperfocus or distraction, the brain’s plasticity allows us to adjust our style of paying attention.

For example, Davidson advises the überfocused to keep their office doors open, place photos of loved ones on their desks, and scatter books and magazines around as temptation to pick one up. Those who are more easily distracted can try keeping the office door closed and removing extraneous stimuli. 

You might also try these attention-building practices:

• Daily mindfulness meditation, Davidson explains, can help improve concentration. “We have found that long-term meditation practitioners, when engaged in the simple practice of focusing on an object, show higher levels of activation in the prefrontal cortex and parietal cortex,” he says. This -“executive” part of the brain also governs self-awareness and decision-making.  

• Body-scan exercises can improve self-awareness, he notes. Because your focus moves across your whole body, scanning trains your mind to move from detailed attention on one spot — such as your big toe — to wider awareness. This can be helpful to people who struggle with either distraction or hyperfocus.

“Investigating physical sensations is one of the best ways for us to learn to be present with whatever is happening in the moment and to recognize the difference between direct experience and the add-ons we bring to it,” says meditation instructor Sharon Salzberg, author of Real Happiness: The Power of Meditation.

• Breathing exercises are another good tool for boosting self-awareness and dealing with strong emotions. To help stressed-out kids stabilize their thinking, connect more deeply, and refocus, actress Goldie Hawn’s MindUP program integrates deep-breathing exercises in its pre-kindergarten-through-eighth-grade curriculum. The program shows teachers how to lead students through three-minute “brain breaks.” These breaks, taken three times a day, calm the brain’s amygdala, which plays a primary role in emotional response. This helps improve students’ capacity to focus and retain information.

• Monotasking allows for and strengthens focused engagement, Davidson explains. Continually switching between tasks, on the other hand, saps your attention. Doing one thing at a time enhances focus and boosts your short-term memory. Multitasking causes your body to release more stress hormones, such as cortisol and adrenaline, which can lead to health problems when chronically elevated. (For more on the impact of stress, see “Hormonal Harmony.”)

Go Deep 

Cal Newport exemplifies the attention-strengthening benefits of monotasking. In addition to helping him make significant career advances quickly, his deep-work ethic has personal benefits, too. 

“For the most part, I don’t touch a computer between the time I get home from work and the next morning when the new workday begins,” he writes in Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World. 

“This ability to fully disconnect, as opposed to the more standard practice of sneaking in a few quick work email checks, or giving in to frequent surveys of social-media sites, allows me to be present with my wife and two sons in the evenings, and read a surprising number of books for a busy father of two.”

Studies have shown that reading books improves cognitive function, working memory, and the ability to detect and understand other people’s emotions. So by spending time reading, Newport is doing the kind of focused work that enhances his ability to pay attention. (If it feels like you don’t have time to read books, reconsider the time you spend on other activities. For example, Americans currently spend about four hours per day watching television.) 

To strengthen your ability to focus, try to minimize “shallow work,” those activities we often perform while distracted that don’t demand deep thought — mindlessly scrolling through email or social-media feeds, for example. Like Newport, you might consider avoiding social media altogether or scheduling specific time periods when you use the internet instead of randomly checking it throughout the day. 

In fact, Newport recommends scheduling every minute of your day. “We spend much of our day on autopilot — not giving much thought to what we’re doing with our time,” he writes. “It’s difficult to prevent the trivial from creeping into every corner of your schedule if you don’t face, without flinching, your current balance between deep and shallow work, and then adopt the habit of pausing before action and asking: What makes the most sense right now?” 

And when it comes to email, Newport suggests sending and responding to only those messages that really matter. 

Manoush Zomorodi, host of the technology-focused podcast Note to Self and author of Bored and Brilliant: How Spacing Out Can Unlock Your Most Productive and Creative Self, agrees. “People confuse productivity with responsiveness,” she says. 

To help workplaces become more focused, Zomorodi suggests they purposefully and thoughtfully use collaborative platforms, such as Slack. “The idea is that you have channels where you can talk to your colleagues, so you aren’t on email as much,” she says. “But what happens is that we spend so much time updating that we don’t have the opportunity to do the harder thinking.” 

Cutting down on needless communication reduces stress. Zomorodi notes that her readers and listeners are often seeking ways to handle workplace burnout, much of which relates to consistent demands on their attention. “The pinging and constant updating is driving people crazy, and making them feel like they don’t have time to do their actual work.” (For more insights from Zomorodi, see “Creative Inspiration: Manoush Zomorodi.”) 

To ease employees’ work-related stress and improve focus and productivity, some companies, including Volkswagen and Deutsche Telekom, have attempted to change the “always-notifying” workplace culture by limiting after-hours and weekend email use. You can do this for yourself by removing the email app from your phone or turning your phone off on weekends and evenings, and by disabling notifications and alerts. 

Take Breaks

A few years ago, while on a sabbatical from Silicon Valley’s daily distractions, futurist and researcher Alex Soojung-Kim Pang, PhD, decided to study the habits of Charles Darwin, Winston Churchill, Stephen King, and other productive people. Although these legendary creatives designed their lives around their work, they didn’t spend long days toiling away. 

Instead, they organized their days to include intensive blocks of concentrated work — typically around four hours — followed by a period of intentional rest, and then another shorter bout of less-intense work. 

 “Deliberate rest and focus complement and reinforce each other,” says Pang, author of Rest: Why You Get More Done When You Work Less. “Not only does rest give you time to recharge the energy you spend at work, but improving your capacity to detach from work deepens your ability to concentrate and be present on the job.” (For more on this concept, see “Deliberate Rest.”) 

Rest is an antidote to attention fatigue, a collection of cognitive symptoms that occur when the brain’s inhibitory system — which tunes out distractions — gets worn down from use. And resting doesn’t necessarily mean napping, although Churchill’s afternoon snooze was a nonnegotiable part of his daily routine. 

Since concentration is demanding, active restorative breaks can also help your body refresh the oxygen and energy your brain needs. Pang cites a group of scientists who relax by rock climbing as an example of “deep play” — an activity that provides many of the same psychological rewards as work. 

Scientific experimentation and rock climbing require the same kind of cognitive problem-solving, Pang explains. “They both involve seeing the big challenge and then breaking it down into little parts.” 

The absorbing and challenging nature of deep play provides room for finding yourself in flow — the intense state of concentration that leaves you feeling energized and that benefits both your work and your well-being. (For more on the connection between flow states and happiness, see “Go With the Flow.”)

Smooth the Transitions

Increasing your ability to transition between tasks is another key to improving attention. Failure to disengage fully from one task before moving on to another can leave your mind spinning in loops of chronic anxiety. It can also impinge on your performance at work and in relationships. 

In the late 1990s, while working as a consultant, Sophie Leroy, PhD, began seeing many employees struggle to pay attention during meetings. After conference calls, she noticed that distracted participants would often express a desire to have spent more time on a topic that had been discussed for several minutes. 

In a 2009 paper, Leroy outlined the phenomenon of “attention residue” — remaining thoughts about one task that distract us from our present one.

Now an associate professor at the University of Washington Bothell’s School of Business, Leroy maintains that strong performance depends on an ability to successfully transition our attention. For example, when we glance at our phones, go to a meeting, and proceed directly to an important conversation with a significant other without taking a break, our brains never get a chance to process information, integrate ideas, or find temporary closure.

“It’s like windows staying open in our brains, and it makes it hard to focus on the intervening work,” Leroy says. “If I am still thinking about task A while trying to do task B, I don’t have the cognitive capacity to process those two tasks at the same time and do a perfect job on both tasks.”

To help manage shifts of attention, Leroy suggests making a “ready-to-resume” plan — a routine to close the task you’re stepping away from and free up your attention for a new activity. This is as simple as taking one minute to write a list of what still needs to be done to complete the unfinished task. When you close that list, you’re ready to move on to the next thing. 

In Leroy’s studies, participants who switched tasks without a plan remained distracted and their performance was inhibited. By contrast, those who made a still-to-do list showed improved performance on the next task and less stress from attention residue. 

Pausing between activities is a gentle way of bringing awareness into the present moment. It allows us to reflect on what we value and how we want to use our attention. We can mindlessly give it away or direct it toward something with intention. As Linda Stone notes, it’s a powerful choice we get to make, every moment of every day. 

This originally appeared as “Play Close Attention” in the September 2018 print issue of Experience Life.

Get the full story at https://experiencelife.com/article/reclaim-your-attention-span/

[anastassiyav]

Week 3 + Reading General design principles

Game mechanics and how they connect to the concepts of challenge, skill and chance. 

Some of the concepts of this weeks lecture I had already wrote about during last weeks reading entry.

Game State

Game contrantly chances state - as a process of communication between the player and the game. Game state can change on different factors, such as the player advancing it or something more simple, like time.

Game state can be changes with power ups, entering combat, invinscibilty state, entering prison in monopoly, playing mini games within a bigger game.

Feedback

Feedback to players actions can enccreare the level of dopamine in the players brain - and make them addicted to playing the games and getting the feedback-reward. However it needs encreaced feedback which leads to encreaced challenge othweriwse the action in the game gets boring.

Skill

SKILL Whenever it’s measurable, it’s probably skill.

Chance

Randomness, unpredictability. Everything that is not measurable because doesn’t depend on something controllable.

SKILL GAMES CREATE HIERARCHIES LUCK GAMES REDISTRIBUTE POWER.

Ambuigulity  

Being free of social norms is a social norm. You can not take things that you did in the game outsidethe game, therefor those actions excist only in the ga,e, making it a space where you can do things that are normally not done.

Liminal and liminoid

LIMINAL Reaffirming and consolidating a social structure through a rite of passage.

Rite of Passage. Linear narration. Structured Play.

LIMINOID Progressive questioning and subversion of the standing order.

Protest - distrapt - etc. Unstructured play.

Readings:

Game, Design, Play - Chapter 3

Kinds of Play

This chapter breaks down and analyses various basic types of play.

Competitive Play

A kind of play where the some players win and some loose. Most likely the most common type of play.

Usually includes sport and most multiplayer games. Includes measuring each players skill against each other, with a goal of doing something better or lasting longer than the opponent.

Interesting concept that the chapter covers is something called Yomi – or knowing a mind of the opponent. I would describe it as a mixture of reading body language and analyzing the strategy your opponent is using to create a counter strategy as well taking advantage of their weaknesses.

Competition can be symmetrical and asymmetrical, one where player have the same abilities and a common goal, and a play where players have a different objectives and abilities (for example Among Us).

Cooperative Play

A game where players work together to achieve a goal, for example, escape rooms.

Cooperation can be symmetrical – all players have the same actions and basic attributes. Cooperation can be asymmetrical – each player will have a predetermined role but they have to cooperate in order to achieve the goal.

Another type of cooperative play is symbiotic – a type of play where players are reliant on each other and cannot complete the game without each other.

Skill-based Play

Game that uses skill development to achieve foals.

Skill can be active – precise movement, precise timing, for example, jumping in the Super Mario.

Skill can be also mental – this involves games such as puzzles, where one has to rely on memory.

Games like Portal combine both active and mental skills.

Experience Based Play

Game of explorations, unfolding story, communal engagement. This type of Play can involve no skill at all, and would just involve exploring a virtual space to unfold a story, for example.

Games of chance and uncertainly

Games that require strategies, games that remove decision making.

Perfect example would be a gambling game, such as poker or gwent.

Whimsical Play

Game that emphasis silly actions, unexpected results, play that you need to feel to understand.

Amusement park rides, rolling downhill, spinning around – - all are form of whimsical play. This kind of play is often about physical silliness. I might be wrong, but for me a video game example of a whimsical game would be something like Octodad, because it is much unexpected and sabots physical silliness of controlling an octopus.

Role-Playing

Players have to take on certain roles and follow loose rules, usually the game play is only limited by imagination. Role-playing is closely related to storytelling and a way of experience the story.

I think various adventure games, where you play as a certain character, like cyberpunk, Red dead redemption or Witcher can be considered role-playing games.

Performative Play

Theatrical form of play, includes improvisation.

Those types of games are fun to watch and to play. Various dancing games, or games like charades fit int his type of play.

Expressive Play

A form of play that subverts player choice in effort to express and share an experience.

This can be intended by the designer or derived from the player.  Usually this form of play is used in music and TV, but it can be found in games, too, for example in various text based games.

Simulation Based Play

Play that models a real-worlds system and presents a point of view.

Simulation games can be in a top perspective or in the eye view perspective, they can be limited and simple, like Papers Please or massive, like SimCity, where you have to control whole city.

Those types of play can and should be combined in order to create new play experiences.

Instead of thinking about an experience, game designer should think what created that experience and translate it into a game form.

Exercises

1.       Choose a game and describe it using one or more of the kinds of play described.

The Sims – Role-playing Simulator with a bit of whimsical, if you consider how silly the Sims act and the gibberish they speak.

The Sims is clearly a Simulator, but considering that you also play as the character you create it I also has a lot, if not more, role-playing elements to it.

2.       Take the game above and apply another kind of play to it. What happens?

I always had craved the Sims to be a little bit edgier, either by adding more character interactions to the game, for example removing the censorship and allow Sims to fight, rob and murder each other, which can and an element of skill or chance to the game. My another idea is to add more storytelling and mysteries to the game, that you can explore while role-playing as your Sim, turning it an experience type of game.

3.       Turn a competitive game into a cooperation one.

It would be quite fun to turn a game such as Fall Guys into a cooperation Game – you will only pass the level if all 50 of you can finish the finish line, so you would need to actively help each to pass obstacles.

A Gameful World - pages 0-23

Reach of games design and game art happened in late 2000.

Gamification started by an app called Foursquare, which would give users awards and achievement badges for visiting certain types of places and even rewards, such as discounts. The app used leader boards and mayor ships to make the users compete with each other. I find it amusing as I have been using and am still suing this app and I have to admit that it did became boring since the app lost its popularity and stopped actually being competitive – I am a mayor practically everywhere I go. I dint however knew that they were among the first apps to use gamification – today it’s so common, almost every app I use have this kinds of achievements and rewards.

Gamification is used in health and wellness, for example in Nike running app.

Users of fitness app can set goals and participate in social competitions, for example who walked the most steps per month mount the participants. You can also see you score against all the competitors and measure you fitness level against others.

Similar system is used in online educational platforms, where you can earn rewards by learning. Some universities have achievement system for non curriculum activities. Even my boarding school had a reward system for getting As, our headmaster would give away mars bars for that, but I do not know if that was really a gamification – our dining hall was really bad, and those mars bars were essential to good nutrition.

 Lots of people resist gamification – game designers and academia members argue that  forcibly gamified products will never be as engaging as well designed games. I agree, but I think those products are doing a good job at motivation and keeping track of things, which is a big plus for people who are obsessed with data and keeping some kind of score – I have this app that lets me keep track of my birth control and cycle, and to be honest I am a bit sad it does just that, there are no rewards or achievements. I kind of wish to get a badge, like, 100 pills taken on time, etc.

It is argues that this type of gamification only frames ply as a pursuit of goals – while play and games crucially depend on..playfulness and enjoyment. Gamification in examples above is used to organize, analyze, provide structure, but playing I often a disruptive activity, used to break patterns and take a break from norms.

 Being playful is the engine of innovation.

[williamexchange]

7 Tips to Create the Perfect Website Post

Creating a riveting website post is something people do every day. There is no such thing as a “boring” topic in the hands of a talented writer who is willing to do a bit of extra legwork to craft a website post that really shines.

Here, learn the 7 essential steps to creating the perfect web post.

1.  Choose A Useful Post Topic

The key to completing this step is developing an awareness of what blog post readers need to know or do. In other words, what problem can your post help solve or what question can you answer?

Sometimes this involves responding to known questions or problems, and sometimes this involves putting forth an answer to a question readers didn’t know to ask or a problem they don’t know they have.

In either case, the more useful your post topic is, the more likely it is to be shared.

2. Choose A Structure For Your Website Post

Once you have your topic in hand, it may feel like the heavy lifting is done. But in fact, you can look at your topic as if it is a diamond thoroughly encased in coal.

Your structure is what will chip the coal away to present blog readers with a shiny diamond – one they want for themselves and also want to share with others.

The post structure you choose should represent the best means of presenting the information. Here are several common structures to use when you create a post:

The list. Sometimes called a “listicle,” this post structure outlines information in list or checklist fashion.

The how-to. Popular with the DIY (do-it-yourself) community, this post structure offers a step-by-step format for accomplishing something.

The long-form. Whether formatted in journalistic or essay form, this long-form post format should be used with care. For best results, be sure to break the text up with lots of graphics or photos.

The expert interview. Interviewing a well-known individual in the field is a great way to give your post a chance to reach a wider audience (i.e. the expert is likely to re-share the post to their readers as well).

The promo. A promotional blog post format is designed specifically to generate interest in something you or your client is selling. This kind of post can work really well when paired with a contest or giveaway.

The review. There are two styles of review posts: sponsored and independent. The latter tends to be more trusted among readers, since the reviewer (you) was not compensated in any way to share your opinion.

The series. The series can be viewed like an online curriculum of sorts, with each successive post going into more depth or exploring different facets of a topic over time.

3. Create A Post Outline

By this step, you have your topic well in hand and have tentatively identified the best structure to convey the information. Now it is time to lay out what you plan to write about.

Taking a bit of time to outline your topic ensures you won’t miss or repeat certain information. It also helps you stay on topic and keep to any word count limitations.

4. Research Your Topic

The amount of research you need to do before launching into the writing phase can depend greatly on the topic and the structure you have chosen.

You may decide to write one section at a time, researching as you go. Or you may want to do all your research up front and have it in-hand as you write. Either way, just be sure you can support any assertions or facts with legitimate sources, should that question arise post-publication.

If your research includes finding experts to offer commentary, it can be wise to complete this before you start writing in case you run into snags with locating the right expert to speak to a particular issue.

5. Start Writing

Pretty much everything else you’ve read up until now is just the manual labor of planning for a successful blog post. The real fun for most writers comes when you actually get to sit down and start writing!

It can be tempting to gloss over some of the preliminary steps to get to this stage faster, but all that preparation gives your brain time to organize and create and ruminate and process what you are learning about the topic.

This often means that once you do start writing, your content just flows.

6. Proofread What You Have Written

Somewhere in between Tip 5 and Tip 6 is a good time to take a break – overnight if possible. This is because you are going to need fresh eyes to proofread your own written words.

You want to proofread for the following:

Spelling

Grammar

Punctuation

Syntax

Facts

References

If you can recruit a friend or colleague to be your “backup proofer,” this can help you catch mistakes your eyes may not see because you are already too familiar with your own content.

7.  Choose Your Headline

Last and often most importantly for viral sharing potential, it is time to choose your headline in earnest. You may have been writing along the theme of a working headline, which is great and helpful, but now it is time to go back and refine that headline if needed.

Be sure your headline uses active voice (so long as your post information is non-scientific) and compelling.

A compelling (hard to ignore) headline includes these elements:

Short

Accurate (factual)

Optimized (for sharing)

While there is always the occasional viral post that just “gets lucky,” most such posts are deliberately crafted to attract their own success. By following these tips, you give your new post its best chance of being read and shared.

Talk to us today  and learn more about our  Web Development Denver, CO   and how we can help you improve yours.

[thedivinefish]

TGIWednesday and is it just you?

TGIWednesday News

Here's my question... is it you and only you? Lately I have come across a lot of folks who are not fully present in their bodies for obvious reasons with all the Covid-19 issues and social distancing/home alone etc. Worse than that, some folks with multiple other entities in their bodies.  At face value it sounds kookee when I say it and read it, but it is real as real can get.  I had a client just the other day with crying/raging panic and after we cleared her of the other critters, she was laughing.  All this took place in a minute.  I know of no other FASTER modality.  So as they say, “check yourself before you wreck yourself” and use your fingers/pendulum or standing sway testing and make sure there is only you in your body.  Make the statement, "I (insert your birth name here) am the only being in this body."  Clear/fish as needed and believe me it can make a huge difference.  I even did it for my cat who was hiding and acting aloof and an hour later he got on the bed and licked my hand!  He is such a dude.  I love it and I love what we do and what we’re a part of... "regular folks" must be bored with out knowing all the fun stuff happening underneath it all...  and fyi, if you’re reading this, you’re not regular by any means :) Don’t forget to join us for our upcoming LIVE Zoom event scheduled for NEXT WEDNESDAY APRIL 29th.  I mentioned on the call last month that the next one would be on immunity but instead wound up releasing the Transcending Covid-19 Crisis audio which is now available in the shop.  In light of where things are focused now, we've updated the theme for this month to be about breaking through the energetic, emotional, financial barriers associated with the global lockdown. The Plandemic:  Moving Forward in Life After Covid-19   Wed April 29th - 30 minutes - $22 7:30 Eastern / 4:30 Pacific Replay sent to ALL who are registered Click here to sign up for the Zoom event:  https://calendly.com/jimmymackhealing/the-plandemic We want to turn on your switches for moving forward with inspiration, creativity, good health, improved relationships, making more money all in an effort to uplift you and help contribute to you obtaining your goals. Let's work together to get the best out of 2020!

What are your top five things you'd like to achieve once we're past quarantine and stay-at-home orders? Registered participants can email us at support@jimmymackhealing.com  and we'll include them in this call. 

Darius Season 19 Pkg B or C buyers can register for the live call for free. Go to the link on your special offer download page or wait and download the replay from that same page after the call. 

TGIWednesday Download

~ BEING FULLY PRESENT IN YOUR BODY~ I believe, think, know and feel I am the only being in this body. I am ready, willing and able to just be me linked to the power of the infinite. I know when, where, how and why to remain grounded, steadfast, and strong. I am receiving steady profound, direct and pure guidance from the one true source here and now in all languages and throughout all time lines and so it is.     

LIVE Appearances - Free Healing

Wed. May 13th The Alara Canfield Show  - Register Here Thurs. May 21st Soul Talk with Patty Malek - Register Here Mon. June 22nd - Straight Talk for the Soul w/ Cari Murphy - Register Here Thurs. July 30th - Your Divine Uniqueness with host Moncef Akfir - Register Here

Fish Food 

The Daily Bread To Feed The Fish

Tell The Fish: 365 Daily Inspirations & Affirmations

APRIL 22nd "Today I will notice what is unusual, what shows up and what cannot be explained.  I will see the positive in the unusual, a promising future in the mystical.  I will believe that bigger and better days are ahead of me now."

From the Fish Box

"Hi Darius,  I just wanted to reach out to you and say THANK YOU for the opportunity to work with Jimmy Mack!  I am SO excited to tell you that not only have I received my freedom from past binding illnesses BUT I am now moving on to my calling TO BE A HEALER!  Thank you, Thank you, Thank you!!" - Mary Jo M. / NY "I just had my one on one session today. Part of my preparation was to listen to your "Money Windfall" mp3 which specifically mentioned  "Mail box Money". Beyond my wildest expectations I received today $1,500...00 for Class Action Settlement. Thank you & Yahoooo... Big Hug," - Ruth Jean 

The Jimmy Mack Healing Radio Show

EVERY TUESDAY at 9pm EDT / 6pm PDT CALL (206) 806-9965 https://www.freeconferencecall.com/wall/goldylocksproductions **Starting in May, the LIVE radio show MOVES to 4pm Eastern/1pm Pacific

Click Here for Previous Weeks' Show and a full archive of past guests & replays.

Yesterday's Show - Special Guest  Mark Hernandez http://www.peopleandpetsenergetics.com Healer and Intuitive Message

April 28th Rev Debbie Dienstbier Visit her Facebook page Our resident trans medium communications with your loved ones in spirit.

The Jimmy Mack Healing Show is LIVE on Tuesday Nights at 9pm EDT  If you want to Listen in only, go to this website: https://www.freeconferencecall.com/wall/goldylocksproductions OR If you want to call in & ask a question CALL (206) 806-9965 No need to press #1, just dial in and you'll be in the queue. If the Call in Number above doesn’t seem to work, please use this back up Call in Number: (425) 535-9149 when prompted, enter 206.806.9965 followed by #  International Callers, click the link below for the International call in list for your country.  If you're using the Free Conference Call App, it automatically re-routes the best call In number for you.  Please unblock your phone number if you wish to speak with Jimmy and or his guest host. Blocked, Restricted and Private Callers are not brought on air.

Sessions at the Tampa Office 

FRIDAY KODAWARI YOGA STUDIOS  *Appointments are either phone or Skype until further notice   

I'm scheduling 15 and 30 minute appointments at Kodawari Yoga Studios from 10am-2pm EVERY FRIDAY.*IMPT! You must call Kodawari directly to schedule times and dates with them AND pay them directly at the front desk prior to your appointment Call Kodawari's front desk directly to schedule (813) 773-4017 and pay at the concierge desk PRIOR  to your appointment - 15 minutes 38$ or 30 minutes 68$. 3965 Henderson Blvd Suite C Tampa (813) 773-4017 http://www.kodawariyoga.com/  

Receive 24/7 Prayers from Jimmy

Nightly prayers include COVID-19 known as the Coronavirus. Each night we work on scrambling the frequency for everyone on the prayer list. Your name will be added to a special VIP Prayer list where Jimmy will use his intelligent computer software, src4you which runs 24/7, to delete the negative and increase the strength of the positive creating a higher probability of favorable outcomes for you.  

In addition, throughout the full 30-days, Jimmy will be dialing into your energetic signature each day upon rising and make certain that you are a clear yes, unclear to no and running forward before you start your day. He is doing the heavy lifting for you around 3am NY time while most of you are asleep in order to smooth out your way and increase your most favorable life outcomes.

The 30-day service is now being offered exclusively  and you also have the option of selecting an ongoing subscription ($95/month) which is managed through PayPal only.

Upon written email request, for each new order we offer a one-time email analysis via the intelligent healing software that Jimmy uses on your behalf.  Most clients have had amazing results and outcomes!

You can add yourself and those living in your immediate household and yes you can include pets! Merely include everyone’s names and Jimmy will add them to his daily prayers. *NOTE if the MDP Service was purchased via a special telesummit or radio show offer, prayers will be limited to BUYER ONLY - and will not include family members or pets.

You can run this monthly and stop at any time after the 30 days is up, you will have the opportunity to renew and update your list each month but are under no obligation. I believe you will experience magical transformations and make progress every day! 

Sign Up for 30-Days - $99

**Can't See The Full Email? Click Here to View Online**

Go deep sea "fishing" with Jimmy!

Level 1 is open to ANYONE at anytime! All Mastery Students:  Check your email & Login to view all the newly upgraded content including new books and audios!    

"Jimmy's My Liquid Fish Change Made Simple program is AMAZING!!! He gives you not only videos so you can see the changes within people, but also the books he's written as well! On top of that he's provided all the links and visuals you need so ANY type of learner can do it!!  I appreciated having it to download in a PDF so I can go back to it any time, plus the books and ACTUAL healing sessions so you see, know and understand the whole process even better!!Highly recommend to ANYONE looking to change and make not only their life... but everyone's around them better as well!!" - E.J. / Florida

The Certificate of Mastery Program includes 2 best-selling ebooks and 2 clearing audios plus written & video instructions, AND one-on-one time with Jimmy ALL for about the cost of a single 1-hr session! This online course is for anyone who is familiar with OR new to "fishing" and is ready to dive into the deep end & get results that are beyond the ordinary! It includes The Tackle Box & The Dowser's Handbook ebooks PLUS 2 MP3s "Clearing Dark Energies" & "Increasing Your Intuition" to help clear, strengthen and prepare your energy field for optimal “fishing” results. This is a work-at-your-own-pace curriculum that will TEACH & CLEAR you at the same time! In under 2wks you will be finished with the program and ready to fish on your own with greater results! Level II offers Practitioner Certification for those who qualify.

LEARN MORE HERE

For those who aren't familiar, here's the list of the MyBeliefWorks™ audio library. 

Find a topic that addresses your issue(s), click on the link to read more. We had a lot of help downloading & channeling these over the years & they keep getting better. Don't forget... you can share these with you immediate friends and family.

Abundance Abuse Addiction Body Scan: Head to Toe COVID-19 Daily GPS Reset Dark Energies/Fears Decision Making Diet & Exercise Education & Learning Family & Relatives The Gold Coin Healing Physical Body Healing Mental Stress Holiday Stress

Increasing Intuition IRS & Tax Time Love & Romance Money Mindset Moving Forward Pain Relief Pet Healing Sales & Success Improving Sex Improving Sleep Traveling w/Ease Work & Career Weight Loss Windfall Youth & Vitality

TGIFunny

Share

Tweet

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Pinterest

Jimmy Mack | Appointments Skype: Jimmy.Mack55 Clearwater Florida USA Book a 15 minute session Book a 30 minute session Book a 60 minute session ​ ​​Transformational Healing of Body, Mind​ & Spirit, People, Places, Pets & Situations!​ ​ Download the My Liquid Fish® Starter Kit (*Updated May 2019) Audio MP3 Downloads​ and books​ to improve your life! Get Certified in ​My Liquid Fish® Change Made Simple® Watch Free Videos on YouTube Weekly Radio Show Archives Shop for ​Supplements ​ http://www.jimmymackhealingshop.com www.jimmymackhealing.com Copyright ©1998-2020 All Rights Reserved  

-------------------------------------------------- TGIW newsletter managed by: Sandy Bidinger Digital Marketing Specialist at SMBeConnected Solutions www.smbeconnected.com  

Stay connected!

  Our mailing address is: Clearwater Florida 33756 USA

[divinefishingtips]

TGIWednesday and is it just you?

TGIWednesday News

Here's my question... is it you and only you? Lately I have come across a lot of folks who are not fully present in their bodies for obvious reasons with all the Covid-19 issues and social distancing/home alone etc. Worse than that, some folks with multiple other entities in their bodies.  At face value it sounds kookee when I say it and read it, but it is real as real can get.  I had a client just the other day with crying/raging panic and after we cleared her of the other critters, she was laughing.  All this took place in a minute.  I know of no other FASTER modality.  So as they say, “check yourself before you wreck yourself” and use your fingers/pendulum or standing sway testing and make sure there is only you in your body.  Make the statement, "I (insert your birth name here) am the only being in this body."  Clear/fish as needed and believe me it can make a huge difference.  I even did it for my cat who was hiding and acting aloof and an hour later he got on the bed and licked my hand!  He is such a dude.  I love it and I love what we do and what we’re a part of... "regular folks" must be bored with out knowing all the fun stuff happening underneath it all...  and fyi, if you’re reading this, you’re not regular by any means :) Don’t forget to join us for our upcoming LIVE Zoom event scheduled for NEXT WEDNESDAY APRIL 29th.  I mentioned on the call last month that the next one would be on immunity but instead wound up releasing the Transcending Covid-19 Crisis audio which is now available in the shop.  In light of where things are focused now, we've updated the theme for this month to be about breaking through the energetic, emotional, financial barriers associated with the global lockdown. The Plandemic:  Moving Forward in Life After Covid-19   Wed April 29th - 30 minutes - $22 7:30 Eastern / 4:30 Pacific Replay sent to ALL who are registered Click here to sign up for the Zoom event:  https://calendly.com/jimmymackhealing/the-plandemic We want to turn on your switches for moving forward with inspiration, creativity, good health, improved relationships, making more money all in an effort to uplift you and help contribute to you obtaining your goals. Let's work together to get the best out of 2020!

What are your top five things you'd like to achieve once we're past quarantine and stay-at-home orders? Registered participants can email us at support@jimmymackhealing.com  and we'll include them in this call. 

Darius Season 19 Pkg B or C buyers can register for the live call for free. Go to the link on your special offer download page or wait and download the replay from that same page after the call. 

TGIWednesday Download

~ BEING FULLY PRESENT IN YOUR BODY~ I believe, think, know and feel I am the only being in this body. I am ready, willing and able to just be me linked to the power of the infinite. I know when, where, how and why to remain grounded, steadfast, and strong. I am receiving steady profound, direct and pure guidance from the one true source here and now in all languages and throughout all time lines and so it is.     

LIVE Appearances - Free Healing

Wed. May 13th The Alara Canfield Show  - Register Here Thurs. May 21st Soul Talk with Patty Malek - Register Here Mon. June 22nd - Straight Talk for the Soul w/ Cari Murphy - Register Here Thurs. July 30th - Your Divine Uniqueness with host Moncef Akfir - Register Here

Fish Food 

The Daily Bread To Feed The Fish

Tell The Fish: 365 Daily Inspirations & Affirmations

APRIL 22nd "Today I will notice what is unusual, what shows up and what cannot be explained.  I will see the positive in the unusual, a promising future in the mystical.  I will believe that bigger and better days are ahead of me now."

From the Fish Box

"Hi Darius,  I just wanted to reach out to you and say THANK YOU for the opportunity to work with Jimmy Mack!  I am SO excited to tell you that not only have I received my freedom from past binding illnesses BUT I am now moving on to my calling TO BE A HEALER!  Thank you, Thank you, Thank you!!" - Mary Jo M. / NY "I just had my one on one session today. Part of my preparation was to listen to your "Money Windfall" mp3 which specifically mentioned  "Mail box Money". Beyond my wildest expectations I received today $1,500...00 for Class Action Settlement. Thank you & Yahoooo... Big Hug," - Ruth Jean 

The Jimmy Mack Healing Radio Show

EVERY TUESDAY at 9pm EDT / 6pm PDT CALL (206) 806-9965 https://www.freeconferencecall.com/wall/goldylocksproductions **Starting in May, the LIVE radio show MOVES to 4pm Eastern/1pm Pacific

Click Here for Previous Weeks' Show and a full archive of past guests & replays.

Yesterday's Show - Special Guest  Mark Hernandez http://www.peopleandpetsenergetics.com Healer and Intuitive Message

April 28th Rev Debbie Dienstbier Visit her Facebook page Our resident trans medium communications with your loved ones in spirit.

The Jimmy Mack Healing Show is LIVE on Tuesday Nights at 9pm EDT  If you want to Listen in only, go to this website: https://www.freeconferencecall.com/wall/goldylocksproductions OR If you want to call in & ask a question CALL (206) 806-9965 No need to press #1, just dial in and you'll be in the queue. If the Call in Number above doesn’t seem to work, please use this back up Call in Number: (425) 535-9149 when prompted, enter 206.806.9965 followed by #  International Callers, click the link below for the International call in list for your country.  If you're using the Free Conference Call App, it automatically re-routes the best call In number for you.  Please unblock your phone number if you wish to speak with Jimmy and or his guest host. Blocked, Restricted and Private Callers are not brought on air.

Sessions at the Tampa Office 

FRIDAY KODAWARI YOGA STUDIOS  *Appointments are either phone or Skype until further notice   

I'm scheduling 15 and 30 minute appointments at Kodawari Yoga Studios from 10am-2pm EVERY FRIDAY.*IMPT! You must call Kodawari directly to schedule times and dates with them AND pay them directly at the front desk prior to your appointment Call Kodawari's front desk directly to schedule (813) 773-4017 and pay at the concierge desk PRIOR  to your appointment - 15 minutes 38$ or 30 minutes 68$. 3965 Henderson Blvd Suite C Tampa (813) 773-4017 http://www.kodawariyoga.com/  

Receive 24/7 Prayers from Jimmy

Nightly prayers include COVID-19 known as the Coronavirus. Each night we work on scrambling the frequency for everyone on the prayer list. Your name will be added to a special VIP Prayer list where Jimmy will use his intelligent computer software, src4you which runs 24/7, to delete the negative and increase the strength of the positive creating a higher probability of favorable outcomes for you.  

In addition, throughout the full 30-days, Jimmy will be dialing into your energetic signature each day upon rising and make certain that you are a clear yes, unclear to no and running forward before you start your day. He is doing the heavy lifting for you around 3am NY time while most of you are asleep in order to smooth out your way and increase your most favorable life outcomes.

The 30-day service is now being offered exclusively  and you also have the option of selecting an ongoing subscription ($95/month) which is managed through PayPal only.

Upon written email request, for each new order we offer a one-time email analysis via the intelligent healing software that Jimmy uses on your behalf.  Most clients have had amazing results and outcomes!

You can add yourself and those living in your immediate household and yes you can include pets! Merely include everyone’s names and Jimmy will add them to his daily prayers. *NOTE if the MDP Service was purchased via a special telesummit or radio show offer, prayers will be limited to BUYER ONLY - and will not include family members or pets.

You can run this monthly and stop at any time after the 30 days is up, you will have the opportunity to renew and update your list each month but are under no obligation. I believe you will experience magical transformations and make progress every day! 

Sign Up for 30-Days - $99

**Can't See The Full Email? Click Here to View Online**

Go deep sea "fishing" with Jimmy!

Level 1 is open to ANYONE at anytime! All Mastery Students:  Check your email & Login to view all the newly upgraded content including new books and audios!    

"Jimmy's My Liquid Fish Change Made Simple program is AMAZING!!! He gives you not only videos so you can see the changes within people, but also the books he's written as well! On top of that he's provided all the links and visuals you need so ANY type of learner can do it!!  I appreciated having it to download in a PDF so I can go back to it any time, plus the books and ACTUAL healing sessions so you see, know and understand the whole process even better!!Highly recommend to ANYONE looking to change and make not only their life... but everyone's around them better as well!!" - E.J. / Florida

The Certificate of Mastery Program includes 2 best-selling ebooks and 2 clearing audios plus written & video instructions, AND one-on-one time with Jimmy ALL for about the cost of a single 1-hr session! This online course is for anyone who is familiar with OR new to "fishing" and is ready to dive into the deep end & get results that are beyond the ordinary! It includes The Tackle Box & The Dowser's Handbook ebooks PLUS 2 MP3s "Clearing Dark Energies" & "Increasing Your Intuition" to help clear, strengthen and prepare your energy field for optimal “fishing” results. This is a work-at-your-own-pace curriculum that will TEACH & CLEAR you at the same time! In under 2wks you will be finished with the program and ready to fish on your own with greater results! Level II offers Practitioner Certification for those who qualify.

LEARN MORE HERE

For those who aren't familiar, here's the list of the MyBeliefWorks™ audio library. 

Find a topic that addresses your issue(s), click on the link to read more. We had a lot of help downloading & channeling these over the years & they keep getting better. Don't forget... you can share these with you immediate friends and family.

Abundance Abuse Addiction Body Scan: Head to Toe COVID-19 Daily GPS Reset Dark Energies/Fears Decision Making Diet & Exercise Education & Learning Family & Relatives The Gold Coin Healing Physical Body Healing Mental Stress Holiday Stress

Increasing Intuition IRS & Tax Time Love & Romance Money Mindset Moving Forward Pain Relief Pet Healing Sales & Success Improving Sex Improving Sleep Traveling w/Ease Work & Career Weight Loss Windfall Youth & Vitality

TGIFunny

Share

Tweet

Forward

Pinterest

Jimmy Mack | Appointments Skype: Jimmy.Mack55 Clearwater Florida USA Book a 15 minute session Book a 30 minute session Book a 60 minute session ​ ​​Transformational Healing of Body, Mind​ & Spirit, People, Places, Pets & Situations!​ ​ Download the My Liquid Fish® Starter Kit (*Updated May 2019) Audio MP3 Downloads​ and books​ to improve your life! Get Certified in ​My Liquid Fish® Change Made Simple® Watch Free Videos on YouTube Weekly Radio Show Archives Shop for ​Supplements ​ http://www.jimmymackhealingshop.com www.jimmymackhealing.com Copyright ©1998-2020 All Rights Reserved  

-------------------------------------------------- TGIW newsletter managed by: Sandy Bidinger Digital Marketing Specialist at SMBeConnected Solutions www.smbeconnected.com  

Stay connected!

  Our mailing address is: Clearwater Florida 33756 USA

[365dailyaffirmations]

TGIWednesday and is it just you?

TGIWednesday News

Here's my question... is it you and only you? Lately I have come across a lot of folks who are not fully present in their bodies for obvious reasons with all the Covid-19 issues and social distancing/home alone etc. Worse than that, some folks with multiple other entities in their bodies.  At face value it sounds kookee when I say it and read it, but it is real as real can get.  I had a client just the other day with crying/raging panic and after we cleared her of the other critters, she was laughing.  All this took place in a minute.  I know of no other FASTER modality.  So as they say, “check yourself before you wreck yourself” and use your fingers/pendulum or standing sway testing and make sure there is only you in your body.  Make the statement, "I (insert your birth name here) am the only being in this body."  Clear/fish as needed and believe me it can make a huge difference.  I even did it for my cat who was hiding and acting aloof and an hour later he got on the bed and licked my hand!  He is such a dude.  I love it and I love what we do and what we’re a part of... "regular folks" must be bored with out knowing all the fun stuff happening underneath it all...  and fyi, if you’re reading this, you’re not regular by any means :) Don’t forget to join us for our upcoming LIVE Zoom event scheduled for NEXT WEDNESDAY APRIL 29th.  I mentioned on the call last month that the next one would be on immunity but instead wound up releasing the Transcending Covid-19 Crisis audio which is now available in the shop.  In light of where things are focused now, we've updated the theme for this month to be about breaking through the energetic, emotional, financial barriers associated with the global lockdown. The Plandemic:  Moving Forward in Life After Covid-19   Wed April 29th - 30 minutes - $22 7:30 Eastern / 4:30 Pacific Replay sent to ALL who are registered Click here to sign up for the Zoom event:  https://calendly.com/jimmymackhealing/the-plandemic We want to turn on your switches for moving forward with inspiration, creativity, good health, improved relationships, making more money all in an effort to uplift you and help contribute to you obtaining your goals. Let's work together to get the best out of 2020!

What are your top five things you'd like to achieve once we're past quarantine and stay-at-home orders? Registered participants can email us at support@jimmymackhealing.com  and we'll include them in this call. 

Darius Season 19 Pkg B or C buyers can register for the live call for free. Go to the link on your special offer download page or wait and download the replay from that same page after the call. 

TGIWednesday Download

~ BEING FULLY PRESENT IN YOUR BODY~ I believe, think, know and feel I am the only being in this body. I am ready, willing and able to just be me linked to the power of the infinite. I know when, where, how and why to remain grounded, steadfast, and strong. I am receiving steady profound, direct and pure guidance from the one true source here and now in all languages and throughout all time lines and so it is.     

LIVE Appearances - Free Healing

Wed. May 13th The Alara Canfield Show  - Register Here Thurs. May 21st Soul Talk with Patty Malek - Register Here Mon. June 22nd - Straight Talk for the Soul w/ Cari Murphy - Register Here Thurs. July 30th - Your Divine Uniqueness with host Moncef Akfir - Register Here

Fish Food 

The Daily Bread To Feed The Fish

Tell The Fish: 365 Daily Inspirations & Affirmations

APRIL 22nd "Today I will notice what is unusual, what shows up and what cannot be explained.  I will see the positive in the unusual, a promising future in the mystical.  I will believe that bigger and better days are ahead of me now."

From the Fish Box

"Hi Darius,  I just wanted to reach out to you and say THANK YOU for the opportunity to work with Jimmy Mack!  I am SO excited to tell you that not only have I received my freedom from past binding illnesses BUT I am now moving on to my calling TO BE A HEALER!  Thank you, Thank you, Thank you!!" - Mary Jo M. / NY "I just had my one on one session today. Part of my preparation was to listen to your "Money Windfall" mp3 which specifically mentioned  "Mail box Money". Beyond my wildest expectations I received today $1,500...00 for Class Action Settlement. Thank you & Yahoooo... Big Hug," - Ruth Jean 

The Jimmy Mack Healing Radio Show

EVERY TUESDAY at 9pm EDT / 6pm PDT CALL (206) 806-9965 https://www.freeconferencecall.com/wall/goldylocksproductions **Starting in May, the LIVE radio show MOVES to 4pm Eastern/1pm Pacific

Click Here for Previous Weeks' Show and a full archive of past guests & replays.

Yesterday's Show - Special Guest  Mark Hernandez http://www.peopleandpetsenergetics.com Healer and Intuitive Message

April 28th Rev Debbie Dienstbier Visit her Facebook page Our resident trans medium communications with your loved ones in spirit.

The Jimmy Mack Healing Show is LIVE on Tuesday Nights at 9pm EDT  If you want to Listen in only, go to this website: https://www.freeconferencecall.com/wall/goldylocksproductions OR If you want to call in & ask a question CALL (206) 806-9965 No need to press #1, just dial in and you'll be in the queue. If the Call in Number above doesn’t seem to work, please use this back up Call in Number: (425) 535-9149 when prompted, enter 206.806.9965 followed by #  International Callers, click the link below for the International call in list for your country.  If you're using the Free Conference Call App, it automatically re-routes the best call In number for you.  Please unblock your phone number if you wish to speak with Jimmy and or his guest host. Blocked, Restricted and Private Callers are not brought on air.

Sessions at the Tampa Office 

FRIDAY KODAWARI YOGA STUDIOS  *Appointments are either phone or Skype until further notice   

I'm scheduling 15 and 30 minute appointments at Kodawari Yoga Studios from 10am-2pm EVERY FRIDAY.*IMPT! You must call Kodawari directly to schedule times and dates with them AND pay them directly at the front desk prior to your appointment Call Kodawari's front desk directly to schedule (813) 773-4017 and pay at the concierge desk PRIOR  to your appointment - 15 minutes 38$ or 30 minutes 68$. 3965 Henderson Blvd Suite C Tampa (813) 773-4017 http://www.kodawariyoga.com/  

Receive 24/7 Prayers from Jimmy

Nightly prayers include COVID-19 known as the Coronavirus. Each night we work on scrambling the frequency for everyone on the prayer list. Your name will be added to a special VIP Prayer list where Jimmy will use his intelligent computer software, src4you which runs 24/7, to delete the negative and increase the strength of the positive creating a higher probability of favorable outcomes for you.  

In addition, throughout the full 30-days, Jimmy will be dialing into your energetic signature each day upon rising and make certain that you are a clear yes, unclear to no and running forward before you start your day. He is doing the heavy lifting for you around 3am NY time while most of you are asleep in order to smooth out your way and increase your most favorable life outcomes.

The 30-day service is now being offered exclusively  and you also have the option of selecting an ongoing subscription ($95/month) which is managed through PayPal only.

Upon written email request, for each new order we offer a one-time email analysis via the intelligent healing software that Jimmy uses on your behalf.  Most clients have had amazing results and outcomes!

You can add yourself and those living in your immediate household and yes you can include pets! Merely include everyone’s names and Jimmy will add them to his daily prayers. *NOTE if the MDP Service was purchased via a special telesummit or radio show offer, prayers will be limited to BUYER ONLY - and will not include family members or pets.

You can run this monthly and stop at any time after the 30 days is up, you will have the opportunity to renew and update your list each month but are under no obligation. I believe you will experience magical transformations and make progress every day! 

Sign Up for 30-Days - $99

**Can't See The Full Email? Click Here to View Online**

Go deep sea "fishing" with Jimmy!

Level 1 is open to ANYONE at anytime! All Mastery Students:  Check your email & Login to view all the newly upgraded content including new books and audios!    

"Jimmy's My Liquid Fish Change Made Simple program is AMAZING!!! He gives you not only videos so you can see the changes within people, but also the books he's written as well! On top of that he's provided all the links and visuals you need so ANY type of learner can do it!!  I appreciated having it to download in a PDF so I can go back to it any time, plus the books and ACTUAL healing sessions so you see, know and understand the whole process even better!!Highly recommend to ANYONE looking to change and make not only their life... but everyone's around them better as well!!" - E.J. / Florida

The Certificate of Mastery Program includes 2 best-selling ebooks and 2 clearing audios plus written & video instructions, AND one-on-one time with Jimmy ALL for about the cost of a single 1-hr session! This online course is for anyone who is familiar with OR new to "fishing" and is ready to dive into the deep end & get results that are beyond the ordinary! It includes The Tackle Box & The Dowser's Handbook ebooks PLUS 2 MP3s "Clearing Dark Energies" & "Increasing Your Intuition" to help clear, strengthen and prepare your energy field for optimal “fishing” results. This is a work-at-your-own-pace curriculum that will TEACH & CLEAR you at the same time! In under 2wks you will be finished with the program and ready to fish on your own with greater results! Level II offers Practitioner Certification for those who qualify.

LEARN MORE HERE

For those who aren't familiar, here's the list of the MyBeliefWorks™ audio library. 

Find a topic that addresses your issue(s), click on the link to read more. We had a lot of help downloading & channeling these over the years & they keep getting better. Don't forget... you can share these with you immediate friends and family.

Abundance Abuse Addiction Body Scan: Head to Toe COVID-19 Daily GPS Reset Dark Energies/Fears Decision Making Diet & Exercise Education & Learning Family & Relatives The Gold Coin Healing Physical Body Healing Mental Stress Holiday Stress

Increasing Intuition IRS & Tax Time Love & Romance Money Mindset Moving Forward Pain Relief Pet Healing Sales & Success Improving Sex Improving Sleep Traveling w/Ease Work & Career Weight Loss Windfall Youth & Vitality

TGIFunny

Share

Tweet

Forward

Pinterest

Jimmy Mack | Appointments Skype: Jimmy.Mack55 Clearwater Florida USA Book a 15 minute session Book a 30 minute session Book a 60 minute session ​ ​​Transformational Healing of Body, Mind​ & Spirit, People, Places, Pets & Situations!​ ​ Download the My Liquid Fish® Starter Kit (*Updated May 2019) Audio MP3 Downloads​ and books​ to improve your life! Get Certified in ​My Liquid Fish® Change Made Simple® Watch Free Videos on YouTube Weekly Radio Show Archives Shop for ​Supplements ​ http://www.jimmymackhealingshop.com www.jimmymackhealing.com Copyright ©1998-2020 All Rights Reserved  

-------------------------------------------------- TGIW newsletter managed by: Sandy Bidinger Digital Marketing Specialist at SMBeConnected Solutions www.smbeconnected.com  

Stay connected!

  Our mailing address is: Clearwater Florida 33756 USA

[advancedthetapractitioner]

TGIWednesday and is it just you?

TGIWednesday News

Here's my question... is it you and only you? Lately I have come across a lot of folks who are not fully present in their bodies for obvious reasons with all the Covid-19 issues and social distancing/home alone etc. Worse than that, some folks with multiple other entities in their bodies.  At face value it sounds kookee when I say it and read it, but it is real as real can get.  I had a client just the other day with crying/raging panic and after we cleared her of the other critters, she was laughing.  All this took place in a minute.  I know of no other FASTER modality.  So as they say, “check yourself before you wreck yourself” and use your fingers/pendulum or standing sway testing and make sure there is only you in your body.  Make the statement, "I (insert your birth name here) am the only being in this body."  Clear/fish as needed and believe me it can make a huge difference.  I even did it for my cat who was hiding and acting aloof and an hour later he got on the bed and licked my hand!  He is such a dude.  I love it and I love what we do and what we’re a part of... "regular folks" must be bored with out knowing all the fun stuff happening underneath it all...  and fyi, if you’re reading this, you’re not regular by any means :) Don’t forget to join us for our upcoming LIVE Zoom event scheduled for NEXT WEDNESDAY APRIL 29th.  I mentioned on the call last month that the next one would be on immunity but instead wound up releasing the Transcending Covid-19 Crisis audio which is now available in the shop.  In light of where things are focused now, we've updated the theme for this month to be about breaking through the energetic, emotional, financial barriers associated with the global lockdown. The Plandemic:  Moving Forward in Life After Covid-19   Wed April 29th - 30 minutes - $22 7:30 Eastern / 4:30 Pacific Replay sent to ALL who are registered Click here to sign up for the Zoom event:  https://calendly.com/jimmymackhealing/the-plandemic We want to turn on your switches for moving forward with inspiration, creativity, good health, improved relationships, making more money all in an effort to uplift you and help contribute to you obtaining your goals. Let's work together to get the best out of 2020!

What are your top five things you'd like to achieve once we're past quarantine and stay-at-home orders? Registered participants can email us at support@jimmymackhealing.com  and we'll include them in this call. 

Darius Season 19 Pkg B or C buyers can register for the live call for free. Go to the link on your special offer download page or wait and download the replay from that same page after the call. 

TGIWednesday Download

~ BEING FULLY PRESENT IN YOUR BODY~ I believe, think, know and feel I am the only being in this body. I am ready, willing and able to just be me linked to the power of the infinite. I know when, where, how and why to remain grounded, steadfast, and strong. I am receiving steady profound, direct and pure guidance from the one true source here and now in all languages and throughout all time lines and so it is.     

LIVE Appearances - Free Healing

Wed. May 13th The Alara Canfield Show  - Register Here Thurs. May 21st Soul Talk with Patty Malek - Register Here Mon. June 22nd - Straight Talk for the Soul w/ Cari Murphy - Register Here Thurs. July 30th - Your Divine Uniqueness with host Moncef Akfir - Register Here

Fish Food 

The Daily Bread To Feed The Fish

Tell The Fish: 365 Daily Inspirations & Affirmations

APRIL 22nd "Today I will notice what is unusual, what shows up and what cannot be explained.  I will see the positive in the unusual, a promising future in the mystical.  I will believe that bigger and better days are ahead of me now."

From the Fish Box

"Hi Darius,  I just wanted to reach out to you and say THANK YOU for the opportunity to work with Jimmy Mack!  I am SO excited to tell you that not only have I received my freedom from past binding illnesses BUT I am now moving on to my calling TO BE A HEALER!  Thank you, Thank you, Thank you!!" - Mary Jo M. / NY "I just had my one on one session today. Part of my preparation was to listen to your "Money Windfall" mp3 which specifically mentioned  "Mail box Money". Beyond my wildest expectations I received today $1,500...00 for Class Action Settlement. Thank you & Yahoooo... Big Hug," - Ruth Jean 

The Jimmy Mack Healing Radio Show

EVERY TUESDAY at 9pm EDT / 6pm PDT CALL (206) 806-9965 https://www.freeconferencecall.com/wall/goldylocksproductions **Starting in May, the LIVE radio show MOVES to 4pm Eastern/1pm Pacific

Click Here for Previous Weeks' Show and a full archive of past guests & replays.

Yesterday's Show - Special Guest  Mark Hernandez http://www.peopleandpetsenergetics.com Healer and Intuitive Message

April 28th Rev Debbie Dienstbier Visit her Facebook page Our resident trans medium communications with your loved ones in spirit.

The Jimmy Mack Healing Show is LIVE on Tuesday Nights at 9pm EDT  If you want to Listen in only, go to this website: https://www.freeconferencecall.com/wall/goldylocksproductions OR If you want to call in & ask a question CALL (206) 806-9965 No need to press #1, just dial in and you'll be in the queue. If the Call in Number above doesn’t seem to work, please use this back up Call in Number: (425) 535-9149 when prompted, enter 206.806.9965 followed by #  International Callers, click the link below for the International call in list for your country.  If you're using the Free Conference Call App, it automatically re-routes the best call In number for you.  Please unblock your phone number if you wish to speak with Jimmy and or his guest host. Blocked, Restricted and Private Callers are not brought on air.

Sessions at the Tampa Office 

FRIDAY KODAWARI YOGA STUDIOS  *Appointments are either phone or Skype until further notice   

I'm scheduling 15 and 30 minute appointments at Kodawari Yoga Studios from 10am-2pm EVERY FRIDAY.*IMPT! You must call Kodawari directly to schedule times and dates with them AND pay them directly at the front desk prior to your appointment Call Kodawari's front desk directly to schedule (813) 773-4017 and pay at the concierge desk PRIOR  to your appointment - 15 minutes 38$ or 30 minutes 68$. 3965 Henderson Blvd Suite C Tampa (813) 773-4017 http://www.kodawariyoga.com/  

Receive 24/7 Prayers from Jimmy

Nightly prayers include COVID-19 known as the Coronavirus. Each night we work on scrambling the frequency for everyone on the prayer list. Your name will be added to a special VIP Prayer list where Jimmy will use his intelligent computer software, src4you which runs 24/7, to delete the negative and increase the strength of the positive creating a higher probability of favorable outcomes for you.  

In addition, throughout the full 30-days, Jimmy will be dialing into your energetic signature each day upon rising and make certain that you are a clear yes, unclear to no and running forward before you start your day. He is doing the heavy lifting for you around 3am NY time while most of you are asleep in order to smooth out your way and increase your most favorable life outcomes.

The 30-day service is now being offered exclusively  and you also have the option of selecting an ongoing subscription ($95/month) which is managed through PayPal only.

Upon written email request, for each new order we offer a one-time email analysis via the intelligent healing software that Jimmy uses on your behalf.  Most clients have had amazing results and outcomes!

You can add yourself and those living in your immediate household and yes you can include pets! Merely include everyone’s names and Jimmy will add them to his daily prayers. *NOTE if the MDP Service was purchased via a special telesummit or radio show offer, prayers will be limited to BUYER ONLY - and will not include family members or pets.

You can run this monthly and stop at any time after the 30 days is up, you will have the opportunity to renew and update your list each month but are under no obligation. I believe you will experience magical transformations and make progress every day! 

Sign Up for 30-Days - $99

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Go deep sea "fishing" with Jimmy!

Level 1 is open to ANYONE at anytime! All Mastery Students:  Check your email & Login to view all the newly upgraded content including new books and audios!    

"Jimmy's My Liquid Fish Change Made Simple program is AMAZING!!! He gives you not only videos so you can see the changes within people, but also the books he's written as well! On top of that he's provided all the links and visuals you need so ANY type of learner can do it!!  I appreciated having it to download in a PDF so I can go back to it any time, plus the books and ACTUAL healing sessions so you see, know and understand the whole process even better!!Highly recommend to ANYONE looking to change and make not only their life... but everyone's around them better as well!!" - E.J. / Florida

The Certificate of Mastery Program includes 2 best-selling ebooks and 2 clearing audios plus written & video instructions, AND one-on-one time with Jimmy ALL for about the cost of a single 1-hr session! This online course is for anyone who is familiar with OR new to "fishing" and is ready to dive into the deep end & get results that are beyond the ordinary! It includes The Tackle Box & The Dowser's Handbook ebooks PLUS 2 MP3s "Clearing Dark Energies" & "Increasing Your Intuition" to help clear, strengthen and prepare your energy field for optimal “fishing” results. This is a work-at-your-own-pace curriculum that will TEACH & CLEAR you at the same time! In under 2wks you will be finished with the program and ready to fish on your own with greater results! Level II offers Practitioner Certification for those who qualify.

LEARN MORE HERE

For those who aren't familiar, here's the list of the MyBeliefWorks™ audio library. 

Find a topic that addresses your issue(s), click on the link to read more. We had a lot of help downloading & channeling these over the years & they keep getting better. Don't forget... you can share these with you immediate friends and family.

Abundance Abuse Addiction Body Scan: Head to Toe COVID-19 Daily GPS Reset Dark Energies/Fears Decision Making Diet & Exercise Education & Learning Family & Relatives The Gold Coin Healing Physical Body Healing Mental Stress Holiday Stress

Increasing Intuition IRS & Tax Time Love & Romance Money Mindset Moving Forward Pain Relief Pet Healing Sales & Success Improving Sex Improving Sleep Traveling w/Ease Work & Career Weight Loss Windfall Youth & Vitality

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Jimmy Mack | Appointments Skype: Jimmy.Mack55 Clearwater Florida USA Book a 15 minute session Book a 30 minute session Book a 60 minute session ​ ​​Transformational Healing of Body, Mind​ & Spirit, People, Places, Pets & Situations!​ ​ Download the My Liquid Fish® Starter Kit (*Updated May 2019) Audio MP3 Downloads​ and books​ to improve your life! Get Certified in ​My Liquid Fish® Change Made Simple® Watch Free Videos on YouTube Weekly Radio Show Archives Shop for ​Supplements ​ http://www.jimmymackhealingshop.com www.jimmymackhealing.com Copyright ©1998-2020 All Rights Reserved  

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[themikithornburg]

School Days (Ring Ring Goes the Bell)

I've been seeing a few memes featuring parents driven to drink by their sudden experience of home-schooling their kids. Not too many memes, I should add. It's probably not all that funny.

So, something occurred to me this morning, and I'm going to pass it on for what it's worth.

Almost every K-12 public school in the US is going to be closed for the rest of this school year, and may still be closed next fall. For the summer months, kids like adults will mostly be confined to their homes. During the school term some will be engaged in distance or on-line learning through their schools, but not all of them will have this advantage (if advantage it is). Some parents are trying their hands at home-schooling, and – if the Facebook memes I've been seeing reflect even some of these parents' experience – this is not as easy as many of them might have thought it would be. If nothing else, they'll come away with a new respect for teachers.

But I wonder if there isn't an opening here for some enterprising and progressive-minded educators (and others) to get together online, develop a curriculum including reading lists, lesson plans, etc., and offer it free of charge to some of these new home-schooling parents. I'm sure there are things like this out there and available, but even so there's room for another, especially one tailored especially for this year and for families who have been forced into the situation rather than choosing and planning for it. This can start out small, with your own families. But it could grow. There's a real need.

Considering many of the issues we've been concerned about for years – climate change and the environment for a start, racism and racial equity, the function of government, and the list goes on – I think most of us have little doubt that schools could and should have been doing more for a long time to combat the pervasive and terrifying ignorance in evidence through large swaths of our country. This is not to cast blame on the schools themselves, nor on university departments of education, let alone on individual teachers; once a system is in place, it's almost impossible to change or dislodge. But now that the system is faltering, for a time at least, we have a unique opportunity to set something better in motion.

Here are a few ideas I've had about what might be done to some effect:

Teach Survival. Lessons in basic survival will be better late than never for too many kids (and parents), but they'll have the advantage of being lessons whose practicality is obvious. Start where the students are. Think about safety, nutrition, physical and mental health. Think about what challenges could present themselves.

Teach Critical Reading, Listening, and Viewing. What is bias? Why might the author or presenter of a text, advertisement, video, etc., want to make you feel a certain way or believe a certain thing? Advertisements are an obvious place to start.

Teach Logical Thinking. How – and why – to separate intellect from emotion. How to judge if a statement or argument is valid. Children as young as six or seven (and some even younger) can begin to grasp the concepts of logic, but don't push too hard. With older kids – push harder. Logical fallacies can be persuasive, and there are clever persuaders out there who profit from keeping us from thinking about thinking.

Teach Ethics. Almost everyone wants to do the right thing, but it's often hard to decide what that is. Too often we confuse ethics with "morals" – i.e., we confuse what is right with what is the traditional, agreed-upon thing to do in any given situation. Too often we confuse ethics with religion. Personally, I'd teach ethics with fictional examples, characters who must make hard choices. Do they make the right choice? Why, or why not?

Teach History. Many students find history boring, and one reason is that it's almost always badly presented in school texts. Find unbiased sources if possible. (Howard Zinn's A People's History of the United States is one. Chris Harman's A People's History of the World is another. Both are easily available online or off.)

Use books, videos, sources you have available, including on television and the internet. Take advantage of the fact that you know your children and can move at their pace. Then challenge them to increase their pace. Kids are hard-wired to learn things and to want to learn. Many kids don't do well in school, or don't like school, because it moves at a pace either too fast or too slow for them. Some things you'll be learning with your kids, which will make you a better teacher if you let them see you're in this with them, not an all-knowing authority but a fellow student.

I'm sure you'll think of more ideas. Share them!

And for anyone (everyone!) not old enough to get what that title is about, here you go: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DHG5-GxI_Es

[aleatoryalarmalligator]

Life Story Part 51

It was the first day of school at the Paradise Creek Regional Alternative School, and I walked into a room full of people I had never met. There was never more than three classes going on at any one time, and often times there was only one real core class of about 20-30 students. Last hour did bring about fifteen more students who spent their days at the regular high school, and would drop into the alternative school to get extra credits. We didn't get passed around through seven classes as day like we did at the public school, there were only three – each class being two hours long. And the building was quite small. It felt weird being in this classroom. Even though I had planned to be in a new school for the last year, it was hard to fathom how I got to that place.

What I had been hoping, and what I had soon learned to be incorrect, was that the alternative school would be very lax about what they expected of you and I wouldn't have to try or anything, since I hadn't truly tried in school for years – even when I brought my grades up, it wasn't with much enthusiasm or interest in doing a good job. It seemed to me early on that this might have been the case, after all, there was no homework, and they weren't overly concerned with what you ate, or wore or when you went to the bathroom so long as you weren't obscene about it. But what I soon learned, was that this school actually expected a lot.

Our primary teacher was named Mike. Mike was married to the counselor of the school, Jenni. When he introduced himself to the class, it was very hard for me to believe he was a teacher. For one thing, he had hair down to his back, neatly put into a ponytail – but still much longer than I had ever seen any other teacher have. Had he walked into the school down in Kendrick, the teachers and the students alike would have been in complete shock. His standards were also very high, and he was overflowing with passion for knowledge. We weren't going to learn anything from a textbook. Instead, he would have us read articles or small books, and we would discuss this – but most of this knowledge resided freshly in his mind. He was very formal – and not so formal at the same time. Nothing weirded him out, but he didn't seem to falter very easily in conversation. And he didn't dismiss anyone. I guess I had been so used to being dismissed in school that it took me by shock that he expected answers from me, and for me to turn in papers at the end of class just like he expected it of everyone else. He didn't pretend that anyone wasn't there, nor did he make strong attempts at shaming or belittling anyone. He was very similar to the writer John Green in some ways.

This was very difficult for me to take. It should have been completely expected on my part, but I was overall stunned to find that he actually wanted everyone, me included (of all people) to participate on the very first day. And what he expected of me was very challenging – at the time at least. He told everyone in the class that we were to write two pages explaining our opinions on 'Do We Believe History is Worthwhile?' And after we wrote it, we were to stand up and read allowed what we had written. This baffled me and caused me to do mental somersaults. Why did he expect me to answer this?? In Kendrick, they had never wanted us to give personal answers to anything. They had discouraged us from asking why, or having us come up with philosophical responses to life. And for all the opinions I upheld and tossed around in conversation at the lunch table, I had never really been challenged to explain why I believed something to be true.

For one, it just wasn't the language of my upbringing. My father was an intelligent person in many respects, but he loathed social issues and questions that pierced the heart of why people do anything. My mother had no discipline of thought whatsoever and only seemed to follow a stream of egotistical and fantastical consciousness that lead nowhere. Both of them did their jobs well, and for them their jobs were all they ever took the time out to learn how to do – not why they did it. They didn't want to look outside of themselves and wonder why they did anything, or within themselves too deeply either. And it wasn't the language of the community I grew up in – it by and large is not the language of the working class even though it definitely should be, or of the school I grew up in – the curriculum, or of my friends and personal relations. So throughout my entire life, even though I had been outside the box in my observations, I had in most ways, been living through a filter, with limitations and assumptions that I never intended or even understood could be challenged. I know that sounds strange, but you would be amazed what dries up and disappears when nobody expects something of you, and perhaps it was challenging and maybe even painful for me to even let myself ask that question in certain parts of my own life.

Just the first two hours were hell. I was angry, and I didn't know why. I wanted to rebel, but there was no reason to. It had always been okay for me to be a bad student in the other school. It was my role, and I had a right to be angry within that role. And I had found a home in that place. It gave me a sense of entitlement to a degree. As long as I was in a position to be in the defensive all the time, I never had to think about making anything better of myself. But nobody was being rude to me in any way. The other students seemed to be either very open minded and somewhat mature for their age, or their lives were plagued by real issues, like being still in school and raising a baby, or living in far more intolerable and abusive circumstances than I could really fathom. Nobody wanted to bring me down. Nobody was kicking my chair, or giving me weird looks. It was strange, but in my observations, I felt like without realizing it, I had grown to expect a mild bit of hostility from people. I welcomed it. I hadn't egged it on or anything, but when nobody seemed to be reacting to me, it was hard for me to know who to be. I was frustrated that someone would even ask me a question like this. I couldn't explain why. I was just angry, and internally combusting as I stared down at a blank page.

I also had/'have enormous public speaking anxiety, and the very act of standing up in front of these people – on my first day especially was beyond mortifying. I had been decent when I understood my place with everyone in the smaller school. I had always been very anxious about standing up and speaking, but it was so much easier to do when I knew I was the one that was meant to ruffle feathers. Here, everyone looked at me like they wanted to know what I had to say, or were perhaps bored, but didn't have anything against me. That was hard. I realize that I had somehow formed a really messed up ego around the identity that I had become. As much as I craved change, I didn't feel like I had any control over anyone, and that made me want to revert. I ended up writing something. I wrote that history was not worthy of study. I knew that the cliché answer from most people would be that it was of course worthy of study, in order to not repeat the mistakes of the past and such. I also had always found memorizing dates and names to be arduous and boring. I was also very Ayn Rand during that time. This isn't to say that Ayn Rand didn't believe in studying history (she probably did but I am not going to fact check it). I had never read her, but much of her beliefs and ideas where things that I believed in a foggier way back in those days. I feel like I understand her – even though I now disagree with just about everything she stands for.

I know myself well enough now to know that I was responding to my abuse in a certain way. It is easier to believe that everything is fit for the fittest, might makes right, you have to crack some eggs if you want to make an omelet. Very capitalistic. You don't question – you do – and the merit of what you do will come back to you in the form of the currency of satisfaction and pleasure. You place your will upon the world around you, and if it is strong enough the world will bend to you. There is no room for weakness. Weakness gets beaten out of you, or you die. And it is a death you deserve, because there is only power, and being weak is the absence of power.

History seemed empty to me at that moment because it didn't have anything to do with me. I felt like it was a way for the collective consciousness to pity itself. It was society eating itself. You live in the now, and the now is all there is, or ever will be. All you have is an arrow in hand, and you shoot your enemies and you don't look back. You strive for the future, and looking in your rear view mirror was a waste of time. What I wrote was something something far less written than even that set of phrases. And I was the only one in the class that held those views.

It took me forever to write that out. I was nervous. I kept looking at Sarah, subconsciously hoping she would save me from the situation. Sarah wrote something that said that history was both not worth studying, and worthy of study. She didn't want to take a side. My nervousness caused me to start talking and making myself somewhat of a distraction. Mike actually had to tell me to be quiet. He rarely would stand above anyone during class, and instead would stoop down to talk to you. And he never sat, because it was painful. He was a fan of extreme ski boarding in the winters and he had had a few accidents on the slopes that had caused him to damage his nerves and be in a lot of pain. So he looked mildly fit and athletic, but he was in fact, stiff as a board for the most part. Nonetheless, he would stoop down to talk to all the students at face level. It was kind of unnerving. It was psychologically off putting. I felt like he was taking power away from me being doing that. And for that situation, I actually made Mike have to almost separate Sarah and I to keep me quiet. It was dumb, but I was responding so nervously, I had this need to rebel against what people told me to do, no matter how reasonable, and I didn't seem to know myself well enough to know why.

I eventually went up and read my essay, it was hard, if not impossible for me to look at the other students in the class. I had no reason to hate any of them. Hating people had always made it easier, but there was no reason for that here. They seemed to abide by some higher order in this room, and I felt like an outside to it.  If anything, I was the one that was actually the jerk. I need the dysfunction in order to function. I was judging them and responding more erratically to their basic act of respect – just sitting there and listening. Throughout the speech, I was so nervous, and psychologically in a state of chaos, I actually started laughing at what I had written – as I was used to other people laughing at me. But nobody laughed with me, and I felt like a deranged lunatic with an enormous and yet fragile ego.

Lunch was a full hour and twenty minutes. It was very nice by comparison to the stuffy lunch rooms of my youth with the angrily hostile diseased looks on their face as they piled slop onto your trays. You could just sit at the computers and check your email or do whatever. Or you could leave class altogether and go to a restaurant. There was no lunch room per say, but rather just a kitchen. And everyday the school made coffee cake, and everyone could have some. There was also bagels, yogurt, and a number of other foods that we could all take if we were feeling peckish. I was still very heavily on a diet, but it was nearly impossible for me to resist the coffee cakes after awhile.

I was also very anxious throughout the day because I didn't feel like I was getting adequate exercise just sitting in the desks all day. So I began taking more diet pills. By the last hour, I ended up realizing that I had taken too many. My heart and thoughts were racing and it hurt to keep still. What's more, I had taken one of my pills in the bathrooms without any water to wash it down. I hadn't realized it fully, but the pill had actually gotten trapped inside of my throat. Slowly, the gel melted away, but as soon as that happened the dust within the capsule would be released. So as I was sitting at the desk, next to this big dark haired guy named Matthew, I ended up coughing and dust started flying out of my mouth. It was pretty embarrassing. Matthew looked at me sort of frightened. I imagine what I had coughed had looked like a billow of smoke.

And then there was this boy named Lyndon that we ended up talking to quite a bit at first. Moscow was a much different place than either Lewiston or any of the small surrounding places. As such, there were small countercultures in Moscow that you wouldn't generally find anywhere else. Famously, one of these countercultures was this extreme group of nerdy young men mostly – there might have been a small handful of girls in the group. These extreme nerd factions were further divided between if each one was a Pirate or a Ninja. I believe this divide has it's roots in computer hacking, though I have never been fully clear on that and have not bothered to look. Both sides seemed identical to me, personally. For one, most of the outlandish ones kept a very similar look, of wearing a sort of video game style long black jacket that went down to their knees, the more straps and buttons the better. All of them looked like they were trying to be some kind of combination of The Crow and The Good, the Bad and the Ugly. And they were all very obsessed with the same things. Every last one of them was a fan of anime, and all of them seemed teeming with an obsession for hentai in particular. You got the feeling when you were around them that they wanted girls in their age bracket to act like stupid hentai woman-babies, since that was what they truly found attractive. Aside from these, these Ninjas and Pirates would set up game days where they would stay up for five days straight playing the exact same game on different screens. It was almost like an opium den. You would theoretically walk in, and there would be people crashed all over the floors, screens everywhere. Somehow they had hooked their consoles together. I even heard that occasionally they would piss in jars just to avoid having to leave their game even for a moment.

Lyndon came up to us and started talking to us very early on. He looked strange, with his combat boots and black jacket clad in all sorts of useless belts and such. We kind of liked him well enough at first – mainly because he was quite friendly in approaching us, and I was feeling rather alienated, so someone coming up and being friendly was helpful – at least to me. But it soon became clear that he mostly was into Sarah. He wouldn't stop blatantly staring at Sarah's chest. He couldn't even look at her face when she began to speak to him – it was that bad. He almost seemed unashamed of it.  We both tried to ignore it at first, thinking perhaps it looked like what it wasn't.

He mostly wanted to brag about his car, his father – who was a preacher, and more than anything his anime knowledge – mostly under shallow interpretation, his love for the band Sonata Arctica, Buckethead, and math rock in general, and his childish identity as a Ninja. He actually seemed years behind the two of us mentally. It felt like talking to a spoiled ten year old with neurotic interests. Nonetheless, we agreed to hang out with him that weekend. I had personally made it a goal of mine to start searching for other people who were like me. And maybe Lyndon wasn't so bad after all? So that weekend we agreed to drive up to Moscow to visit.

That weekend rolled around, and we drove up there. I don't remember much about the first half of the visit, only that it was sort of terrible. He just wanted Sarah on her back, basically. He looked at me annoyed wishing I wasn't there. He acted like an expectant child almost. Early on, we ended up going to visit this friend of his, that he always mentioned named Emery. So we drove to Emery's house – which was kinda weird. So, from what I understood, Emery's parent's were loaded and they couldn't really stand living with Emery as his taste, appearance and personality had been so taken over by video games. So they own this half falling apart antique home up in Moscow, it was an old duplex, and the other half was completely fallen apart. The other half, which you had to get to by traveling over loose boards and broken parts of the ceiling was fine to live in. When we got in there, Emery was sort of unfriendly. He talked coldly, as if he were one of the 'serious' anime guys in a show. But in fact, he was twice as spoiled as Lyndon. They were living a fantasy here together, pretending to be anime characters.

They first tried to make us watch this anime show on this tiny television they had set up. The room smelled of sweaty bachelor, and the sitting arrangement was awkward. It seemed like it was a techno anime show where there was data and such – and school girls of course. I failed to be enthralled by it. After that, Lyndon and Emery mostly just talked to each other. Emery looked at me almost with hostility the whole time. They wanted Sarah, but only as an anime cartoon girl who would strip for them and blush – which Sarah was not. Sarah and I convinced them that we wanted to go to the mall – mostly to get out of this creepy dark building with these two guys who were making us feel kind of sick. It wasn't that I really hated either one of them, but there was just something gross about them.

We went into the mall, and they came with us. Sarah and I started acting more ourselves and going into stores we wanted to go into, and I could tell Emery and Lyndon were annoyed by this. They actually looked embarrassed by us, and wouldn't get anywhere near us. I couldn't help noticing just how decked out Emery was. He was wearing what had to be, hundreds of dollars in fancy belts, boots, coat and hat – all to look like an anime character. He might have even been carrying fake weaponry even.

When we finally made it out of there, neither one of us had had a true chance to talk about what we were thinking. For the good majority of that day, we mostly just kept to ourselves and went along with whatever we were doing. I think perhaps we were both afraid that the other might still think Lyndon was a good guy and didn't want to hurt the other person's feelings. But I just told Sarah that I still felt gross from being in Emery's strange little cave, and she suddenly broke out wholeheartedly in agreement. We both spent the rest of the car ride home explaining and interpreting what we had just done all day and what we had both seen. It was obvious at this point that Lyndon was just in the market to get in Sarah's pants, though it was also painfully clear that he had zero charm and expected girls to simply fall at his feet because he was Lyndon after all, and he didn't even need any game. And Emery was so lost in the world of being an anime guy that there was no hope for him either. Nobody wanted me there – well, except Sarah. And since they probably just saw me as a fat chick – as most teenage boys will, they had been annoyed that I was there – as they thought they deserved some ridiculous stereotype.

So our first attempt to make friends ended up not going that well. Which was fine. For the rest of the year, I suffered Lyndon's existence more or less. He would start talking at you – mostly to brag about anime characters that he thought were cool. He never even tried to explain why they were funny or cool, or who they were. He would talk to you as though you lived inside his head and already agreed with him, and then he'd get this glint of anger and annoyance when people ever told them something about themselves. For Lyndon, everything was about him. He also intentionally ate as loudly as he could. It was a genuine distraction when we sat in the small computer room to write research essays, and he was intentionally eating obnoxiously – because anime characters that he liked ate loudly. He would slurp and smack animatedly. And he would sometimes and quite often get on the computers and watch his anime shows, or read manga, and he would laugh and talk to the screen. 'DON'T DO IT MASATAKA!' or just some anime character's name. We were all trying to study. I grew to dislike Lyndon very much for the remainder of the time I knew him.

Aside from him, there were a few kids in the class, that I remember. There were a lot of these sorts of girls I had never really known in Kendrick. They love smoking weed, they were super honest about everything, and though mostly very good natured, they had anger issues and probation officers. One girl, I remember, actually had gotten into trouble because of road rage. Someone had done something to piss her off while driving, so when they both stopped at a red light, she had gotten out of her vehicle, opened up their vehicle, dragged them out into the intersection and beat them. Another girl that I remember the best was named Kat. She had been there for years. She knew everyone in Moscow. She was extremely chill all the time, and was able to communicate very well. Most of these kids all listened to a lot of Sublime, Phish, and the Grateful Dead, though some of the angrier girls preferred screamo. So overall, there seemed to be about four subcultures I noticed in Moscow, the nerds – subdivided into the Ninjas and Pirates which I already mentioned, the hippie stoner types, who loved the Grateful Dead bears and were mostly pretty nice – though not really interested in challenging themselves, and then there was a large group of Emo-Screamo types who were extremely  obsessed with whatever it was that Hot Topic was currently selling. The girls all had enormous crushes on the singer of My Chemical Romance. And then there was a skateboarding subculture that I never really knew much about. I imagine it was like the skateboarders of any town.

Aside from Mike and Jenni running things, they had support aids – who would be there to help handle the more full classes. Andre was the one I remember better than any of them, and it was just him and Mary Kay early on. Andre was very different from anyone I had ever met. He was black, and from the south and didn't care what anyone thought of him. Most of the students hated his guts because he at times would become neurotically unhappy and be very cold to most of the students. He had worked at the school years previously, becoming a very close friend to Mike at one point – and in those days I heard stories that he was very friendly and warm towards people. And then he had gone to fight in Afghanistan. When he came back he wasn't the same. And it caused him to not really be able to do certain elements of his job properly. People were frightened to ask him for any sort of assistance.

He did like Sarah and I though. Mostly because we weren't afraid of him. I think some of the fear people had of Andre was because of his skin color, but some of it too was because he yelled a lot. But what we realized was that if Sarah and I both just continued to bravely talk to him rather than act frightened, he was actually a very nice. He cared a lot in some ways, possibly too much. He was the aid for the first and part of the second semesters and then one day, Mike told us that Andre had resigned. I guess they had had a falling out – the two of them. There was a girl in our class who was doing a lot of meth. Mike actually worried about this stuff a lot, and so did Andre. Everyone in this school cared more about the well being of the students than I even imagined any teacher ever actually did. They seemed to be constantly trying to find ways to untap each student's potential like a puzzle in their personality. It became a very psychological thing.

Mike however, had walls. He wouldn't quite allow himself to be really close to the students. Which was confusing because the very nature of his job was to try to reach us, and in so doing he had to be highly professional. Mike could have been a psychologist. But he still had walls. And this one girl doing meth, he didn't feel like he could help her after awhile. He would speak to her, and try to ask her challenging questions about herself, and she would just make up excuses in response. So Mike let go of trying to help her. Andre felt this was wrong to give up on any student, and he felt that Mike's approach to distancing himself from his students was amoral. So the two ended up fighting, and in the end Andre marched out. Nobody missed him but Sarah and I – and there was some reason for that. Him yelling at the students was really unprofessional and in bad keeping with the way the school operated. And some of these students had done nothing wrong. He was fun to talk to for Sarah and I however. We would crack a lot of jokes back and forth. I never really knew him though – only that he loved his young daughter a lot, and that he had his name professionally threaded into his shoes.

The other aid was named Mary Kae, and she in many ways was a silent optimist in every situation. She seemed like a boring happy housewife in many respects, except nothing seemed to shock her or make her flinch. Students would try to make her angry and nothing could. I didn't get to know Mary Kae all that well, but there wasn't that much to know. To anyone at the school, she was more or less and open book and the thing about her that were private seemed incredibly normal overall.

With the hours kept by the new school, I was rarely home to see my father ever. Half the time, and in some cases, almost all the time, I just spent the night at Sarah's and we would get up in the morning together and leave together for school again. By the time we got out, it was six in the afternoon, and we would drive back to Kendrick, eat dinner together and then draw and talk or get into an argument that would dissolve in misery and tears early in the morning, before falling to sleep – getting up and doing it again. I saw my dad maybe four hours a week. Another thing too, was that my older half sister Maria had come back from Florida for the second time, and she had been in a miserable place and had eventually called my father and asked if she could stay in his house with her now four children – Jasmine, Ian, Chantelle and baby JT. I think partially because of my absence, my father said yes. Maria could be the babysitter while I was off at school. She would fill in for me. So during this time, I didn't even need to babysit. It was almost like I wasn't entirely a part of the family unit anymore. And I had never understood what that would be like, but I ended up thriving because of it. It was the first time in my life that I felt like I could actually grow as a person – and there was no family members to bring me down or hurt me. I was away from the repetitive working class lifestyle. I didn't have to worry about my father, because he wasn't there – and he didn't even see me enough to be upset. And after a few months, his angry negative voice that I carried around with me began to fade.

With the family thing all sorted out temporarily in my life and the stress, worry and self monitoring related to that, I was actually able to face myself in a way I had never had a chance to. In many respects, I was sort of radicalized during this year. I thought more about ideas for ideas sake rather than what these ideas meant to me personally. I practiced a lot of abstract thinking. The whole world didn't just start seeming a whole lot bigger to me, it also seemed a whole lot deeper. I learned that you could take just about anything you saw in daily life an analyze it and realize all the connections there were in the world and to yourself. I was able to form a much more in depth aspect to my character than had consciously been there before. Going up to school in Moscow was probably the best decision I ever made.

About a week after I had started school, I was waiting for Sarah to come pick me up from my house, when my father received a phone call. I could hear him weeping and having troubles breathing. My first thoughts were that perhaps his mother had passed away. Grandma Betty was still alive at this point, but she was getting rather old. I had seen her a year before at the family reunion and she had seemed very happy to see everyone, but didn't at times seem that grounded of what was going on. She also had always been a heavy chainsmoker and it was only a matter of time really before that caught up with her.

I was too afraid to see my father crying, so I continued to sit out on the front ledge of the house and pretend that I hadn't heard. I knew I would find out any second anyway, and though many people like to be comforted immediately after something traumatic, nearly as many others would prefer time to compose themselves before facing the rest of the world. My father came out and in a sob explained to me that Patti, his recently exed girlfriend – the one he was doing the Hottest Men of the Lewis-Clark Calendar 2006 for, had just killed herself.  She had come home from the bar, having most likely been dumped by the twenty year old man she was pursuing. Being that she had just turned fifty, she felt ugly and used. She was starving herself terribly, her daughters seemed to hate her (and everything really). And so she got on her car, and hooked up a hose to the exhaust and had suffocated herself. Her best friend found her body three days later.

I can't say that my father has ever been the same after that. I think a lot of things effected him negatively in his life – the death of my baby brother William, the divorces, his breakup with Jody. But something dragged him closer to death when Patti died that way. And there was something less comforting, and more off about him forever after. He had been hoping to win her back in some way. He was still very much in love with her. He made a lot of phone calls after that, even talking to her ex husband that she had had her daughters with. The ex husband had expected Patti to do something like this, but he was rather cold about it in many regards. As were her children, though no one had anything to say that she had done that was particularly evil. She had been vein about herself, and willing to drop everything she did on a dime to attach herself to very young men. And this had made her a joke to them at her age. She had been passed around and humiliated. She had been obsessed with beauty and the thought of getting older was something she could not handle. But none of these things were criminal or evil, and her family for the most part made it seem that they had been. Perhaps it was their own upper class way of handling Patti and the ultimate stain of killing herself and what that meant for her daughters. She had been destroyed by her obsession with being perfect. And she had always been alone. She had been alone as teenager with no friends taking care of her dying religious mother. She had been alone with all of her relationships. And I think that kind of aloneness took her down as well.

After grieving for a few weeks, my father instantly went into this different mode and became obsessed with buying large amplifiers and speakers. Over the next few years, it became ridiculous. He kept buying PA speakers and filling the house with them. So everywhere you went in the house, there were either speakers, or speaker boxes with wires and soddering tools for building them. He got rid of furniture so he could fill the house with speakers. And these speakers ended up taking the place of tables and sometimes even chairs when it was a real sturdy one. And all he wanted to do was talk about speakers. He ended up calling people in the speaker companies and talking to representatives and help lines for the company, even going so far as to knowing these people personally, mostly because they also loved speakers. He started hanging out with anyone who played music, just in hopes that they would also enjoy talking about his speakers. And the weird thing is, he rarely ever actually hooked them up. It was always a project. He might turn something on to see how it performed, but there was never any real need for all these speakers. I don't know what this all meant in his underlying psyche, but I venture to guess that in some deep psychological way, he hoped that the sheer mass of volume could drown away his hopelessness and misery. Because aside from me, he never had much of an opportunity to sort through any of his feelings. If anyone knew what he was going through, it was me.

Three nights after Patti killed herself there was a strange night at the Sanborn household. I woke up from a nightmare. The nightmare wasn't about anything realistic in particular. I just dreamed that I was a little girl, a different child and I was walking in the woods with my brother, but there was something sick in the woods around us and we had to keep walking through these woods. It was hard to explain the sick feeling, but it made me think of flies on dead bodies. But it seemed very much alive and out to get us. The dream spiraled off into this general sense of strange dread, before I finally woke myself up. At the very same time that I woke up, I could hear my sister Allison screaming in the room down the hall. She had also just woken up from a nightmare. In her nightmare a vampire had been under the bed and it was trying to grab her feet. In her dream she had thought she was awake. And then she saw it floating up on the ceiling, and somehow she had woken herself up with her own screaming. And then my father had also just awakened from a nightmare. In his nightmare, someone had been standing in his bedroom, but he couldn't tell who it was. The person had kept saying his name over and over, but he had been paralyzed until Allison had screamed and he had woken up as well. None of us were the type to typically have nightmares – especially me – at least I don't remember them if I do have them. The only person who hadn't had a nightmare had been David, who was still fast asleep even though him and Allison shared a room.

My father and I contemplated about what that could possibly mean the next day. It was strange, because my father had always been very anti anything related to the supernatural. I had been fond of the supernatural, but I had never been able to really talk to him about it because he didn't understand or really seem to want to hear about it. But we couldn't help but wonder if this had somehow been related to Patti in some way. My father has silently maintained in his heart that in some way, this had been Patti's way of saying goodbye to him.

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[genesischi]

Um, hi. I hope you don't mind me asking if you have any suggestions on how I should deal with my new college's enablement services? For the course interview,I explained I have diagnosed mental health issues, and was in the process of being assessed for autism as an adult (I should have the final diagnosis before/after) starting the course in August. I disclosed to explain my circumstances -- and because my GP advised me to... But I don't really know what they expect me to ask for? (1)

2) I went through a 3year BA degree with no accommodations *before I had a breakdown* inmy honours year. Don’t get me wrong - I found lectures pointless (Idon’t process audio information very well). Exams were nightmares,every little noise, footsteps of invigilators… And now I make itclear that I was disclosing to explain my circumstances - how do Iaccept help? It took me years to go to a dr for my mental healthissues. From your blog, it seems as if you have personal experience…

I’m really reallyglad you asked me! I don’t mind at all. I panicked a little atfirst since I had no idea how to answer, but after calming down frominitial communication shock I realised that while my experience is ofcourse individual and the solutions I have found won’t necessarilywork for you, I can always make suggestions.

Disclaimer: All thisinformation is based on current British law, any other countries willrequire checking the laws there.

So I can’t promisethis will be helpful, and always feel free to ask follow-upquestions, but I’ll certainly do my best and try.

Okay, so first thingsfirst, how to deal with the enablement services? What problems areyou having: do you not know what to say to them? Do they not listento you? Are their suggestions not helpful? Are they overfull and notable to make time for you? Are there funding problems? I can’treally help without knowing what the problems are.

For lectures (notknowing anything about what you may have already tried, or what typeof course you do or the teaching style where you go) I would suggestperhaps having a audio recorder with a speech-to-text software so youcould upload it and read it later, however this is very expensive andrequires a sufficiently powerful computer or laptop, so depends onwhat funding you have. Otherwise, and far cheaper, would be to askyour teachers for their lecture notes, class plans and curriculum,and if your lessons have presentations to obtain copies - I knowthese are very generic but I’ll cover the basics since I don’tknow the specifics here.

There are lots of studyTumblr blogs that could probably advise better on how to take notesin way you find easy to follow, but I can’t really help there,since I don’t take notes EVER. I either pay attention and learn bylistening and talking in class (though I don’t process well withaudio alone either, I need visual and audio to line up), or I couldtake notes and actually learn nothing.

The solutions I foundfor exams were to ask for separate invigilation, which does notrequire much funding as they are either teachers and it’s part oftheir contract, or they’re volunteers/parents who are doing a gooddeed.

The problem with thiscan be limited amount of rooms available when you need them,depending on where you are, some places have excess rooms. However,if you think this would help you and rooms are scarce, this shouldcome under what in England and Wales is called “ReasonableAdjustment”, which means legally under the United Kingdom EqualityAct 2010 organisations, employers and services have to supplyreasonable adjustments to anyone meeting one or more of the“Protected Characteristics” (e.g. disability, age, gender, etc).So in this example they cannot deny you based on rooms, in that casein Britain there would be a case for discrimination.

Separate invigilationgave me a room on my own, with two invigilators, one for the student,one for the paper (in case you need to leave to go to the toilet orsomething like that, they can’t leave the paper alone so you needtwo). From my experience they don’t patrol around, they just sitand look bored, so that removes the feeling watched aspect. We alsonegotiated that they would never be behind me, only ever in my lineof sight since it makes me nervous when people stand behind me. Youmay also be able to ask to be in a certain position (whatever is toyour liking) near the doors or windows, or specifically ask to be ina room with/without certain electronics (e.g. fluorescent or buzzinglights/fans).

I get separateinvigilation as it means I don’t disturb other people taking theexams when I leave early, another clause that I require. Depending onthe exam length, and the place I was taking the exam there weredifferent rules, some I could leave the room but not the building,but that the paper could be removed and I be allowed to sit and chatwith the invigilator, and some allowed me to completely leave and gohome.

I know this is unusualto finish earlier rather than later, but I’m usually finishedwithin a third or two thirds of the time given, and I really can’thandle sitting in silence doing nothing between 30 mins and twohours. The silence and lack of activity allows anxiety and intrusivethoughts and other bad things to happen.

One of the things thatwas discussed but ultimately ruled out for me in exams was to allowme previously-approved music. If I remember correctly it was decidednothing with words could be allowed as it could in some way be usedto cheat, but instrumental pieces or relaxing sounds like whale musicor the wind or rain - this is something you could discuss if it mighthelp you.

A more common one butone that still had to be negotiated was the use of a “wordprocessor” aka a computer/laptop, since I struggled with orderingmy thoughts, and if I needed to edit on paper it would look verymessy and waste a lot of time, where with a laptop it’s much easierto edit and move text around to insert or change things.

Now, having reread yourquestion I was less sure I understood it, but thought I’d keep theabove information in case I’d interpreted it correctly there.

If you actually meanthow do you get the mindset of accepting help that is given ratherthan just proudly refusing it, then I may still be able to help, butit’s a rather personal answer yet again.

I’d say the trick tolearning to accept help, is to realise that you’re human, you’renot innately capable of everything. But also the more important bitis to remember that those who created all these rules and systemswere also humans, and they got it wrong, they created a structurethat doesn’t work for a huge percentage of the population who gothrough it. Some may fake it better than others, but I know thateveryone struggles at some point.

So, in summary what youneed to figure out is what are struggling with (the hardest part),what support could actually help you, and finally what is actuallypossible/legal/within the rules.

I find that mindmappingon my worst days is the best way to figure out what is causing theproblems, I then needed to filter out home/personal issues andfinetune my observations to what was relevant to my educationprovider. From there, you need to discuss (withfriends/family/supporters) or think about what can be done for thedifficulties you have identified. And then, take this to yourenablement service for further discussion.

Be prepared forrejection of some ideas due to funding and/or plausibility, and awarethis may take months of sessions to arrange to your liking. You mayhave to compromise.

I think that’s allI’ve got to say, but I’m happy to help more and talk privately ifyou wish.

[douchebagbrainwaves]

YOU GUYS I JUST THOUGHT OF THIS

Well, it doesn't. Err on the side of the story: what an essay really is, and how well, languages can be described easily as recursive functions. That is the essence of what scholars did then, it became the basis of the curriculum. But if you have the resources, it's more elegant to think of all phone calls as one kind of thing, no matter where the other person is. The CEO of Forgent, one of the motives on the FBI's list. I was trying to think of a successful startup: to start with just one. For a couple centuries, some of the smarter ones, particularly angels, can give good advice about the product. Last year one founder spent the whole first half of his talk on a fascinating analysis of the limits of how little the initial idea, and I expect them to proliferate. Modula: Pascal is too wimpy for systems programming. So they prefer bigger deals, where they can meet nerds.

The usual motives are few: drugs, money, sex, revenge. When nerds are unbearable it's usually because they're trying too hard to conceal your rawness—by trying to seem corporate, or pretending to know about those in a startup this quarter shows up as Yahoo earnings next quarter—stimulating another round of funding to start approaching them. A round to a startup we'd seed funded. The programmers you'll be able to charge for content when it works to charge for content without warping society in order to seem smarter. The topic sentence is your thesis, chosen in advance, the supporting paragraphs the blows you strike in the conflict, and the difference is embodied in the name. Investors look for founders like the current stars. A lot can change for a startup in several months. One thing I can say for the other 90% is that some of it is funnier in hindsight than it seemed then. A typical VC fund is now hundreds of millions of dollars worth of advertising on Yahoo to promote their brand. Six weeks is fast.

In fact, our ideas about what's possible tend to be smart, so our third test was largely a restatement of the first sentence. There are only a few things we don't. The distinguishing feature of nasty little problems is that you don't invent anything at all. For example, if your business model, because a they may be on the board of someone who will buy you, and the advertisers will follow. It's more like saying I'm not going to generate ideas as well as as apportioning the stock, you should either learn how or find a co-founder who can. I realized when I started writing this. Partly because some companies use mechanisms to prevent copying. Twelve! We also thought we'd be able to shake it free. Many a hacker has written a PhD dissertation knows, the way they were 10 years ago. Why not just sit and think? With the result that writing is made to seem boring and pointless.

Maybe it's just a whirl of names and dates. Data. That's what you want to write about English literature. One is that software is so complicated that patents by themselves are not worth very much. In fact, I'd say investors are the most important sentence first; write about stuff you like; if you say anything mistaken, fix it immediately; ask friends which sentence you'll regret most; go back and tone down harsh remarks; publish stuff online, because an audience makes you write more, and impose more onerous conditions. There were no police. But that's not what you're supposed to when starting a company. Most investors, especially VCs, are not like you want from technology? Our startup, Viaweb, was of the second type. I remember from it, and so must people trying to write. Try a patent search for that phrase and see how many results you get.

But why should I be? When most people think of startups, they think of companies like Apple or Google. During the Bubble a lot of people trying to write interesting software, and talk to them, not something you face and read to an audience sitting behind you. This happens in software too. Collecting surprises is a similar process. Hence such parodies as Pets. When you read what the founding fathers had to say for certain at the time to hypothesize that it was, in fact, all a mistake.

History seems to me there is a deeper reason that hackers are alarmed by measures like copyrights and patents. Too much money seems to be able to bear a good deal on it. Experts can implement, but they were worth it as market research. One of my favorite bumper stickers reads if the people lead, the leaders will follow. So the rate of evolution in programming languages is likely to have readers turned against them by clumsy, self-appointed tour guides. You don't, really. Semantically, strings are more or less a subset of lists in which the most efficient solutions win, rather than by compiler writers.

Saying I'm not going to lie just because everyone else does is not like saying I'm not going to apply for patents because patents are part of the core of a language to see if there are any axioms that could be anything, the content of your description approaches zero. People would order it because of the name, and I was even more convinced of it after hearing it confirmed by Hilbert. I'll be forced to come up a with a clearer explanation, which I needed to do, designing beautiful software, would be much more difficult. Being turned down by investors. Any hacker a lock and his first thought is how to learn to program by looking at good programs—not just at what they do so well that they pass right through professional and cross over into obsessive. What we couldn't stand were people with a lot of technological leverage will of course raise the specter of unemployment. It's the concluding remarks to the jury. Everyone knows these, because they're at the forefront of technology. If we think of the things they tell you to get lost. And the way to do it.

We all thought there was took place in lulls between constant wars and had something of the character of the thoughts of parents with a new baby. But startups aren't tied to VC the way they taught me to program in. The flaw in the need to know principle is that you don't learn anything from them. Ten weeks later we invite all the investors we know to hear them present what they've built so far. It would be pretty easy to write a better word processor than Microsoft Word, for example, there is a deeper reason that hackers are more politically incorrect. Once you sink that low, other countries can do whatever they have to understand them. Angels don't need to prevent people from being rich if we can prevent wealth from translating into power. I'm sometimes accused of meandering. An essay is something you write to try to recast one's work as a single thesis. The problem is, as you can. Well, they're not. Because then you're asking government or almost-government employees to do the other three quarters of the time.

[aartisenblog]

  GET THIS BOOK

Author:

Benjamin Crowell

Published in: Light and Matter Release Year: 2006 ISBN: 0-9704670-1-X Pages: 282 Edition: First Edition File Size: 14 MB File Type: pdf Language: English

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Description of Newtonian Physics

Why a New Physics Textbook?

We Americans assume that our economic system will always scamper to provide us with the products we want. Special orders don’t upset us! I want my MTV! The truth is more complicated, especially in our education system, which is paid for by the students but controlled by the professoriate. Witness the perverse success of the bloated science textbook. The newspapers continue to compare our system unfavorably to Japanese and European education, where depth is emphasized overbreadth, but we can’t seem to create a physics textbook that covers a manageable number of topics for a one-year course and gives honest explanations of everything it touches on. The publishers try to please everybody by including every imaginable topic in the book but end up pleasing nobody. There is wide agreement among physics teachers that the traditional one-year introductory textbooks cannot, in fact, be taught in one year. One cannot surgically remove enough material and still gracefully navigate the rest of one of these kitchen-sink textbooks. What is far worse is that the books are so crammed with topics that nearly all the explanation is cut out in order to keep the page count below 1100. Vital concepts like energy are introduced abruptly with an equation, like a first-date kiss that comes before “hello.” The movement to reform physics texts is steaming ahead, but despite excellent books such as Hewitt’s Conceptual Physics for nonscience majors and Knight’s Physics: A Contemporary Perspective for students who know calculus, there has been a gap in physics books for life-science majors who haven’t learned calculus or are learning it concurrently with physics. Newtonian Physics book is meant to fill that gap.

Learning to Hate Physics?

When you read a mystery novel, you know in advance what structure to expect: a crime, some detective work, and finally the unmasking of the evildoer. Likewise, when Charlie Parker plays a blues, your ear expects to hear certain landmarks of the form regardless of how wild some of his notes are. Surveys of physics students usually show that they have worse attitudes about the subject after instruction than before, and their comments often boil down to a complaint that the person who strung the topics together had not learned what Agatha Christie and Charlie Parker knew intuitively about form and structure: students become bored and demoralized because the “march through the topics” lacks a coherent storyline. You are reading the first volume of the Light and Matter series of introductory physics textbooks, and as implied by its title, the storyline of the series is built around light and matter: how they behave, how they are different from each other, and, at the end of the story, how they turn out to be similar in some very bizarre ways. Here is a guide to the structure of the one-year course presented in this series: 1 Newtonian Physics Matter moves at a constant speed in a straight line unless a force acts on it. (This seems intuitively wrong only because we tend to forget the role of friction forces.) Material objects can exert forces on each other, each changing the other’s motion. A more massive object changes its motion more slowly in response to a given force. 2 Conservation Laws Newton’s matter-and-forces picture of the universe is fine as far as it goes, but it doesn’t apply to light, which is a form of pure energy without mass. A more powerful world-view, applying equally well to both light and matter, is provided by the conservation laws, for instance, the law of conservation of energy, which states that energy can never be destroyed or created but only changed from one form into another. 3 Vibrations and Waves Light is a wave. We learn how waves travel through space, pass through each other, speed up, slow down, and are reflected. 4 Electricity and Magnetism Matter is made out of particles such as electrons and protons, which are held together by electrical forces. Light is a wave that is made out of patterns of electric and magnetic force. 5 Optics Devices such as eyeglasses and searchlights use matter (lenses and mirrors) to manipulate light. 6 The Modern Revolution in Physics Until the twentieth century, physicists thought that matter was made out of particles and light was purely a wave phenomenon. We now know that both light and matter are made of building blocks with a combination of particle and wave properties. In the process of understanding this apparent contradiction, we find that the universe is a much stranger place than Newton had ever imagined, and also learn the basis for such devices as lasers and computer chips.

A Note to the Student Taking Calculus Concurrently

Learning calculus and physics concurrently is an excellent idea — it’s not a coincidence that the inventor of calculus, Isaac Newton, also discovered the laws of motion! If you are worried about taking these two demanding courses at the same time, let me reassure you. I think you will find that physics helps you with calculus while calculus deepens and enhances your experience of physics. Newtonian Physics book is designed to be used in either an algebra-based physics course or a calculus-based physics course that has calculus as a corequisite. This note is addressed to students in the latter type of course. Art critics discuss paintings with each other, but when painters get together, they talk about brushes. Art needs both a “why” and a “how,” concepts as well as technique. Just as it is easier to enjoy an oil painting than to produce one, it is easier to understand the concepts of calculus than to learn the techniques of calculus. Newtonian Physics book will generally teach you the concepts of calculus a few weeks before you learn them in your math class, but it does not discuss the techniques of calculus at all. There will thus be a delay of a few weeks between the time when a calculus application is first pointed out in the Newtonian Physics book and the first occurrence of a homework problem that requires the relevant technique. The following outline shows a typical first-semester calculus curriculum side-by-side with the list of topics covered in the Newtonian Physics book, to give you a rough idea of what calculus your physics instructor might expect you to know at a given point in the semester.

Content of Newtonian Physics

0 Introduction and Review 19 1 Scaling and Order-of-Magnitude Estimates 43 Motion in One Dimension 2 Velocity and Relative Motion 69 3 Acceleration and Free Fall 91 4 Force and Motion 121 5 Analysis of Forces 141 Motion in Three Dimensions 6 Newton’s Laws in Three Dimensions 171 7 Vectors 183 8 Vectors and Motion 193 9 Circular Motion 207 10 Gravity 221