#it's prime feels real estate that has not been explored nearly enough

[newstfionline]

Saturday, March 20, 2021

More than 40% of people reported depression and anxiety symptoms since start of pandemic, survey finds (Yahoo News) When COVID-19 was first reported in the United States, many were optimistic that it would come and go quickly enough. But after a few weeks, reality set in and took a toll, not only on our physical selves but on our collective mental health as well. Over the past year, a lot of people have struggled with feelings of isolation, anxiety, depression and despair due to the global pandemic. Many have lost loved ones, missed funerals and births and other milestones, and dealt with emotions that some may not have even experienced before. What has been the overall mental health impact on our nation’s people in the past year? According to a recent survey by Yahoo/YouGov, 35 percent of adults in the U.S. report that their mental health has worsened since the start of the pandemic. And an even larger percentage (44 percent) report an increase in depression in the past year, with 48 percent stating that their anxiety symptoms also increased. “The mental health impacts of COVID-19 are just beginning to be understood fully,” says Catherine Burns, a Vermont-based psychologist and clinical supervisor for COVID Support Vermont. “As time passes, we are developing a clearer picture that increasingly highlights experiences of stress, anxiety and depression across the globe.”

Polluted waters around the world (Reuters) About 4 billion people experience severe water shortages for at least one month a year and around 1.6 billion people—almost a quarter of the world’s population—have problems accessing a clean, safe water supply, according to the United Nations. While the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals call for water and sanitation for all by 2030, the world body says water scarcity is increasing and more than half the world’s population will be living in water-stressed regions by 2050. In the run-up to the UN’s World Water Day on March 22, Reuters photographers used drones to capture dramatic pictures and video of polluted waterways around the world. In one image, a discarded sofa lies beached in the Tiete river, in Brazil’s biggest city Sao Paulo, into which hundreds of tonnes of untreated sewage and waste are tipped each day. Others show domestic waste clogging the Citarum river in Bandung, Indonesia, and sewage flowing into the Euphrates in Najaf, Iraq.

Gunmen kill 13 police in daytime ambush in central Mexico (Reuters) Gunmen killed at least 13 Mexican police in an ambush a short distance outside the capital on Thursday, local authorities said, in one of the worst mass slayings of security forces to rock the country in recent years. Photos of the grisly scene circulated on social media showing a bullet-riddled police car and an unmarked truck, along with officers’ bodies scattered out along the street or still inside the car. The convoy of security personnel was attacked in broad daylight by suspected gang members in the Llano Grande area in the municipality of Coatepec Harinas as it patrolled the area, said Rodrigo Martinez-Celis, security minister for the State of Mexico. The area is southwest of Mexico City and about 40 miles (64 km) south of the city of Toluca, the capital of the populous State of Mexico, which surrounds much of the capital.

British Airways considers selling its headquarters after homeworking switch (Reuters) British Airways said it was considering selling its headquarters building because of a switch to homeworking during the pandemic means it may no longer need so much office space. The shift to homeworking over the last year has already prompted some of Britain’s biggest companies to make changes to their office footprints. Banking giant Lloyds said it would cut office space by 20% within three years, with HSBC aiming for a 40% reduction.

Locked-down Spaniards seethe with envy as Germans flock to Mallorca (Reuters) Tens of thousands of Germans are planning last-minute Easter getaways to Spain’s sun-kissed islands, leaving many Spaniards, who are not allowed to do the same because of a travel ban, upset. “It makes absolutely no sense that in Spain we can’t move between regions but any foreigner can come in ... and spread infection,” said Emilio Rivas, 23, who lives in Madrid. The young tax assessor wanted to get out of town for the holidays but must instead stay home because Spain banned travel between regions over Easter to avoid a repeat of a spike in contagion seen after an easing in restrictions over Christmas. But tourists from European countries with higher infection rates like France or Germany can fly in for a holiday as long as they have a negative covid test result—something even top health official Fernando Simon described as “incongruous.”

Paris goes into lockdown as COVID-19 variant rampages (Reuters) France imposed a month-long lockdown on Paris and parts of the north after a faltering vaccine rollout and spread of highly contagious coronavirus variants forced President Emmanuel Macron to shift course. Since late January, when he defied the calls of scientists and some in his government to lock the country down, Macron has said he would do whatever it took to keep the euro zone’s second largest economy as open as possible. However, this week he ran out of options just as France and other European countries briefly suspended use of the AstraZenca vaccine. His prime minister, Jean Castex, said France was in the grip of a third wave, with the virulent variant first detected in Britain now accounting for some 75% of cases. Intensive care wards are under severe strain, notably in Paris where the incidence rate surpasses 400 infections in every 100,000 inhabitants.

US-Russia ties nosedive after Biden-Putin tit-for-tat (AP) U.S.-Russia ties nosedived on Thursday after Russian leader Vladimir Putin shot back at President Joe Biden’s description of him as a killer. In taking a tough stance on Russia, Biden has said the days of the U.S. “rolling over” to Putin are done. Also Wednesday, U.S. intelligence released a report finding that Putin authorized influence operations to help Trump’s re-election bid. Later that day, Putin recalled his ambassador to the U.S. and on Thursday he pointed at the U.S. history of slavery and slaughtering Native Americans and the atomic bombing of Japan in World War II. Responding to that, the White House said Biden would continue to look to work with Putin on areas of mutual concern but stressed that he was “not going to hold back” when he has concerns about Putin’s actions. Putin had been asked about Biden’s comment during a video call marking the anniversary of Russia’s 2014 annexation of Crimea, and he responded along the lines of “it-takes-one-to-know-one,” saying his counterpart’s words reflected the United States’ own problems. At the same time, he offered to have a phone call with Biden to discuss issues of mutual interest.

Myanmar security forces kill eight as Indonesia calls for end to violence (Reuters) Myanmar security forces shot dead eight opponents of a Feb. 1 coup on Friday, a funeral services provider said, as Indonesia sought an end to the violence and urged that democracy be restored, in an unusually blunt call from a neighbour. Ousted lawmakers explored whether the International Criminal Court (ICC) can investigate crimes against humanity since the coup, while authorities arrested two more journalists, including a BBC reporter, media said.

Lebanese are gripped by worry as economic meltdown speeds up (AP) Shops closing, companies going bankrupt and pharmacies with shelves emptying—in Lebanon these days, fistfights erupt in supermarkets as shoppers scramble to get to subsidized powdered milk, rice and cooking oil. Like almost every other Lebanese, Nisrine Taha’s life has been turned upside down in the past year under the weight of the country’s crushing economic crisis. Anxiety for the future is eating at her. Five months ago, she was laid off from her job at the real estate company where she had worked for years. Her daughter, who is 21, cannot find work, forcing the family to rely on her husband’s monthly salary which has lost 90% of its value because of the collapse of the national currency. The family hasn’t been able to pay rent for seven months, and Taha worries their landlord’s patience won’t last forever. As the price of meat and chicken soared beyond their means, they changed their diet. Taha’s family is among hundreds of thousands of lower income and middle class Lebanese who have been plunged into sudden poverty by the crisis that started in late 2019—a culmination of decades of corruption by a greedy political class that pillaged nearly every sector of the economy. More than half the population now lives in poverty, according to the World Bank, while an intractable political crisis heralds further collapse.

Fear and Hostility Simmer as Ethiopia’s Military Keeps Hold on Tigray (NYT) When Ethiopia’s prime minister, Abiy Ahmed, began a sweeping military operation in the restive region of Tigray on Nov. 4, he cast his goal in narrow terms: to capture the leadership of the region’s ruling party. The party, the Tigray People’s Liberation Front, had brazenly defied his authority for months, and then attacked a federal military base. But four months on, the operation has degenerated into a bitter civil conflict marked by accounts of egregious rights violations—massacres, sexual violence, ethnic cleansing, and fears that starvation is being used a war tactic—that have set off alarm across the world. In Mekelle, the region’s biggest city, many Tigrayans say they feel that they, not their leaders, are the true targets of Mr. Abiy’s military campaign. Hospitals are filled with casualties from the fighting that rages in the countryside, many of them terrified civilians arriving with grievous wounds. Schools house some of the 71,000 people who fled to the city, often bringing accounts of horrific abuses at the hands of pro-government forces. A palpable current of fear and resentment courses through the streets, where hostilities between residents and patrolling government soldiers often erupt into violence.

Goldman Sachs analysts say they work 95-hour weeks and endure ‘inhumane’ treatment (CNN Business) A workplace survey from a group of junior analysts at Goldman Sachs is about to make you feel a lot better about your job. About a dozen first-year analysts say they are working more than 95 hours a week on average, sleeping just five hours a night and enduring workplace abuse. The majority of them say their mental health has deteriorated significantly since they started working at the investment bank. “There was a point where I was not eating, showering or doing anything else other than working from morning until after midnight,” one analyst says in the report. The survey comes from a self-selected group of 13 first-year analysts who presented their findings to management in February, a spokesperson for the bank said. Few people entering the cutthroat world of Wall Street banking would expect a tidy nine-to-five. But the analysts in the survey are essentially pleading with their employer to cap their weekly work hours at 80.

[katrinawritesthings]

Jonghyun/Taemin; A Year of Sunsets (Part 1/5); PG

listen.... au where taem moves to the forest and paints sunsets every day and jong is his neighbor and also there are wolf shapeshifters

There’s silence for a moment as Jonghyun expects him to say something and Taemin doesn’t have anything to say; then Jonghyun’s lips twitch up and he leans over to open up the box he brought over. “I got you some stuff, like, welcoming presents,” he says.

1-2-3-4-5

Taemin is so in love.

He’s so in love with his new life. His new house, his new empty garden, his new lack of close neighbors. This is what he’s been all about for years. A cute little log cabin in the woods. It’s got a sweet porch that he’s gonna hang some strawberry plants from, a nice big fireplace, a backyard that fades out right into a path into the trees… he stands out front, right where Kibum’s car and the moving van were not five minutes ago, and just looks at his new place with the happiest sigh he’s ever sighed. This is perfect.

The hot June sun is just about getting ready to start setting behind the trees and if Taemin leans a little bit to the left, he can see a thin trail of smoke a little bit away. That’s his closest neighbor, about a twenty minute stroll down the little dirt road through the forest. There are other houses in these woods, but most are unoccupied. Most people live in the little town near the woods, but not actually in them, and even then, it’s not very many. It’s kind of why Taemin got his house so cheap, to be honest; legal shapeshifter forests aren’t exactly prime real estate location.

Taemin doesn’t mind at all; he knows full well that shapeshifter communities that live on actual reserves keep to themselves. It’s not like they're vicious human eaters that just want to maul him in his new bed--and even if they were, there are laws to protect humans from them, just as there are laws to protect them from humans. He expects people that spend the grand majority of their time as their animal forms want even less to do with paperwork than full-time human people do. They’re probably just deeper in the forest, doing their wolfy things, hunting deer, snuggling their pups, not wanting to be human or around humans, the usual. He can relate, kind of.

Taemin’s never really been the social type. He’ll just go to the town for groceries, and take longer drives to the city to visit his friends if he’s feeling lonely, and that will be perfect. He’ll also have to talk to his new neighbor eventually, he guesses, but it’s not like he’s dreading it or anything. He’s sure that they’ll be friendly enough, and if they’re not, they’re a mile away anyway. It won’t be hard to avoid them. If they haven’t come by to welcome him to the foresthood in a week, he’ll go over there and introduce himself just to be polite.

For now, he wraps his arms around himself, hugging himself, because he’s just so fucking happy to have finally achieved his dream. And he’s barely over thirty. He’s got his dream house, his dream location, his dream job.... and speaking of which, he should get started, before the sun goes down.

With one last happy sigh for now, he slips inside of his new home. Passing all of the unopened boxes and lazily arranged furniture, he grabs his easel--the very first thing he unpacked--under his arm. He picks up his box of painting stuff and a pillow as well, and with those under his other arm, he heads straight back outside. He thinks, for his first time, his first painting on his first day here, he wants to paint the view right from the road in front of his house.

He finds that big, flat boulder on the other side of the road he was eyeing up earlier, sets up his easel and canvas in front of it, throws the pillow onto it, sits down, gets all of his colors ready next to him, and paints the sun just peeking out from behind the corner of a beautiful log cabin, tall trees casting shadows against the land, and a little, swirling line of grey in the distance.

~

When Taemin finishes setting up his little collection of grass Pokémon plushies and one pink glass tentacle dildo on the mantle is when he figures that he should probably go introduce himself to his new neighbor. It’s been five days; he doesn’t really know the etiquette of greeting new neighbors, but he thinks they should at least know each other by now. A few hours remain until it’ll be time to paint the day’s sunset. If he’s asked to stay for a meal or something, it won’t be long enough for him to get too tired out. He turns to face the rest of his living room, stopping for a moment to hold himself again and sigh happily. It’s lovely. Lovely and cozy and warm and perfect.

He practically bounces to his couch, fixes up the blanket thrown over it, and glances into the mirror he hung up above it yesterday. Hmm. His black hair is a little mussed. He runs his fingers through it to make it look “casually” messy instead of “I just spent the last three hours rearranging my living room” messy. It totally works. Passing through the kitchen to leave the house, he pauses to frown at the chips and poptarts he has on his counters. Should he bring something? To be polite? None of this is even good stuff to bring over to someone’s house. And he’s the new one here; he shouldn’t be expected to bring the gifts, right? Ugh. This is why he doesn’t like social shit.

Fuck it, he decides, he’ll just tell them that he was going to bring something but hasn’t gotten settled enough to get any real cooking done. It’s not like it’s not true. He runs his fingers through his hair one more time as he grabs the handle of his front door, and then there’s a knock on his back door.

He turns, confused. Who the fuck is knocking at his back door? Or, well--it can probably only be one person, so--why are they there instead of here in front? He heads back there instead with another glance at himself in the mirror. When he pulls open the door, he’s confident that his hair is pretty okay for a dude that just spent the last three hours rearranging his living room.

Also, when he pulls open the door, he finds someone with tan skin, dark hair, deep brown eyes, and a charming smile.

“Hi,” they say cheerily. They’re holding a box in both hands, so they just lift a few fingers in a wave at Taemin instead of offering their hand to shake or something. Well, good. Taemin gets paranoid about what people think of his handshakes and he always winds up gripping too hard to meet the crushing expectations of masculinity placed upon him by the patriarchy. “I’m Jonghyun,” his neighbor says, “your friendly neighborhood… neighbor.” They pause for a moment with a little frown at their box; Taemin feels like they don’t rehearse things nearly as much as he does. “Friendly neighborhood resident,” they say, looking back up. “Or, person. Empty genderless void. Whatever. He pronouns, though. I’m friendly. That’s the point.” He shrugs with a little smile; Taemin finds himself baffled yet also pleasantly informed. “Sorry if coming to your back door was weird,” Jonghyun goes on, “it’s just, way faster to cut through the woods than go around the actual path.”

“Oh, uh,” Taemin says, realizing that he should probably reply to something that Jonghyun is saying. “No, it’s cool,” he grins. Already he’s learning great tips for living in this area. He was legitimately about to walk the whole twenty minute long way. Maybe he’ll stop exploring the forest in front of his place on his daily searches for good sunset viewing spots and start working on the trees between his house and Jonghyun’s. He notices Jonghyun readjust the box in his arms and curses internally. He’s being rude. “Uh, come in, please,” he says, stepping back and holding the door open wider. “I was just about to go visit you myself, actually,” he admits.

“Ahh, yeah, sorry about that too.” Jonghyun laughs a little sheepishly as he steps inside. He sets his box down on Taemin’s coffee table and turns back to him quickly. “I meant to come greet you before, but I thought you weren’t gonna be here until next week, and then I had to go to the store to get some stuff, and then I didn’t know how early was too early, and then I didn’t want to interrupt your lunch, and I tried coming around after dinnertime yesterday but you weren’t here, and… well, yeah.” This Jonghyun sure does talk a lot, Taemin notes. It’s kind of endearing, how he lets his words get carried by his excitement. It cleared up all of Taemin’s questions about why he hadn’t come to visit yet, at least.

“After dinner isn’t a good time for me, no,” he hums, picking one things Jonghyun’s said to reply to. “That’s when I go out to paint the sunset. Um, see?” He gestures at the first painting he did out here not a week ago at it’s new home above his fireplace. Then he gestures at the empty canvas and box of paints on the kitchen table, waiting for tonight’s adventure. His other paintings from the last few nights are in the mess of boxes and packing peanuts that he’s going to clean up into his art room soon. “It’s kind of my job,” he grins, turning back to Jonghyun. “One sunset a day. They’re really simple, but really fun, and every time they’re different, and I pretend like they take me like, three times as long to paint as they really do so I can charge more.” He shrugs unashamedly. He’s gotta eat.

“Sounds nice,” Jonghyun says. “You’re very talented.”

“Thanks,” Taemin smiles, proud. He does work hard. “Do you want something to drink?” he asks suddenly, remembering that Jonghyun is a guest in his house. “You can sit, too, I gue--yeah. Feel free.” He smiles politely to cover up how bad he is at talking. Jonghyun smiles back, looking vaguely sympathetic to Taemin’s efforts, as he sits. As long as he doesn’t point it out.

“Water, please,” he says, and Taemin nods. Water. He can do that. He slips into his kitchen and fills up a glass. Halfway through, he realizes that he hasn’t even told Jonghyun his name yet. Fuck. What a great first impression he’s making here. When he brings Jonghyun’s water back out, Jonghyun is looking over one of his little business cards on the table with a curious smile. Taemin hopes he’s enjoying the “Corporate Banana, He who Banans” label in the bottom corner. He had to pay an extra two dollars for that. Jonghyun looks up when Taemin offers him his water and takes it with another polite smile. “Taemin, right?” he asks, “he pronouns?” and frick.

“Yeah, sorry,” Taemin says. He can’t believe Jonghyun had to get his info off of a shitty business card first. “I’m not good at the whole… talking to people thing.”

“That’s okay,” Jonghyun says, waving off his concerns as he takes a sip of their water. “Sometimes I’m not either. I kind of shift. Between being a social butterfly and kind of a lone wolf, you know?” Taemin doesn’t really know, being always on the lone wolf end of that spectrum himself, but he nods anyway. There’s silence for a moment as Jonghyun expects him to say something and Taemin doesn’t have anything to say; then Jonghyun’s lips twitch up and he leans over to open up the box he brought over. “I got you some stuff, like, welcoming presents,” he says. Taemin breathes a sigh of relief. Thank fuck Jonghyun knows how to save a conversation. He sits down next to Jonghyun, peeping into the box curiously as he pulls stuff out.

“It’s just, you know, some things that you might not know you need, to be living out here,” Jonghyun tells him. “Like… mosquito bracelets.” He pulls out a little packet of coiled rubber bracelets that Taemin takes curiously. There’s five in there, all different cute colors. “They smell a little weird, but I kind of like it, to be honest. You don’t even have to wear them in the house. Just hang one on your headboard, you know, and over the table or whatever, and they’ll do their jobs.” He shrugs; Taemin mirrors him for lack of a better reply and stuffs the packet into his pocket. “I also got you some fire crystals,” Jonghyun says, pulling out a new little packet with much more enthusiasm. “If you throw them into the fire they change it’s color and it’s really cool.”

“Ooh,” Taemin says, grabbing the bag and flipping it to read the back. He’s always wanted to try these. Jonghyun smiles at his excitement and pulls more stuff out of the box.

“A double flashlight, so you don’t trip over yourself outside… batteries, because the power goes out here quite a bit in winter… swiss army knife, because, well, you know… a fancy water filter bottle in case you run out of water on a hike or something so you can drink from the lake or the river… a compass, the town is south east, deeper into the woods is north west... oh--” He reaches to the very bottom of the box and pulls out his final items: graham crackers, marshmallows, and chocolate. “S’mores,” he says brightly. “Very essential.”

“True,” Taemin says, making grabby hands greedily. He was gonna get some of these the next time he went shopping, eager to make some with the first fire he sets up in his cool new fireplace as soon as it got cold enough to justify a fire. He looks at everything else laid out on the table as well, just little things to help him adjust. This is all so sweet. “Um, thank you, really,” he says, not entirely sure how to express his feelings. When Jonghyun looks at him though, a gentle ease in his deep eyes and toothy smile, Taemin feels reassured that his small words of thanks were good enough.

“No problem,” Jonghyun says. “I was gonna make you cookies or something, but I’m not that great at baking.”

“I am,” Taemin grins. He’s great at fruit pies and berry muffins and putting obscene amounts of strawberries between layer cakes. “I can bring something over next week, if you want,” he offers. It’ll make up for how awkward and unprepared he is for their first meeting now.

“Uh, actually,” Jonghyun says, “I’m not gonna be here next week.” He takes a sheepish sip of his water as he leans back into the corner of Taemin’s couch. “I’m gonna leave soon, I think for a month or two. Vacation.” He wiggles his eyebrows at Taemin over his glass. Taemin raises his own.

“Hmm?” he asks. Living out here is practically a permanent vacation for him, to be honest. “To the city?” Sounds awful.

“No, no, just deeper into the woods,” Jonghyun says. He waves a hand towards what Taemin thinks is the lake. “Northwest. Connect with my inner nature, you know? Hunt and shit. I’ve been really itching to go out there for a week or so, but,” he shrugs at Taemin and gestures around his living room, “I wanted to make sure I welcomed you to the forest before I left.”

“Oh. Aw. I mean--or--” Taemin runs his fingers through his hair with a grimace. That’s not an “aw” thing. It’s more of a… he doesn’t know. Helpful? Considerate? Just--”Thanks, again,” he says. “You didn’t have to postpone it for me.” Taemin is sure that he could’ve managed on his own for a lil bit without Jonghyun, but it’s touching that he chose to stay.

“Don’t worry about it, I never really plan it anyway,” Jonghyun says. “Usually I kind of just… go. For a few days, or I think the longest was five months, maybe?” He frowns up at Taemin’s ceiling in thought before shrugging again. “I don’t know. Until I feel like coming back again.”

“Like shifting back into a social butterfly, you mean?” Taemin grins, gathering up all of the stuff Jonghyun brought over and putting it back in the box absentmindedly. He’ll unpack it again with everything else that he has left. He glances up in time to see a little smirk pulling up the corners of Jonghyun’s lips.

“Something like that, yeah,” he agrees. Taemin’s smile grows with a tiny bit of pride. He totally nailed that sly little joke. He understands. It’s like how he himself is only going to go to the city every once in a while if he feels lonely, except apparently Jonghyun goes from mild isolation to like… super isolation. He bets there are some pretty cool sunset spots out there in the woods. Maybe he’ll ask Jonghyun to give him a map or something when he comes back. They fall into silence a second time; it’s less awkward than before, but Taemin still finds himself pulling Jonghyun’s box into his lap and drawing little circles with his fingers on the sides. It’s around three in the afternoon; too late for lunch but definitely too early for dinner. There’s not really a reason to ask Jonghyun to stay, but there isn’t one to ask him to leave either. Taemin has no idea what he’s supposed to do.

Luckily, after another few moments of silence, Jonghyun decides for him.

“Welp,” he says, standing up and downing the rest of the water. “I’ll let you finish getting settled in.” He smiles at Taemin and holds out his glass. “Thanks, and welcome to the forest. You can always come visit me if you want, if I’m in.”

“Oh--yes, okay, thank you,” Taemin says. He stands up as well, taking his glass back. “Um--have fun on your vacation.” When he gets back, Taemin will bake him a little something something, as a proper thank you present. That’ll make them even. Jonghyun nods with friendly little smile, then heads out of Taemin’s back door, waving over his shoulder.

A few hours later, when Taemin wanders through the trees between their houses to find a good sunset spot, he notices that for the first time all week, there isn't a little trail of smoke rising from Jonghyun’s chimney. He’s already gone.

[likepuppetsonastring]

I Dare You. (A WKM Story.)

(A/N: LONG ASS ONESHOT I’M SORRY I’M STILL OBSESSED.)

Every town has their ghost stories, and their haunted places. Some have huge hotels full of sordid affairs and midnight rondesvous gone wrong, some have old farm houses in the backcountry, steeped in the folklore of the hills and the mists of the early mornings. Los Angeles is no exception. There's no shortage of ghosts and spectres haunting the City of Angels, no want for dark pasts and dangerous deeds in this hotbed of Hollywood fame and infamy. Such a case of infamy is that of Markiplier Manor, the huge, sprawling estate of actor Mark Fischbach in the hills that used to house the most influential people in town, back in the early '10s. No one really knows what went down on October 11th, 2017, and the few days that followed. All we had to go on was a pseudo-reporter's rambling blog on tumblr and a few short articles with fantastically gruesome headlines.

"3 Found Butchered in Markiplier Manor." "Public Despair at the Discovery of Mayor Damien Noir's Mutilated Corpse." "Unstable Colonel Ford Prime Suspect in the Murders of Markiplier Manor."

Everyone had a guess. Everyone had a theory. But no one knew the truth. No one knew exactly why, on the 14th of October in 2017, the butler from the manor had come running into the LAPD Headquarters, screaming about demons and murder. What everyone did know, however, was that when the police, with sirens blaring, went to investigate the butler's claims, they'd been sickened to find three rotting corpses scattered around the manor, in various states of dismemberment and decay. They said that the mayor's body was the worst, looking like it'd been torn limb from limb by animals, almost without a single bone that wasn't broken, his tortured form found on the balcony outside the foyer. Then there was the body of a woman later identified as Fischbach's former wife, Celine, found in a small room upstairs, surrounded by occult items. It was practically perfect in appearance, but when they tried to do an autopsy, they found her insides had been practically liquified. The last body was the most tame, a detective by the ironic name of Abraham Lincoln, shot through the right side and left to die slowly at the top of one of the staircases. It was the worst murder case they'd seen in years. They couldn't get anything sensible out of the butler, who, according to his friends and family, had been a perfectly sensible man before the tragedy. But now he was spouting nonesense about "dens of evil" and "forces far beyond our understanding". They did manage to get the names of the other people present at the poker party out of him, and found everyone but the colonel and another party member whose name was never given to the public, and a statement as to the death of Mark Fischbach on the 11th. Mark's body was never found. Of course, the media had opinions as to what had actually happened.

I mulled over the headlines and the stories again in my head as I pulled onto the long gravel driveway, overgrown with weeds and bramble in the years of disuse. A stupid thing had led me to my dismal destination today: a dare. A simple, ridiculous dare among friends, and the fatal phrase, "You're not chicken, are you?" I was never one to turn down a good dare, and honestly, I'd never been particularly superstitious. The worst thing I feared was the cold of this year's record-breaking October nights, and the animals that had likely taken up residence in the absence of human habitation. Stepping out of my borrowed vehicle and shouldering my duffle bag of provisions, I surveyed the area, and my first thoughts were, I won't be lacking in places to camp out for the night, that's for sure. I trekked up to the rusting gate and chucked my belongings over it, climbing (with much difficulty) after them and landing about as gracefully as they had. Excellent, I thought as I rubbed a bruise on my knee, only another thousand yards to walk before I'm actually inside this place. The front garden was beautiful, even in its wild state. There was something to be said for the mossy stonework and the dry fountains, a kind of dystopian beauty that a city-slicker like me seldom gets to see, that made the walk bearable, and before I knew it, I was at the wide front doors, testing the handle to see if it was locked. Fortune was on my side, or so I believed, and I found it open, so stepped into the once-lavish front hall. The ceilings were high and covered in cobwebs, and nearly every surface was caked with a layer of dust thick enough to be snow, including a shattered mirror whose shards glittered on the table below it. The sight of my own exercise-reddened face in it gave me an unexpected chill, which I chalked up to the weather hastily, and I decided to move on. As I walked, I glanced up the stairs, wondering if these were the ones that'd once seen a detective's final breaths, and the panicked screams of a man running for his life. What had these walls seen, I wondered? If they could talk, what tale of terror would they recount? My eyes wandered into the foyer as I passed, and I was forced to stop and double take. Lines of weather-worn yellow caution tape lay strewn around a body's outline in front of the fireplace. This time, I accepted the chill as my own reaction. There'd been no mention of a fourth body. Was this where Fischbach had met his end? Was this the place where the detective had sussed out the murderer, and decided to confront him, thereby sealing his own fate? I didn't think I wanted to know the answer, and I decided to try to look for a bedroom, as it was getting late. I climbed the stairs by phone-flashlight, careful not to touch the railings as I went. A dark stain on one wall had me frozen on the top step. That was the unmistakable stain of blood, and the discolored wall around it looked almost like an outline of its own. I had a moment of silence for the fallen man, then moved quickly past his old resting place to the hall beyond, and into an open bedroom out of the line of sight of the stairs. Perhaps I'd sleep better if I couldn't see it; I'd underestimated my own detachedness. The room I'd entered looked as if it'd been through hell. There were books and papers all over the floor, the musty bed was in total disarray, and a table in a nook on my left had been overturned, scattering a few broken picture frames to the ground. I dared to look at one of the pictures, and found smiling back at me the same faces that'd smiled out of the articles proclaiming their deaths and disappearances. The mayor, the colonel, the actor, and the ex. Looking away quickly, I decided to set up camp and drown my fears in a few hours of portable game system distraction. My bag thudded dully down beside the bed, and I thudded dully down beside it, rummaging and humming an old happy tune to break the silence. I couldn't help but feel that something was inherantly wrong with this place, but I brushed that aside. I had no use for silly superstition and fanciful interpretations of old stains and pictures. After all, this place had been empty for going on fifty years. The killer was either long gone or long dead; I had nothing to worry about.

It was 2:15am when I squinted at my dying phone's screen, startled out of my uneasy sleep by a loud thud downstairs. "It's an animal," my brain told me lazily. My heart, however, wasn't listening, and was instead trying to leap out of the frosted glass doors to freedom and safety. Sighing, I stood and stretched. It looked like tonight was going to be an exploring night rather than a resting one. I pulled the real flashlight out of my bag, grabbed the extra batteries and stuck them in my pocket, put my phone in there with them, on power-saving mode, and went for a walk, carefully avoiding the small room to my right, and the stairs down the hall. This place was definitely living up to the status of the word "manor": it seemed like an endless maze of halls and bedrooms and bathrooms and studies and media rooms and dining halls. Even the kitchen was enormous, and from its window I could see the vast balcony and the backyard that seemed more like a safari jungle, the green-watered swamp of a pool its oasis and the dilapidated golf-holes its plains of the Sarangheti. I wandered without thinking for the most part, trying to distract myself from the ever-lasting night with searching games. Where were the drinks stored (I didn't go down into the wine cellar), where were the games played (I didn't touch the royal flush still sitting on the poker table)? This worked until I found myself pushing open a door and the beam of my light fell across what I can only describe as a crime show "murder board". Red yarn connected various fading, fragile Polaroids of a bygone age's people, some of whom I recognized from the news, some of whom were strangers to me. Yellowing articles and criminal profiles were thumb tacked to the cork boards that lined the walls. Looking a little closer, I could see that they were not the sensationalizations that I carried in my phone's picture gallery, but various stories of the lives of the victims. An old campaign poster that bore Mayor Noir's reserved, smiling face was connected to an article about one of Mark's movies and its failure in the box office. A front page bearing the title "Safari Hunt Gone Wrong!" sat in front of a copy of the marriage certificate for the Fischbachs. Even the faces of the chef and the butler glared judgmentally back at me, their records sitting beside them as if to ask what my credentials were to enter this dangerous estate. What investigation had led the detective here, then? I frowned at some of the hand-written notes peppering the boards, but I couldn't make heads or tails of it. The most I could get was that Fischbach had been in financial trouble, and the mayor had apparently been working with him on...something. The colonel, it seemed, had always been a bit of a wild card, and perhaps had been a very dangerous man; several of the notes seemed to accuse him of the murder of Mark Fischbach. Oddly, none of the other murders were mentioned. Celine Fischbach was notoriously absent. Another thud, close to my room this time, shocked me out of my investigation, and I hid as I recognized the sounds of footsteps. I was technically trespassing, though who owned the land now I didn't know. Perhaps my friends had thought it funny to call the police and send them to pick me up. I decided that they'd pay for that later, but my main concern was staying out of sight. I ducked under the desk and held my breath as the footsteps came into the room. I didn't think about it until much, much later, when I was recounting the tale to my awestruck friends over mediocre school lunches, but from the moment I heard the first steps, a high pitched whine had droned in the background, as if some feedback from a cellphone on a cheap radio were being played constantly.  At the time, I was more focused on not making a noise as what I assumed was a cop wandered around the room, stopping every once and a while, and occasionally pacing on one end of the room, as if he were studying something on that wall. There was one point when the man had stood so near to the desk that I'd been able to see him in profile, but not being able to use my flashlight without giving myself away, I hadn't seen much other than the outline of a man in a suit, with disheveled hair falling in a sweep over the left side of his face, the only side I could see. Oddly, it was as if he were giving off a little light of his own, a red and blue hue defining some of his smaller features, like his stubbley jaw and the creases in the elbow of the otherwise immaculate suit. Perhaps he'd brought something with him to light his way, some weird lamp or flashlight. Maybe it was his phonescreen. Either way, this was a detective, I guessed then, fervently ignoring the sense of wrongness that radiated from him like waves, though why they'd sent him and not a normal beat cop, I didn't know. My heart almost stopped when I was almost certain I heard him speak, a low, gruff voice that seemed to have too many layers, but it was so quietly that I couldn't tell whether it'd been "You've stayed" or "Betrayed." I was certain that I heard, "Never again," though. By this point, keeping myself from shivering was a constant, conscious effort.

"It's quite amusing to me that you think you can hide by simply being out of my sight and 'keeping quiet.'" This time, there was no guesswork. This time, my heart did stop, and I couldn't tell whether I was going to shit myself or scream. But the man didn't seem to care that I was there. He simply seemed to want to acknowledge my presence, as if out of a want not to be rude in ignoring me. "Stay, if you like. Read all of these old lies. Make guesses, everyone else seems to have done so already. Let's see if you can get any closer to the truth of the famous 'Murders at Markiplier Manor'." I could practically hear the cold smile leaving his voice, and it was as if part of it had dropped half an octave, if that makes any sense. "Or you can go now, and forget you ever saw this place. Pretend it's just another mystery tale to tell each other while you waste your time with meaningless relationships." It went back to the pitch it'd been before, and the cold smile was back in it, if backed by a bit of bite this time. "It is, of course, your choice."

He never said another word that I heard, and it seemed to take forever for him to leave, but when he had gone, I stayed hidden for another long minute, until I was sure he had left the house (though I ignored that fact that I never once heard a door open). I stood shakily, flicking  my flashlight on again, and froze. There was only a single set of footprints in the room, and that was the diamond-patterned prints of my own Chucks in the dust on the old wood floor. I don't think I'd ever run faster in my life, or broken more rules of the road, than I did as I got the hell out of that place.

Everyone always asks me what I think I saw. Was it a ghost? Or a demon? Maybe a shade of the mayor, or of the actor? All I can respond is...I don't know. I don't know what I saw, or what spoke to me, or what those words meant, in the long run. And I'm certainly no closer to a positive ID of the murderer than anyone else. But there're certain things I never say, like how I don't think the butler was mad anymore, and how it was almost as if I could hear voices calling as I left, the strange red-and-blue light never completely dissipating until I had scrambled back over the front gate and shakily started my car, not daring to even turn on the headlights until I had made it back off of the estate, just praying and following the gravel path back to the main road by memory and feel. If you want a solid opinion, then here's what I think: I think I never want to know what I encountered, and that I never want to encounter it again. I think I'm going to follow his advice, and let the mystery stay unsolved. 

After all, it makes for a damn good story, doesn't it?

[ive-always-been-a-pirate]

The Other Prince + A CS Modern Royal AU [Chapter 2]

Modern Royalty AU: HRH Prince Killian has grown up in the shadow of the crown while enduring tragedy and the burdens of being the spare to the heir. With a desire to escape his past, he agrees to play host to the visiting general's daughter in exchange for an eventual life outside royal bounds. Moving on is never that easy though and he quickly learns that being the 'other' prince is even more difficult when you find yourself falling for the girl everyone wants your brother to marry.

Catch Up On Previous Chapters: One Also on FF.net and AO3.

Word Count: 4,748

Alright, here's the first Emma POV chapter! My knowledge of the British military isn't extensive so hopefully I didn't muck it up too bad. Enjoy and keep an eye out - the next Killian chapter will be up soon!

"So, Elsa said that you met Walsh at the banquet last night - that new pilot they just stationed in Wales, right?"

Trying to hold back a grumble, Emma pulled her latte to her lips as she glanced down toward her half empty breakfast plate. The sun had only peeked over the distant hills a few hours earlier, but she'd only been awake for a small fraction of that time - late obligatory night be damned. She should have figured this conversation was coming and in all honesty, it wasn't that surprising that her mother had chosen the soonest moment she could. Tapping her fingers on the side of the porcelain cup, Emma wondered if she'd still have an appetite to finish the rest of her eggs and whatever the daily pastry was when this little chat was over. She adored Mrs. Potts and the majority of things she'd baked or boiled in the estate's large kitchen over the past six months, but the guilty pleasure of a plain old pop tart wasn't something Emma had ever managed to shake.

One result of a normal college experience - well, as normal as attending a prestigious university could be for a daughter of a largely decorated military hero. Though it helped that she'd been able to acquire her undergraduate degree in America rather than one of the countries listed beneath the crown, it didn't change the fact that there were very few circumstances in her honor shadowed life that Emma would dare label as ordinary.

"You've already been gathering intel from the Norwegians this morning I see," Emma commented, her eyebrow raised in a manner of taunting. "You could at least wait until she gets back home, Mom. I'm pretty sure they weren't flying back until later today."

"Actually, Elsa informed me that Ingrid has decided to stay in England a few extra days and it was just a quick chat," her mother defended cheerfully. "I wanted to make sure she's still planning on visiting next month. It's been ages since we've seen her."

It was difficult to be too annoyed at how happy her mom seemed at the prospect of hosting company, especially because Emma felt just as anxious to spend some time with a familiar face. She'd met Elsa during one of their week long stays in Europe years ago, a trip where the backdrop was all British politics and several snowy days. With the pair of them being the matching age of twelve, they'd done everything from ice skating to bookstore hopping while Emma's father sat in on multiple meetings with top dogs from the Royal Navy and Ingrid Frost, the Norwegian prime minister they'd hoped to gain as an ally - and who just so happened to also be Elsa's aunt. The distance across the North Sea and Emma's constant travels didn't allow them to spend much time together over the years, but Elsa was the closest thing she had to a best friend. It had been a relief to see the girl who always had her back in attendance at whatever the hell that event was the night before, but somehow, Emma had managed to forget about her mother and Elsa's newly found friendship by phone.

God, that woman could swindle information out of anyone.

"I figured you'd be more interested in hearing about the event itself rather than the guest list," Emma answered after a moment, adorning her tone with a hint of sarcasm. "I should know better by now, right?"

"Hey now, that's not what I…."

The dark haired woman's voice trailed off and she let out a sigh, one that turned into a defeated laugh as Emma offered a sarcastic roll of her eyes. The exchange didn't hold the confirmation of total frustration much to her dismay and silence filled the space between them, the only noise coming from the rather distant railway and several playful birds circling the blossoming trees. Glancing up at their fluttering wings in distraction, Emma took a moment to wonder about or perhaps envy the lives they led - freedom to fly and explore the world without much worry from anyone. It was the persistent tale of the branch dwelling sparrows that almost taunted her, their happy chattering reminding her just how different they were.

So lucky, she thought quietly. Those simple songbirds would never know how good they had it. Her mother was fairly subtle, but they'd had this conversation before and it was anything but simple.

"I didn't mean to imply that you finding a love interest last night was the goal, Em. You know I don't mean to pressure you," her mother said after their mutual pause, her caring tone prodding Emma toward a little guilt. "I just….I want you to be happy, sweetie. I guess I'd hoped maybe you might have some luck with that at the banquet - proper and slightly mandatory as it was."

Emma pursed her lips, giving the woman a softer stare as she realized just how silly her defensive nature was in a moment like this. She let out a much calmer breath as the stalemate between them fractured a bit. It was the one that always lingered and reminded them both of the life she'd unintentionally fallen into despite her parents' annoying yet loving prompting. Though Emma had spent the past eight years away from her family doing everything from charity work to college courses, she'd still somehow become an esteemed military man's apathetic daughter who'd all but given up on that next step in life - finding love and the man who could prove to her that such a thing still existed.

To say she was simply skeptical was an understatement - especially when she'd been handed a few reasons to be much more than that.

"I know," she replied, setting her cup down as Mrs. Potts stopped by to refill it. "It wasn't too bad actually, though I did meet this Walsh guy and found out quickly how much I did not want to hear about his family's dedication to the Air Force. Nothing against a war tale or two, but wow…."

She felt her spirit brighten as her mother snorted unexpectedly, covering her mouth fast to conceal her obvious laughter. The cocky, overly charming pilot she was referring to may have been a nice guy, but it was truly difficult to know for sure since he'd spoken of nothing but his own heroics the entire night. Emma bit back her grin as she recalled Elsa rolling her eyes while mouthing 'flying monkey' just before they'd escaped to the bar for reprieve.

"Fair enough," her mother said, an amused laugh accompanying her words. "I've met his aunt and I can't say she was much different. She's been a widow for a few years I believe, but honestly, I fear for any man who ever gets involved with her - she seems like the jealous type."

"Thankfully, I didn't have the pleasure of meeting her," Emma said with an exaggerated exhale. "Green with envy though, huh?"

"That's a good way of putting it," her mother smirked as she sipped her own drink. "But I know your father appreciates you attending in his place, Emma. Hopefully he'll be back to it soon and you won't have to fill in again for a while."

Emma felt her heart sink just slightly as her mother offered a forced smile, the strength in their matching stares holding firmly even after the multiple months they'd spent talking themselves in and out of moments like this one. It had been a lengthy and terribly winding road for their family, but cliche as it was, it was a proven fact that the Nolans didn't give up.

"I didn't see him this morning," Emma noted in a questioning tone. "How was he?"

"Good enough to walk down to the stables and check in on the horses-" her mother answered, a pleased yet still concerned grin on her lips. "-so not too bad it seems."

Emma let a sense of pride settle in her bones at the confirmation of the most important man - well, the only man - in her complicated life mending his injured body and hopefully his spirit as well. Lord knows it had been a long time coming.

"He probably wouldn't mind a visit," her mother prodded, taking the nearly empty teacup to her lips once more. "I'm sure he'll have questions and he mentioned needing to discuss something with you….though I don't know what."

Feeling her eyes narrow as she'd detected the tiny lie - or perhaps just slight avoidance of the truth - Emma nodded, pulling her carefully woven sweater tighter around her arms as she rose. She wondered quietly just what sort of ask her parents had planned and pondered momentarily just how she might decline it. With a sigh, she gave up the brief thought of ditching out. They don't deserve that, she reminded herself.

Her father who'd been through recovery hell and back definitely deserved his only daughter's full cooperation - or what she could muster of it anyway.

"I can check in with him real quick I guess," she conceded, letting herself revel in her mother's appreciative grin. "Though I have to say after being forced to wear that frock of a princess dress last night, the price of favors is rising very quickly."

"Well, I guess it's one he'll have to pay," her mother replied with a successful nod and appreciative eyes, handing Emma a steaming silver thermos that had just been delivered to the table. "Take this to him. I wonder if he grabbed his coat on the way down there - it's not exactly warm today."

With her eyes watching the slight wind cling to the trees, she noted her mother wasn't wrong about the uncertain temperature testing the mid morning air. She shivered slightly while reminding herself that the mild weather and the chill it often brought was a small price to pay for the life they'd somehow hung onto despite the dwindling threat to it.

Maybe one day she'd be able to let go of the hesitation that still seemed to weigh on their words, but for now, she would gladly accept what she could get - even if it meant unstable weather and sporadic storms of many kinds.

"I'll take it to him," Emma told her mother with a soft smile as Mrs. Potts approached, handing over the warm men's wool jacket she must have heard them discussing. "Be back soon, okay?"

The expression she received in return was a tender one full of love and utmost gratitude, a look she'd experienced quite often since returning home - or whatever this place was. With her younger brother recently starting his third year at Eton College just outside of Windsor and her mother trying to balance the household minus the help of a healthy husband, Emma knew it was pertinent that she was around to assist in these little moments. As difficult as it had been to be tossed into sudden turmoil, it hadn't taken long to settle into this life - a life she now didn't know if she actually wanted to leave.

It wasn't as if she hadn't been encouraged to do so. The moment her father started making substantial progress, her mother started prompting her to look into nearby schools where she could finish up the final degree she'd been pursuing when the accident had derailed her schooling. Cambridge and Oxford weren't far and she definitely maintained the grades back in America to possibly be accepted to either. There were even a handful of closer universities that would allow her to remain nearby, but each day that she declined her mother's scholarly nudges brought Emma closer to the point of shoving her graduate studies aside altogether. She'd loved her past college experience, but seeing her father struggle with relentless pain and the new life he was being sentenced to deepened her fear of what could happen in her absence.

She couldn't risk not being there. She couldn't leave with the knowledge of what might happen if she was gone.

Glancing out over the elaborate gardens as she descended down the steps belonging to the backyard veranda, Emma held tight to the the metallic thermos and her father's well worn jacket. Maybe this place wasn't hers, but this new life was - and getting used to it was just another hurdle she'd have to conquer.

As the sun attempted to shine, Emma let her feet move casually, the soles of her shoes tapping the walkway with soft thuds as she glanced out across the property they'd been borrowing for a little over half a year now. It didn't seem like much time, but the months they'd spent in the rural outskirts of West Yorkshire had been more consistent than any other place she could recall. It was the constant disadvantage of a military based family always on the move - home wasn't a place but rather an illusion.

The repeated realization running through her head didn't keep Emma from glancing back at the house she'd just departed from. It truly was beautiful - an old yet updated house cloaked in historical dark bricks and surrounded by about twenty acres of equestrian property her father took full advantage of even though he certainly wasn't supposed to while still hurt. The windows were thick glass and the doors were strong eighteenth century with many sagas she hoped to one day hear more about. The frontage road leading from the manor's front gate to the stables wasn't exactly short, but Emma liked the think time that stroll offered. The view was unbeatable with a small yet lively duck pond to the right and the greenest grass she'd ever known stretching beyond a distance she could fully observe.

She'd allowed herself to miss the place several times when she'd temporarily been away - something she probably shouldn't do as a Canadian born citizen who certainly didn't have the right to think of wealthy outlying England as home. She couldn't help it though and as her mother began regularly tending to flowers they'd planted in the yard, Emma started letting the concept of home creep in for a few sporadic moments a day.

It was only once she'd learned of the structure's past that she fought to pull those thoughts back in. The house she'd assumed they were renting wasn't just anyone's - it was in possession of the Royal family, a place given in a kind gesture for the idolized Admiral David Nolan to rehabilitate peacefully. It was something Emma knew they should be grateful for, but accepting regal assistance had given her pride a pretentious nudge. Not being able to provide comfortable quarters for the leading man who'd always kept their family safe was frustrating, but her mother had reminded her that the circumstances weren't meant to elevate anyone's ego.

Well, not anyone's but those of the monarchy - and Emma was pretty sure they didn't need reminding of how generous and hospitable they continued to be to their people.

It wasn't that she had an actual issue with the royal family or the people who made up that elite group. It was more that the whole concept just seemed outdated - queens, princes, palaces, and thrones. They all seemed like things she would have fawned over as a little girl, but this was the modern real world and the whole notion of a crown controlling multiple countries just felt like something out of a fairytale storybook. It was right up there next to 'true love' on the list of make believe in her head and she tried not to let her cynicism seep through. Real life definitely wasn't about happily ever after.

No, reality was about accepting that life was full of hardships and struggles - and honestly, on what level could anyone born into royalty really understand that?

Reaching the downhill slope toward the large building that housed about ten barred stalls, Emma slowed her pace a bit. The gravel under her soles was skittish - a fact she knew from experience with a very nervous and very appropriately named pony called Hopper that she'd ridden exactly once around the age of six. Visiting her father at the stables had become a regular thing, yes, but like hell if she'd ever get back on any horse.

Hearing the gentle clomping of hooves as she entered through the large open doors, she finally caught sight of him near the left wall with a heavy saddle draped over his arm as he bit his lip in concentration. Fighting the urge to rush toward him with a helping hand and a scolding word, Emma took a second to realize just how far he'd come. He was dressed in that familiar flannel shirt he'd been wearing for ages now - dark maroon with the navy blue pattern. His brown shoes seemed at ease against the concrete underfoot and she observed his motion with anxiety pulsing through her veins. Walking had only become something he could manage without help roughly a month ago, but now, he moved pretty easily and only with a slight grimace when the pain seemed to spike. Despite her gratitude for his regained ability to carry things he probably shouldn't, Emma couldn't help but offer a little warning as she folded her arms in the entryway.

"You know that Mom would totally freak out if she saw you lifting that, right?"

Her father looked over his shoulder with a knowing smirk before he stumbled a bit, a slight misstep that sent Emma hurrying to his side automatically despite her taunting. Pausing as he held his hand up in refusal of her regular help, she stood back and waited to see just what he could do with his never ending stubbornness. With a quiet groan and a balancing move, he soon caught hold of the slick black bar near the top of a gate and he stationed his feet wide in a stance that was finally starting to strengthen. A few deep breaths brought him back to his usual defenses and Emma couldn't help but find joy in his returned ability to brush off her guidance.

"What your mother doesn't observe or hear about won't hurt her," he replied with a wink and the paternal smile she could typically expect. "Plus, that wasn't all bad. Still on my feet at least, right?"

Emma sighed in agreement, continuing to take in the details of the injured man only a few paces away. His bruises and cuts were fading as time slowly passed and the scars marring his body were now hidden beneath his familiar faded clothes. It had taken a long time - almost the entire duration of their current stay in England - for him to begin to look like himself again. It was a welcome sight and she tried to revel in the fact that he was getting better. He was healing - and in turn, so could the rest of their family.

She'd been staring out the large third floor window in one of Columbia's many campus buildings, enduring the second hour of her capstone class when she'd received the call - well, nine calls that turned into several alarming voicemails. Stepping out into the hallway with the vibrating phone in her clenched hand was a recollection that now felt almost as surreal as dashing through LaGuardia to catch a red eye flight had been that terrifying evening, but walking into the military hospital just off the shores of Scotland was a memory that still burned each time it crossed her thoughts.

She'd failed the class, scuffing up her college reputation not long after the course officially started. It was the only black mark on her university record and it was definitely something her father would have chided her for had he been in the condition to do so. She had done her best to shove that subtle shame aside since arriving in England to an indefinite future. Proficient grades ceased to matter the instant she promised her mother she'd be on the next flight over the vast ocean, even if the failure they represented still lingered heavily in her mind.

Family became suddenly even more important when she'd boarded the plane and holding that framework together wasn't something she'd allow to be swayed by a single moment.

That was not to say that the moment itself hadn't been the most fearful one of her life - the sound of her mother's distraught voice and the matching state of their teary eyes when they finally found one another just outside of the surgery room was a thought that would never go quietly. Hearing her father had been in an accident was a risk that always came with his commitment to the Royal Navy, but being thrown into the aftermath without warning wasn't something she'd wish on her worst enemy.

"So I take it you're feeling a little better today?"

"A bit more every day," he assured her with that half hearted smile. "We'll get there eventually."

Emma tried to return his shaky certainty with a nod, but watching the heroic man before her struggle wasn't getting any easier. She knew she should be more patient - the surgeons had told her and her mother that a full recovery could take years. It wasn't a total surprise to hear such a frustrating conclusion, especially once the doctors read off the lengthy list of her father's sustained injuries - multiple left leg fractures, a strained and dislocated shoulder, a few cracked ribs, plenty of bruises paired with stitches on his chin, and a black eye that had taken weeks to disappear. All of that was caused by the initial fall, a slip up that occurred during a rainy training effort he'd been managing and then attempting to salvage. His brave actions had saved the lives of two other men who'd been caught in the stormy circumstances as he's sent them to safety and tried to secure whatever had been so goddamn important on the slippery ship deck, but that valiant effort was something she had a hard time feeling proud of as she watched him battle the triumphs and setbacks since that day. There ended up being a couple other ailments that he'd fortunately moved on from since then - the main issue being slight respiratory stress invoked by those few short moments he'd faced the possibility of drowning in the storm addled water.

That was the one thought she'd yet to find the courage to consider. There just wasn't any way the sea could have potentially stolen the man who'd taught her to swim - both literally and figuratively.

"So," he said after a moment, moving to sit down on one of the closeby wooden benches. "Have you come to check up on me or offer your wrath? I heard the company in Cambridge last night wasn't the best."

"No, it wasn't," Emma laughed, taking the empty space next to him and placing the jacket on the seat at her side. "But it also wasn't the worst."

"I suppose I owe you big for that one - I've heard about a few of those favored families and guests that were set to attend," he continued, cringing dramatically with a smile. "Some woman named 'Zelena' I think? She already sounds villainous and I've never even met her."

Emma couldn't help the small giggle that escaped her, relaxation settling on her shoulders as she watched her father's cheesy sense of humor rise and fall between them. It was a relief to observe him in such spirits and as she took note of his subtle smile, it was difficult to believe that things might never return to normal.

They had to. He had to.

"So," Emma started, tilting her head toward him. "Mom says you had something you wanted to ask me?"

"Oh, well - yeah," he said, surprise filling his face as he met her eyes. "I should have figured she'd put me on the spot like that."

"Yeah, you'd think you would have learned by now," Emma teased. "So what's up?"

Watching him straighten his posture and sigh heavily was oddly amusing and Emma felt her lips twitch up into a slow smirk. What was he up to?

"Well, the doctors gave me the all-clear yesterday-" he divulged, hold up his hands in defense as soon as she tried to argue. "-and that doesn't mean I'm headed for enemy lines, but I do need to get back up to speed on what's going on with the crew."

"So the favor you need is for me to go tell them to keep the ships in line or whatever because you're not coming back to the base yet, right?"

"I happen to like the men I work with so I'm definitely not about to send you to threaten them," he replied with a light chuckle, elbowing her as she glared gently. "But what I wanted to tell you is that there's a new possibility of a new small fleet of ships setting sail in a few months and I'm being briefed on the negotiations this Friday. It's a little less glamorous than being out on the water itself, but I figure that it couldn't hurt to start fresh with a new assignment. It might even be called a step up of sorts."

Emma felt relief overcome her at his explanation. Letting the recently repaired sailor back out onto the open ocean wasn't something she or her mother could fathom right now and while playing politics with the other various ranked men of the military wasn't exactly safe either, Emma knew it was much less risky for her father to wear a suit than battle the sea for the time being. It took only a moment and his sideways glance for her to realize that she'd still yet to learn what he needed her to play.

"Okay," she said, trying to keep her curiosity at bay. "So you need….me to pack you a lunch? Or a ride to the base or something?"

"Not exactly, but it's good to know you're willing to do both of those things without much begging," he grinned, stretching his injured leg out and folding his arms. "Actually, your mother is going to accompany me to London for this meeting and I hoped I might be able to coerce you into joining us. Maybe make a long weekend out of it?"

"London," Emma repeated, narrowing her gaze intently. "But your briefings usually happen here or in Portsmouth, don't they? What's in London?"

"Kind of a broad question, Em," he told her with a soft chuckle. "But I think you mean 'who' rather than 'what'."

The clever expression on his face was entertaining and it was truly the first time she'd seen him look fractionally giddy since the accident. The idea of trekking to London on wasn't exactly her idea of a good time, especially because she'd heard talk on the news that morning of a large event planned at Buckingham that weekend as well. Dealing with the droves of people it would surely bring in while trying to stay otherwise occupied as her father got back to work didn't sound appealing in the least, but she couldn't help her need to know just what had him in such high spirits.

"Okay, fine," she said with an exaggerated sigh, trying to let him enjoy whatever shenanigans he was up to. "Who is in London?"

"Well, I suppose in most situations, she'd be called the boss," he offered, arching an eyebrow. "But perhaps it would be more proper to go with Her Majesty the Queen in this particular case."

Emma felt her eyes widen as she processed the answer she'd finally obtained. Sure, her father was high in the military ranks and likely in the opinions of those advising the iconic woman who represented the monarchy, but she still hadn't imagined hearing him clarify their purpose in such a way. Watching him shrug sheepishly as he begrudgingly pulled on the coat she'd brought along, the disbelief swirling in her thoughts finally settled enough for her to draw one very important conclusion.

This was obviously a hell of a promotion - and she had zero idea what that meant for her.

Tagging some lovely people: @optomisticgirl (thank you for the beta assistance, my friend), @themmaswan, @xpumpkindumplingx, @spartanguard, @harryandthecambridges @fergus80, @eala-captian, @allietumbles, @kmomof4, @laschatzi, @galadriel26, @timeless-love-story, @lifeinahole27, @kat2609, @msres, @all0of0the0usernames, @captainswanismyendgame, @lovelycssefan, @hooksheroicheart, @irishcaptainodonoghue, @gonzothegreat90, @cat-sophia, @rebelcxptain, @prairiepirate, @yesplskillianjones, @jennjenn615, @xhookswenchx, @heomomka, @fckyesroyals, @lenfazreads, @cherrywolf713

*If there’s anyone who’d like a tag in future chapters, just let me know :)

[ciathyzareposts]

Missed Classic: Moonmist – Getting a Clue (Won! Once!)

Written by Joe Pranevich

Welcome back to Moonmist, the Nancy Drew mystery with a bit less Nancy Drew and a bit more Clue. The more I think about it, the more likely it seems that Galley and Lawrence were inspired by the 1985 film starring Tim Curry and based on the board game. (Our international readers may know both by their foreign titles, Cluedo.) Both the game and the film relish in mystery tropes including the all-important “dinner scene”, but the genius of the Clue film comes in its multiple endings. When you went to the theater, you were randomly selected to get one of several possible endings with different murderers and motives. The whole film had to be set up to support the multiple endings and, for my money, it is one of the great comedic twists in film. Moonmist’s multiple endings, plucked from a seemingly-random question of color at the beginning of the game, might not really be based on Clue but I cannot help but think there is a connection. Later releases of Clue included all of the endings, one after the other, at the conclusion of the film. We will return to Moonmist after we beat it once to see how the other threads play out.

We left off last week just after the critical dinner scene. The pre-recorded voice of the late Lord Lionel Tresyllian invited the assembled guests to participate in a scavenger hunt for a missing piece of his fortune. Lord Jack, Lionel’s nephew and the new owner of the castle, is a prime suspect in his uncle’s death due to his inheriting the estate. His ex-girlfriend, Deirdre, also recently died in mysterious circumstances. (She fell down a well!) Meanwhile, our friend Tamara believes that someone is trying to kill her and the mysterious “White Lady” ghost has resumed haunting the halls. How are all of these details connected? We just have to solve the mystery to find out.

Wilton Castle in Cornwall might be built in the same style. Notice the circular tower region separated from a more “modern” manor house. 

All In The Brochure

Now that dinner is over, I need a strategy. My initial plan is to run down the two leads that I have so far and then join the family’s scavenger hunt. At some point, I will need to break to explore the castle and grounds to build a map. Although a fine map came with the game, it does not include the whole castle and certainly does not document all the nooks and crannies that we may need to explore to solve this mystery.

The first clue to follow up on is the maid’s note. Last week, we intercepted a note from the butler to Lord Jack that stated not only that the servants were preparing to leave for the night, but that one of the maids had decided to quit. She left a resignation letter on the desk in the sitting room. As all of the guests were ushered into that room as soon as the meal was over, so it’s easy to look! Before I get there, I commented on one aspect of this game already but it bears repeating: even though I know there is a desk in the sitting room, we cannot “see” it. All we get for the room description is this:

> look It looks even lovelier than it sounds in the brochure.

This is perhaps explicable because they were trying to cut down on the amount of text in the game, but no other Infocom work to this point required such extremes to depict a fully fleshed-out world. This is the description in the brochure:

From that, we can learn that there is a desk, window seat, and many other objections in the room that merit our investigation. I find flipping between the game and the manual (even in PDF form) to be annoying but at least the game only does this for a half-dozen rooms in the brochure.

Enough about that, let’s read the note:

Today, while cleaning the room of a certain person who shall remain nameless, I was SHOCKED to discover SUMMING DREADFUL! I hope I knows me place, Your Lordship, but I was brought up to be a PERFECTLY RESPECTABLE young woman, and I cannot go on working under the same roof where such WICKEDNESS takes place. I am not the type of girl given to idle gossip, so I will only say this. Maybe there is more reason than ANYONE SUSPECKS why that so-called ghost prowls about the castle at night, if you know what I mean. I am not the type who peeks through keyholes, either, but maybe it is high time someone did!

I dislike the fake “accent” writing and misspellings. If she had been an American servant, I would fear that Lawrence and Galley were channeling some vaguely racist southern slang, but as it stands it just reads as off to me. This may be a great approximation of a working class Cornwall accent! Unfortunately, the note doesn’t tell us much.That she saw something while peeking through a keyhole suggests something illicit, perhaps an affair by Lord Jack himself, but I hesitate to connect that to the ghost. This clue may make more sense later and I was planning to ransack all of the bedrooms anyway.

Another game with gratuitous nudity.

Garden of Eden

After reading the note, I explore the rest of the sitting room. I barely get farther than noticing that music from A Prairie Home Companion (already twelve years old when this game came out!) is on the piano before Jack gets up and leaves the room. I quickly abandon my plan and follow him through the castle to see where he is heading. He leaves the sitting room and heads west to the old “tower” part of the castle before ascending the stairs beyond the limits of our tourist brochure. I discover him searching in a disused chapel next to a stained glass window depicting the Garden of Eden. Vivien’s clue from last week read:

Forbidden fruit tempted the very first lass, ‘Twas once in a garden, but now in a glass.

It looks like we are in the right place! Since the brochure didn’t mention the chapel, I doubt I would have found this location quickly. All the more reason why I need to map! I search the window and discover a note taped to the apple. Jack catches me taking it but seems strangely happy about it. It’s not like his family fortune is on the line, right? Or does he get to keep the treasure if I find it?

> examine window Stuck on the apple of the stained-glass window is a third clue. “How nice! You found a third clue!” says Lord Jack.

This is another moment where the prose feels “off”. At the very least, there is too much “the” in there, but even so the text in this game feels more stilted than in some of Infocom’s previous works. It says:

Despite its appearance, the fruit was quite sour. One bite of the apple drove Eve from her bower.

I do not know what to make of it. “Bower” seems to be the key word, but where did Eve go when leaving the Garden of Eden? There’s not an easy answer to that question, but I may work it out as I explore more of the castle. (As a guy that spent years blogging about bible stories, I can tell you that the answer is complicated as pre-flood geography is implied to be different and subject to debate. Mormons believe that the Garden of Eden was in modern day Missouri.)

I follow up on the butler’s clue next. He told me that he had seen the White Lady searching for something on the floor in the drawing room. She ran off when he saw her, but he could not work out where she went as the doors were still locked. I bee-line for the sitting room next– it is in the eastern end of the new section of the castle, according to the brochure– and search for myself. I discover a small red jewel in the carpeting! The jewel is otherwise unremarkable, but it may help me discover the ghost’s identity.

Yes, the game came with a map, but…

Mapping, Mapping, Mapping Since I have no more clues and every other guest is vigorously lounging in the drawing room, my next step is to map out the castle. I would not have known about the chapel if Lord Jack had not led me there; I expect there are many more such surprises. To get ahead of myself, the process of mapping the castle will take hours of both real and in-game time. By my count, the castle consists of 56 locations and a web of secret passages. My plan is to map out everything I can, notate anything interesting, and come back to key locations after I am done.

The castle can be broadly divided into three areas:

The “main” tourist part as well as the bedrooms and private living spaces for the family. Those are anchored off of an “Old Great Hall” in the west that rises like a tower, and a “New Great Hall” in the east with more modern construction.

The servants’ spaces in the kitchen and basement. This area can be accessed through a hidden stairwell in the dining room (leading down to the kitchen) as well as a pair of stairs at the base of the old tower.

Secret passages! There are a lot of secret passages in the game; nearly every location can be entered or spied upon by one of these hidden hallways.

Starting at the ground floor, I have already explored the dining and sitting rooms. I head outside and am relieved that the hedge “maze” is not an adventure game-style maze and just a quick jaunt to a fountain in the center. I discover my first interesting thing in the foyer: a strange cane in the umbrella stand. It barely looks like a cane at all, more like a club with faceted bumps all over it. A closer examination reveals that it has been recently painted. I hold onto it as it may be a clue.

Above the New Great Hall is a block of bedrooms, including my own. Does it seem odd that everyone has their own room, even those that presumably live just down the street? I suppose they planned to party all night long and staying in the castle was just more convenient for all involved. I search the rooms and find nothing incredibly suspicious although (lucky me!), only my room has an attached bathroom.

Jack and Tamara’s (separate) bedrooms are located on the western side of the castle, in the tower. Lord Jack has a nice telescope in his room which I try to use, but doing so opens up a secret passage. Unfortunately, the interior was dark and I’ll need to return to explore once I find a light source. Jack also chooses now as the right time to go to bed and he catches me snooping around in his room. He’s not happy, but neither is the game. I try to leave, but he blocks my exit:

> enter secret passage Lord Jack blocks your exit! [ Foo!! This is a bug!! ]

This freaks me out and I restore my game to an earlier point. The last thing I want is to trigger a bug and end up in a walking dead situation. I cannot recall any other Infocom game that had a bug message like this. Am I just unlucky or is this game not as well-tested as other Infocom products?

Other than the secret passage, I find nothing of note in Jack’s room. There is an inkwell that we can grab in his office.

King Dingane ka Senzangakhona Zulu, also known as King Dingaan

Zulu Research The final room on that floor of the tower is the library where Tamara does her research into Lord Lionel’s expeditions. There are comfy chairs and plenty of books all around. Someone kindly left one of Lord Lionel’s journals open on a table and I read it to discover the nature of one of his treasures from Africa: a war club that once belonged to Zulu “King Dingaan”. It’s diamond-studded and must have been smuggled out of Africa under dubious circumstances. I’m sure we’re supposed to think of Lord Lionel as a rugged adventurer in the mold of Indiana Jones (whose first movie came out only two years before this), but now I just think of evil colonialists who robbed Africa of her heritage. He didn’t even donate it to a museum, he just added it to his private collection!

It doesn’t take me more than a moment to realize that the “odd cane” that I picked up by the door is a repainted war club. I scratch away some of the paint to confirm. I found the treasure by accident!

Let’s pause for a bit of a history lesson. Dingaan was a real king of the Zulu, ruling from 1828 until 1840. He overthrew his brother, the much more well-known King Shaka. I don’t know enough about Zulu history to put that into context. Zulu warriors fought with several weapons, one of which was a mace-like war club called an iwisa. It appears that our club is likely intended to be a ceremonial version of that. The right-hand picture above shows one, but here is a better view:

Yes, I can see how that could be mistaken for a cane.

Good on Infocom for doing a bit of research here, but shame that there was not more commentary on the inherent evil of stealing artifacts like these and hiding them away in manor houses where no one will ever find them. Even by the 1980s, I thought those sorts of practices were frowned upon. I’m not done because the game tells me that I still need to “collect evidence and identify the ghost.” To do that, I resume exploring.

The third floor of the tower contains the chapel plus a game room and lumber room, both of which appear to be primarily used for storing junk. There’s a giant stuffed rhino in the game room, for instance, and a birdcage and treasure chest in the lumber room. (“Lumber room” appears to be a British term for storage room, so it is unsurprising to find junk in there.) The treasure chest isn’t interesting because it contains a treasure but rather because there is a small opening under the chest that looks down into Tamara’s bedroom. Is Lord Jack spying on her? Alternatively, maybe the peephole was built hundreds of years ago and he doesn’t even know it is there. At the top of the tower is the fighting deck. There’s a bell up there that you can ring; we are told it can be heard throughout the whole castle.

An example of a servants’ staircase in an old British house. Not very posh.

Dungeon Crawling

That is it for the public parts of the castle. I head back downstairs and duck into the servants’ area through the “backstairs” tucked away behind the dining room. Not surprisingly, this is a real thing: it was not uncommon to have separate entrances and hallways for the help such that they would not need to interact with the gentry more than necessary. Just beneath the dining room is the kitchen and an old-timey brass lantern. I grab it immediately. I don’t know how many adventure games I’ve played through by now, but a brass lantern is always comforting.

The game does not let us explore the servants’ quarters, but we can proceed west into the basement and wine cellar. There, we grab a bottle of wine and look over Lord Lionel’s stored adventuring gear, but I find nothing of interest. The well that Deidre fell into is also in the basement, I do not find any clues there to her fate and the well itself is too dark even with the lantern.

Further west is the castle’s disused dungeon, although an iron maiden is just calling out to be used on someone. A “priest hole” leads out of the castle and onto a cliff path behind it, offering a means of escape for someone that didn’t want to use either of the castle’s front doors, but it’s too dark even with my lantern to explore it. From my understanding of priest holes, I believed they were hiding places for clergy of whatever faith was being persecuted at the time; this seems more like a secret exit. If we climb (warily) into the iron maiden, a hidden mechanism is triggered and we are taken down in an elevator to a secret tomb. I was ready to be amazed by the treasure or whatever it is that we would find there, but it’s nothing more than an empty coffin. Very disappointing!

An illustration of a priest hole.

It’s A Secret to Everybody

With my lantern in hand, I return to Lord Jack’s room and enter the castle’s warren of secret passages. I’d love to tell you that they were interesting, but I’m only willing to go as far as “annoying to map”. In the western side of the castle, the passages wind up and down stairs between levels and it’s easy to lose track of what floor you are on. In contrast, the eastern side of the castle is neatly organized with a tidy loop of passages hidden in the outer walls. I clearly did a poor job of pushing and pulling objects in every room that I went to because it turns out that nearly every room in the castle is connected to a secret passage somehow. No bedroom is safe from an intruder that knows the system, nor is the library, drawing room, or anywhere else. Peepholes let you spy on the Great Hall. Someone went to a lot of trouble for this.

The one exciting thing I thought I found wasn’t exciting at all. At one point in one of the passages, you find a door that is high above you which calls out to be explored. Elsewhere in the warren, you have to ascend and descend using a ladder, but it’s not mobile and cannot be used to access the elevated door. I thought for sure that it would be a hidden room that could only be accessed by solving a puzzle, but the reality was more boring than that. In the sitting room, there is a secret entrance that requires you to sit on a window seat and manipulate one of the nearly wyvern statues. This is a one-way drop into the passage below. Instead of being a clever puzzle to find a mystery room in the castle, it is nothing.

At one point, I stumbled on the White Lady in one of the passages! She runs away quickly and cannot be followed like the other residents. I neglected to make a note of when and where so I could not find her again right away. That was a mistake, but not a huge one.

My completed map of the game.

Solving Puzzles

I mapped the whole castle and found no more clues, so it’s time to take stock of what we know and what we do not know:

The three clues appear to lead us to the discovery of the war club, but I have not worked out the third clue and at this point it probably doesn’t matter. The first clue, the King of Spades with a sceptre, is obvious in retrospect as a way to suggest the war club as the prize.

There are plenty of suspicious things around the castle that seem like they should be used for something, but aren’t. There is a suit of armor in the great hall, a mounted rhinoceros in the game room, the well, and the secret passage out of the castle, not to mention the secret crypt and empty coffin. These might be for some of the alternate solutions, but right now they are just distractions.

I have not discovered the scandal that caused the maid to resign her position.

Why is there a peephole into Tamara’s room? I try watching Tamara through it and she’s either not there, getting ready for bed, or sleeping. I found nothing suspicious beyond that I was watching my friend sleep.

While we know the White Lady uses the secret passages, and can surmise that she uses the priest hole to enter and exit the castle, we don’t know who she is or what she is up to.

As I write this, it’s after 6 AM in game time and everyone in the castle has long since been asleep. Just for giggles, I wait a bit. The police arrive at 7 AM and take over the investigation, but I’m not even clear what crime they are investigating. Was there a murder or something overnight that I missed? As far as I saw, everyone was sleeping peacefully.

I start over and quickly retrace my steps for the clues, the war club, and the red jewel in the carpet. This time, I use the objects to interrogate Jack. When I show him the club, he announces that it’s the end of his search and then just walks away. I just saved the family’s financial fortunes and that is all the thanks that I get?

“That must be the hidden treasure! Then that’s the end of my searching.” “That’s super!” adds Lord Jack. “We can’t thank you enough.”

Did I mention that the dialog in this game feels stilted and repetitive? Jack’s response to the red jewel is more telling:

> show jewel to jack He flinches a little before answering. He looks at it with interest. But he says he can’t identify it.

Lord Jack clearly recognizes the jewel but doesn’t want to admit it. I race back upstairs and search his bedroom once again. This time, I discover one of Deirdre’s necklaces in a “tallboy” that I missed before (possibly because I did not realize that a “tallboy” is a British word for a type of dresser). I compare the stone to the necklace and it is a perfect match! But why did the ghost have the stone and how did she lose it?

I interview the remainder of the guests to look for reactions, but none of them respond in an interesting way and many of the answers are repeated across guests. It another way that the game feels cheap and incomplete; a far cry from the tailored responses in a game like Deadline. The last guest I have to interview is the White Lady herself so I sit in one of the secret passages and just wait until she comes by. Shortly after midnight, I am rewarded with a ghost sighting. When I show her the necklace I filched from Lord Jack’s bedroom, I get a very helpful response:

> show necklace to ghost She says, “Please don’t speak, just listen! I’m really Deirdre, and I’m alive. Jack tried to murder me, and I think he murdered Lionel! He pushed me down the well, but an underground stream carried me swiftly to the sea, where I was rescued by a yacht. I have come back to Tresyllian Castle in disguise — both to frighten him and to find some proof of Lionel’s murder. And to incriminate Lord Jack for my own ‘murder’ by planting the tiny red jewel from my necklace in the clothes he wore that night — but then I lost it in the drawing room.” She goes on, “But now that you’re on the case, I can leave the country with the yacht captain. Find proof of Lionel’s murder, and we can both rest easily!” She races off towards the priest hole.

(Congratulations, Ms. Doe, you’ve identified the ghost!)

Wow. I have so many thoughts. Why does she want the world to think she is dead? This isn’t the 1700s, you cannot just fake your death and live an otherwise normal life. She has bank cards and passports and so many other things to deal with. Even if she wanted to leave Jack, I cannot imagine that plan working. Since she also survived attempted murder, I think she would want to take that to the authorities instead of dressing up as a ghost. Speaking of which, where does she live? How is she buying the white makeup? How does any of that make sense? She is not Tamara’s attacker and we do not have anyone with a motive for that.

I wake up Tamara to tell her about the ghost, but that is useless. She complains that she is too sleepy to talk and goes right back to bed. The same thing happens when I wake up any of the other guests. I know that Jack did it; how do I solve the murder?

The ghost was Deirdre the whole time!

Taking a Hint

At this point, I am stumped. I have no idea how to prove that Jack killed Deirdre and no idea who wants to kill Tamara. After some further exploring, I took a hint: I needed to take the maid’s note a lot more literally. I was supposed to be looking through all of the bedroom keyholes, not just searching the bedrooms. If I would have done that, I would have discovered that there were wires in the keyhole to Lord Jack’s room. The wires lead to a microphone and hidden tape recorder, evidently set up by Lionel before his death. I believe the implication is that it started recording whenever someone opened his door, but I’m not sure exactly.

I play what is on the tape:

> play recorder First, you hear Lionel: “This secret tape recorder should capture any sound in the master bedroom when I run it. Testing,… testing,…” Then you hear Lionel tell Deirdre that he suspects Jack of coveting the inheritance and wanting to kill him. After a pause, Jack tells Lionel, with a cold-blooded chuckle, that his time has come. Then Lionel’s voice is urgent and muffled, as if he’s being smothered! He calls out, “Jack! Stop!” and then… silence. (Congratulations, Ms. Doe! You found evidence of the crime!)

Jack killed both Deirdre and Lionel! That doesn’t seem surprising, but wasn’t Lionel dying of a rare jungle disease anyway? Or was that a ruse? I’m also not sure how this maps to the maid’s note. If she found the tape recorder proving that Jack killed Lionel, she would not have explained what she found in a note to the killer. I just cannot map her screed about “wickedness” to what we actually found in the keyhole.

The clue says that I need to wake Jack up and accuse him of the crime– as opposed to, for example, calling the local police. His bedroom door is locked and I have to pick my way there through the secret passages. As soon as I wake and accuse him, Jack attacks me but I am rescued by the butler Bolitho who appears suddenly. He didn’t leave after all! Maybe he even knew that Jack was the killer the whole time? The game is over and we are given the official summary:

Lord Jack murdered Lionel to inherit the title and castle. Deirdre was blackmailing Lord Jack to marry her, because she knew he was plotting to kill Lionel. So Jack tried to do away with her, too, by dumping her down the well. But Jack was wrong in thinking he killed Deirdre. She survived and came back to the castle at night — to play on Tamara’s nerves, since her arrival seems to be part of Jack’s plot; to hunt for proof that Jack murdered Lionel; and to try to frame him for her own “murder” by planting the tiny red jewel in his trouser cuff, until she lost it in the drawing room.

I am happy that I won, but it feels unsatisfying. It turns out that Deirdre was the one scaring Tamara after all, but is leaving a poisonous snake in a desk really “playing on nerves”? And where did she get the snake? The realization that Deirdre was blackmailing Jack makes sense as a motive, but if she wanted to be rich she shouldn’t be running off with the guy on the yacht. And finally, instead of going to the police with evidence she is alive, she wants to “get even” by planting evidence on Jack and hoping that someone sees it and puts it all together? Nope. I don’t buy it.

With one case down, we have three more variants to go. Will they be any better than this? My guess is that they will go a lot faster since I already have the castle mapped, but it may be more difficult than I expect to shift to a different mystery with the same players and setting; I could miss a clue because I do not think to search something again.

Time played: 4 hr 40 min Total Time: 5 hr 25 min

As you are aware, Covid-19 has taken a toll on the lives and schedules of our regular reviewers. It is my sincerest hope that we will be able to return to a more normal posting pattern soon, however even my schedule is still more than a bit crazy and I may not be able to consistently write one post per week yet.

In the previous entry, I asked whether our readers would like me to continue to the next Infocom game (1987’s Hollywood Hijinx) or move immediately into Space Quest V, even with the understanding that there could be post delays. Thus far, we have two votes for me to play the Infocom game next. Please let me know what you think in the comments below.

source http://reposts.ciathyza.com/missed-classic-moonmist-getting-a-clue-won-once/

[samuelfields]

Why $5 Million Is Barely Enough To Retire Early With A Family

When toddlers close their eyes, they think other people can’t see them. But I wouldn’t expect grown adults to think the same way.

Despite half the United States population living in expensive coastal cities and other high-cost areas of the country, there is somehow disbelief and even outrage a family might need multiple millions, let alone $5 million dollars, in order to retire early comfortably.

I recognize the attractiveness of lower cost areas, hence why I’ve aggressively invested in the heartland of America. Migration to the heartland is a multi-decade trend I want to be a part of. But I hope more folks can also recognize some of the reasons why people live in higher cost areas as well: higher pay, more job opportunities, greater diversity, sometimes better weather, amazing food selection, and family to name a few. 

An Average Retirement Life With $5 Million

In my after-tax investment amounts by age for a comfortable retirement, I included a more aggressive after-tax investment chart for those who want to retire in an expensive city like San Francisco, New York, Los Angeles, Washington DC, Boston, San Diego, Seattle, Miami, or now Denver.

Again, not everybody wants to or can relocate to Des Moines and leave their friends and family behind. As a refresher, let’s review the high cost of living retirement chart.

If you retire at 40 with $2,500,000 in after-tax investments, you’ll only be able to generate $100,000 a year in gross income or $75,000 in after-tax income based on a 4% rate of return. Is this enough? Not according to the Department of Housing and Urban Development, which considers $100,000 a year “low income” for a family of three living in San Francisco, for example.

Yes, you could potentially earn a higher rate of return than 4%, but when you’re counting on only your investments to support a family, it’s better to have a more conservative portfolio.

Private grade schools and private universities give financial aid to families who make $100,000 a year or less per child. Why is that? Because they agree with the Department of Housing and Urban Development.

Living Off $5 Million In Retirement

Based on simple math, $5,000,000 in after-tax investments at a 4% annual return will generate $200,000 a year in gross income.

To give you an idea of what $200,000 a year in passive income can cover, let’s profile Jerry, a Financial Samurai reader’s budget. Jerry is 45 years old, has a 8-month-old daughter and a non-working spouse named Linda, 38. They’ve lived in Los Angles for the past 20 years.

Both have decided to retire early in order to spend as much time as possible with their daughter. After both negotiated severance packages equal to $100,000 for Jerry and $60,000 for Linda, they have a combined net worth of roughly $6,300,000 if you include the $600,000 in equity they have in their primary residence, and $700,000 in their combined pre-tax retirement accounts.

Their goal is to never go back to full-time work again and perhaps do some part-time consulting once their daughter goes to kindergarten in five years. Neither parent is doing any sort of side hustling at the moment, contrary to most early retirees I know, including myself.

I’ve cross-referenced all the numbers based on my family’s own household expenses over the past year since we have a 18-month-old toddler and also live in California. All the expense line-items are realistic, if not a little conservative.

Please review J&L’s expenses below.

Retirement Income Analysis

One of the biggest benefits of earning passive investment income versus job income is a lower federal marginal income tax rate. J&L’s $200,000 in investment income is taxed at 15% versus 24% if it had been earned through employment. After paying roughly 8% in California state income tax, Jerry and Linda’s effective federal + state tax rate is only ~24% versus ~30% if they were W2 employees.

Due to the State And Local Tax (SALT) deduction being capped at $10,000, they’re losing out on at least $5,000 in tax refunds they would have received before Trump’s Tax Reform Act was passed. This painful realization will be felt by millions of HCOL homeowners in 2019 when they do their 2018 taxes.

Because Jerry and Linda want to be completely present parents, they’ve promised not to do any activity to generate money at least before their daughter goes to pre-school. They’re burnt out anyway. As a result, they must be disciplined and stick to their budget if they want to remain retired.

Retirement Budget Analysis

Kids Are Expensive (~$36,000/year)

The 10 hours a week of childcare assistance is extremely important so J&L can keep their sanity. Sometimes they use that time to go on dates, other times they use those hours to have “me time” to get away from each other. Being stay at home parents 24/7 is no joke. But it’s getting a little easier every month as their daughter sleeps a little better through the night.

J&L take their daughter to swim class twice a week and gym class once a week. On the other days, they go to the local science museum, where they have an annual family membership for $150 as well as the zoo, where they also have a $150 annual family membership.

Despite being able to each contribute $15,000 a year to their daughter’s 529 plan, they can really only afford to contribute $11,000 each if they want to maintain their lifestyle. They don’t believe making their daughter a 529 millionaire is a particularly wise move given the possible lack of motivation so much money might cause. Although, sending their daughter to public school in order to have the option to make her a millionaire sounds brilliant.

J&L will start their daughter off in public school to save money and see how she does. If they find she needs a smaller environment with a different style to thrive, then they will consider paying for private grade school.  Their #1 goal is give their daughter a wonderful foundation so she can be a strong and independent woman.

Property ($4,794/month)

Having a gross monthly property cost of around $4,794 for a single family home in West LA is reasonable believe it or not. J&L live in a modest 1,600 sqft, 3 bedroom, 2 bathroom home at the edge of Santa Monica. Their house is assessed at around $1.3M, or $400,000 below the median priced home in the area since they are further inland.

J&L have been thinking about upgrading to a remodeled house closer to 2,500 sqft. But such a house in their neighborhood would cost around $2M. They read my Buy Utility, Rent Luxury strategy for real estate investors and have decided to keep costs low and earn a higher rental yield in other parts of the country through real estate crowdfunding and aristocrat dividend stocks instead.

Not living large in Santa Monica, CA for $1.395M

Healthcare Premiums ($1,650/month for a platinum plan)

According to the Kaiser Family Foundation, the average annual premium for employer-based family coverage in 2018 is $19,616 or $1,635 a month. You can see the breakdown of what the average employer and worker pay in the chart below.

Average healthcare premiums nearly $20,000 for a family

Given J&L no longer have jobs, they bear the entire cost of health insurance. With an 8-month-old daughter, they’ve decided not to mess around and maintain a gold health insurance plan.

Their daughter not only sees a pediatrician every three months, but also an ophthalmologist every three months because she has ocular albinism and strabismus. They need to make sure her daughter’s prescription is correct to help her eyes align properly during development. After about age five, the neural pathways that go from the brain to the eyes tend to hardwire.

Health insurance is clearly one of the largest and most necessary expenses early retirees must consider. You could get Affordable Care Act subsidies if your household income is below a certain threshold, but J&L need the income to live and don’t want to draw down principal so early.

Food ($1,800/month)

J&L value their time more than anything. As a result, they are happy to pay $5 for food delivery and save 1-2 hours cooking in order to spend more time with their daughter. J&L supplement their grocery shopping with Amazon Prime about once a month as well. They still prefer doing their own grocery shopping because they’re better at picking out fruit than the delivery guys.

Non-essential Expenses

J&L hardly ever buy new clothing for themselves. They have no need since they don’t have to look good in front of anybody for work. If they need to look fancy, they’ll wear their old work clothes that still fit 10+ years later because they have maintained their same sizes.

Ryan Gosling has strabismus & that’s OK

J&L feel their $330 sports club expense is well worth it. Los Angeles has a huge fitness culture. The club provides a physical and social outlet three times a week. They’ve made many friends from the club. Without their health, their wealth is meaningless.

Finally, they’ve decided to stay local for the first two to three years of their daughter’s life. They have so much of Los Angeles, Newport Beach, Big Bear, and San Diego left to explore as a family. Besides, they agree with me that extensive travel before the age of three is a waste of time since their daughter won’t remember a thing when she’s older.

Budget Adjustments If Necessary

J&L could cut their expenses by contributing less to their daughter’s 529 plan, ordering less food delivery, and spending less money on childcare to free up an extra $5,000 – $10,000 a year. But they’re not sure the additional savings would outweigh the decline in their lifestyle.

Half the population lives in the more expensive blue zones

They could move to a lower cost area of the country, but they’d rather stay warm all year round, rather than face brutal Midwest winters. Further, as a Latino (Jerry) and Asian (Linda) family with a mixed-race daughter, they prefer the diversity of LA that can only be matched by even more expensive places like New York City or San Francisco. This feeling of comfort is underestimated by the majority.

Instead, it seems better to just continue sticking to their budget, and earn supplemental income if they need more money or want to spend more money.

Jerry worked in managing consulting for 23 years and Linda worked in digital marketing for 15 years. Prior to retiring, Jerry was earning a base salary of $300,000 + $100,000 – $200,000 in bonus. Linda was earning a $180,000 base salary + $50,000 in stock compensation.

Every $10,000 of supplemental income earned equals $250,000 in after-tax capital earning a 4% rate of return. J&L could easily consult part-time for a combined 10 hours a week at $100/hour and earn $52,000 a year if one of the following concerns comes true.

J&L’s financial concerns in early retirement include:

1) What if they want and have another child? They need to allocate at least another $20,000 a year for basic expenses, college savings, and childcare help.

2) What if the stock market and real estate market roll over? Their $5 million after-tax portfolio could easily shrink by 10% – 20%, leaving them with passive income of only $160,000 – $180,000, not enough to fund their existing lifestyle with one daughter.

3) What if their daughter has future unknown medical issues? Nobody really tells new parents this, but it takes years before you can find all the issues that need addressing. For example, autism usually only starts showing signs between 18 – 36 months old.

4) What if one or all of their parents get sick and need to move in with them? All parents are still alive, but not all have long-term care insurance. Housing one or two parents will require extra funds.

Worst case, either Jerry or Linda can go back to work full-time, or they can start eating into their after-tax retirement principal until their daughter goes to kindergarten.

Again, please be aware the vast majority of people who espouse FIRE are working hard to make extra income or have a working spouse. Even though my wife and I are also stay-at-home parents, I continue to publish 2-3X a week on Financial Samurai partly because I enjoy writing, partly out of habit for the past 10 years, but also because this site makes a healthy amount of revenue.

While J&L have settled on $5 million in after-tax investments to raise their family, we’re shooting for more just in case our boy can’t win the SF public school lottery. My fingers and mind still work, so I might as well keep going until they don’t.

Let There Be Understanding

Despite detailing the numbers and providing context around J&L’s financial situation, I’m sure there will continue to be disbelievers that $5 million or more in after-tax investments is what’s required to live a comfortable, but not extravagant lifestyle in a high cost location.

It’s also become a national pastime to hate the rich, no matter how hard or long they studied in school, no matter how many hours they’ve worked a day, no matter how many risks they’ve taken to provide a better life for their family, and no matter how much in taxes they pay.

Like how more international travel and the mastery of a second language can help to create more harmony, hopefully, this article can help lead to more understanding by those who do not understand.

Related: When Earning $1 Million A Year Doesn’t Make One Couple Happy

Faced with having a family to provide for, aging parents to take care of, taxes to pay, and inflation to counteract, do you think it’s necessary to have millions of dollars in order to live a comfortable early retirement lifestyle in a HCOL area? Why do you think some people in low cost areas of the country refuse to acknowledge half the population? Are there any parts of J&L’s budget you would cut?

To continue this series, I’m looking to profile families living in Houston, Austin, Miami, Seattle, and the Washington DC area if you’d like to leave a comment with your contact info. So far I’ve covered NYC, SF, and LA. 

https://www.financialsamurai.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/10/Living-an-average-lifestyle-of-5-million.m4a

The post Why $5 Million Is Barely Enough To Retire Early With A Family appeared first on Financial Samurai.

from Finance https://www.financialsamurai.com/why-5-million-dollars-is-barely-enough-to-retire-early-with-a-family/ via http://www.rssmix.com/

[therealestatesparkblog]

Why "Overpriced" Markets Like San Francisco May Be Healthier Than You Think

Housing Prices in Expensive Markets Are Unsustainable! Housing Costs as a Percentage of Median Income Make Absolutely NO Sense! A Crash is Imminent! Investors, homebuyers, and ordinary residents of expensive markets around the country seem to share the above sentiments. In this article, I am going to explain in very simple terms why things are sustainable even in the most expensive markets in the country and why housing costs as a percentage of median income make perfect sense, even in perhaps the most extreme market in the countrySan Francisco. I have no idea if a crash is imminent or not, but I personally plan to continue my consistent, yet nonaggressive accumulation of rental properties. Do not mistake this article as an expression of an opinion that the market will continue to rise, stagnate, or fall. I make no such market predictions. Instead, I want to simply point out that the median/average resident of an expensive market can afford the housing costs of those cities. Housing prices as a percentage of total spending can and will continue to be sustainable, so long as median wages remain above the national average. Many market pundits like to use the fact that, in many markets, the cost of housing has appreciated at a considerably faster rate than the growth in median income. The problem with this logic is that growth in median income does not linearly correlate with proportional increases in the cost of housing.

To demonstrate this point, we will compare and contrast two American cities: San Francisco, CA, and St. Louis, MO. I chose San Francisco, CA because it epitomizes a city where housing costs are significantly more expensive than the rest of the country, and where housing expenses comprise a greater percentage of household spending than other parts of the country. I chose St Louis, MO because it exhibits income, housing, and spending trends that are remarkably close to the national average. Also, I dont like making work for myself when its already been done for me by someone else. The Bureau of Labor Statistics recently released two in-depth studies that nearly perfectly assist me in constructing this article for these two cities. The studies analyze consumer expenditures in San Francisco and St. Louis. The question we are trying to explore here is this: Is the median earner in an expensive market like San Francisco spending an unsustainably large amount of money on housing, such that the market cannot bear further increases in home prices and rental rates? Or do the underlying economics for household expenditures support current pricing? To answer this question, lets start off with some numbers. All data is from the U.S. Census Bureau (median income) and the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics (everything else). San FranciscoMedian Income: $87,701Average Income: $118,098Average Household Spending: $75,380Percent of Spending on Housing: 40.3%Dollars Spent on Housing: $30,378Remaining Dollars Spent Elsewhere: $45,002Dollars Spent on Personal Insurance and Pensions: $10,026 Heres a chart breaking down that $75,380 in spending by category:

St. Louis, MOMedian Income: $61,103Average Income: $69,351Average Household Spending: $57,774Percent of Spending on Housing: 31.7%Dollars Spent on Housing: $18,314Dollars Spent on Everything Else: $39,460Dollars Spent on Personal Insurance and Pensions: $6,760 Heres a chart breaking down that $57,774 in spending by category:

What do these numbers tell us? Well, first off, lets point out that we have a data problemthe spending data is based on averages, but ideally, wed be looking at median household spending. I typically prefer using numbers spent by the median American, rather than taking averages, because the top earners typically skew the averages way up, and I believe that looking at median spending would give us even better insight into what reality looks like for your ordinary resident of these two cities. But I could not find this level of detail for median spending in these two counties. If you are able to link me to that data, I will revise and repost this article using median figures. If that totally blows up my argument for you, please feel free to say so in the comments and stop reading. If you can bear that data problem, then lets do some analysis and see if we cant learn something here. Related: I Live in a High-Priced U.S. City. Can I Still Invest in My Local Market? Point #1: Outside of housing, the average cost of living is remarkably similar in both cities. After Housing and Personal Insurance and Pensions, average household spending is remarkably similar for a citizen in San Francisco and a citizen in St. Louis. A citizen in San Francisco spends about $35,000 after housing and insurance/pensions. A citizen in St. Louis spends about $33,000 after housing and insurance/pensions. For all that talk about San Francisco being an expensive place to live, it would seem that your median income earner is making do just fine spending only $2,000 more than a resident of St. Louis. I take out personal insurance and pensions as well, because this is really a form of savings and life insurance. The increased spending here, in my opinion, is a sign of financial strength, not a cost of living that rises proportionally based on location. Feel free to disagree in the comments! There could be some big insurance spending that residents of San Francisco have to pay that I am unaware of. Note that this excludes health, auto, and home insurance. You can argue all day long about which household experiences the better quality of life at these spending levels, but the fact of the matter is that your resident in these two cities is getting by at those levels of spending, so therefore, we must conclude that they enjoy a similar quality of lifeor would, by and large, relocate. One notable item to consider is transportation. It seems that transportation expenses are lower as a percentage of household spending in SFO than STL. This makes sense to mepublic transportation was great, and traffic was terrible last time I was in SFO, whereas I found fewer attractive public transit options and more reasonable traffic when I passed through STL.

Point #2: Housing is nearly twice as expensive in San Francisco as it is in St. Louis. Remember, this is average housing. Im aware that for the people at the very bottom of the economic ladder, very affordable housing exists in and around St. Louis, but that this same affordable housing does not similarly exist in San Francisco. Thats a real problem, but its outside the scope of this article, which is geared towards helping your everyday real estate investor develop their opinion about their own markets. Housing costs in San Francisco average $30,378 per year, and housing costs in St. Louis, MO average $18,314 per year. To put this in perspective, median household income is 30% greater in San Francisco than it is in St. Louis, MO. But housing costs are 65% higher. As much as the people in expensive housing markets stamp their feet and complain about how overpriced their markets are, the fact of the matter is that the folks earning median incomes are able to sustain the burden of housing costs. The data is quite clearmedian households in their respective markets do not spend materially different amounts of money on their lifestyles outside of housing expenses. ALL of that increase in median income, net of taxes, can therefore be spent on housing, and one could theoretically enjoy a very similar quality of life in both regions. And because the cost of life outside of housing expenses is roughly equal in most parts of the country, housing prices do not scale linearly with growth in median income. They scale exponentially. Think about this for a second: Imagine that San Franciscos median income rises by enough such that the median household all of a sudden has an additional $5,000 per year in disposable income. If everyone still wants housing, then all or nearly all of that $5,000 increase will be spent on housing. Housing costs will rise to 44% of household spending, still further out of touch with the rest of the countryand everyone will continue getting by and enjoy basically the same lifestyle they do today. Related: How I Landed a Solid 4-Plex in Denver, One of the Hottest Markets in the Country And this story works both for rents and the price of housing. A $6,000 increase in after-tax, take-home pay enables a household to afford the payments on roughly $100,000 more in property value. (Monthly payments, just principal and interest, on a $100,000 mortgage at 4.5% interest comes out to about $500 per month or $6,000 per year.) And, of course, they can make a $6,000 annual increase in rent work too. Conclusion The ratio of median incomes to housing prices are not an effective manner of gauging the health of your market, particularly if median incomes in your market deviate substantially from the national average. Much, if not most of, household spending is on goods and services that are priced at relatively similar levels, no matter what part of the country you reside in. A TV, new piece of clothing, groceries, and the like cost me pretty much the same in St. Louis or San Francisco. Dont believe me? Go to Amazon.com. I can buy basically anything I want and ship it anywhere in the continental United States for free with my Prime Account. I get the same price and speed of delivery regardless of whether I ship to Denver, St. Louis, New York, or San Francisco. Again, this means that all or nearly all of the increase in median incomes in expensive cities can go towards rent and/or mortgage payments. It means that your city may well have a healthy housing market that is sustainable for as long as median incomes remain proportionally higher than in other parts of the country. I havent done this study on the opposite tracklooking at markets with median incomes well below the national averagebut I suspect the same trend to be true. In markets with much lower median incomes, I expect the median resident in those areas has next to nothing to spend on housing, resulting in housing expenses that are a relatively small percentage of household spending. That, or housing prices make up a large amount of household spending and quality if life IS worse for the median household than in areas that are closer to the national median. If you fail to grasp this concept and instead measure the health of housing markets by measuring median incomes as a ratio of housing prices, then I believe that you run the risk of misunderstanding markets that have median wages materially deviating from the national average. I suspect that a better way to predict the impact of median income growth on housing prices in expensive markets is to predict whether the median income in said city will diverge further and increase faster than the national average or revert towards and increase more slowly than the national average. In the former case (and assuming all else is equal), continued above-average pricing inflation is both sustainable and to be expected. In the latter case, Id expect below-average appreciation both in rents and prices. The further median incomes divert from the mean, the more extreme the housing market will appear, even though median residents are perfectly capable of sustaining their lifestyles. Because the cost of food, clothing, transportation, and the like are materially similar in every city in the country, nearly 100 percent of the increase in after-tax, take-home pay in more expensive cities can go towards rent or housing payments. That means that folks can afford to spend larger and larger percentages of their take-home pay on housing and still come out ahead. Remember, our average resident of San Francisco saves MORE in both real dollars and as a percentage of total spending on insurance (like life insurance) and pensions than our average resident in St. Louis in spite of higher housing costs as a percentage of total spending. Were republishing this article to help out our newer readers.

Do you agree with this assessment? Argue your point below! https://www.biggerpockets.com/renewsblog/overpriced-market-health

[juditmiltz]

Ballers, stars and fashionistas: Who’s buying and selling in South Florida?

Jonathan Vilma and his $14.4 million mansion

From TRD Miami’s spring issue: UPDATED, March 29, 2:54 p.m.: The constellation of stars in South Florida is ever-changing. There’s no shortage of celebrity sightings on South Beach, of course, and Star Island remains one of most exclusive enclaves in the world. But with competition for prime real estate among everyone from athletes to tech titans to foreign investors, some boldfaced names are exploring other areas for their splurges. For those who don’t need the hassle of tending to an estate, there are endless luxury condo buildings running all the way up the coast. And mansions are being built in evolving Miami neighborhoods for those thinking outside the celebrity box. Or, if horses are a concern, what about moving inland a bit and picking up a few equestrian acres? Here’s a look into the deals of the famous folks who recently bought or sold in South Florida.

After playing ball at the University of Miami, Jonathan Vilma moved on to the NFL with the New York Jets and to the Super Bowl with the New Orleans Saints, but the star linebacker called Tahiti Beach Island home until he sold his five-bedroom mansion for $14.4 million in January. Vilma bought the property overlooking Biscayne Bay in 2011 for $6 million and later built a 6,900-square-foot modern home on the land. The mansion at 17 Tahiti Beach Island Road was listed for $18.5 million last year with Douglas Elliman’s Chad Carroll.

“Luxurious understatement reigns supreme at chez Tomas Maier,” Vogue recently wrote about the German-born designer’s fall collection, and the same could be said of the oceanfront house in Gulf Stream that he and his husband, Andrew Preston, sold in January. The 6,270-square-foot home fetched $9.5 million, although the sale price was a bit off the $10.95 million price tag when the 3377 North Ocean Boulevard property hit the market in November. Douglas Elliman’s Nicholas Malinosky and Randy Ely represented the sellers. Maier and Preston are moving to a recently renovated mansion in Palm Beach, which they bought in 2014 from Ivana Trump.

Mickey Drexler and his $13.7 million waterfront property

Mickey Drexler needed a little more room, so he bought the neighboring 22,719-square-foot lot. That lot happens to be a waterfront property in Miami Beach, so the J. Crew chairman had to put down $13.7 million for it. But Drexler paid a little more than half the $25 million that 4462 North Bay Road was listed for in 2015. The previous owner, former chairman of MTV International Bill Roedy, cut the asking price to $15.9 million last year. Ralph Arias of One Sotheby’s International Realty represented the seller.

Actor Michael Caine and his wife, Shakira, sold their luxury condo at the Apogee South Beach for $7.45 million in January, as the couple is spending less time in Miami, according to listing broker John Lennon of South Pointe Drive Realty. The 4,154-square-foot, four-bedroom home last had an $8.7 million asking price, but had been on the market several times over two years, initially at $12.9 million. The Oscar winner bought the Miami Beach apartment at 800 South Pointe Drive in 2008 and, appropriately, added a small movie theater. Christiana Machado of Cervera Real Estate represented the buyer, a Brazilian businessman.

Dion Waiters and hid $7.4 million mansion in Pinecrest

Miami Heat guard Dion Waiters set an off-the-court record when he put up $7.4 million for a mansion in Pinecrest, making his the most expensive non-waterfront property in the area. Architect Frank Mendez took a shot with the 17,700-square-foot spec home and scored with features intended to attract professional athletes. The nine-bedroom Balinese-style home at 5745 Southwest 94th Street has a shower big enough for 12 people and a driveway large enough for 30 cars. The property was first listed in January 2015 with a $9.9 million price tag. Brown Harris Stevens Miami agent Marianna Dubinsky had the listing. Nancy Bernstein and Jonathan Garcia of ONE Sotheby’s International Realty represented Waiters.

Billy Joel and his horse-loving wife, Alexis Roderick, are movin’ out of the Florida beachfront properties the singer owns and movin’ up to a five-acre equestrian ranch in Wellington, which they bought for $3.5 million in January. The property at 14190 Palm Beach Point Boulevard features a 12-stall barn, five paddocks and a regulation-size dressage ring. Joel bought a neighboring five-acre parcel in 2016 for $3.6 million. The ranch isn’t far from the Winter Equestrian Festival, one of the nation’s largest horse-riding events. The Piano Man and his wife join a host of other celebs who’ve bought in Wellington, including Bruce Springsteen and Bill Gates. Carol Sollak of Engel & Volkers Wellington had the listing.

Jay Schottenstein spent $6.77 million on a condo at the soon-to-open Ritz-Carlton Residences

Where does a Midwestern boy stay in Miami? At the Ritz if he’s Jay Schottenstein, the CEO and chairman of American Eagle and DSW. The Ohio-based retail heir spent $6.77 million on a 4,347-square-foot, three-bedroom condo at the soon-to-open Ritz-Carlton Residences at 4701 Meridian Avenue in Miami Beach. With 111 condos and 15 standalone villas designed by architect Piero Lissoni, the ultra-luxury community will offer its residents a marine helipad, 36 boat slips and — for those who don’t have their own — a house yacht. The complex is scheduled to open later in 2018. Darin Tansey of Douglas Elliman was the listing agent.

“Get it while you here, boy/’Cause all that hype don’t feel the same next year, boy,” Drake rapped from his living room in the Marquis Residences for the “I’m On One” video. That was in 2011. In 2012, he sold the downtown Miami condo to then-Heat guard Mario Chalmers for $2.4 million. Chalmers held onto the 5,475-square-foot apartment for more than a year, but he put it on the market for $4 million in 2014 and was then traded to the Memphis Grizzlies. There were no takers until February, when the condo sold for a small loss at $2.3 million. Representing Chalmers was Denver Bright, who was with Douglas Elliman at the time. Bright is now with Compass.

Rosie O’Donnell and her $5 million West Palm Beach home

Rosie O’Donnell sold her West Palm Beach home for $5 million in January, and the first thing buyer H. Wayne Huizenga Jr. is going to do is tear the place down. Built in 1957, the five-bedroom manse sits on an acre of land next to the Intracoastal Waterway. The comedian bought the nearly 7,600-square-foot house at 3100 North Flagler Drive in 2015 for $4.975 million and had listed it for $6.05 million before cutting the price in June 2017. O‘Donnell can probably afford to laugh off the $25,000 profit margin — she sold a Star Island property in 2013 for $12.6 million. Liza Pulitzer of Brown Harris Stevens of Palm Beach had the listing.

Even if Justin Timberlake, Jay-Z, Missy Elliott and all the guys from OneRepublic decide to drop by at the same time, Timbaland’s new waterfront condo in Miami should be big enough to host all his collaborators. The Grammy Award-winning rapper and producer, whose full name is Timothy Zachery Mosley, bought two units in the still-under-construction Aria on the Bay, which will encompass 4,700 square feet when they’re combined, plus another 1,300 square feet of terrace overlooking Biscayne Bay. Tim Elmes of Coldwell Banker and Marc Hameroff of Engel & Völkers Miami represented Timbaland in the reportedly $4 million deal.

Editor’s note: This story has been amended to include Dion Waiters’ representation in his home purchase. 

from The Real Deal Miami https://therealdeal.com/miami/issues_articles/ballers-stars-and-fashionistas-whos-buying-and-selling-in-south-florida/#new_tab via IFTTT

[walterfrodriguez]

Ballers, stars and fashionistas: Who’s buying and selling in South Florida?

Jonathan Vilma and his $14.4 million mansion

From TRD Miami’s spring issue: UPDATED, March 29, 2:54 p.m.: The constellation of stars in South Florida is ever-changing. There’s no shortage of celebrity sightings on South Beach, of course, and Star Island remains one of most exclusive enclaves in the world. But with competition for prime real estate among everyone from athletes to tech titans to foreign investors, some boldfaced names are exploring other areas for their splurges. For those who don’t need the hassle of tending to an estate, there are endless luxury condo buildings running all the way up the coast. And mansions are being built in evolving Miami neighborhoods for those thinking outside the celebrity box. Or, if horses are a concern, what about moving inland a bit and picking up a few equestrian acres? Here’s a look into the deals of the famous folks who recently bought or sold in South Florida.

After playing ball at the University of Miami, Jonathan Vilma moved on to the NFL with the New York Jets and to the Super Bowl with the New Orleans Saints, but the star linebacker called Tahiti Beach Island home until he sold his five-bedroom mansion for $14.4 million in January. Vilma bought the property overlooking Biscayne Bay in 2011 for $6 million and later built a 6,900-square-foot modern home on the land. The mansion at 17 Tahiti Beach Island Road was listed for $18.5 million last year with Douglas Elliman’s Chad Carroll.

“Luxurious understatement reigns supreme at chez Tomas Maier,” Vogue recently wrote about the German-born designer’s fall collection, and the same could be said of the oceanfront house in Gulf Stream that he and his husband, Andrew Preston, sold in January. The 6,270-square-foot home fetched $9.5 million, although the sale price was a bit off the $10.95 million price tag when the 3377 North Ocean Boulevard property hit the market in November. Douglas Elliman’s Nicholas Malinosky and Randy Ely represented the sellers. Maier and Preston are moving to a recently renovated mansion in Palm Beach, which they bought in 2014 from Ivana Trump.

Mickey Drexler and his $13.7 million waterfront property

Mickey Drexler needed a little more room, so he bought the neighboring 22,719-square-foot lot. That lot happens to be a waterfront property in Miami Beach, so the J. Crew chairman had to put down $13.7 million for it. But Drexler paid a little more than half the $25 million that 4462 North Bay Road was listed for in 2015. The previous owner, former chairman of MTV International Bill Roedy, cut the asking price to $15.9 million last year. Ralph Arias of One Sotheby’s International Realty represented the seller.

Actor Michael Caine and his wife, Shakira, sold their luxury condo at the Apogee South Beach for $7.45 million in January, as the couple is spending less time in Miami, according to listing broker John Lennon of South Pointe Drive Realty. The 4,154-square-foot, four-bedroom home last had an $8.7 million asking price, but had been on the market several times over two years, initially at $12.9 million. The Oscar winner bought the Miami Beach apartment at 800 South Pointe Drive in 2008 and, appropriately, added a small movie theater. Christiana Machado of Cervera Real Estate represented the buyer, a Brazilian businessman.

Dion Waiters and hid $7.4 million mansion in Pinecrest

Miami Heat guard Dion Waiters set an off-the-court record when he put up $7.4 million for a mansion in Pinecrest, making his the most expensive non-waterfront property in the area. Architect Frank Mendez took a shot with the 17,700-square-foot spec home and scored with features intended to attract professional athletes. The nine-bedroom Balinese-style home at 5745 Southwest 94th Street has a shower big enough for 12 people and a driveway large enough for 30 cars. The property was first listed in January 2015 with a $9.9 million price tag. Brown Harris Stevens Miami agent Marianna Dubinsky had the listing. Nancy Bernstein and Jonathan Garcia of ONE Sotheby’s International Realty represented Waiters.

Billy Joel and his horse-loving wife, Alexis Roderick, are movin’ out of the Florida beachfront properties the singer owns and movin’ up to a five-acre equestrian ranch in Wellington, which they bought for $3.5 million in January. The property at 14190 Palm Beach Point Boulevard features a 12-stall barn, five paddocks and a regulation-size dressage ring. Joel bought a neighboring five-acre parcel in 2016 for $3.6 million. The ranch isn’t far from the Winter Equestrian Festival, one of the nation’s largest horse-riding events. The Piano Man and his wife join a host of other celebs who’ve bought in Wellington, including Bruce Springsteen and Bill Gates. Carol Sollak of Engel & Volkers Wellington had the listing.

Jay Schottenstein spent $6.77 million on a condo at the soon-to-open Ritz-Carlton Residences

Where does a Midwestern boy stay in Miami? At the Ritz if he’s Jay Schottenstein, the CEO and chairman of American Eagle and DSW. The Ohio-based retail heir spent $6.77 million on a 4,347-square-foot, three-bedroom condo at the soon-to-open Ritz-Carlton Residences at 4701 Meridian Avenue in Miami Beach. With 111 condos and 15 standalone villas designed by architect Piero Lissoni, the ultra-luxury community will offer its residents a marine helipad, 36 boat slips and — for those who don’t have their own — a house yacht. The complex is scheduled to open later in 2018. Darin Tansey of Douglas Elliman was the listing agent.

“Get it while you here, boy/’Cause all that hype don’t feel the same next year, boy,” Drake rapped from his living room in the Marquis Residences for the “I’m On One” video. That was in 2011. In 2012, he sold the downtown Miami condo to then-Heat guard Mario Chalmers for $2.4 million. Chalmers held onto the 5,475-square-foot apartment for more than a year, but he put it on the market for $4 million in 2014 and was then traded to the Memphis Grizzlies. There were no takers until February, when the condo sold for a small loss at $2.3 million. Representing Chalmers was Denver Bright, who was with Douglas Elliman at the time. Bright is now with Compass.

Rosie O’Donnell and her $5 million West Palm Beach home

Rosie O’Donnell sold her West Palm Beach home for $5 million in January, and the first thing buyer H. Wayne Huizenga Jr. is going to do is tear the place down. Built in 1957, the five-bedroom manse sits on an acre of land next to the Intracoastal Waterway. The comedian bought the nearly 7,600-square-foot house at 3100 North Flagler Drive in 2015 for $4.975 million and had listed it for $6.05 million before cutting the price in June 2017. O‘Donnell can probably afford to laugh off the $25,000 profit margin — she sold a Star Island property in 2013 for $12.6 million. Liza Pulitzer of Brown Harris Stevens of Palm Beach had the listing.

Even if Justin Timberlake, Jay-Z, Missy Elliott and all the guys from OneRepublic decide to drop by at the same time, Timbaland’s new waterfront condo in Miami should be big enough to host all his collaborators. The Grammy Award-winning rapper and producer, whose full name is Timothy Zachery Mosley, bought two units in the still-under-construction Aria on the Bay, which will encompass 4,700 square feet when they’re combined, plus another 1,300 square feet of terrace overlooking Biscayne Bay. Tim Elmes of Coldwell Banker and Marc Hameroff of Engel & Völkers Miami represented Timbaland in the reportedly $4 million deal.

Editor’s note: This story has been amended to include Dion Waiters’ representation in his home purchase. 

from The Real Deal Miami & Real Estate News News | & Curbed Miami - All https://therealdeal.com/miami/issues_articles/ballers-stars-and-fashionistas-whos-buying-and-selling-in-south-florida/#new_tab via IFTTT

[markjsousa]

How Can Brands Compete With Amazon?

  How to compete against Amazon is a key strategic question at the moment. Rightfully so as more and more brands are forced to contend with its seemingly iron-clad business.

Having worked in key positions at Nike and Starbucks at critical points in their growth, I have some ideas that will help.

The first step in any strategic problem-solving initiative is to get the fundamentals right. Specifically, make sure you’re asking the right questions from the start. Asking the right questions determines the kinds of insight you will receive and the value of that insight. This cannot be overstated, after all Amazon’s advantage has been built on asking the right questions.

Start your inquiry process by taking a close look at why Amazon has been so successful in selling products of all kinds to people in all classes (not just the middle class). As you dig deeper you find Jeff Bezos’ guiding principles in driving growth of Amazon’s online product marketplace.

Let’s review them.

The first principle is “Customer Obsession.” Amazon’s definition of customer obsession is straight forward, the primary focus is to obsessively understand and satisfy basic “unchanging” customer needs. Amazon identified three that it believes comprise basic needs that are not likely to change over time.

Amazon’s Customer Drivers:

Provide the lowest comparative prices (money savings) … selling new or used products

Provide the fastest delivery services (time savings) … Amazon Prime, One-Click Purchase, Two Hour Delivery

Provide the most extensive product selection (long-tail of products)

By choosing to obsessively focus on delivering better results to their customers in these three areas, their physical footprint and brand sales have enjoyed remarkable success. In addition, Jeff Bezos has taken a 5 –to- 7 year ROI stance, which is longer than most businesses’ 1 –to-3 year payback period. This has allowed Amazon Retail to achieve consistent growth with low prices and margins in its retail products business.

On May 5th, 2017 Warren Buffett said, ‘Amazon’s Jeff Bezos is the most remarkable business person of our age.’ Warren also said, ‘I’ve never seen a guy succeed in two businesses simultaneously.’ The other business Warren Buffett was referring to is Amazon Web Services (AWS). Amazon Web Services is powered by new AI and computing solutions aligned with their three customer drivers, giving Amazon a cost and technology advantage over many retailers.

Amazon Web Services falls in line with Jeff Bezos’ second principle for success; to ‘Invent / Experiment / to Find Better Ways to Satisfy Customer Needs.’ Originally, customers who ordered products on Amazon had three shipping choices. Amazon Prime was created to increase the speed and lower the shipping costs for regular customers. Amazon Prime then offered same day delivery. Recently with the addition of Whole Foods, Amazon is offering a 2-hour delivery option for groceries from local Whole Food stores.

These “faster delivery initiatives” are in support of the customer insight that ‘customers will always want faster and faster delivery.’ Amazon is therefore intensely obsessed with lowering delivery times, just as it is also obsessed with lowering prices and increasing its product assortment.

Commit To Deep Customer Insight

Traditional retailers have to be asking, how do we compete against this? Can we offer better product assortment, faster delivery, lower prices? If we can’t really compete in these areas, can we conduct research that uncovers other drivers of consumer behavior that would create an equally compelling offer or even a brand advantage? That answer is yes.

Online sales have been growing but they still only represent about 10% of all retail sales. It is true that we had a record number of retail stores close in 2017 (nearly 7,000 up 200% from one year ago). So understanding the hierarchy of needs (articulated and tacit) that are driving consumer behavior in retail today is a requirement. A qualitative research project would be needed to explore this territory. What would that look like?

Certainly, Amazon’s customer insights pillars would need to be part of any research survey developed. Store proximity to the target customer’s home, time savings in shopping one way versus another. Physical retail stores also offer ‘experiential’ dimensions that are not offered online. Physical product browsing is a more visceral experience, you can pick things up, get a better sense of size, fit, feel, smell, comfort and colors. Some people may enjoy shopping in-stores more, if the stores offer certain kinds of amenities and experiences (lighting, sound, food, beverages, displays, friendly human help). Keeping in mind, some people are not comfortable yet making purchases online.

I know from my years at Starbucks that 50% of the success of any retail strategy is the physical store location. Where are your stores located? With so many retail stores now closing, is better real estate opening up? Ease of access, parking, foot traffic, and convenience to daily commute patterns all matter greatly to consumers.

If it takes 20 minutes one way to get to your store, 20 minutes to get back and thirty minutes to shop that’s a big chunk of somebody’s day. If an option like Amazon’s same day or 2-hour delivery develops and I can order online in ten minutes and have it delivered to my door, what’s that worth in time savings? Saving somebody an hour of their time could be worth more than what is purchased! Amazon knows this better than most retailers because of its intense customer obsession and its willingness to experiment with different ‘time saving’ services. So, it gains these insights ahead of everybody else and then doubles down in its ‘time savings’ investments before its competitors even know what hit them.

Have The Right Focus

Many brands are obsessed about different things right now and not necessarily with what matters most. Some are primarily product obsessed. That is, they intensely focus on what it takes to design, develop and market their products. Some businesses are focused on their business model. For example, if you are a big box retailer, how you fill a standard store format with an optimal merchandising mix becomes the primary focus. The obsession on the business model in this sense can blind you to how the value proposition in all of retail is changing. Some brands are technology obsessed, that is they focus on offering upgrades and more features to technology products, but without a deep understanding of consumer drivers. With its competitors distracted, Amazon is focused on innovations that matter to the people it serves. Again, when you get the questions right, you gain more powerful, market-moving insights.

When your business model hits a strategic inflection point you need a sharply focused understanding of how customer values and needs are changing in your category, particularly in regards to new entrants. Brand positioning research can be the ideal research tool for uncovering how the competitive landscape has changed in this sense. People that patronize Amazon, associate a few things with it that shape their behavior and patronage. You need to know what Amazon’s key brand attributes really are all about. This is a way to gain better understanding of the changing needs of your consumer.

Study the traditional retail versus Amazon situation more intensely, merely asking consumers questions (without any other context) is not enough. You need to understand how a new competitor has achieved a competitive advantage. You need to understand their governing principles and any driving consumer insights they hold dear. You then need to do the same form of research on your own brand. What is it that that your customers think you do really well? Why does your brand generate repeat customers? What brand attributes are you known for? What are the benefits sought most in your category of retail and are there any key benefits that your brand falls behind the leaders on?

The right answers should lead to the design of a retail category segmentation study. Segmentation studies can locate customer segments driven by different perceptions, values, needs and benefits. It is possible that Amazon is growing because it has uncovered hidden drivers leading to new consumer segments. It is also possible that with its success in delivering better on its three key drivers, that it can work backwards to better integrate these values into traditional retail categories.

Create New Value That Is Aligned With Customer Values

Amazon is an important company for all retailers to study more intensely right now because they are experimenting and inventing new sources of value. This value is being integrated with old brick-and-mortar retail models. If you don’t discover new sources of value that you can own and how to align your offering with key consumer values, then your store concept will be obsolete by comparison and your business model and brand will be at a disadvantage.

Consumer research can be helpful only if it’s framed properly on the front end. To frame-up any multi-dimensional problem requires that you walk around it completely and look at it from all dimensions and directions (business model, competitive, products, pricing, service speed, brand, etc.)  The best research approach to take usually emerges from the initial study of what’s going on in your business and in the competitive dynamics of the category. If your business culture is strong on innovation and thought leadership, then strategic inflection points like this one can be overcome with the right approach to strategic research. But, if your culture is driven primarily by incremental improvements to an existing business model, then multi-dimensional and highly focused competitors like Amazon will be very difficult to overcome.

Amazon is not invincible, it has its weaknesses. These weaknesses will eventually be exploited by progressive retailers that make the same commitment to gaining and using deep customer insight.

These and other insights into brand truth, purpose and deep customer insight is covered in greater detail in my new book, Soulful Branding – Unlock the Hidden Energy In Your Company and Brand.

The Blake Project Can Help: Please email us for more about how we help retail brands create bigger futures.

Build A Human Centric Brand At Marketing’s Most Powerful Event: The Un-Conference: 360 Degrees of Brand Strategy for a Changing World, May 14-16, 2018 in San Diego, California. A fun, competitive-learning experience reserved for 50 marketing oriented leaders and professionals.

Branding Strategy Insider is a service of The Blake Project: A strategic brand consultancy specializing in Brand Research, Brand Strategy, Brand Licensing and Brand Education

FREE Publications And Resources For Marketers

[glenmenlow]

How Can Brands Compete With Amazon?

  How to compete against Amazon is a key strategic question at the moment. Rightfully so as more and more brands are forced to contend with its seemingly iron-clad business.

Having worked in key positions at Nike and Starbucks at critical points in their growth, I have some ideas that will help.

The first step in any strategic problem-solving initiative is to get the fundamentals right. Specifically, make sure you’re asking the right questions from the start. Asking the right questions determines the kinds of insight you will receive and the value of that insight. This cannot be overstated, after all Amazon’s advantage has been built on asking the right questions.

Start your inquiry process by taking a close look at why Amazon has been so successful in selling products of all kinds to people in all classes (not just the middle class). As you dig deeper you find Jeff Bezos’ guiding principles in driving growth of Amazon’s online product marketplace.

Let’s review them.

The first principle is “Customer Obsession.” Amazon’s definition of customer obsession is straight forward, the primary focus is to obsessively understand and satisfy basic “unchanging” customer needs. Amazon identified three that it believes comprise basic needs that are not likely to change over time.

Amazon’s Customer Drivers:

Provide the lowest comparative prices (money savings) … selling new or used products

Provide the fastest delivery services (time savings) … Amazon Prime, One-Click Purchase, Two Hour Delivery

Provide the most extensive product selection (long-tail of products)

By choosing to obsessively focus on delivering better results to their customers in these three areas, their physical footprint and brand sales have enjoyed remarkable success. In addition, Jeff Bezos has taken a 5 –to- 7 year ROI stance, which is longer than most businesses’ 1 –to-3 year payback period. This has allowed Amazon Retail to achieve consistent growth with low prices and margins in its retail products business.

On May 5th, 2017 Warren Buffett said, ‘Amazon’s Jeff Bezos is the most remarkable business person of our age.’ Warren also said, ‘I’ve never seen a guy succeed in two businesses simultaneously.’ The other business Warren Buffett was referring to is Amazon Web Services (AWS). Amazon Web Services is powered by new AI and computing solutions aligned with their three customer drivers, giving Amazon a cost and technology advantage over many retailers.

Amazon Web Services falls in line with Jeff Bezos’ second principle for success; to ‘Invent / Experiment / to Find Better Ways to Satisfy Customer Needs.’ Originally, customers who ordered products on Amazon had three shipping choices. Amazon Prime was created to increase the speed and lower the shipping costs for regular customers. Amazon Prime then offered same day delivery. Recently with the addition of Whole Foods, Amazon is offering a 2-hour delivery option for groceries from local Whole Food stores.

These “faster delivery initiatives” are in support of the customer insight that ‘customers will always want faster and faster delivery.’ Amazon is therefore intensely obsessed with lowering delivery times, just as it is also obsessed with lowering prices and increasing its product assortment.

Commit To Deep Customer Insight

Traditional retailers have to be asking, how do we compete against this? Can we offer better product assortment, faster delivery, lower prices? If we can’t really compete in these areas, can we conduct research that uncovers other drivers of consumer behavior that would create an equally compelling offer or even a brand advantage? That answer is yes.

Online sales have been growing but they still only represent about 10% of all retail sales. It is true that we had a record number of retail stores close in 2017 (nearly 7,000 up 200% from one year ago). So understanding the hierarchy of needs (articulated and tacit) that are driving consumer behavior in retail today is a requirement. A qualitative research project would be needed to explore this territory. What would that look like?

Certainly, Amazon’s customer insights pillars would need to be part of any research survey developed. Store proximity to the target customer’s home, time savings in shopping one way versus another. Physical retail stores also offer ‘experiential’ dimensions that are not offered online. Physical product browsing is a more visceral experience, you can pick things up, get a better sense of size, fit, feel, smell, comfort and colors. Some people may enjoy shopping in-stores more, if the stores offer certain kinds of amenities and experiences (lighting, sound, food, beverages, displays, friendly human help). Keeping in mind, some people are not comfortable yet making purchases online.

I know from my years at Starbucks that 50% of the success of any retail strategy is the physical store location. Where are your stores located? With so many retail stores now closing, is better real estate opening up? Ease of access, parking, foot traffic, and convenience to daily commute patterns all matter greatly to consumers.

If it takes 20 minutes one way to get to your store, 20 minutes to get back and thirty minutes to shop that’s a big chunk of somebody’s day. If an option like Amazon’s same day or 2-hour delivery develops and I can order online in ten minutes and have it delivered to my door, what’s that worth in time savings? Saving somebody an hour of their time could be worth more than what is purchased! Amazon knows this better than most retailers because of its intense customer obsession and its willingness to experiment with different ‘time saving’ services. So, it gains these insights ahead of everybody else and then doubles down in its ‘time savings’ investments before its competitors even know what hit them.

Have The Right Focus

Many brands are obsessed about different things right now and not necessarily with what matters most. Some are primarily product obsessed. That is, they intensely focus on what it takes to design, develop and market their products. Some businesses are focused on their business model. For example, if you are a big box retailer, how you fill a standard store format with an optimal merchandising mix becomes the primary focus. The obsession on the business model in this sense can blind you to how the value proposition in all of retail is changing. Some brands are technology obsessed, that is they focus on offering upgrades and more features to technology products, but without a deep understanding of consumer drivers. With its competitors distracted, Amazon is focused on innovations that matter to the people it serves. Again, when you get the questions right, you gain more powerful, market-moving insights.

When your business model hits a strategic inflection point you need a sharply focused understanding of how customer values and needs are changing in your category, particularly in regards to new entrants. Brand positioning research can be the ideal research tool for uncovering how the competitive landscape has changed in this sense. People that patronize Amazon, associate a few things with it that shape their behavior and patronage. You need to know what Amazon’s key brand attributes really are all about. This is a way to gain better understanding of the changing needs of your consumer.

Study the traditional retail versus Amazon situation more intensely, merely asking consumers questions (without any other context) is not enough. You need to understand how a new competitor has achieved a competitive advantage. You need to understand their governing principles and any driving consumer insights they hold dear. You then need to do the same form of research on your own brand. What is it that that your customers think you do really well? Why does your brand generate repeat customers? What brand attributes are you known for? What are the benefits sought most in your category of retail and are there any key benefits that your brand falls behind the leaders on?

The right answers should lead to the design of a retail category segmentation study. Segmentation studies can locate customer segments driven by different perceptions, values, needs and benefits. It is possible that Amazon is growing because it has uncovered hidden drivers leading to new consumer segments. It is also possible that with its success in delivering better on its three key drivers, that it can work backwards to better integrate these values into traditional retail categories.

Create New Value That Is Aligned With Customer Values

Amazon is an important company for all retailers to study more intensely right now because they are experimenting and inventing new sources of value. This value is being integrated with old brick-and-mortar retail models. If you don’t discover new sources of value that you can own and how to align your offering with key consumer values, then your store concept will be obsolete by comparison and your business model and brand will be at a disadvantage.

Consumer research can be helpful only if it’s framed properly on the front end. To frame-up any multi-dimensional problem requires that you walk around it completely and look at it from all dimensions and directions (business model, competitive, products, pricing, service speed, brand, etc.)  The best research approach to take usually emerges from the initial study of what’s going on in your business and in the competitive dynamics of the category. If your business culture is strong on innovation and thought leadership, then strategic inflection points like this one can be overcome with the right approach to strategic research. But, if your culture is driven primarily by incremental improvements to an existing business model, then multi-dimensional and highly focused competitors like Amazon will be very difficult to overcome.

Amazon is not invincible, it has its weaknesses. These weaknesses will eventually be exploited by progressive retailers that make the same commitment to gaining and using deep customer insight.

These and other insights into brand truth, purpose and deep customer insight is covered in greater detail in my new book, Soulful Branding – Unlock the Hidden Energy In Your Company and Brand.

The Blake Project Can Help: Please email us for more about how we help retail brands create bigger futures.

Build A Human Centric Brand At Marketing’s Most Powerful Event: The Un-Conference: 360 Degrees of Brand Strategy for a Changing World, May 14-16, 2018 in San Diego, California. A fun, competitive-learning experience reserved for 50 marketing oriented leaders and professionals.

Branding Strategy Insider is a service of The Blake Project: A strategic brand consultancy specializing in Brand Research, Brand Strategy, Brand Licensing and Brand Education

FREE Publications And Resources For Marketers

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[joejstrickl]

How Can Brands Compete With Amazon?

  How to compete against Amazon is a key strategic question at the moment. Rightfully so as more and more brands are forced to contend with its seemingly iron-clad business.

Having worked in key positions at Nike and Starbucks at critical points in their growth, I have some ideas that will help.

The first step in any strategic problem-solving initiative is to get the fundamentals right. Specifically, make sure you’re asking the right questions from the start. Asking the right questions determines the kinds of insight you will receive and the value of that insight. This cannot be overstated, after all Amazon’s advantage has been built on asking the right questions.

Start your inquiry process by taking a close look at why Amazon has been so successful in selling products of all kinds to people in all classes (not just the middle class). As you dig deeper you find Jeff Bezos’ guiding principles in driving growth of Amazon’s online product marketplace.

Let’s review them.

The first principle is “Customer Obsession.” Amazon’s definition of customer obsession is straight forward, the primary focus is to obsessively understand and satisfy basic “unchanging” customer needs. Amazon identified three that it believes comprise basic needs that are not likely to change over time.

Amazon’s Customer Drivers:

Provide the lowest comparative prices (money savings) … selling new or used products

Provide the fastest delivery services (time savings) … Amazon Prime, One-Click Purchase, Two Hour Delivery

Provide the most extensive product selection (long-tail of products)

By choosing to obsessively focus on delivering better results to their customers in these three areas, their physical footprint and brand sales have enjoyed remarkable success. In addition, Jeff Bezos has taken a 5 –to- 7 year ROI stance, which is longer than most businesses’ 1 –to-3 year payback period. This has allowed Amazon Retail to achieve consistent growth with low prices and margins in its retail products business.

On May 5th, 2017 Warren Buffett said, ‘Amazon’s Jeff Bezos is the most remarkable business person of our age.’ Warren also said, ‘I’ve never seen a guy succeed in two businesses simultaneously.’ The other business Warren Buffett was referring to is Amazon Web Services (AWS). Amazon Web Services is powered by new AI and computing solutions aligned with their three customer drivers, giving Amazon a cost and technology advantage over many retailers.

Amazon Web Services falls in line with Jeff Bezos’ second principle for success; to ‘Invent / Experiment / to Find Better Ways to Satisfy Customer Needs.’ Originally, customers who ordered products on Amazon had three shipping choices. Amazon Prime was created to increase the speed and lower the shipping costs for regular customers. Amazon Prime then offered same day delivery. Recently with the addition of Whole Foods, Amazon is offering a 2-hour delivery option for groceries from local Whole Food stores.

These “faster delivery initiatives” are in support of the customer insight that ‘customers will always want faster and faster delivery.’ Amazon is therefore intensely obsessed with lowering delivery times, just as it is also obsessed with lowering prices and increasing its product assortment.

Commit To Deep Customer Insight

Traditional retailers have to be asking, how do we compete against this? Can we offer better product assortment, faster delivery, lower prices? If we can’t really compete in these areas, can we conduct research that uncovers other drivers of consumer behavior that would create an equally compelling offer or even a brand advantage? That answer is yes.

Online sales have been growing but they still only represent about 10% of all retail sales. It is true that we had a record number of retail stores close in 2017 (nearly 7,000 up 200% from one year ago). So understanding the hierarchy of needs (articulated and tacit) that are driving consumer behavior in retail today is a requirement. A qualitative research project would be needed to explore this territory. What would that look like?

Certainly, Amazon’s customer insights pillars would need to be part of any research survey developed. Store proximity to the target customer’s home, time savings in shopping one way versus another. Physical retail stores also offer ‘experiential’ dimensions that are not offered online. Physical product browsing is a more visceral experience, you can pick things up, get a better sense of size, fit, feel, smell, comfort and colors. Some people may enjoy shopping in-stores more, if the stores offer certain kinds of amenities and experiences (lighting, sound, food, beverages, displays, friendly human help). Keeping in mind, some people are not comfortable yet making purchases online.

I know from my years at Starbucks that 50% of the success of any retail strategy is the physical store location. Where are your stores located? With so many retail stores now closing, is better real estate opening up? Ease of access, parking, foot traffic, and convenience to daily commute patterns all matter greatly to consumers.

If it takes 20 minutes one way to get to your store, 20 minutes to get back and thirty minutes to shop that’s a big chunk of somebody’s day. If an option like Amazon’s same day or 2-hour delivery develops and I can order online in ten minutes and have it delivered to my door, what’s that worth in time savings? Saving somebody an hour of their time could be worth more than what is purchased! Amazon knows this better than most retailers because of its intense customer obsession and its willingness to experiment with different ‘time saving’ services. So, it gains these insights ahead of everybody else and then doubles down in its ‘time savings’ investments before its competitors even know what hit them.

Have The Right Focus

Many brands are obsessed about different things right now and not necessarily with what matters most. Some are primarily product obsessed. That is, they intensely focus on what it takes to design, develop and market their products. Some businesses are focused on their business model. For example, if you are a big box retailer, how you fill a standard store format with an optimal merchandising mix becomes the primary focus. The obsession on the business model in this sense can blind you to how the value proposition in all of retail is changing. Some brands are technology obsessed, that is they focus on offering upgrades and more features to technology products, but without a deep understanding of consumer drivers. With its competitors distracted, Amazon is focused on innovations that matter to the people it serves. Again, when you get the questions right, you gain more powerful, market-moving insights.

When your business model hits a strategic inflection point you need a sharply focused understanding of how customer values and needs are changing in your category, particularly in regards to new entrants. Brand positioning research can be the ideal research tool for uncovering how the competitive landscape has changed in this sense. People that patronize Amazon, associate a few things with it that shape their behavior and patronage. You need to know what Amazon’s key brand attributes really are all about. This is a way to gain better understanding of the changing needs of your consumer.

Study the traditional retail versus Amazon situation more intensely, merely asking consumers questions (without any other context) is not enough. You need to understand how a new competitor has achieved a competitive advantage. You need to understand their governing principles and any driving consumer insights they hold dear. You then need to do the same form of research on your own brand. What is it that that your customers think you do really well? Why does your brand generate repeat customers? What brand attributes are you known for? What are the benefits sought most in your category of retail and are there any key benefits that your brand falls behind the leaders on?

The right answers should lead to the design of a retail category segmentation study. Segmentation studies can locate customer segments driven by different perceptions, values, needs and benefits. It is possible that Amazon is growing because it has uncovered hidden drivers leading to new consumer segments. It is also possible that with its success in delivering better on its three key drivers, that it can work backwards to better integrate these values into traditional retail categories.

Create New Value That Is Aligned With Customer Values

Amazon is an important company for all retailers to study more intensely right now because they are experimenting and inventing new sources of value. This value is being integrated with old brick-and-mortar retail models. If you don’t discover new sources of value that you can own and how to align your offering with key consumer values, then your store concept will be obsolete by comparison and your business model and brand will be at a disadvantage.

Consumer research can be helpful only if it’s framed properly on the front end. To frame-up any multi-dimensional problem requires that you walk around it completely and look at it from all dimensions and directions (business model, competitive, products, pricing, service speed, brand, etc.)  The best research approach to take usually emerges from the initial study of what’s going on in your business and in the competitive dynamics of the category. If your business culture is strong on innovation and thought leadership, then strategic inflection points like this one can be overcome with the right approach to strategic research. But, if your culture is driven primarily by incremental improvements to an existing business model, then multi-dimensional and highly focused competitors like Amazon will be very difficult to overcome.

Amazon is not invincible, it has its weaknesses. These weaknesses will eventually be exploited by progressive retailers that make the same commitment to gaining and using deep customer insight.

These and other insights into brand truth, purpose and deep customer insight is covered in greater detail in my new book, Soulful Branding – Unlock the Hidden Energy In Your Company and Brand.

The Blake Project Can Help: Please email us for more about how we help retail brands create bigger futures.

Build A Human Centric Brand At Marketing’s Most Powerful Event: The Un-Conference: 360 Degrees of Brand Strategy for a Changing World, May 14-16, 2018 in San Diego, California. A fun, competitive-learning experience reserved for 50 marketing oriented leaders and professionals.

Branding Strategy Insider is a service of The Blake Project: A strategic brand consultancy specializing in Brand Research, Brand Strategy, Brand Licensing and Brand Education

FREE Publications And Resources For Marketers

[char27martin]

After the Debut: 3 Things I’ve Learned, with Emily Littlejohn

[Can you impress us in 1500 words or less? Enter the Short Short Story Competition today! Deadline January 15, 2018]

by Emily Littlejohn

You’ve signed off on the final edits to your debut novel. Your agent and your editor are already hearing positive early reviews and a couple of big name authors have offered glowing blurbs. You pour a celebratory glass of champagne and kick back on the sofa. You did it. You wrote a novel and landed a two-book contract. It’s easy street from here on out, kid.

Then your eyes stray to the calendar hanging on the wall, the kind that with a single glance shows you the next twelve months. Twelve long months to write the next book. Plenty of time.

Of course, there is that two-week European vacation in the spring, not to mention the lengthy out of state work conference you’re chairing. And to be honest, between the day job, the kids, and all the shows the family is streaming, it’s hard to get much writing done during the week. You’ll write on the weekends. No problem.

Lately, though, the weekends seem to fly by.

Still, surely you can squeeze in a few hours here and there.

Suddenly twelve months seems like a very short time.

***

I wrote my debut novel, Inherit the Bones, over the course of three long years. It was a hobby, a lark. At the time, I was working forty-plus hours a week at a regular day job and spending most of my free time with friends and family. I’d go weeks without touching my laptop and then when the muse struck, I’d sometimes wile away entire weekends puttering around in the fictional world I had created.

Long story short, I finished Bones and signed with an amazing agent, Pamela Ahearn of The Ahearn Agency. To my complete astonishment and joy, Ahearn sold Bones in a two-book deal. Before I knew it, what had been a private hobby was suddenly very public, with deadlines and schedules. Most mind-boggling of all: I had to submit a second book, in less than a year.

Happily, not only did I meet my deadlines and complete the follow-up to my debut novel, A Season to Lie, I learned a few things along the way.

Meet Deadlines

One of the first things I learned while writing my second book is that deadlines exist for a reason. Traditionally published novels have many moving pieces to them; pitches, edits, cover design, printing, creating advance reader copies… all of these and more are steps along the way as a book marches from an author’s word document to the final version in the reader’s hands.

What does that mean for an author?

Making those deadlines is critical.

And make no mistake: writing a novel to a deadline is very, very different from tinkering around on a manuscript here and there. Life, in the form of regular employment, family obligations, and heck, even meals, has a funny way of interrupting your writing. If you haven’t already carved out dedicated time to work on your second book, it is imperative to do so now. For some, that means waking up early to get a few hours of writing in while the kids are still asleep. For others, weekend activities like movies and sporting events need to take a backseat to plotting and drafting.

[Online Course: 12 Weeks to a First Draft with Terri Valentine]

What helped me tremendously was setting a goal of about 1500 words per writing session. I knew there would be days when I simply would not be able to sit down and write; a daily word count goal, then, would have been frustrating. Instead, I promised myself that on those days when I did get to my laptop, I would write at least 1500 words. Most of the time, I found that I exceeded the goal. And page by page, my novel grew in length. As my page count increased, the deadlines didn’t seem so… deadly.

Fall in Love with Your Characters 

While meeting deadlines as you write your second novel can feel like added pressure, getting to better know your series’ recurring characters is downright fun. In my mysteries, like many others, murder and mayhem move the plot forward… but the characters are what readers return for. In A Season to Lie, I loved exploring the relationships and back stories of Detective Gemma Monroe, her loved ones, and her colleagues on the police force. For instance, things that are hinted at in Inherit the Bones between Monroe and her romantic partner, Brody Sutherland, became necessary to tease to the forefront in A Season to Lie.

[6 Tips for Creating Believable Characters That Win Over Readers]

Coincidentally, one of the greatest things about writing a series in the mystery genre is possessing the ability to kill off characters you fall out of love with… or those that you never liked to begin with. My husband is always relieved when he finishes one of my books and sees that the romantic interest is still kicking… though he knows that I’m an equal opportunist and should the story demand it, well… let’s just say I believe everyone’s a suspect and everyone’s a potential victim.

The second book of a series is truly prime real estate for character development. You’ve laid the groundwork in the first book yet you’re still early enough in the series that your characters aren’t so formed that they are unable to change. I encourage you to have fun with that, to add in bits and pieces of backstory as you move the story forward.

Publicity is the Name of the Game

Debut authors are like pizza… everyone wants a slice. As you are writing towards completion of your second novel, marketing will be ramping up for the publication of your debut novel. That translates to invitations for guest blog posts, guest articles, interviews, author events, and so on. All wonderful things that can take your attention away from finishing the second novel.

I said yes to every invitation I received, as will you. Of course you will. There are few things more exciting for an author than getting to talk about your work. A word of caution, though, especially if you are writing mysteries: keep your storylines straight. You are perfectly aware that the beloved butler introduced in the first book is brutally disposed of in the second book… but readers of your interview-blog post- Facebook status update haven’t even read the first book yet.

Spoil nothing yet provide enough intrigue to entice all. And before you know it, you’ll be working on your third novel with an eye towards your fourth.

EMILY LITTLEJOHN was born and raised in southern California and now lives in Colorado. If she’s not writing, reading, or working at the local public library, she’s enjoying the mountains with her husband and sweet old dog. She has a deep love of horror stories, butter pecan ice cream, and road trips. A Season to Lie is her second novel, following Inherit the Bones. Follow her on Facebook.

Writer’s Digest Digital Archive Collection: Iconic Women Writers

For nearly 100 years, Writer’s Digest magazine has been the leading authority for writers of all genres and career levels. And now, for the first time ever, we’ve digitized decades of issues from our prestigious archives to share with the world. In this, the first of our series of archive collections, discover exclusive historic interviews with classic women authors including Maya Angelou, Pearl S. Buck, Margaret Atwood, Joyce Carol Oates and Joan Didion—and much, much more. Featuring five stunning issues spanning more than 60 years, this collection is perfect for writers, literary enthusiasts, educators and historians. Explore what’s inside.

The post After the Debut: 3 Things I’ve Learned, with Emily Littlejohn appeared first on WritersDigest.com.

from Writing Editor Blogs – WritersDigest.com http://www.writersdigest.com/editor-blogs/guide-to-literary-agents/breaking-in-writers-digest/debut-novel-things-ive-learned-emily-littlejohn-meet-deadlines

[newstfionline]

How Singapore Is Creating More Land for Itself

By Samanth Subramanian, NY Times Magazine, April 20, 2017

Jurong Island, a man-made smear of sand, lies just off the southern coast of Singapore. A quarter the size of Nantucket, it is thoroughly given over to the petrochemical industry, so crowded with spindly cracking towers and squat oil-storage tanks that the landscape is a blur of brand names--BASF, AkzoNobel, Exxon Mobil, Vopak. One of the island’s most distinctive features, though, remains hidden: the Jurong Rock Caverns, which hold 126 million gallons of crude oil. To get there, you ride an industrial elevator more than 325 feet into the earth, and that brings you to the operations tunnel, a curving space as lofty as a cathedral. It is so long that workers get around on bicycles. Safety goggles mist up with the heat and the humidity; the rock walls, wet from dripping water, look so soft they might have been scooped out of chocolate ice cream. This is as far as anyone--even the workers--can go. The caverns themselves are an additional 100 feet beneath the ocean: two sealed cylindrical vaults, extending away from Jurong. They opened for business in 2014. Next year, three new vaults will be ready. Then, if all goes according to plan, there will be six more.

As a concept, underground reservoirs are not new. Sweden has been building them since the 1950s; a pair in the port of Gothenburg has a titanic capacity of 370 million gallons of oil. So the Jurong Rock Caverns are less an emblem of the marvels of technology than of the anxiety of a nation. Singapore is the 192nd-largest country in the world. Tinier than Tonga and just three-fifths the area of New York City, it has long fretted about its congenital puniness. “Bigger countries have the luxury of not having to think about this,” said David Tan, the assistant chief executive of a government agency called the Jurong Town Corporation, which built Jurong Island as well as the caverns. “We’ve always been acutely aware of our small size.”

The caverns were designed to free up land above ground, Tan said. I remarked that the phrase “freeing up land” occurs like clockwork in conversations with Singapore’s planners. He laughed. Land is Singapore’s most cherished resource and its dearest ambition. Since it became an independent nation 52 years ago, Singapore has, through assiduous land reclamation, grown in size by almost a quarter: to 277 square miles from 224. By 2030, the government wants Singapore to measure nearly 300 square miles.

But reclaiming land from the ocean has its limits, particularly in an age of a warming planet. Scientists warn that by 2100, sea levels may rise by as much as six feet, and furious storms will pound our coasts. All over the world, the governments of small islands are working to respond to these hazards. Kiribati, an island nation in the Central Pacific, has bought 6,000 acres of forested land in Fiji, more than a thousand miles away, hoping to resettle some of its 100,000 people if a crisis hits. The Maldives, similarly, has talked about buying land in Australia. People have begun to leave Tuvalu, in the South Pacific; the Marshall Islands; and Nauru, in Micronesia. Five of the lowest Solomon Islands have already vanished. In humanity’s battle to save itself from a harsher climate, these diminutive islands find themselves on the front lines.

Most of these islands--in the Pacific or in Asia--are impoverished, reliant on larger nations for assistance and resources. Singapore is an exception. In countries ranked by per capita gross domestic product, it places fourth--far above Nauru, at 112, or Kiribati, at 212. Over the past half-century, building upon its function as one of the world’s great ports, Singapore has turned into a capital of finance and services. The country is so devotedly pro-business that it can feel like a corporation; its constitution includes several pages on how the government’s investments should be managed. Singapore doesn’t reveal how much money its two sovereign wealth funds administer, but a senior economist at the Macquarie Group estimated their value at just under a trillion dollars.

Among the world’s smattering of small islands, then, Singapore, with a population of 5.6 million, is a special case: a country that’s also a city, a government that owns 90 percent of all real estate, a one-party state in all but name. But how it fends off the ocean will be of deep interest to many other populous and productive cities near the water: New York, Miami, Rio de Janeiro, Mumbai, Guangzhou, all miniature nations of a sort.

Much of Singapore lies less than 50 feet above sea level. A third of the island sits around 16 feet above the water--low enough to give planners the jitters. Coastal roads are being raised; a new airport terminal is being built 18 feet above sea level. All the while, the island receives more and more rain each year. “If global temperatures continue to rise,” a government official said last year, “many parts of Singapore could eventually be submerged.”

The Jurong Rock Caverns are just one answer to a pair of intriguing questions: What does a tremendously rich and ambitious country do when it is running out of land? And what can the rest of the world learn from these experiments?

In the Tolstoy short story “How Much Land Does a Man Need?” a peasant muses in frustration: “Our only trouble is that we haven’t land enough. If I had plenty of land, I shouldn’t fear the Devil himself.” Similar thoughts must have struck Lee Kuan Yew, who cast Singapore in his vision. Through his three decades as prime minister, Lee saw his country as locked in a struggle against its size. Singapore was a tiny nation, and dire fates awaited tiny nations that could not take care of themselves. “In a world where the big fish eat small fish and the small fish eat shrimps, Singapore must become a poisonous shrimp,” he once said.

The island is still awash in his apprehensions. Bureaucrats assemble reports on topics like Maximizing Value From Land as a Scarce Resource. The government works from a Concept Plan, a land-use scheme that looks half a century into the future; the plan itself is reviewed every 10 years. On the first floor of a city museum in the Urban Redevelopment Authority building, a wall is engraved with letters that spell SMALL ISLAND. It’s not until the second floor that the second half of the message materializes: BIG PLANS.

A 10-minute walk from the museum is Boat Quay, the site of the island’s very first land reclamation. In 1822, having just colonized Singapore, the British dismantled a hill and packed the material along the bank of the Singapore River. “Some two or three hundred laborers were paid one rupee per head per day to dig and carry the earth,” Abdullah bin Abdul Kadir, who acted as an informal secretary to British officials at the time, wrote in his 1849 memoir. “Every afternoon, sacks of money were brought to pay the workmen.” Boat Quay’s old shop-houses--shops that doubled as their owners’ residences--have been converted into restaurants, bars and massage parlors. In the evenings, the tables heave with workers from the nearby financial district, much like Manhattan’s South Street Seaport and other ribbons of waterfront realty around the world. In the spirit of preservation, the buildings of Boat Quay have remained low, crouched close to the ground. One street away, however, Singapore’s skyscrapers begin in earnest.

Once I began looking for reclaimed land, I encountered it everywhere. The five towers of the Marina Bay Financial Center are built on reclaimed land; so is an assortment of parks, wharves and a coastal highway. Beach Road, in the island’s belly, at one time had a self-evident name; now it reads like a wry joke, given how much new land separates it from the ocean. Most of Singapore’s Changi Airport sits on earth where there was once only water. The artist Charles Lim Yi Yong grew up in a kampong, or village, near where work on the airport began in 1975, so his house looked out onto reclaimed land. “It was a wooded area, but if you walked there, the ground would be sand and not soil,” Lim said. “Then you went through this desert space. It felt like I was in ‘The Little Prince.’”

Before he turned to art, Lim, now 43, sailed in the 1996 Olympics on the Singapore team. He grew interested in the sea because he sailed, and he sailed because he came from a kampong on the coast. The kampong has long since disappeared, and the coast has changed beyond recognition. Lim’s major creation, “Sea State,” is an anthology of artifacts and installations: videos and charts, buoys and other nautical paraphernalia. Shown at the Venice Biennale two years ago, “Sea State” embodies Lim’s obsession with his country’s transactional relationship with the ocean. His art is a form of urban exploration, roving over, into and around Singapore, studying what few others see: outlying islets, sewage tunnels, buoys, lighthouses, sand barges. For Lim, most of these are easy to access. “I can just take a small sailboat and go. I look very innocuous when I’m out at sea.”

Lim is able to narrate, practically by himself, a fine-grained history of the island’s reclamation projects. He pointed me to one of the videos in “Sea State,” which he has uploaded onto Vimeo. It stars an engineer who surveyed Singapore’s neighborhoods in the 1990s to determine where it would be best to haul away sand for reclamation. Close to the coast, he found more silt than sand, so he and his colleagues went farther out to sea, to “suck the sand into the barges and deliver the sand over to Singapore.” Once, having strayed into Indonesia’s territorial waters without a permit, they were arrested. “We weren’t criminals,” he said. “We were just doing our job.”

Several countries have tired of feeding Singapore’s endless appetite for sand; Indonesia, Malaysia and, most recently, Cambodia have halted exports altogether. These bans have affected some of Singapore’s reclamation schedules, David Tan said, although he insisted that the supply lines from Myanmar were “still robust.” In any case, Singapore is trying to shrink its reliance on sand imports. “We do a lot of tunneling work for the subway, so that material goes into reclamation,” he said. Most of the infill in the reclamations under a coming shipping-container terminal--planned to be the world’s largest--is rock and soil debris from construction projects.

But the desire to reclaim never-ending shelves of land, farther and farther into the sea, will inevitably be outfoxed by physics. On a whiteboard, Tan drew me a diagram of the process: first, building a wall in the water, reaching all the way down into the seabed; next, draining the water behind the wall and replacing it with infill. As the ocean grows less shallow, it becomes harder and harder to build the wall, to stabilize the infill, to protect it all from collapse. “We’re already reclaiming in water that is 20 meters deep,” Tan said. “Maybe it would be viable to reclaim in 30 meters, if land prices go up. But 40 and 50 meters would be very difficult. It’s physically difficult and economically unviable.”

Lim had told me that Singapore holds a strategic sand reserve, for emergencies. It lies somewhere in the area called Bedok, he said. I spotted it one day as I rode past in a taxi. The site was strewn with No Trespassing signs installed by the Housing and Development Board, a government agency. Fenced off from the public, the giant trapezoidal dunes shone bone-white in the sun and caramel in the shade, as the sand waited to be summoned.

To live within an altered climate will require deep pockets--a fact that punishes billions of poor people with negligible carbon footprints. When Kiribati bought its land in Fiji for $7 million, critics worried that the money was being squandered; the nation’s gross domestic product, after all, is only $211 million. By contrast, the first phase of a single Singapore government project--L2 NIC, which clumsily stands for Land and Liveability National Innovation Challenge--has $96 million to disburse to finance creative ideas.

C.M. Wang, a professor of civil engineering at the National University of Singapore, served as a project reviewer for L2 NIC, sifting through proposals for how Singapore might create more space. Wang even has an idea of his own. Approached by Singapore’s ports authority six years ago, he developed and patented a way for coastal cities to create land in the sea. At least, this is the way his staple PowerPoint presentation describes his idea for Very Large Floating Structures, which can bob about on the ocean, hold a range of facilities and “free up land.” “Singapore is the largest bunkering base in the world,” Wang told me when I went to see him in his office at the university. “Ships sail from the Suez, where they refuel, and then the next refueling stop is Singapore.” To be the Texaco station of the high seas, the island needs to maintain vast farms of oil tanks, enough to store the 53.6 million tons of fuel sold to ships last year.

“A logical move would be to store fuel in the sea, because fuel is lighter than water, so it should float,” Wang said. “What we need is a skin to go around it, a container.” He sketched a plan on a scrap of paper: two rectangular concrete decks laid out in parallel, holding oil tanks made of prestressed concrete partly submerged in the water. A ship could slide between the two decks, refuel and steam back out. Wang is working on making his design more economical, but he already has other ideas for floats. On his computer, he flicked through them: dormitories, a restaurant that resembles a crab, bridges, even miniature cities. Last October, to test a proposal from two government agencies, Singapore floated a hectare of solar panels in one of its reservoirs; it hopes, eventually, to build a four-gigawatt solar plant at sea.

Wang urged me to visit the Float at Marina Bay, the world’s largest floating stage, a 107,000-square-foot slice of steel that clings to the lip of Singapore’s esplanade. The afternoon I went, a shroud of smog covered an already sunless sky, and the artificial grass on the Float’s soccer field seemed wan and uninviting. Life preservers were fastened to the railings around the field, lest a player tumble into the sea. I sat on a bench for a while, with my back to the skyscrapers, watching office workers limber up for a friendly game. They looked happy enough with this insertion of playtime into their day, but watching them rattle around on this unnatural parcel of green was, somehow, dispiriting.

Still, unnaturalness may well be the world’s conceivable future; certainly it will be Singapore’s, as the country prepares to terraform itself in search of space. There will be more underground caverns, David Tan told me: a warren of research laboratories within the folds of Kent Ridge, right under the university; perhaps a warehousing facility beneath Jurong Bird Park. “Most of this space will be for industrial use,” he said. “People aren’t likely to live underground.” The island’s geology--a heart of granite in the west, compacted alluvium in the east--is such that most of it could be hollowed out. “Now, I’m not saying we should use it all,” he went on, in the tone of an eminently prudent man. Then he added, “But we can use two-thirds of it.”

Singapore also plans to reclaim its air. “Twelve percent of the island is occupied by roads,” Tan said. “What’s above roads? Nothing! If you put roads under buildings, you free up some land.” Sky bridges and midair concourses are already a part of some public-housing estates. As Wang told me: “In the future, you might see a little town or offices above the expressways. We might create space above our container ports.”

Singapore already has high-rise factories: towers occupied by dozens of manufacturing units, all sharing amenities like cargo elevators, electricity and truck ramps. Since 2012, the government has funded vertical farms, shelves of aluminum planters that grow spinach, lettuce and Chinese cabbage. Singapore grows only 7 percent of its food, having decided long ago that its land has more profitable uses. In the 1980s, it began dispatching its pig farms to outlying Indonesian islands like Batam, which still supplies Singapore with pork. The government has invested $380 million in agricultural projects in Australia, and it is renting land in northeast China to build itself a farm that will measure double the area of the island of Singapore. The farm will take 15 years to complete and will cost $18 billion. Given enough ready money, thorny issues of territorial sovereignty swiftly dissolve.

Whether many of these ventures will bear fruit is difficult to say. When you’re talking to a typically matter-of-fact city planner, each of these ideas seems to possess the heft of certainty. Collected together, though, this vision of Singapore--on the ground and under it, in the air and beneath the sea, a city and a country and a transnational entity all at once--feels fantastic. Then again, even Singapore as it is--born a slum-ridden speck with no oil, no hinterland and a volatile mix of ethnicities, raised with an authoritarian hand and transformed into one of the most prosperous, most politically meek nations on earth--even this Singapore tugs at the bounds of our credulity.

Singapore has always held elections, but only one party--Lee Kuan Yew’s People’s Action Party--has ever ruled the island, and only three men have ever been prime minister. Opposition parties have never been permitted to be anything more than frail invertebrates, so the P.A.P. can do as it pleases. The environmental consequences of remodeling the coastline--an altered ecology, wetlands rubbed off the map--can be waved away. Residents can be moved so that projects can proceed. In Singapore’s quandary of where to put its people, the people themselves--the living as well as the dead--can seem like pieces on a checkerboard.

Nothing seems to dent the P.A.P. It won an election in 2011, even though Singaporeans were angry over housing shortages and an overburdened public-transportation system. It won even more handily in 2015, after land prices rose by 30 percent three years in a row and after the government’s migration-led population target of 6.9 million by 2030--necessary to fill out the work force, but also a strain on the island’s finite resources--kindled a public protest, a singular event in this country. But stopping the state from doing something it wants to do is, in Singapore, a task primed for.

One afternoon, Charles Lim and I drove to a marina near the southeastern corner of Singapore and rented a sailboat, a two-man Laser Bahia in which Lim did the work of both men. The haze from Indonesia’s forest fires muddied the day; the ocean looked as if it were evaporating in front of us. Not far beyond the marina, cargo ships and oil tankers waited patiently for their turn at port. To the east rose the tall, unblinking surveillance tower of Changi Naval Base. “I call it the Eye of Sauron,” Lim said.

The wind rose and fell in heavy gusts; Lim’s hair, tousled even indoors, grew still more animated. He pointed out a man-made hill eastward along the coast from the marina, where trucks and earthmovers milled about. This was the Changi East reclamation: more than a thousand hectares of land, designed to hold the new airport terminal and its three runways. In trying to edge closer, we must have wandered into sensitive waters. A loudspeaker screamed from the naval base, punctuated by three types of sirens: “You are entering a prohibited area! Please clear now!” Lim instructed me to pull at various ropes, and we tacked hurriedly out.

A couple of hours after we cast off, we came upon Tekong Island, sitting in the strait between Singapore and Malaysia, owned by the former but nearer the latter. The two countries bickered over reclamation activities here in 2002; it took three years of negotiations before Singapore could proceed. The part of the island where Singapore’s army units train was a smoky smudge on the horizon. Our boat nuzzled against a rock wall that marked out reclamation work. The wall began on the northern coast of the island, ran eastward to sea and then looped back to a point on the southern coast. In outline, it resembled a porpoise’s nose.

“That’s odd,” Lim said. “There’s no one here.” No trucks, no security guards, no bulldozers. “Maybe they’ve stopped work because of a shortage of sand.”

Lim held the boat steady while I waded into the shallows for a better look, careful not to trespass on the island. The rocks underfoot were slick, and I barked my shin.

“How does it look?” Lim called.

A few feet from the outer wall was an inner one, and packed between the two was sand: lovely, pristine sand the color of milky Ovaltine. It was held firm and tight in its sleeve of rock, its surface so level that had I walked on it, I might have been the first visitor on undiscovered land. Trapped beyond the inner wall was a low pool of water, yet to be filled in. Around us, the ocean lay idle in the sun, ready to challenge Singapore’s ingenuity with its patient, adamant rise.

[juditmiltz]

Ballers, stars and fashionistas: Who’s buying and selling in South Florida?

Jonathan Vilma and his $14.4 million mansion

From TRD Miami’s spring issue: UPDATED, March 29, 2:54 p.m.: The constellation of stars in South Florida is ever-changing. There’s no shortage of celebrity sightings on South Beach, of course, and Star Island remains one of most exclusive enclaves in the world. But with competition for prime real estate among everyone from athletes to tech titans to foreign investors, some boldfaced names are exploring other areas for their splurges. For those who don’t need the hassle of tending to an estate, there are endless luxury condo buildings running all the way up the coast. And mansions are being built in evolving Miami neighborhoods for those thinking outside the celebrity box. Or, if horses are a concern, what about moving inland a bit and picking up a few equestrian acres? Here’s a look into the deals of the famous folks who recently bought or sold in South Florida.

After playing ball at the University of Miami, Jonathan Vilma moved on to the NFL with the New York Jets and to the Super Bowl with the New Orleans Saints, but the star linebacker called Tahiti Beach Island home until he sold his five-bedroom mansion for $14.4 million in January. Vilma bought the property overlooking Biscayne Bay in 2011 for $6 million and later built a 6,900-square-foot modern home on the land. The mansion at 17 Tahiti Beach Island Road was listed for $18.5 million last year with Douglas Elliman’s Chad Carroll.

“Luxurious understatement reigns supreme at chez Tomas Maier,” Vogue recently wrote about the German-born designer’s fall collection, and the same could be said of the oceanfront house in Gulf Stream that he and his husband, Andrew Preston, sold in January. The 6,270-square-foot home fetched $9.5 million, although the sale price was a bit off the $10.95 million price tag when the 3377 North Ocean Boulevard property hit the market in November. Douglas Elliman’s Nicholas Malinosky and Randy Ely represented the sellers. Maier and Preston are moving to a recently renovated mansion in Palm Beach, which they bought in 2014 from Ivana Trump.

Mickey Drexler and his $13.7 million waterfront property

Mickey Drexler needed a little more room, so he bought the neighboring 22,719-square-foot lot. That lot happens to be a waterfront property in Miami Beach, so the J. Crew chairman had to put down $13.7 million for it. But Drexler paid a little more than half the $25 million that 4462 North Bay Road was listed for in 2015. The previous owner, former chairman of MTV International Bill Roedy, cut the asking price to $15.9 million last year. Ralph Arias of One Sotheby’s International Realty represented the seller.

Actor Michael Caine and his wife, Shakira, sold their luxury condo at the Apogee South Beach for $7.45 million in January, as the couple is spending less time in Miami, according to listing broker John Lennon of South Pointe Drive Realty. The 4,154-square-foot, four-bedroom home last had an $8.7 million asking price, but had been on the market several times over two years, initially at $12.9 million. The Oscar winner bought the Miami Beach apartment at 800 South Pointe Drive in 2008 and, appropriately, added a small movie theater. Christiana Machado of Cervera Real Estate represented the buyer, a Brazilian businessman.

Dion Waiters and hid $7.4 million mansion in Pinecrest

Miami Heat guard Dion Waiters set an off-the-court record when he put up $7.4 million for a mansion in Pinecrest, making his the most expensive non-waterfront property in the area. Architect Frank Mendez took a shot with the 17,700-square-foot spec home and scored with features intended to attract professional athletes. The nine-bedroom Balinese-style home at 5745 Southwest 94th Street has a shower big enough for 12 people and a driveway large enough for 30 cars. The property was first listed in January 2015 with a $9.9 million price tag. Brown Harris Stevens Miami agent Marianna Dubinsky had the listing. Nancy Bernstein and Jonathan Garcia of ONE Sotheby’s International Realty represented Waiters.

Billy Joel and his horse-loving wife, Alexis Roderick, are movin’ out of the Florida beachfront properties the singer owns and movin’ up to a five-acre equestrian ranch in Wellington, which they bought for $3.5 million in January. The property at 14190 Palm Beach Point Boulevard features a 12-stall barn, five paddocks and a regulation-size dressage ring. Joel bought a neighboring five-acre parcel in 2016 for $3.6 million. The ranch isn’t far from the Winter Equestrian Festival, one of the nation’s largest horse-riding events. The Piano Man and his wife join a host of other celebs who’ve bought in Wellington, including Bruce Springsteen and Bill Gates. Carol Sollak of Engel & Volkers Wellington had the listing.

Jay Schottenstein spent $6.77 million on a condo at the soon-to-open Ritz-Carlton Residences

Where does a Midwestern boy stay in Miami? At the Ritz if he’s Jay Schottenstein, the CEO and chairman of American Eagle and DSW. The Ohio-based retail heir spent $6.77 million on a 4,347-square-foot, three-bedroom condo at the soon-to-open Ritz-Carlton Residences at 4701 Meridian Avenue in Miami Beach. With 111 condos and 15 standalone villas designed by architect Piero Lissoni, the ultra-luxury community will offer its residents a marine helipad, 36 boat slips and — for those who don’t have their own — a house yacht. The complex is scheduled to open later in 2018. Darin Tansey of Douglas Elliman was the listing agent.

“Get it while you here, boy/’Cause all that hype don’t feel the same next year, boy,” Drake rapped from his living room in the Marquis Residences for the “I’m On One” video. That was in 2011. In 2012, he sold the downtown Miami condo to then-Heat guard Mario Chalmers for $2.4 million. Chalmers held onto the 5,475-square-foot apartment for more than a year, but he put it on the market for $4 million in 2014 and was then traded to the Memphis Grizzlies. There were no takers until February, when the condo sold for a small loss at $2.3 million. Representing Chalmers was Denver Bright, who was with Douglas Elliman at the time. Bright is now with Compass.

Rosie O’Donnell and her $5 million West Palm Beach home

Rosie O’Donnell sold her West Palm Beach home for $5 million in January, and the first thing buyer H. Wayne Huizenga Jr. is going to do is tear the place down. Built in 1957, the five-bedroom manse sits on an acre of land next to the Intracoastal Waterway. The comedian bought the nearly 7,600-square-foot house at 3100 North Flagler Drive in 2015 for $4.975 million and had listed it for $6.05 million before cutting the price in June 2017. O‘Donnell can probably afford to laugh off the $25,000 profit margin — she sold a Star Island property in 2013 for $12.6 million. Liza Pulitzer of Brown Harris Stevens of Palm Beach had the listing.

Even if Justin Timberlake, Jay-Z, Missy Elliott and all the guys from OneRepublic decide to drop by at the same time, Timbaland’s new waterfront condo in Miami should be big enough to host all his collaborators. The Grammy Award-winning rapper and producer, whose full name is Timothy Zachery Mosley, bought two units in the still-under-construction Aria on the Bay, which will encompass 4,700 square feet when they’re combined, plus another 1,300 square feet of terrace overlooking Biscayne Bay. Tim Elmes of Coldwell Banker and Marc Hameroff of Engel & Völkers Miami represented Timbaland in the reportedly $4 million deal.

Editor’s note: This story has been amended to include Dion Waiters’ representation in his home purchase. 

from The Real Deal Miami https://therealdeal.com/miami/issues_articles/ballers-stars-and-fashionistas-whos-buying-and-selling-in-south-florida/#new_tab via IFTTT