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p-and-p-admin · 5 years

Photo

Interview given to The Severus Snape and Hermione Granger Shipping Fan Group. (sharing here Admin approved)

https://www.facebook.com/groups/199718373383293/

Hello Subversa and welcome to Behind the Quill, thank-you for letting us get to know you a little better.

Many of our members will be familiar with your stories which include This Time, Improbable Felicity and of course, The Love You Take.

Okay, let’s jump right in.

What's the story behind your pen name?

My tagline on LiveJournal was Subversive Subversions, and that kind of says it all about me. I like to stir the pot

Which Harry Potter character do you identify with the most?

I identify most with Hermione, the book-loving swot. Oddly enough, on the various Sorting tests I’ve taken, I always Sort into Ravenclaw. (Until I took the Pottermore test, where I Sorted into Slytherin; I blame years of living in Snape’s head).

Do you have a favourite genre to read?

I grew up reading voraciously. My first genre of choice was romance. As an adult, I began reading thriller/suspense books, and I really didn’t come back to reading romance until I began writing fanfic.

Do you have a favourite "classic" novel?

It would be a toss-up between Pride and Prejudice, Sense and Sensibility, and Jane Eyre. I see shades of SSHG in them all.

At what age did you start writing?

I took my first run at writing when I was eight years old. My parents, however, discouraged the idea of me being a writer, and even though I started a number of stories over the years, I never finished one until I began writing fanfic in my forties.

How did you get into writing fanfiction?

It was in April 2005, while I was impatiently waiting for HBP to be published. I was noodling around the Internet and I stumbled over Mugglenet. As I was gobbling up all the content, I found a link to their fanfiction.

I perused the genres, and under romance, I found the pairings. When I saw SSHG, I was horrified. So of course, I had to read something.

I read The Long Wait by ancientgirl, and I couldn’t stop. I was completely enchanted, and I thought to myself, “I could do this.” So I started writing Master of Enchantment.

I have to say that Potterverse, and specifically the SSHG fandom, became my obsession and occupied all my thoughts for several years. I pretty much read nothing but fanfic and did continual re-reads of the HP series during that time--this from a woman who previously read 3 novels a week.

What's the best theme you've ever come across in a fic? Is it a theme represented in your own works?

JKR may not know it, but her greatest creation is Severus Snape, the antagonistic protagonist.

I have always been driven by Snape’s plight. It is the theme I am most drawn to in stories I read. Over and over again through my years of active fanfic writing, I tried to give him redemption and the happiness he deserves.

What fandoms are you involved in other than Harry Potter?

I watched the birth and rise of the Sherlock BBC fandom on LiveJournal, and I saw a number of friends go over to that particular dark side. I read some of the fic, but was never tempted to write it.

As a favour to a friend, I wrote a Twilight fanfic story for a gift exchange on LiveJournal (it was awful).

So, Potterverse is really my only fandom.

If you could make one change to canon, what would it be? Do you have a favourite piece of fanon?

I basically hated book 7. The whole Deathly Hallows thing felt like something JKR introduced out of thin air. I hated the interminable camping trip. I hated the epilogue (except for “and he was probably the bravest man I ever knew”) and the idea that you must marry the person you crushed on in high school.

Mostly, of course, I hated the death of Snape.

So my change would be to have Snape survive, be vindicated in the eyes of the world, and live to earn the happiness he had never known before.

My favourite fanon thing is the myriad ways we have of making Snape survive Nagini’s attack.

Do you listen to music when you write or do you prefer quiet?

I always listen to music. Every piece I have ever written has its own soundtrack. I have piles of CDs from the time before I had an iPod, with the name of the current story I was writing scrawled on it in Sharpie. The longer pieces had soundtracks that evolved over the course of the story. There are songs that still pierce me with the memories of what I felt when I wrote. Music is an integral part of my process.

What are your favourite fanfictions of all time?

Wow. This is a hard question. I’m sure that any list I create will be missing an important story. Nevertheless, here are some, in no particular order:

Care of Magical Creatures

She Was Beautiful to Him

Guard... Check... Mate

Second Life

Big Name Death Eater

Marry a Choice

The Absinthe of Reason

I'll Never Take Advantage

Irresistible

The Bookshop

The Price of Madness

King of Swords

Denial

No Loyalty in the Moonlight

You Can't Have One Without The Other

The Language of Flowers

Are you a plotter or a pantser? How does that affect your writing process?

I am a total pantser. It means I can write myself into a corner and have to write myself out again.

What is your writing genre of choice?

Forever and always, romance. Often with a side of erotica.

Which of your stories are you most proud of? Why?

Transcendent Quality of Remembrance, because there were two timelines running and it was an intricate plot device. It is also one of the most heart-wrenching stories I’ve ever written.

Did it unfold as you imagined it or did you find the unexpected cropped up as you wrote? What did you learn from writing it?

I have to admit, the unexpected always crops up as I write. I’m one of those people who believe without apology in my Muse.

As for what I learned, I found that writing the entire story before trying to post it meant the story would hang together better without me having to write myself out of a corner. I probably went back and changed the first chapter seven or eight times due to developments in the plot.

How personal is the story to you, and do you think that made it harder or easier to write?

Everything I write is intensely personal to me. I am immersed in my story, and I feel every emotion. It is the only way I have ever written. I don’t think I could write something I didn’t feel. So it’s neither easier nor harder. It is what it is.

What books or authors have influenced you? How do you think that shows in your writing?

Georgette Heyer, who wrote a large number of Regency romances, was and is a huge influence on my writing. I think I absorbed her turns of phrase and plot devices and romantic hero figures through my skin. It absolutely shows in my writing.

Do people in your everyday life know you write fanfiction?

Not my coworkers or family outside of my husband and children. My best friend knows I write fanfic.

How true for you is the notion of "writing for yourself"?

For me, it’s the only way I can do it. I have to be consumed by the basic idea and let it live in me as I write. I write the stories I want to read about the subjects that fascinate and inspire me.

How important is it for you to interact with your audience? How do you engage with them? Just at the point of publishing? Through social media?

During my active fanfic writing years, I was immersed with my audience. At that time, SSHG Fandom pretty much lived in LiveJournal, and I was active there every day. I was not very good at answering reviews, but I tended to put author’s notes before and/or after chapters as a way of engaging with my readers.

What is the best advice you've received about writing?

To write the story I want to read. To fall in love with my protagonist.

What do you do when you hit writer's block?

Walk away from the computer and pick up a pen and pad of paper.

Has anything in real life trickled down into your writing?

Many, many things about my romance with my husband were fodder for the romances I’ve written.

Do you have any stories in the works? Can you give us a teaser?

I am striving to complete my first novel of original fiction. It’s the beginning of a trilogy. All have been written (first draft), and the first has been to a professional editor. I’m striving to complete a draft with her suggestions.

It’s about a swotty girl and her teacher. (shock)

They live in a magical world with conflict. (further shock)

There is lots of sex with a BDSM twist.

The protagonist is (in my heart) Severus Snape in disguise. He has his own brand of physical unattractiveness and a mesmerizing presence.

Any words of encouragement to other writers?

Write what’s in your heart. Use a good beta reader. Take constructive criticism in the spirit it is offered. Ignore trolls.

Thanks so much for giving us your time.

#fanfiction #fanfic #writing #severus snape #snape #pro snape #hermione granger #snamione

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reekierevelator · 6 years

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The Face of Tomorrow

Sitting, eyes red and head drooping, foot almost glued to the pedal, feeding the coarse material through the needle. At last, she moved her foot away and let her head fall. Another piece finished. Twenty shirts, all exactly the same, already today.

But before Ode could take a few moments to rest her arms and have a sip of water the foreman arrived to snatch away the finished shirt, saying ‘Atta girl, plenty more where that came from’, and pushed a sewing pattern down in front of her tired eyes. This was quickly followed by ‘Here you go then, next piece’ as he thrust a pile of cut-outs on to the heavily scratched beech wood of her small work desk. The new pieces were in a dazzling shade of almost iridescent blue with a subtle pattern of thin black lines running through them. Ode sat up and stared, mesmerised. The foreman couldn’t understand it. ‘It’s the same shirt dear, just different material’ he explained slowly, as if Ode was some kind of simpleton.

Since leaving school Ode had spent long hours working in the dilapidated red brick building only the boss calls the Golden Garment Company factory. Her fellow workers called it the workshop. Her old school friends called it the sweatshop. Long hours and poor pay, but ‘it’s a job’. And without qualifications Ode felt lucky to be employed at all. She knew it was only because her mother had taught her the basic skills required – through making her sew and mend from a very young age, - that she’d got the job in the first place. In her own family, new clothes were a rare and almost unheard of luxury. It had been that way since they had fled to escape the fighting, arriving in Britain from Nigeria when Ode was a small child.

She had never owned the kind of on-trend fashionable clothes that she’d seen on some of the city’s girls. And she knew anyway that she was plain and unattractive. Fancy clothes wouldn’t hide that. People had never been backward in coming forward to tell her so.

Once, she’d gone with her friend to try on expensive clothes in a posh shop – it was what they did, try them on, admire themselves in the mirrors, and then return the clothes to the rails. Sometimes Ode took even longer as she examined the textiles, the way a particular fabric had been cut, sewn, pleated. It was much more valuable to examine the actual clothes, see exactly how they had been treated, cut on the bias or whatever, than to read about them in the odd fashion magazine that came her way. She could understand why her behaviour could irritate the woman in charge of the changing rooms and how she might get annoyed. When Ode emerged wearing a floor length sequined gown the woman had carped ‘You don’t really fit the modelling mould, do you love? Not got the required features: not thin enough, not tall enough, and your legs are too short.’ It cut Ode to the bone, but still she couldn’t shake the obsession.

In fact she became quite acclimatised to cruel humiliation. ‘Your cheekbones are too low, nose is too big, your mouth is too wide, the shape and colour of your eyes is all wrong.’ In a way it made her more resilient. ‘You can’t squeeze into that dress my girl, even the bust’s not right. In fact, your whole build is all wrong for those kinds of dresses. To be honest I can’t see even spending a fortune on make-up and cosmetics making much difference.’ Even when it left her almost in tears Ode found she could cope. That was just how her life was and since it was likely to stay that way she better get used to it.

Somehow she just couldn’t help herself. She inevitably found herself starting conversations with workmates, family, and sometimes even strangers at the bus stop by commenting on their clothes. She offered them her ideas on what might suit them better. But what she considered sensible suggestions were often received as rudeness; unwarranted intrusions, impolite, offensive, insulting. On the odd occasions when she had ventured to make such suggestions to her friends they had either laughed out loud, asked what on earth she was thinking, or stared at her as if they thought he was going mad.

But at least the meagre wages she was earning allowed her the very occasional luxury purchase. The unusual blue cloth triggered her desire. At the end of the day she noticed the scrag end of a roll abandoned on the cutting room floor. She picked it up and approached the foreman.

‘Could I take this home with me?’ she asked

The foreman knew there was not enough material for another garment and that it would only be swept up and put in the refuse with the rest of the rubbish. He barked back ‘Of course not, it belongs to the company,’

‘I could pay for it,’ Ode answered timidly.

‘How much?’

‘I have six pounds saved,’ said Ode, rummaging in her pocket then stretching out her hand showing him the money.

The foreman cast his eyes furtively around the now empty room. ‘Sold’, he muttered, quickly grabbing the cash from Ode’s hand.

With the dress-making skills her mother had somewhat forcefully bequeathed to her Ode intended to cut the material into embellishments for her existing clothes. But then she struck on the idea of unpicking the stitching of her own dress and using her own quirky ideas to remake it in a wholly new style, one she imagined would show off the blue material properly. The dress she created was highly unusual, a peculiar variation on the traditional dress of her ancestors, a new take on the sort of clothes her mother wore as if she still walked the Nigerian countryside every day. A matching gele, or headdress, completed the effect.

At first her best friend, Uma, impulsive and beautiful, with big eyes and an impish smile, was the only one she would allow to see her new ‘African’ dress. Then one day Uma said ‘Is real neat, yah. But what you gonna do wit it though – just sit at home wearin it, starin at youself in the mirror like you famous? Shu, no girl like you ever gonna wear that kinda thing on the street.’

But maybe that was just the challenge Ode had been waiting for. The very next Saturday she wore her highly original new dress while accompanying Uma to Harlesden market, shopping for yams, plantain, and cooking bananas. She drew admiring glances from other girls, saying ‘Stunna, innit’ and ‘You got an ankara buba now Ode?’. Even some of the boys approached her, passing comments like ‘That’s a wicked colour’, and ‘Cool dress’. A white boy mentioned her ‘Impressive kaftan.’

Ode’s girlfriends were quick to convert to a full appreciation of the new style. They found themselves re-thinking the fashion advice Ode had tried to give them, which they’d previously rejected as ridiculously outlandish. It didn’t take long before they were asking her advice on materials, and arranging for Ode to run up clothes for them at home after they brought her the lengths of cloth they’d bought.

One Saturday afternoon Ode and Uma passed the unimposing little shopfront of a professional photographer. They paused outside for a moment before Uma, on the spur of the moment, marched in, her friend trailing behind, and asked him to take photos of her. ‘For a fashion model portfolio?’ the photographer had joked, and Uma surprised herself when, the idea having been put in her head, she replied ‘Well yes.’ When she asked him for the names and addresses of modelling agencies her Ode’s laughter became uncontrollable. But still, he’d gamely suggested a few names while keeping his grin in check.

Uma collected the big glossy photos the next weekend and posted them off to New Vision Models, one of the names she’d remembered. Surprisingly, the agency, under pressure to demonstrate greater ‘diversity’, invited her for an interview. But when Uma arrived to speak to Zelda it was quickly clear that she wasn’t really interested. Uma was glad she’d gone alone and that her friend wasn’t there to hear Zelda’s casual, acerbic comments on her height, weight, and the size of her feet.

Zelda’s phone rang. It was an urgent request. One of their clients had put together a mail order catalogue that had to go to print next day and they’d only just realized all the models they’d used were white. They couldn’t afford to be depicted as racially biased and they couldn’t afford to re-schedule the printing job. In fact, business was so bad because of all the new online retailers that unless the catalogue brought in a lot of sales they knew the company was going to collapse anyway. As a matter of fact they couldn’t even afford to pay the usual going rate for models but they desperately needed someone within the hour.

So for a minimal fee, from which Uma would earn only ‘experience’, the agency sent her to wear cheap clothes for some quickfire photographs which would be included in a mail order women’s clothes catalogue that would be printed in great haste on cheap paper. In their hurry a shot was taken of Uma wearing the dress in which she’d arrived, a dress designed and stitched together by Ode. The photo was included along with an arbitrary price the catalogue editor had made up on the spot.

Inevitably, the catalogue’s readers hated the clothes and bought very little. But even while the company was folding, comments proliferated across the social media about one of the models, how she was so different to the usual mannequin-like catalogue clothes-horses and actually looked like a ‘normal lively girl’ for a change. As attention was directed towards Uma, more readers also commented that the only item of clothing in the catalogue that was worth buying was one that she modelled – a sort of esoteric take on traditional West African dress. Unusually, the dress was in bright pink rather than the usual primary colours and its pattern was picked out in subtle, swirling crimson and gold. Surprisingly, the cut was for a casual dress style, a chiseled cut and only knee-length, with a rectangular neckline. Equally surprisingly, the dress was still somehow unmistakeably African.

While casually flicking through Instagram discussions a young man linked it to a message he sent to the husband of Phoebe, a young aspiring clothes designer. ‘People are saying there’s someone, something out there, that is “different” ‘.

When the husband brought it to her attention Phoebe investigated. She checked Instagram. The nape of her neck prickled. She tracked down a copy of the printed catalogue. She phoned the catalogue company, then the modelling agency, and then Uma herself. When she discovered who had made the catalogue’s one outstanding clothes item her sense of excitement went into overdrive. She ran out of her office in Jermyn Street and was soon on the Bakerloo Line heading north to Harlesden. When she found the flat in the high-rise she confused Ode’s mother by asking to talk to the girl with the perfect eye.

The social media hubbub also reached Zelda. She was quickly back in contact with Uma, offering her more work, and insisting the company could live up to its name of New Vision.

Ode handed in her notice at the sweatshop. The foreman told her to stay, warned her she’d regret leaving, since his own pay was linked to production and he knew how hard Ode worked. But Ode began working with Phoebe. With Ode’s ideas and Phoebe’s business contacts it wasn’t long before they were selling vast numbers of new garments, not only throughout the UK but to the near two hundred million Nigerians and to other parts of West Africa.

Within a year Uma’s cheerful face was on billboards and the cover of Cosmopolitan. She was following in the footsteps of Iman and Naomi Campbell.

But Ode’s face, despite the cheekbones being too low, nose too big, mouth too wide, and shape and colour of the eyes all wrong, was the real face of tomorrow. It was already to be found on the inside pages of Business Today as well as StyleWatch, Glamour, and West Africa Now. The world had moved on. The face of Britain was multicultural and not only was the West African market online, but the whole face of Africa was changing fast. Given the respect accorded a top class designer, business couldn’t be better.

#Reekie Revelator #short story #fashion #immigration

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mybukz · 6 years

Text

Review: At Night We Come Out by Yanna Hashri

Title: At Night We Come Out Author : Yanna Hashri Genre: Poetry Format: Paperback, 24 pages Price: RM10 Released: August 20, 2018 Reviewer: Jeremy Chin

First, a disclaimer from me. In her poem, Wondering, You Wander, Yanna Hashri speaks of “the soul, looking for/whichever god will/house its needs”. Reality bends itself to our biases, and we all have a mesh over our eyes that lets through only that which we want to see. What follows is my take on Yanna Hashri’s collection of nineteen poems, through a lens that is entirely my own. A fair bit, I reckon, I’ve interpreted differently from was intended, but poetry is beautiful in that way; its cryptic nature leaves it open, invites you to give meaning to it, to make of it what you need it most to be.

A 26-page chapbook, At Night We Come Out is a light book with a heavy message. I found a few recurring themes in this body of work, and have sectioned my review accordingly.

ENTRAPMENT

Every time we get caught in an eddy of anxiety and depression, we create a prison for ourselves. The walls, as they become more stifling, induce reflection and expression, and have compelled many to push pen to paper, which perhaps is why entrapment shows up as a common theme in many poems, including Yanna’s.

In her poem The Weight of Her Light, she writes, “only blindness of self/ could make the night’s sky a cage” and “When she could take no more/the night begged me to let her go/ but all that flew out of my mouth was a bird the shape of death/tumbling down a black hole/its wings cutting deep into the edges of a universe”.

In her next piece, Three Paths, she speaks of the “map of the human heart/with no side doors or exits?”. In the Oldest of Ghosts she unleashes this line, “Time is a ponderous jest/under which I cup my tears”.

The outcome is a little different in Shhh, a poem on physical abuse, breaking out of the silence, and payback, which she artfully brings to life using the concept of shapes. Often it is the aggressor who entraps, smothers the voice of the weak, but in this instance, the victim refuses to stay down, and violence finds its way back to its owner.

LOVE

A few poems of Yanna’s touch on love. The one titled Tempest depicts the destructive nature of flare-ups in a relationship, how they sometimes come from a place that escapes reason, manifesting as “a one-eyed tempest/ howling up a fire from nothing/ until everything is wet ash”. Yanna goes on to describe how the cycle is renewed, her poem tapering off with the following verse: “She rages on and on/seeking answers to questions she doesn’t know/and in the morning, spent and shrunk/she wrecks herself, as always,into/ the moor of your battered arms”.

In her next poem, Curtain Call, she speaks of a house that had retained memories of its tenant: the blooming of her relationship with another, the “early tiptoe/of maybes and why nots”, the inevitability of rapture, the way their “hearts began to howl from the force/of collisions too violent to heal”.

“The song ends like so many sad things do -” Yanna writes, “sputtering to a stop as it drags/its last notes across the finish line.”. The house still stands, except the walls that once trapped in all the joy now cradles the emptiness that comes in the wake of love lost.

WAR

In many instances, we inherit the sins of our fathers. Yanna Hashri touches a fair bit on war and its implications, the way violence gets propagated from one generation to the next. In one of her pieces she opens with “The history of my people/is a history of madness”. In another she claims that there are only three paths to freedom: “To wade through decades of blood/To go mad from the silence of martyrs/To leap headfirst into the/ beast’s crepuscular belly”.

“Go look a mad man in the eye and ask/ how the flames wolfed down his heart/ and then tell me what you know of war”. In Neither Dream Nor Fable, she addresses the fire of violent conflict, the way it consumes everything in its path, how it makes us do the unthinkable: “We were hungry and desperate you see/ so we dug up the graves and sucked /the old pain from our grandmothers’ bones”.

The Dead Men Go Singing tells of the young who are exposed to war propaganda, who “gobble these songs up in their dreams like/hot fat dripping down their tongues/and into the proud swell of their chests”. Our youth are recruited into the violence and slain before they can understand its futility, “piling up mountains of useless regrets/ on the tips of blades they never learn to wield/until their bodies succumb to that last fall”.

DEBAUCHERY AND FALSE PERSONAS

In her poem Taste, Yanna brings to light how society is lost to gluttony, fakery and drunkenness, pointing to the idiots who could “drink/their weight in excess/and plop down to the earth,/sated and singing to each other/ in a language only beasts/ could understand”.

In her next poem, Hassia and the Fools, she speaks of a group of brutes, intoxicated by wine, wealth and lust. They fail in their pursuit of Hassia, who, to elude capture, “swam with swans in the day/and sang with wolves in the night”.

This theme of donning different personas trapezes into her next poem, Natural Disasters, where she writes: “Here comes Father in his suit and tie/choosing a face from the wall/to wear with care for the day”.

Final Words

Yanna’s Hashri’s collection feels like a walk through a gloomy cave with dripping fangs. But to my surprise, and delight, she concludes her collection with a piece that lights up the darkness, this turn-around brought on by the arrival of a child, her own, perhaps.

“You may have your father’s eyes/but you don’t have to look/at the world through them”, she writes in her concluding poem, One Day I’ll Love Yanna Hashri. “Gaze past the ramparts./It doesn’t matter what came before/or whose skin you were born into/… Lift your little boy into your arms/and wear his joy like armor/Leave all the bodies behind/and cross the moat/into the soft light of the morning”.

Yanna Hashri has produced an insightful, artistic and frighteningly real representation of the human condition, of a world lost to greed, violence and foolery. In her poem, The Garden, she writes, “The stories you cradle/in the dark palm of your hand/can serve you well if you/learn how to wield them”. I don’t know how autobiographical her poems are, but from what I’ve read, they appear to have been penned by one who has emerged from the fire a little scathed, a little scarred, but a whole lot stronger.

Yanna Hashri is a writer and editor with a degree in English Language and Literature. Her poetry takes inspiration from the complexity of human nature, surrealism and the magic of everyday things.

Jeremy Chin is a Malaysian-born author best known for his book FUEL, a story of a novice long distance runner who, fueled by sadness, wins the New York marathon. His book has developed a cult following amongst runners globally, and has been read by coaches, ultrarunners and Olympians worldwide.

If you are interested in obtaining a copy, you may do so at: https://www.amazon.com/Jeremy-Chin/e/B018LXOJJA/

#Yanna Hashri #At Night We Come Out #poetry #chapbook #Malaysian poetry #malaysian literature #Jeremy Chin #Fuel #book review

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evanvanness · 4 years

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Annotated edition, Week in Ethereum News, April 13 issue

The newsletter didn’t get sent until Monday morning, so a bit late for me. The reason why is that last week I was busy securing the 4 major sponsors necessary to keep this newsletter free for everyone. Hopefully news on that front will be coming soon. I’ll be very grateful to the folks who help Week in Ethereum News stay free, and hopefully you will be too. As I’ve told everyone I talked to, as an editor, the product will remain the exact same. As a publisher, it’s very important to me that it’s a productive relationship for everyone.

Here’s the most clicked, preserved in a screenshot since my tweets auto-delete

People are excited that the fee market is getting simulated. This particular piece is probably a bit too simplistic, but Barnabe will be publishing more soon, with more realistic assumptions about endogenous demand.

People are excited because the fee market change will 1) make it easier for app devs to get their user transactions included and 2) because every transaction will burn some ETH, and 3) it kills economic abstraction forever, something I remember Gavin pushing quite hard in 2015 and 2016.

Meanwhile, Danny published a design on turning off PoW. Even though it’s long, it’s still rough and just an initial plan. The focus has been on launching the eth2 chain, but as soon as it is launched, the goal is to turn off the wasteful electricity burn (and issuance!) of PoW.

Eth1

EIP1559 fee market change simulations, assuming demand is exogenous

EVM Bytecode Merklization – merklize code chunks for block witnesses, estimates 40-60% reduction

Some more estimates on code merklization based on recent blocks

One important bit of stateless Ethereum is trying to merklize code chunks to shrink the witness size so that full nodes do not have to hold the full state. Two different estimates published this week on how important and feasible it is.

Eth2

Bitfly’s explanations of eth2 block explorer charts

PegaSys’s Teku client fully syncs with the Lighthouse testnet

Latest Nimbus client update. Getting up to the multi-client testnet spec, networking improvements, interop ready with Lighthouse

SigmaPrime’s update fuzzing the eth2 clients. Catching bugs, new fuzzing engine

Work on formally verifying the eth2 spec using Dafny

A look at the GUI for Rocketpool’s decentralized staking pool

Aditya’s how FFG is implemented in Eth2 explainer

The clients are all speeding into launching the multi-client testnet. I suppose the other stuff mostly speaks for itself.

Eth2, post-BeaconChain launch

A design for merging eth1 and eth2 clients to turn off PoW

Better attestation aggregation algos

Verifiable precompiled contracts

An approach for cross-shard transfers at EE level

Perhaps people forget that when Ethereum launched in July 2015, it didn’t actually do anything. It’ll be the same with Eth2, so on the research front things shifted awhile ago towards all the things necessary to make eth2 work.

Stuff for developers

Solidity v0.6.6 and v0.6.5 – ‘immutable’ new major feature, tuple assignment bugfix, and memory array creation overflow bugfix

Truffle v5.1.21 adds Solidity’s immutable

wighawag’s Buidler Deployment Plugin

Not new, but a comparison of ethers.js and web3js

Example of using web3modal (former web3connect) with vanilla Javascript

MelonJS v1 to interact with Melon’s deployed code

Tool for decoding Ethereum storage

Arrays and maps in Solidity

Yul+ Remix plugin

Chainlink redeployed ETHUSD contract; 2 weeks to migrate from old code

Maintaining offchain NFT data using IPFS

SQL queries on DuneAnalytics tutorial

Django with web3py tutorial

Lots of devs excited about immutable.

One problem Ethereum has is that everyone prefers RicMoo’s ethers.js yet most people still use web3js because the tutorials push new devs to it.

Ecosystem

discv5: an explainer of Eth networking’s peer discovery protocol

Eth brand survey

I really appreciate Dean’s networking explainers, I find them quite well-written, and it makes me a little mad that he’s a high school dropout who writes better than I do.

Enterprise

from the founder of Simple, Sila: payments API to take on ACH

EEA mainnet survey

Hyperledger Besu v1.4.3 – adds eth/65 for better networking, issue found for private transactions created with v1.3.4 and before

Besu now running eth/65 too, which as we found out a few weeks ago, cuts bandwidth usage by a crazy amount. A nice change from Péter Szilágyi.

Governance, DAOs, and standards

MakerDAO’s 13 improvement proposals to decentralize governance

TheLAO launches April 28

how to create a bankless DAO

EIP2593: Escalator algo fee market change

This week a lawsuit was filed against Maker. Personally I think if you’re running to the US courts to bail you out (or assisting that effort) of your use of leverage, then you deserve all the opprobrium that you get.

Application layer

Reddit is rolling out the tokenization of it its karma for more than just r/EthTrader?

Status v1.2, adds Waku to replace Whisper for better messaging

SmokeSignal.eth, post by burning Dai interface prioritizes higher burn

Autumated dollar cost averaging of your stablecoins on Uniswap

Suggestions and programs in Colony

Overview of DxDAO’s Omen prediction markets

Inspect, DeFi transparency registry

Fairmint’s continuous securities offering is live on mainnet

The Reddit thing seems like an unintentional leak, where they were trying to roll it out to just one more community but it got in the app, and now they’re unsure what to do it. But they’ve been playing with this for years - I believe a job listing first surfaced for a dev to play with this stuff in late 2016 (may have been early 2017)

My weekly DeFi ratio: i’ll call it 3/8 to be DeFi, which is lower than normal. On the other, the BTC++ could have very easily been in this section (it’s all a bit arbitrary, no?) as well as the 10 Dai use cases post, etc... which would have changed it quite a bit.

Tokens/Business/Regulation

PieDAO’s BTC++ is live on mainnet, a token of comprised of multiple versions of locked/synthetic BTC

Is tokenized BTC on Ethereum good for ETH?

Top 10 use cases of Dai

NFTScribe – attach a message onchain to an NFT while you own it

a16zcrypto: crypto’s biz model isn’t that different but who benefits is

Jesse Walden’s article is now the #2 most clicked - by the time I do the #MostClicked, it’s usually pretty steady, but this time it moved up quite a bit in the subsequent 24 hours.

Betteridge’s Law of Headlines suggests the answer is no, but of course the answer is actually yes. People using ETH is a good thing, even if it is to speculate on the price of unsustainable memecoins. It’s impressive how many people are finding different ways to bring the orange memecoin into ETH, using different trust assumptions on BTC side or different use cases.

Case in point: Atomic Loans did a big push yesterday, where you can lock up BTC and get stablecoins. Pretty juicy rate to lend at - 9% for USDC and 9.5% for Dai.

General

Chicago DeFi Alliance formed to connect market makers and DeFi startups

CryptoHack: online puzzles to learn cryptography

UTokyo paper on digital courts

You can join the trusted setup ceremony for Semaphore, a zk privacy layer for apps

The CryptoHack site moved up and would have made the most clicked. Not a shocker that this audience wants to learn more crypto. Even app devs probably need to learn that the best architecture often involves more crypto and less state storage.

If you haven’t done a trusted setup ceremony, I highly recommend doing one. Contribute your entropy to the future! Semaphore is very neat gadget to help app developers be able to add privacy, which is a very needed layer to prevent dystopia.

#ethereum

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victorineb · 8 years

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Fic Recs Mega Post

A little weekend reccing for any fannibals in need of a good read, this time we’ve got catmen, daemons and a goblin king... and that’s just for starters!

No Man’s Land by @empathalitis and @cannibalcuisine: Following a drunken, clumsy encounter with Hannibal… and Hannibal's lips, and Hannibal’s hands (depicted in previous instalment In My Head There's A War), Will finally has to confront his desire for the man he's run away with. But, well, it's Will and Hannibal, which means things are never going to be straightforward and between memories of ex-wives and a total lack of emotional intelligence, both men continue to tie themselves in knots rather than getting down to business. This wonderful fic skilfully flows between Will and Hannibal’s POVs, with an amazing handle on both characters and their emotions. And when that dam finally bursts? Well, let’s just say it is very, very much worth the wait!

Stray Cat by Not_You: Taking the “Hannibal is really a cat” theory to its logical conclusion, this AU finds Will working not for the FBI but for the government division that oversees the rights and management of human/animal hybrids. Some of these beings live as pets, others as humans, still others as part of the “Feral Nation” which operates outside of human society. And then there are Will’s worst nightmare, those who are kept in labs and cruelly experimented on. Hannibal is one such case, a human/cat hybrid placed into Will’s custody after escaping and murdering those who kept him in captivity. For a dog person, Will quickly grows attached to this fiercely intelligent, oddly endearing catman (and Hannibal, as usual, cares for no one but Will) but there are many, many hoops for them to jump through before going too far down that road… This is just a stunningly assured piece of writing – the worldbuilding is smart and intricate, Hannibal’s catlike characterisation is perfect and canon elements are woven in with care and intelligence.

Housewarming by @wrathofthestag (Mwuahna): In this latest part of the utterly wonderful, adorable Giving Themselves series (in which Will and Hannibal started dating after the Tobias Budge Incident™), the boys are moving in together. And a milestone in Hannibal Lecter’s life can mean only one thing: a big, fancy party (much to his dear Will’s horror). Invites are sent. Caterers are hired. Booze is stockpiled (well, Will and Bedelia will be in attendance). And shenanigans, inevitably, ensue. Not least of all when Will’s father shows up to set the cat amongst the pigeons (and to flirt with every female in sight). I love and adore this series with all my heart, and this latest part is no exception. It has everything: drunken hook-ups, Will and Bedelia bitching at each other, Mrs Komeda being fabulous, Will getting a handful of the Hannibooty, Jimmy Price saying words… it is, in other words, utterly glorious and I must insist that you read it. Now. Go!

The Vessel by @weconqueratdawn: Ok, I admit, I went into this assuming it was going to be an entertainingly kinky Hannigram romp (c’mon, the tags include “Coming Untouched,” “Threesome,” and “Wendigo porn” XD). And while plenty of kinks do get an airing, this is a much deeper and more complex fic than I had imagined, with an intense storyline exploring religious corruption, sexual slavery and the power of knowledge. Will is the Vessel of the title, a slave elevated to a sacred position within his society’s religion – which means that he suffers and bleeds for their sins, as well as being drugged and used as part of a sexual ritual by the holy men of his temple, including its Father, Jack (yep, there’s a bit of Jack/Will here!). Conditioned from his childhood to believe that he is performing a vital service for his community, doubts begin to creep into Will’s mind when Hannibal is installed as the temple’s new seer. This is an example of a brilliant writer taking elements of our beloved show and using them to create something fresh, intelligent and insightful, while always remaining completely true to the characters. It’s immensely impressive stuff that will linger in the reader’s mind long after the last chapter.

Labyrinth by @llewcie: Labyrinth was one of my favourite movies when I was a kid. Hell, it’s still one of my favourite movies – the amazing songs, the adorable characters… trying to figure out which is bigger, Bowie’s hair or his codpiece… So a Hannigram take on the 80s classic was pretty much guaranteed to appeal, and this fic does not disappoint! Will Graham wakes from a six-month coma to find that his father is dead and nobody seems to remember he has a sister, Abigail. Well, no one except the strange, alluring man sitting at his bedside – who claims to be the goblin king and that Will must defeat his labyrinth in order to get his sister back. The genius of this crossover AU is that, instead of a simple retread with the Hannibal characters standing in for those from the movie, Llew carefully redesigns the ‘verse to reflect Will and Hannibal. Which means we get a labyrinth that is much more dangerous and threatening, a “hero” who is long on sass and short on patience, and a “villain” whose intentions and morality are far more complex than they first appear. Oh, and a boatload of mutual flirtation, of course.

Quicksilver (series) by @weconqueratdawn with artwork by @theseavoices: I know, I know, I’m horribly late to the party here. This is just one of those series that I’ve been saving for special, but having been told off for my reticence by some fellow fannibals, I mainlined the whole series in a oner. And damn, it is as good as everyone says it is. In this AU, Will is a nineteen year old psychology student, who requests a meeting with Hannibal to discuss some coursework. Hannibal, impressed by the boy’s proposal, agrees to the meeting, little knowing that he will soon be utterly, irrevocably, life-alteringly besotted by the beautiful, confident, gender-fluid student who turns up at his office. Accompanied by some jaw-droppingly gorgeous artwork by theseavoices, this is an utter gem, a thing of beauty, featuring one of my all-time favourite versions of Will, who is sharp, sexy and empowered in these stories and a total joy to read. Don’t be like me and put off reading these – get over to ao3 and devour them now!

En Garde! by @artbyvictoriaskye (VictoriaSkyeMasters): VSM ends up on these lists pretty much every time she writes something new because she is a complete genius of AUs and rare pairs. Her latest is an absolute scream, taking the logical step of pairing Mads!Rochefort with Hugh!D’Artagnan in a brilliant funny, deeply sexy romp involving horse thievery, secretly soft villains and an impressive amount of spanking. It begins with a typically hot-heated, self-absorbed, vainglorious D’Artagnan once again search of adventure after his famous adventures with the Three Musketeers… and managing only to head back to the little village he had abandoned in search of glory. Where he makes the terrible mistake of splashing a certain eye-patched villain with mud and not apologising for it. And we all know what happens when you’re rude to a Mads… D’Artagnan soon finds himself a captive of the fearsome Rochefort but, as it turns out, he might not mind it all that much. This is easily one of my favourite fics ever, one I know I’ll be returning to over and over again.

Sweet Sanatorium by @thewanderingcannibal (wanderlust96): Sometime in the 1930s, a teenage Will Graham is institutionalised at his father’s request – partly for his sexuality (at a point in time when being gay could get you locked up) and partly for his uncanny empathy. Fortunately for Will, his new doctor finds these aspects of his character extremely appealing and Will soon finds himself under Doctor Lecter’s wing (not to mention, consensually, between his legs). Unfortunately for Will, though, not everybody’s happy about Hannibal taking favourites… One of the interesting things about Hannigram is that, by any measure of logic or reason, being with Hannibal Lecter is a terrible, awful, no-good decision. Except that, if you’re Will Graham, he might also be the person who can best love, protect and cherish you. And this AU hits that duality right on the button. It also contains a pleasing amount of murder and mayhem, so everything you could want in your Hannigram!

Tevelis by @shiphitsthefan: Ok, daddy kink is not my favourite. It’s not that I actively avoid it but I don’t go out of my way to find it either. And it certainly takes something special to make me truly enjoy it. So take this as the huge recommendation it is meant to be: I LOVED this fic. Post-fall, Will and Hannibal are playing a game. Their usual game, aka: “Hannibal is a cryptic bastard and Will can’t let him win.” Except this time, the stakes are even higher than murder and entrapment – this time, the boys have been discussing kinks, and Will’s tired of waiting for Hannibal to give. So he kidnaps a third party, one with empathic powers to match his own and, in something of a deviation from the usual Murder Husband M.O., doesn’t kill him. Instead, he uses him to finally find that one little word to light Hannibal’s fire... Daddy kink is definitely the marquee attraction here but it’s far from just a hook to entice readers. The kink is written with imagination, inventiveness and insight, used as a means of exploring Will and Hannibal’s dynamic as it develops into (somehow!) something even deeper and more intimate than it was before.

Hold for Release by @sunshinexlollipops (cloudsarefluffy): In this AU, omega Will Graham doesn’t use his empathy to consult for the FBI and BAU Chief Jack Crawford. Instead, he uses it to write for the Virginia Tribune and editor-in-chief Jack Crawford. This does not mean that he isn’t obsessed with the Chesapeake Ripper. Indeed, the nigh-on admiring tone of his articles about the serial killer is putting his job at risk. So being a sensible man who easily lets things go, Will starts a new story about… ha ha, no, of course not. Will, being an idiot who can’t leave well alone, takes his heat leave and his stored up vacation and (with a little help from Chilton being his usual idiotic self) winds up on the doorstep of one Dr Hannibal Lecter, an alpha who turns out to be quite a fan of Will’s journalism… especially his very flattering articles about the Ripper. I love and adore journalism AUs and the fact that this is an omegaverse version just makes it even more entertaining. Nothing is ever quite what it seems in this intricate and intelligent fic, with Will and Hannibal running rings round each other and thoroughly enjoying the process.

Turn the Page by @disraeligearsgoestumblin (DisraeliGears): I have a bone to pick with this fic – upon heading to bed one night I needed a new fic to read, and thought I’d get started on this. Cue me, still up at 4am, utterly unable to even think about sleeping until I finished this masterpiece. @disraeligearsgoestumblin, I entirely blame you for my inability to concentrate the following day! In this canon-divergent AU, instead of marrying Molly after Hannibal is imprisoned, Will sells everything, buys a motorbike and starts driving… and doesn’t stop for a good couple of years. Not until he, in quick succession, realises he wants Hannibal back, gets majestically drunk, and essentially gets adopted by a middle-aged Mexican woman who puts him to work in her bar. This beautifully atmospheric piece takes Will on a very different voyage of discovery than in canon, one in which, without the distraction of his ready-made family, Will has to confront the truth about himself and his feelings for Hannibal with rather more honesty. And the results are… interesting, to say the least… especially when a familiar face turns up at the bar…

One Way Out Of Many by @hellotailor and @nakamasmile: I cannot possibly describe to you the depth of my love for Phillip Pullman’s His Dark Materials series of novels – I utterly, utterly adore them. So reading this Hannigram crossover AU was a complete delight, especially given the lovely, inventive divergence it takes from canon. Set in s1, just as the symptoms of Will’s encephalitis are growing truly disturbing, Hannibal’s daemon (Daiva, who takes the form of a stoat) decides that Will and his daemon (Poppy, a crow) belong to her and Hannibal. So she sabotages Hannibal’s conspiracy with Sutcliffe, ensures that Will gets the treatment he needs and persuades Hannibal onto a new path: to ensnare Will via care and affection. The addition of daemons to the Hannibal ‘verse makes for a fascinating new perspective on the characters and their relationships. And, most pleasingly, both Poppy and Daiva are utterly fascinating creations in their own right, often getting sections written from their own POVs and given agency and agendas of their own.

A Companionable Silence by @hotsauce418: One Eye has been alone for a long time, believing it to be for the best and not seeing much chance for change anyway. Until the alpha rescues a young omega named Charmont from a cage and finds himself growing irrevocably attached to the fierce, spirited young man to whom he lends his protection. Raised as royalty, and an alpha besides, Char has serious issues of his own to work through, but living in close proximity makes it hard for either man to ignore their growing attraction, and when Char’s first heat hits, well… Soft alpha One Eye and sassy omega Char is surely one of the greatest madancy pairings yet – they’re a beautiful example of that contrasting yet complimentary dynamic that makes the rare pairs phenomenon so compelling. And hotty writes them with such obvious affection and care, it’s an absolute treat to observe. Valhalla Enchanted is a thing of beauty and you should all treat yourselves by reading this!

An Unorthodox Dinner by @ratbagqueen: This writer’s one and only Hannibal fic and it’s so damn good, I can only pray they’ll bestow another on us someday! Set post-season 2, Will is recovering from the events of Mizumono (and trying to figure out just why the hell he seems to be missing the man who gutted him), when he receives an invitation in a familiar, elegant hand. Hannibal, it seems, is still in Baltimore, somehow, and still has designs on having Will for dinner. Both more and less literally than Will fears… I rushed straight through this fic, utterly hooked by the slowly building tension between our boys. Both characters are beautifully rendered and the writing is pleasingly redolent of that sinister-yet-intimate tone of the best Hannigram scenes. Although I must warn you: anybody who has issues with seafood might want to steer clear!

As ever and always, if I’ve mistagged anyone or there are bad links, please let me know and I’ll fix them lickety-split. Until next time, lovely fannibals <3

#fic rec mega post #hannibal fic rec #rare pairs fic rec #hannibal #hannigram #rare pairs #murder husbands #hannigram au #hannibal au #madancy au

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clairebuddicom8-blog · 7 years

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The French Erotic Films You Need to Find out about This Valentine's's Time.

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hollywoodjuliorivas · 7 years

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How to Survive a Jerk at Work - The Wall Street JournalLeadership Many employees have to deal with colleagues and bosses who are rude or abusive. Here are some techniques to make things a little easier. For many people, going to work every day can be hard enough. When they have to deal with a jerk in the office, it can be unbearable. Countless studies document the damage inflicted by rude, demeaning and disrespectful people—including anxiety, depression, sleepless nights and heart problems. What’s more, employees who have to deal with unpleasant bosses, colleagues and customers are less productive and creative, and make worse decisions. Bad behavior is also contagious. Trevor Foulk and his colleagues from the University of Florida found a single exposure to a rude person (say, an insulting email from a customer) turns targeted people into “carriers” who then infect others. As they put it, rudeness spreads much “like the common cold.” (Dr. Foulk is now an assistant professor of management at the University of Maryland.) Battling bullies, though, is risky business. It’s upsetting and time-consuming, and even if you are confident of victory, the jerks might be stronger than you think. The new human-resources chief of a large company once bragged to me that she was firing the firm’s most abusive senior executives. She assured me that the CEO was in her corner and she had a mandate to sack them. She was wrong. The jerks went to the CEO and persuaded him they were less expendable than she was—and she was canned a few weeks later. At the same time, it may be equally hard for people to escape toxic workplaces. Some stay because their work is so fulfilling that it seems worth it to endure the haters. For others, the grass is even browner elsewhere: Their only options are jobs that pay far less or at places where the incivility is worse. For still others, an abrupt or early departure would do irreparable harm to their careers. So, what’s an employee to do? Plenty, as it turns out. While jerks take a toll on everyone, there are ways to reduce the onslaught and suffering. Here are a handful of techniques, based on academic studies and thousands of email exchanges and conversations I’ve had over the years with people who deal with rudeness, disrespect and backstabbing at work. Keep your distance. Sometimes the most obvious solution is the best: Stay away from the offending person, limiting the frequency, duration and intensity of toxic encounters. Even a few extra feet can help, because communication drops off rapidly as distance increases. Research in the 1970s by Thomas Allen, a professor of management at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, found that people are four times as likely to communicate regularly with a colleague who sits 6 feet away compared with a colleague who sits 60 feet away. Recent research further shows the dangers of getting too close to a jerk. From 2013 to 2015, Michael Housman, then chief analytics officer at Cornerstone OnDemand, and Dylan Minor, an assistant professor at Northwestern University’s Kellogg School of Management, tracked 2,000 workers at a technology company and found that toxic behavior was “contagious.” If a toxic worker sits near you, they concluded, your chances of behaving in a toxic way rises by one and half times. They also found that people who sat within 25 feet of a toxic employee were twice as likely to leave the company as employees who sat further away from the local jerks. Slow down. Slowing the rhythm of interactions is another useful technique. Many abusive people take pleasure in their targets’ pain. When they provoke visible reactions from targets—tears, anger, kissing up, effusive apologies, or writing a long email in response to their imaginary emergency—the pleasure centers in their twisted minds light up. Don’t give the bully that pleasure. Instead, respond as slowly and infrequently to the jerk as possible, and when you do respond, stay as calm and composed as you can. That way, your tormentor is denied reinforcement. This method reduces how often abuse occurs and helps you predict and control when it happens. I learned this technique from a doctoral student who had a rude and temperamental adviser. At first, when the adviser sent the student demeaning emails, or called at 2 a.m. to give her grief, the student answered right away. This fueled further abuse because he got the instant reinforcement that he craved. The student learned to respond more and more slowly, first waiting hours, then days, and sometimes weeks. Over time, the abuse persisted, but to a much lesser degree. That student is now a tenured professor at a prestigious university—and believes she wouldn’t have stayed sane or finished her Ph.D. without this technique. Early-warning systems. In many workplaces, people spread warnings when powerful jerks are in vile moods (and it is best to avoid them) or are “incoming.” Real life sometimes resembles a scene from “The Proposal,” a 2009 film in which Sandra Bullock plays a cruel New York book editor. As she approaches the office, her assistant emails his colleagues “THE WITCH IS ON HER BROOM.” In an instant, the gossiping and eating stops, people scurry back to their cubicles, and each pretends to be doing something productive. Look at it another way. Another category of survival methods entails “reframing” the jerk’s behavior in a more positive and less threatening light. This strategy is akin to how cognitive behavioral therapists help patients construe their difficulties and concerns as less upsetting, or even good things. Among the reframing techniques I’ve observed: telling yourself you aren’t to blame (“she’s just a jerk doing what jerks do”), playing down the threat (“this is a small matter”), focusing on the silver lining (“sure, my boss is a jerk, but she’s taught me so much”), and rising above it (in Michelle Obama’s words, “when they go low, we go high”). Imaginary time travel is another simple and effective reframing technique. Emma Bruehlman-Senecal, a postdoctoral researcher at the University of California, Berkeley, and Ozlem Ayduk, a professor of psychology at the university, studied how people dealt with rough patches such as poor performance on an exam or the end of a long-term relationship. When people framed current troubles in terms of how they would feel about them in the distant future (rather than the near future), they experienced less anxiety, anger, sadness and guilt in the present. Similarly, targets of workplace bullying can tell themselves “this too shall pass,” and imagine it is hours, days or years later and the sting is gone. That’s how one U.S. Air Force Academy cadet survived the traditional hazing during his freshman year. He wrote me that when upperclassmen berated him, he imagined it was a few years later, he was flying a plane, and the temporary torment was a small price for living his dream of becoming a pilot. And that’s what happened. Protective reframing is also achieved via emotional detachment—defining your predicament in ways that help you tune out, feel indifferent or become emotionally distant from the jerks. When one university administrator I know encounters a mean or condescending colleague, he pretends to be a doctor who specializes in diagnosing intriguing, rare and extreme cases of “jerkism.” He tells himself how lucky he is to find such a “fascinating case,” which prevents him from getting mad or feeling hurt. From enemy to friend. Finally, there’s the technique than may be the most effective one of all: Turn your tormentor into a friend. As psychologist Robert Cialdini documents in his classic book “Influence,” flattery, smiles and other signs of appreciation (even if not entirely sincere) can win over strangers, critics and enemies. Another way to make friends is to get the jerk to do you favors. In “You are Now Less Dumb,” David McRaney dubs this “the Benjamin Franklin effect.” When Franklin was a young man struggling to overcome his modest means and lack of formal education, a wealthy peer gave a speech attacking his actions and motives. Franklin was furious, but didn’t fire back. Instead, he wrote his critic and asked to borrow a “very scarce and curious book” from his library. The man sent the book, and Franklin later returned it with a warm thank-you note. In Franklin’s words, this man “ever after manifested a readiness to serve me on all occasions, so that we became great friends, and our friendship continued to his death.” Mr. McRaney explains he turned “his hater into a fan” because, as many experiments show, “we grow to like people for whom we do nice things and dislike those to whom we are unkind.” Look in the mirror. One last, perhaps painful point: If you are a jerk, it won’t be easy to admit it to yourself or others. We humans have a penchant for denial and delusion. As a result, we need to see how others see us—even when it hurts. We need people who know us and won’t sugarcoat the truth, and to accept their candid feedback. According to the U.S. Workplace Bullying Survey, nearly half of respondents report they’ve been bullied or witnessed others doing it; less than 1% admit to being perpetrators. In other words, there are a lot of jerks out there who aren’t confessing their sins. And you might be one of them. Dr. Sutton is a professor of management science at Stanford University and author of “The Asshole Survival Guide: How to Deal With People Who Treat You Like Dirt,” to be published in September. This piece is based on that book. He can be reached at [email protected].

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lindhartsen · 7 years

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Why Does Not Installing One Driver Make My Lenovo Yoga 3 11 Work?

When I was browsing options for laptops a few years ago, one machine that caught my eye was the Lenovo Yoga 3 11. Small in size, the Best Buy model featured a fanless Intel Core M, 8 GBs of RAM, and a sizable 256GB SSD. All around, it hit me as a great machine, suiting my want for portability, workable processing power, and a quality screen. When I finally got around to buying it, I couldn’t help but be excited. For the most part it worked, but one issue became apparent, much more with Windows 10: It throttled too much.

I understand that a fanless CPU will have limited power due to heat limits, but this laptop was plagued with throttling where nearly no daily task worked. We’re talking about browsing the web, watching streaming video, working in a desktop or even UWP app. Under Windows 8.1, this seemed to be passable, the system typically getting back to a state where the CPU would scale up to a usable speed. With Windows 10, that never happened. Time and again, you’d want to pull up a streaming video, or open a complex application, and the system would just come to its knees, yet it didn’t seem to exhibit the heat to justify it.

So, online I went, looking for answers. Lenovo’s own support forums had a 20+ page thread devoted to people frustrated with the throttling, occasionally people seeming to find answers, while others remarking those answers didn’t work. After digging there for awhile, I gave up, more or less accepting that my laptop might just be a paperweight when it ran Windows 10.

Then, one day, I was browsing Amazon and happened upon an entry for my model laptop. In the reviews, I saw an odd idea.

Great device, just need to uninstall the Intel Dynamic Platform and Thermal Framework drivers or it throttles hopelessly.

Scratching my head, I figured why don’t I give this a try, what do I have to lose? Opened up my laptop, went into Programs and Features, removed the driver, done! Rebooted my PC, and sure enough it seemed like the system ran consistently. A few hours later, back came the throttling, but why? Well, Windows Update had automatically run in the background and re-installed a different version of the DPTF drivers. That wouldn’t work.

Alright, how do you stop Windows 10 from automatically reinstalling a driver? There’s multiple steps here, and - depending on how late you are attempting this, you might just have to reinstall Windows and start from a clean slate. Why? Well, if this particular driver installs, removing it from the Device Manager never seems to remove all of its pieces, the driver re-installing itself on endless loop.

So, how do you block a driver from re-installing in Windows 10? Here’s some bullet points. And keep in mind, I wouldn’t recommend these actions to everyone, this was partially out of desperation for my machine to work.

Download the “Show or hide updates” troubleshooter from the Microsoft site and block the driver from installing. In this situation, that will include any that include the words Dynamic Platform and Thermal Framework

You may need to stop Windows from automatically downloading and installing device driver icons and apps. This can be found going to Start > typing “view advanced system settings” > selecting the top search result > clicking the Hardware tab > clicking the Device Installation Settings > then selecting No. This option is not necessarily needed but might help avoid the auto-install from happening. (And now that I’m looking at this dialog again, I’m almost thinking it does nothing useful in Windows 10)

This last one is a Registry edit. Launch the Registry editor by typing regedit into Start and accepting the UAC prompt. Go to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\DriverSearching and change the value of SearchOrderConfig to 0 to prevent downloads of driver updates. (credit to this source for the Registry key)

The last one seemed to be what helped my machine stop re-installing the driver. I say that, but that was only after I did a completely clean install of Windows 10, ran the troubleshooter to block the update, then the Registry edit. I was able to get all of my other drivers to install and am using that machine now.

Why, oh why, Lenovo could never get their throttling right on this machine drives me mad to this day. How do you sell a machine that can get near unusable, especially with it priced, MSRP, 700+ dollars.

#technology #lenovo #lenovo yoga 3 11

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