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leonaesque · 4 years

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Poetic Injustice: On Ateneo and Negotiating Complicity

To be a successful comprador is an art. Tony Tan Caktiong knows this. Given the scale at which multinational corporations influence Philippine culture, at this point, who are we to refute it? And how? Profit-seeking forces itself on us; to be recognized. Every mass-produced item of clothing featuring the pattern of an ever-smiling billion-dollar bee is indication enough: Art is execution. In fact, being the recipient of foreign capital requires deliberate hands able to maintain thousands upon thousands of labor-only contractual workers, despite their having worked at the same establishment for years on end. These workers produce what no middleman can. Yet a company will still view being bought-out by an industry giant as the ideal exit strategy. Each moving part makes for one striking image of monopoly– worthy, one might insist, of being featured in a gallery.

Jollibee Foods Corporations (JFC) acquires stakes or ownership of restaurant chains in order to expand, as it has done over the course of many years with local and foreign brands. Their current roster includes Greenwich, Chowking, Red Ribbon, Mang Inasal, Burger King PH, The Coffee Bean and Tea Leaf, and Panda Express PH. The company also runs businesses internationally, such as Smashburgers in the United States, and Yonghe Dawang or Yonghe King in China.[1] Of course, the face of this massive undertaking remains the once tiny Magnolia-inspired ice cream store, Jollibee, now every business-oriented insect’s wet dream.

Ernesto Tanmiantong, brother and successor of Tony Tan Caktiong as Chief Executive Officer (CEO) of Jollibee Foods Corporation, is the latest former Chairperson of the Ateneo de Manila University Board of Trustees.[2] One can even find his name, along with his wife’s, gracing a first-floor exhibit hall of the Ateneo Art Gallery, found inside the university’s so-called creative hub, the Arete. In the months before the start of the first semester of S.Y. 2018-2019, Tanmiantong’s adorable, marketing-committee-approved buddy in white gloves and a chef’s hat took a trip to the then-newly inaugurated art gallery for a photo-op. The mascot then posed with several installments and paintings, a couple of which depicted farmers and workers.

According to the Department of Labor and Employment (DOLE), JFC is one of the most notorious businesses with regards to the perpetuation of the practice of contractualization.[3] Contractual workers are, according to law, not employed by– and, therefore, not the responsibility of– the company they provide labor to. Because of this, these workers do not receive benefits or compensation, are often subject to abusive working conditions, and are vulnerable to the shameless practice of mass termination. No doubt, the Public Relations stunt with the Ateneo Art Gallery was ill-timed; right at the height of protests against the corporation, in the midst of its non-compliance with the DOLE’s order to regularize upwards of 6,000 of its workers– there was Jollibee: tone-deaf and taking pictures to post on his Facebook profile, The Atenean Way.

Ironically, as the statement by Ateneo’s School of Humanities Sanggunian (which condemned the incident) pointed out, perhaps even the person inside that oversized blinking head of the Jollibee mascot was a contractual worker, posing in a space that he might never have been able to enter without the cartoon-bee-mask of his exploitation.[4] Surely, it does not matter whether or not the institutional faux pas was an intentional case of art-washing. At least, it should not. Is there such a thing as art for art for art’s sake?

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There is this poem entitled “The Doomed” written by Mikael De Lara Co. A friend of mine recommended it to me once after a workshop session because my piece, he said, reminded him of it. I do not think my friend meant to insult me. Unless he did.

“The Doomed” is a poem about writing a poem, wherein the poet-persona is aware that, while he is writing poems about lilies, there is violence somewhere, which he is both physically and socially detached from. This violence is manifest into the shooting of Liberal Party supporter and candidate, Hamira Agcong, in 2010, as well as the infamous Ampatuan Massacre that occurred in 2009, where 58 people were kidnapped and killed.

Where do poems fall under in the realm of social praxis (if at all)? “The Doomed” ends with the lines “I want to find beauty in suffering. / I want to fail.” Yet, the poem’s aestheticization of the murders via tone and imagery is blatant. The declarative rejection of an ideal like beauty or portraying beauty betrays the poet’s pretentiousness in what can only be his underlying conservativity. There is no attempt to avoid it. With lines like “You sit at your desk / to write a poem about lilies and a clip of 9mm’s / is emptied into the chest of a mother…” and “… a backhoe in Ampatuan crushes the spines of 57 / – I am trying to find another word for bodies”, it sounds as though these killings are more poetic material than actual, politically motivated deaths. Tell me, is the reader to blame for reading what is on the page? Mikael De Lara Co fails in failing, making the poem and its project a useless endeavor.

Despite the pointedly crafted grief into the persona’s voice, “The Doomed” does nothing to grieve the circumstances which brings about its dramatic situation. Why are people “doomed”, if not for the bureaucrat capitalists that viciously plot to stay in power? Could the poet not have addressed that, instead of weeping about his writing process? I do not believe that the poem would have failed that, at least, because all language inevitably fails in the face of social reality. That would be lazy, if it were not bullshit.

But I suppose that is why “The Doomed” fails, most of all: The poet believes it is fine to write speeches for a leader who allowed farmers and indigenous people to be harassed, as long as they could be tagged as members of the New People’s Army, the armed faction of the Communist Party of the Philippines. A text speaks, though the words are not on the page. So, the poet dooms.

Mikael De Lara Co has won many awards for his writing and translations, including the prestige-inducing Don Carlos Palanca Award for Literature. He graduated BS Environmental Science from Ateneo de Manila University, where he was once an editor of Heights, the school’s official literary publication. He has been published in many other magazines, literary journals, and the like, where his author’s notes proudly indicate all these accomplishments and more, such as having, himself, worked for the Liberal Party and once been a member of the former President Benigno Aquino III’s staff under the Presidential Communications Operations Office. Ergo, ghostwriter, alongside a number of other Ateneans who were also once part of Heights.

“Noynoy Aquino was a fascist” is a phrase that does not get said often enough. The Aquino administration, with its neoliberal policies the color of dehydrated piss, is credited with the starving thousands of farmers to death. Unsurprising, I suppose, for a family of landlords to inherit a disdain for the very hands that feed them. Corazon Cojuanco Aquino passed the Comprehensive Agrarian Reform Program (CARP) during her regime, and her son amended it with an extension and reforms (CARPer), making it even easier for land owners not to have to redistribute their lands at all.

For all its “Kayo ang boss ko” and “Daang Matuwid” pandering, the Aquino administration did not skimp on its counterinsurgency program, Oplan Bayanihan, which heavily drew from the U.S. Counterinsurgency Guide.[5] Here, it was farmers and Lumad, some of the most vulnerable sectors of Philippine society, that were tagged as rebels, terrorists, communists, etc., simply for knowing and standing for their rights, as the government failed to decimate actual armed revolutionaries in the countryside.

The massacre that took place under the Aquino administration occurred in Kidapawan, Cotabato on April 1, 2016. According to reports, among the group of 6,000 protesters that was mainly composed of farmers and activists, 116 were injured, 87 went missing, and 3 were killed.[6] Perhaps the lilies in “The Doomed” were a metaphor for De Lara Co’s beloved Noynoy.

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Speaking of Ateneo: For an institution that makes yearly claims to combat historical revisionism and uphold the memory of the victims of human rights violations under the Martial Law era, this university loves to slurp on major Marcos ass. In 2014, President Fr. Jose Ramon Villarin, SJ drew flack for having rubbed elbows with the iron butterfly herself, Imelda Marcos, at an Ateneo scholars’ benefactors’ event.[7] The mere thought of Imelda posing as a charitable, bloated cockroach in a wig that feasts on all that is lavish and garish, while the university welcomes her to do so is nearly comical. I imagine the blood.

In 2019, a similar incident ensued[8], this time with Imelda’s daughter, Irene, whose art connoisseur lifestyle she lives second-hand. It was during the inauguration of the Arete’s amphitheater, named after Ignacio B. Jimenez, a crony of the corrupt family themselves.[9] Community backlash forced the building’s executive director, Yael Buencamino, to resign and for University President, Fr. Jose Ramon Villarin, SJ to issue a statement in response to the instance.

Yet, despite the triumph of Ateneans in demanding accountability for having the Marcoses at our literal and metaphorical dining table, there are also the Camposes, the Consunjis, the Lorenzos, and other local elite whose hands are stained with generational blood, that have established their presence in the campus with no near hopes of showing them out. Students could also be as loud as they pleased about the violations on workers’, farmers’, and national minorities’ rights that these families are frequently attached to, with only the answer of a warning that school organizations may lose sponsorship opportunities. What else can we expect? Of course, the names that line the halls that one studies in are the limits of academic freedom.

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A few semesters ago, I wrote a poem to be workshopped by my co-English staffers in Heights as part of our membership retention requirements. It was not a good poem, I know. It was about my experience of integrating with the striking workers of Sumifru, a multinational Japanese company that produces fruit, whose union was called NAMASUFA (Nagkahiusang Mamumuo sa Suyapa Farm). After struggling to get word out of their plight and facing violent dispersals and harassment, 200 workers came all the way from Compostela Valley to Metro Manila via boat and plane, despite the difficulties of travel due to the imposition of Martial Law throughout Mindanao. Their objective was to pressure the DOLE and its Secretary, Silvestre Bello III, into action; that is, to be firm in enforcing Sumifru’s compliance to regularize their workers, which the company refused to do even though the DOLE had legally recognized them as their workers’ employer. The workers set up camp in various places, such as Mendiola, Liwasang Bonifacio, and beside the Commission on Human Rights inside the University of the Philippines Diliman campus, and often welcomed students who came to learn about their cause.

During the workshop, the discussion began with a silence and an awkward laugh. Political realism was how my poem was diagnosed, for obvious reasons. However, the main critique that I remember was that my use of language– the words multinational corporation and bureaucrat capitalists, in particular– did not induce the feeling of the struggle that the workers went through. It was not the language workers used or would use. I refuted this claim, saying I had talked to the workers. That this is exactly what they say. No, it is not poetic. It is real.

I agree, though, with the verdict that my poem was not good, if the basis were form. I agree because I do not think poems need to be good to say what is needed. If the basis were factors other than form, I still do not think the poem is good. I mean, either way, it does not change the fact that, ultimately, I only wrote a poem for a workshop, despite any intention of bringing awareness to NAMASUFA. Is a poem going to save them their jobs? Does that make a difference? Did it make a difference?

The Sumifru workers returned to Mindanao last July, 2019. I have left Heights as well.

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Within the Ateneo campus, a tarpaulin overlooks the red brick road that the entire Loyola Schools population traverses. The sign merits a purposeful, impossible-to-miss position on the old Rizal Library building, immortalizing the critique: “We find the Ateneo today irrelevant to the Philippine situation because it can do no more than to service the power elite.” Nothing could be more fitting, in my opinion. The Ateneo de Manila University’s commitment to performativity deserves to be blasted in our faces, if at least once a day.

This declaration was taken from the “Down from the Hill” manifesto published by The Guidon in November of 1968. The manifesto was written by a group of five students, namely Jose Luis Alcuaz, Gerardo Esguerra, Emmanuel Lacaba, Leonardo Montemayor and Alfredo Salanga, all of whom actively campaigned for an anti-imperialist orientation to nationalism.

I want to talk about Eman Lacaba. Throughout the Marcos regime, he was a student activist– a radical, so to speak, as disapproving administrative bodies might now label him. Presently, he is known for being a poet, revolutionary, guerilla, and a martyr during the Martial Law era. One of his most often discussed poems is “An Open Letter to Filipino Artists”, a piece that finds itself into syllabi like a de-fanged snake. The poem is a detailing of his experience as a cadre of the New People’s Army; the provinces he visits, his process of proletarianizing from a burgis boy to a communist rebel, and so forth. The epigraph of the work, a quote from Ho Chi Minh, affirms his praxis– “A poet must learn how to lead an attack.” The poem is the revolution that Lacaba takes up arms for. I guess now that he is dead, Ateneans can wholeheartedly claim him as one of their own.

After the Martial Law era, Ateneo decided to create a body dedicated to the integration of its students with various disenfranchised sectors of society, as encouragement for their middle to upper-middle class youth to become more socially aware and active. The Office of Social Concern and Involvement (OSCI) is the current iteration of this. Their programs, from first year to fourth, require students to be socially involved enough to pass their Theology units. Commendable, no? Still. You can almost get sanctioned for so much as lighting candles for state-murdered farmers on the sidewalk by the gates outside of campus if it is not an Office of Student Activities-approved event– something I learned the hard way. I was not aware that bureaucracy was a key principle in Catholic Social Teaching.

So, does this mean the opposite of active non-violence is that which is inactively violent? The areas that OSCI allows their students to immerse in are carefully chosen, the interactions are prepared for in advance. In fact, they do not want to use the term “immerse” lest they be misconstrued with the damn leftists that climb mountains and “brainwash” unsuspecting poor people. You know, the ones that dare challenge the status-quo? Ateneo, or at the very least, its administration, will recognize the necessity of political action, but only to a certain extent. Nothing like Eman, the warrior-poet, whose militance is much too red to aestheticize.

The contradiction between what is said (marketed, poeticized, apologized for, etc.) and what is done should be scrutinized, instead of convincing ourselves that our interests are not merely our own. The dominant culture of a society will expose who supports those who hold political and economic power.

[1] Cigaral (List: Brands operated by Jollibee Foods Corp.)

[2] (Leadership)

[3] Patinio (Jollibee tops list of firms engaged in labor-only contracting: DOLE)

[4] SOH Sanggunian (The Statement of the SOH Sanggunian on Jollibee's PR Stunt)

[5] Karapatan (OPLAN BAYANIHAN For Beginners)

[6] Caparas (WITH VIDEOS: 3 dead, 87 missing, 116 hurt as police fire on Cotabato human barricade)

[7] Francisco (Ateneo de Manila 'sorry' over Imelda's visit)

[8] Paris (Irene Marcos was invited to Ateneo, and students are up in arms)

[9] Rappler.com (Ateneo hit for art ampitheater named after Marcos 'dummy')

Works Cited

Caparas, Jeff. “WITH VIDEOS: 3 Dead, 87 Missing, 116 Hurt as Police Fire on Cotabato Human Barricade.” InterAksyon.com, 1 Apr. 2016, web.archive.org/web/20160402013745/interaksyon.com/article/125901/breaking--security-forces-open-fire-on-cotabato-human-barricade.

Cigaral, Ian Nicolas. “List: Brands Operated by Jollibee Foods Corp.” Philstar.com, The Philippine Star, 24 July 2019, www.philstar.com/business/2019/07/24/1937490/list-brands-operated-jollibee-foods-corp.

Francisco, Katerina. “Ateneo De Manila 'Sorry' over Imelda's Visit.” Rappler, 6 July 2014, www.rappler.com/nation/62549-ateneo-manila-imelda-marcos-apology.

Karapatan (Alliance for the Advancement of People’s Rights). OPLAN BAYANIHAN For Beginners, Karapatan, 2011.

“Leadership.” Leadership | Ateneo Global, global.ateneo.edu/about/leadership.

Paris, Janella. “Irene Marcos Was Invited to Ateneo, and Students Are up in Arms.” Rappler, 8 Apr. 2019, www.rappler.com/nation/227702-irene-marcos-invited-to-ateneo-students-protest-april-2019.

Patinio, Ferdinand. “Jollibee Tops List of Firms Engaged in Labor-Only Contracting: DOLE.” Philippine News Agency RSS, Philippine News Agency, 28 May 2018, www.pna.gov.ph/articles/1036679.

Rappler.com. “Ateneo Hit for Art Ampitheater Named after Marcos 'Dummy'.” Rappler, 21 Apr. 2019, www.rappler.com/nation/228633-ateneo-ignacio-gimenez-ampitheater-marcos-dummy.

“SOH Sanggunian.” SOH Sanggunian - The Statement of the SOH Sanggunian on..., 2 July 2018, www.facebook.com/sohsanggu/photos/a.157891440898864/1893103380710986/?type=3.

#mine #nonfic #essay

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meta-shadowsong · 4 years

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On Change for the Jedi Order

Specifically in Relation to Nontraditional/Latecomer Students

So, there’s a commentary that’s been floating around lately, that examines whether the Jedi Order/culture should change purely because of Anakin’s issues integrating (and later issues as an adult, some of which are related). And if that were the question, then the answer is probably no--as these commentaries have pointed out, the vast majority of Jedi don’t have that kind of trouble and are, so far as we the audience can tell, happy/fulfilled. Or, if not, they’re willing and able to depart under peaceful circumstances. And, as has also been pointed out, if they did adapt to the changing galaxy in the ways that fandom, with its external viewpoint, would suggest, who’s to say Palpatine wouldn’t be thinking five steps ahead of them and have a contingency plan in place? (The man does love his contingency plans, I gotta say.)

These are valid points, particularly in terms of some of the doctrines/requirements placed on adults/full Jedi (i.e., no marriage, etc.) that tend to catch a lot of criticism, but I feel like there’s a piece missing from this conversation. And that’s a consideration of other nontraditional/latecomer students (and/or nonstudents who are rejected for being too old), aside from Anakin. Because, from where I’m standing, the evidence indicates that the traditionalist Jedi Order, as it is at the fall of the Republic, is not super great at helping them integrate.

Before I get into my actual examples/analysis, I want to say that I don’t think this is from a lack of compassion or effort on the part of the Order. I do believe that, once a nontraditional student is accepted, they are given support in terms of that integration. I just don’t think it’s very effective support, because I don’t think that the Order, as it stands at that point, is very well set up for it.

Second, I want to say that the reason why this matters is that there’s a not-insignificant implication that not all potential candidates are identified within the acceptable age range; and therefore some unknown, and possibly significant (in proportion to the size of the Order itself) number of people are actually affected by this policy. I’ve touched on this before, but the fact that Palpatine (who comes from a) a Republic sector capital, b) a culture that highly values children, and c) parents with means) is never identified indicates that there are some significant gaps in the search process; probably particularly for populations that are more likely to slip through the cracks in a society like the Republic (i.e., the deep underlevels of Coruscant; remote farming/mining communities that are essentially Space Appalachia; etc.)

I should also mention, as a caveat, that we unfortunately have very few examples of nontraditional students within canon, so it’s admittedly not the greatest sample size in the world--I came up with five, which I will discuss at some length. But the sample sizes for any discussion on this subject are pretty small (I think we have personal information/significant canon detail on maybe a hundred members (i.e., ~1%) of the Jedi Order of this period?), so assumptions have to be made regardless. The way I’m defining my five examples is that they are students who came to the Jedi Path later than the traditional Order would typically allow, and they were trained/raised by Jedi Masters who were themselves traditionally trained (so far as we know).

Okay. Moving on.

So, the five nontraditional students we see in any detail are Anakin, Rael Avaross, Luke, Ezra, and Ventress.

With Anakin and Rael, we see a failure to adapt to the culture. Again, this is despite a genuine effort given on the part of their teachers. Admittedly, I’m less familiar with Rael, since I haven’t gotten around to reading Dooku Lost myself, but I’ve read enough excerpts and analyses that I feel like I have a general idea of what’s going on. Basically, my understanding is that he has some of the same issues Anakin has, relating to the family he left behind, and wanting things that are out of step with Jedi values. And, yes, at least with Anakin, Palpatine’s manipulations play a role in that. But the fact that he’s not the only example indicates (to me, at least) that it’s not the only factor in play here.

Obviously, this disconnect does not in any way excuse what Anakin (or Rael) later does, when he comes to a crisis point. I’m not trying to say that.

What I am trying to say is that I think this is an issue of conflicting expectations, and a fundamental miscommunication/disconnect despite genuine effort, particularly in the early stages, that leaves nontraditional students with a shaky foundation even if/when they find workarounds to appear like things are on track. Because the fact is that the Jedi Order typically takes in very small children, who can absorb most of these cultural norms essentially by osmosis, through a combination of infant neuroplasticity and the Force. An older child needs a different approach, and I’m not sure that the Jedi Order actually has the tools it needs to adapt their teaching style effectively to those circumstances. Especially when trying to integrate someone into a close-knit, fairly isolated/insular culture, which is difficult for an outsider/newcomer under the best of circumstances, on top of the new modes of behavior/emotional processing/etc. And, given how few nontraditional students there are, this is definitely a factor.

So, then it becomes sort of a feedback loop--older/nontraditional students have trouble adapting, which means the Jedi Order is less likely to take them on in the future, which means any they do take in have further troubles, etc., etc. Legends sort of indicated how this cycle started; canon has not; but frankly it’s a chicken-and-egg situation as of the period we’re talking about. Once that cycle does start, it’s hard to break.

Which brings me to my next set of examples, and the reason I think this is at least in part an issue in the Jedi Order’s teaching style.

Luke and Ezra are also nontraditional students, who are taught by traditionally-trained masters. And they are both successful.

And maybe, in part, that comes down to some quirk in personality that they share that Anakin and Rael don’t. But there’s also the fact that (due to genuinely horrific circumstances; and I will interrupt myself here and now to say that, while I do advocate for change on this particular issue, I don’t think the catalyst for change had to be, let alone should have been, what it was; but in canon, it was a catalyst for a change in approach), their masters had to adapt traditional teachings and values into a somewhat nontraditional framework. One reason I lean more towards the second/change in approach as the stronger factor--and, granted, we don’t have many specific examples to cite; plus they don’t fit technically my established definition--is that Luke’s new Academy would pretty much have to be all nontraditional students, and, so far as I can tell, the vast majority of them seem to have been successful, or on their way there, until Kylo Ren happened.

So, that leads to the conclusion that there’s an issue in how traditional Jedi Order teachings/teaching styles work with nontraditional students. Meaning, the Jedi Order of the late Republic era has difficulty in adapting said styles to the needs of the few older candidates they do take in, though not for lack of trying.

At this point, I’ll interrupt myself again to say that adjusting these practices might have an impact on the children who are brought in at a more typical age, and there’s possibly a balance to be struck between the needs of those students and the needs of these others. The way the culture is structured now does seem to be beneficial for the majority of students brought in the usual way, and fixing this flaw might open another, which might be more detrimental in the long run. And if there were any viable alternatives for training and support, that would be the end of it, as far as I was concerned. But the fact is--there aren’t. Pretty much all other Force-adepts we see seem to be closed ethnoreligious groups (or Sith). So I think an increase in flexibility in the early-stage teaching style/age limit for adoption is actually of a net benefit. Whether or not any changes are made to the broader framework/culture past that period, which is a separate discussion.

And that brings me to Ventress, my final example, who is much more complicated and harder to discuss due to several key pieces of evidence that are missing.

Where does she fit into all of this?

The implication in her flashbacks seem to be that she does pretty well with Ky Narec, who--without the same awful circumstances pushing his choices--adapts and uses a non-traditional/one-on-one approach with her, rather than trying to bring her to the Temple and integrate her into the culture right away.

Of course, there are a couple of issues with this. One, Ventress falls apart when he dies, so his approach also clearly had some flaws. Two, her memories may not be the most reliable/she might not be a super reliable narrator. Three, we are missing so much information about how and in what order everything went down.

First, why did Ky Narec make the choices he did? One explanation is that he had no way off the planet/no long-range communications and couldn’t contact the rest of the Order. I find this hard to believe for two reasons: how did Ventress then get offplanet after he died; and how did she get onto the planet in the first place? Someone there has a connection with the wider galaxy, and if Ky Narec really wanted to make contact, I’m sure he could’ve found a way.

So, why didn’t he? Was it because he knew Ventress was too old, and he felt he lacked the standing/social or political capital to convince the Council to accept her anyway? Was that assessment accurate on his part? Alternatively, did he think he could get her accepted, but felt that some training on their own before trying to integrate her into the broader culture was the better approach; and then he died before he could complete that process? Was he already thinking about leaving (as did the Lost Twenty), and she was what pushed him to actually take that step? I’m sure there are other possible explanations, but those are the ones that jump to mind.

Second, what did he tell her? What were her expectations for if/when they finally made contact with the Order? Did he warn her that her training was unauthorized and the Order would not accept her (whether or not that was actually true)?

Third, what did she actually do when he died? Did she try to reach out to the Order? Did she assume that there was no point? Did she reach out to her sisters on Dathomir? (From what I recall, most likely not, but it’s been a while since I watched the relevant TCW episodes.) Did she go straight to Dooku?

Fourth, when she did finally contact Dooku, was she seeking him out as a former Jedi who might have some understanding and compassion for her situation, or was she seeking him out as a Sith Lord/Dark Side adept? (Unless that’s actually covered in her flashbacks as well; again, I might be misremembering/have forgotten.)

So…yeah. It’s really hard to evaluate this question fully without more information on how everything with Ventress went down. But all the other evidence does indicate a disconnect.

I guess my point in all of this was…no, it’s not right for an entire culture to have to change everything for one person. But on the other hand, there’s something to be said for a test case/case study that draws attention to an existing flaw in the structure. And Anakin, while the most visible, isn’t actually the only one here.

Also...on a more general note, cultures are dynamic. They do change over time. Sometimes very rapidly, when change is forced by external pressures, sometimes more organically, by gradual internal shifts. So, the implication that the culture of the Jedi Order should remain exactly as it is as of the late Republic because that’s the best possible way for it to be, no matter how much the broader culture of the galaxy and/or their role in it might shift, feels…a little off to me. Especially since the war itself was already an impetus for change. The postwar Jedi Order was almost certainly going to be somewhat different from the prewar Order; how drastic or subtle that change would be without Anakin making all the wrong choices is a little harder to determine. And--look, I know I’m citing Legends here, because canon has yet to provide deep (i.e., 100+ years pre-TPM) backstory, but some of these things already have shifted over time, in response to both internal and external pressures. The age limit for taking in initiates/apprentices being one of them.

...but I’ll admit that that last paragraph may be me misinterpreting/reading too much into some of the posts and my There Is No One True Way button getting pushed again whether or not it’s merited in this case XD

Anyway, tangent aside, I just wanted to highlight why I feel this particular issue should be addressed, even if the expected cultural norms/code of conduct for Jedi who have integrated into the culture remain the same. Because, yeah, those seem to work out for most members, and the option to leave is there for those who have issues.

But the problem of latecomers/nontraditional students, particularly when there aren’t really any other options available to them for training and support, and there are an unknown (but possibly significant, in proportion to the size of the Order itself) number out there, is still a Thing.

((Also, one last tangent re: why this matters/is a Thing…look, applying IRL issues/politics/history and so on to Star Wars can be a weird/hinky/YMMV thing, apart from certain direct/explicit/obviously intentional parallels, and in general I try to avoid doing it--and, like, earlier today, I had to stop myself from going off on a long tangent about the Constitutions of Clarendon and Thomas Becket on a semi-related post about Ahsoka; if I want to do it, I can--but given the issues older kids/teenagers have being adopted IRL, and given the idea that baby Jedi are essentially adoptees, the fact that older kids are excluded is a little…yeah.))

#fandom #star wars #originally posted february 2020

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segadores-y-soldados · 6 years

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Reunion: Shadows at High Noon

McCree: This is all your fault, Reyes!

Reyes: I’m never gonna hear the end of this, am I?

McCree: I’m sure I’ll get over it…eventually.

Reyes: Good. Because I’m gonna need you, Jesse.

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Ashe: …Jesse McCree. Been awhile. You promised you’d write.

McCree: Well, Ashe…I’ve been kinda busy.

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Sombra has always been a core component of the “Reaper is a double-agent looking to enact retribution on Talon” theory (or “Masquerade theory”, if you want a snazzier name) - in fact, I’d argue that Sombra is the core component of the theory. While most of my analytical content in the last year has really focused a lot on Gabriel Reyes/Reaper, Moira, Jack Morrison/Soldier: 76, Akande Ogundimu/Doomfist, Talon, and their respective connections to Retribution, Sombra has never stopped being relevant to the discussion. If anything, she is the network, the axis, the center that keeps it all together.

And that is a pretty literal description of her and her role.

In most of these posts, I’ve avoided discussing McCree directly because, well, there simply wasn’t as much evidence about his connections to the “masquerade” that Reaper, Sombra, and likely Soldier: 76 and Ana are playing with Talon. Prior to “Reunion,” this is the evidence we had that McCree was at least on Sombra’s radar:

A picture of him along with a picture of Jack Morrison in Sombra’s room.

An image of him connected to Overwatch and Ana (who is unmasked, by the way), and the word “Escanear” (Scan).

And a comic panel of him maybe meeting Sombra at the Calaveras bar in the Castillo area of Dorado.

Granted, this isn’t poor evidence by a long shot. The evidence around Soldier: 76 and Ana is much more ephemeral, but with logic, there’s enough ways to sleuth through the contradictions and outright lies by Reaper and Soldier: 76 to deduce that there is something going on (again, this says nothing about how much Soldier: 76 and Ana approve of Reaper and Sombra’s plan, just that they’re aware of it in the present (Recall-Masquerade-era)).

The last piece of evidence that seemed to hint at McCree’s role in the Recall-Masaquerade-Searching-era was a key interaction from Retribution:

McCree: This is all your fault, Reyes!

Reyes: I’m never gonna hear the end of this, am I?

McCree: I’m sure I’ll get over it…eventually.

Reyes: Good. Because I’m gonna need you, Jesse.

---

The final line by Reyes certainly implies he had plans for McCree after the Venice Incident - that he would need McCree to do some sort of work for Blackwatch...and for Overwatch as a whole. However, it was hard to say exactly what Reyes had in mind. For example, it could be argued that Reyes anticipated more openly aggressive moves by Talon or other extremist groups, such as Null Sector:

And we know that he specifically used McCree as the agent to sneak into the hot zone of London and get ground-level views and images of the situation.

But with “Reunion”, we now have much more overt evidence that McCree is “up to something” -

That “something” being that he’s actually doing work either for Reaper (through Sombra) or following Sombra’s own objectives.

(An extremely long post under the cut.)

(TL;DR: Jesse McCree appears to still be operating under a set of mission orders from either Gabriel Reyes himself, or he is cooperating with Sombra who is effectively coordinating former members of Blackwatch (such as McCree and Reaper) and Overwatch (Soldier: 76 and Ana Amari/“The Shrike”) either on her own terms or on her own “objectives” that she was given by Reyes. While no specific parts are set in stone, the story of Overwatch is implying that Sombra is running a massive network of coordinated roles between characters like Reaper, Soldier: 76, Ana Amari, possibly Zarya and/or Symmetra, and Jesse McCree himself.)

Again, this says very little about how much McCree approves of the plan, just that he’s in on it. Like all of Sombra’s relationships - canon or implied - there’s a level of ambiguity about how much each character fully trusts her, how much they want to work with her, and if there’s some sort of compromising, deal-making, or blackmailing going on.

Personally, I believe that all the characters Sombra is connected to - canon or implied - are willingly working with her. Michael Chu’s exact statement on how Reaper “views” Sombra is that he knows she is “effective” at what she does, which is a part that has three main roles.

The first role Sombra has is:

Reaper: Try to stick to the plan, Sombra.

Sombra: Look, someone has to be ready when all your careful planning doesn't pan out.

Be his backup.

You know.

In case he gets himself trapped again.

The second:

Play “the fool” to Reaper’s “loyal commander” act.

By this, I mean that Sombra provides the “distraction.” Like any good “smoke and mirrors” act, Sombra is the distraction for Talon members to focus on while they start to increasingly rely on Reaper and continue to pull him into the fold and chain of command. By pretending to undermine each other, Sombra and Reaper do a tactical sleight of hand on the other Talon members to effectively boost Reaper through the ranks while still passing information to Sombra herself. Both Sombra and Reaper achieve what they want while still being able to cover each other’s back should something go wrong (you know, like Point 1 above).

Sombra does this role very -

Very -

Sombra: Isn't it a little embarrassing to get beaten up by a monkey? Doomfist: Have you ever been hit by a giant, genetically engineered gorilla? I could arrange it for you...

---

Moira: Started any wars lately? Sombra: I'd have to check my schedule.

---

Sombra: Ah, my favorite spider. I wonder what sort of web you're spinning now. Widowmaker: It'd be a shame if something happened to you on our next mission. A real pity.

---

Very well.

Note how in the second image shown that Sombra says, “You’re making me think you don’t trust him,” and Doomfist immediately replies with, “I don’t trust anyone.” It’s pretty clear the implication of his words are directed towards Sombra herself (though we miss whatever her reaction is), but this is followed up with the in-game interactions between Sombra, Doomfist, Moira, and Widowmaker, which makes it much more blatant that no one in Talon trusts her, but that she’s too “effective” to not work with.

(Additionally, note how different her interactions with Reaper are:)

Sombra: What are we doing today, Gabe? You don't mind if I call you 'Gabe,' do you? Reaper: Stick to the mission. --- Reaper: Try to stick to the plan, Sombra. Sombra: Look, someone has to be ready when all your careful planning doesn't pan out. --- (On Oasis) Sombra: So what are we doing here, boss? Reaper: I need to pay a visit to a friend. (Moira)

---

Reaper “tolerates” Sombra much better than the other Talon characters, which again, plays back into their dual-roles of the masquerade they’re playing.

The third role that has been hinted at but not shown outright in canon story events or materials is:

Sombra’s “network.”

Again, while this isn’t shown or stated outright, there are too many details in-game and in the comics that show Sombra having connections with at least three other characters: Soldier: 76 (Jack Morrison), The Shrike (Ana Amari), and Jesse McCree. This is partially due to Sombra being the “ultimate plot convenient” role and also due to actual canon which demonstrates she’s been in contact with certain people.

Lynx-17 knows that Sombra has an established connection with Soldier: 76, though they do not seem to be fully aware of Sombra’s connections to Ana (probably because Lynx doesn’t realize Ana is still alive and is hiding as The Shrike).

In-game, both Sombra’s room and the Necropolis are littered (quite literally) with evidence that implies Sombra is managing a network of rogue Overwatch and Blackwatch agents (again, to stress, this does not imply how much anyone likes working with her).

She knows who Jesse McCree and Jack Morrison are.

She knows Ana’s masked persona of “The Shrike.”

She appears to either be establishing or facilitating connections between McCree and Ana.

And on Necropolis:

She’s giving Soldier: 76 and Ana updates on Reaper’s movements.

Note that since the Necropolis map was made before “Masquerade” was released, Reaper’s (and Sombra’s) visit to Venice isn’t included in the map. However, the other locations all have actual events or connections to them:

Los Angeles, California: “Reflections”

Numbani, Nigeria: either the “Museum Heist” or retrieving Doomfist from prison

Watchpoint: Gibraltar: “Recall”

Oasis, Iraq: visiting Moira’s lab

Volskaya Industries in St. Petersburg, Russia: “Infiltration”

Again, the game makes it pretty clear that Sombra is the one doing this.

All the shots are from “Infiltration”.

This exact shot is from Sombra’s perspective.

(She might even be sending Jack and Ana live footage from the Volskaya mission.)

Like I said above, it’s easier to logic out that Sombra is working with Soldier: 76 and Ana than it is that she’s working with McCree directly. So much of Overwatch’s in-game details of environmental storytelling are tantalizing and imply a significant amount, but rarely do they show anything super concrete.

For example:

Does Sombra know who McCree is?

Yes, she does. We can say this with certainty.

Is she working with McCree?

Prior to “Reunion” the answer to this would have been “I can’t really say one way or the other.”

But then “Reunion” came out.

And the evidence got much more overt.

---------

On the fringes

Like the Recall-Masquerade-era Soldier: 76 plotline, the implications of Sombra’s work and information is easier to suss out when we work through “Reunion” logically.

In Soldier: 76′s plotline, there are numerous gaps where the easy answer to the questions are “Well, Sombra.”

How did he know Ana was “The Shrike”?

Well, Sombra.

How did he possibly coordinate “the trap” with Reaper to lure Ana out of hiding (to come protect him)?

Well, Sombra.

Why would he and Sombra work together?

Well, Reaper (okay, that one’s a little different, but still.)

Obviously, this is a simplistic summary of things: there’s a lot more going on with the Reaper, Soldier: 76, Sombra, and connected characters plotline (such as Moira, Doomfist, Talon, Retribution, etc), but basically...

We have been shown Sombra knows who Soldier: 76 is, that she knows what his motivations and interests are on a personal level (Reaper), that she knows how to “bargain” with him somehow (re: the Lynx-17 panel), and that she appears to have facilitated the “trap” between him, Reaper, and “The Shrike”.

This applies to McCree almost to a tee -

Down to literally helping him “set up” a situation where he can recruit an ally.

As I wrote in “Reunion: Quick Bites” and “Echo Notes”, even though the short only has two main chunks of dialogue, there’s so much going on in the details that it’s actually a pretty sizable burst of expanding McCree’s plot and his character.

Taking it step by step:

1. Echo: the crate and key.

Again, just repeating what I said in “Echo Notes”, Echo’s crate is currently being transported by some sort of military train (which is also hauling more munitions and weapons). It appears to be moving roughly east to west (we’ll get into that again later).

A train this fully-armed would never have a public timetable or schedule - if it’s even on one. It may very well be an infrequent, single-trip transport. That means finding this information requires digging deep.

Or, you know.

Hacking some sort of confidential military system.

Don’t get me wrong - McCree is smart, and I have no doubt he set up the whole situation in “Reunion.”

But he’s consider a vigilante and is wanted by the United States law enforcement.

Gonna be a little hard for him to just walk into a military base and do the intel-digging by himself.

Good thing that’s something someone else is very, very effective at doing.

Like Soldier: 76′s story, Sombra fills in the first big “plot hole” in “Reunion”. In fact, it’s almost unfair to even call it a plot hole, because it really isn’t one: Overwatch has been slowly building the implication and connections in Sombra’s network for two years now (since her release).

The team doesn’t want to tell you that she’s helping McCree: for starters, that’s the worst way to do a story (“show, not tell”).

Secondly, the lead writer himself wants you to figure this stuff out:

“One of the things we really like doing with Overwatch is playing with perspective. We utilize perspective when we analyze or when we tell stories about characters, what they’re thinking, what their goals are. And we have a lot of unreliable narrators. We want people to pay careful attention to what characters think about in particular situations. We want them to use their judgment and their knowledge of a character’s thoughts to come up with their own ideas about the universe.” (Bold for emphasis)

- Michael Chu, GDC Spring 2017

The stuff about McCree has been in Sombra’s room in Castillo since the map was released in May 2017.

The animated shorts take several months - likely up to a year - to make in advance, but even then, this means the Castillo map and all its easter eggs and lore details existed well before Story and Franchise started storyboarding “Reunion”. I would argue that “Reunion” was actually specifically written to help build these links between Sombra and McCree, again, with just enough specific “gaps” in the story and just enough tantalizing wording by McCree to “show, not tell” those connections.

If Echo’s crate is being held by a military branch, institution, or a security force contractor like Helix Securities, it’s likely that her key was also being held by that same group, but in a different location.

This is obvious from the fact that McCree already has her key at the beginning of the short.

It has to have been in a different, separate location than Echo herself.

If what McCree implies about Echo is true (“they want me, but really, [Overwatch] needs you”) then Echo is being set up to be a strong character. Keep in mind that game balancing means she will never be, you know, unkillable - even Reaper dies in-game - but she’s certainly important to the former organization, and likely will be a powerful ally for the small, ragtag Recall team from a lore perspective.

This is a standard “spy thriller”/“secret treasure” trope in media: the “key” to unlock something Really Super Special is in a separate location. It’s especially common in video games, where a developer can quickly expand a quest by making the key a separate object to locate and retrieve first.

And if Echo is as powerful as McCree implies, then it makes sense that the organization “safeguarding” her physical body would remove the key and put it in a separate, secret location, especially if it’s another military base.

Because who’s going to be crazy enough to try and physically infiltrate a hostile, militarized base all on their own?

(It’s almost like there’s a pattern here.)

And this leads to:

2. “Well, Ashe...I’ve been kinda busy.”

So Sombra figures out the location of both Echo’s crate and her key. As I said in “Echo Notes”, we don’t exactly know where either of these are, just that the train is moving from east to west.

Given that we know now for sure that Deadlock Gorge is in Arizona, this means - in extremely broad terms - that Echo’s key was closer to Arizona (or even in the state) than her crate at or around the time of “Recall”.

Or at least -

That the key was closer to McCree than the crate was.

Granted, it’s possible McCree already had the key or was given it by someone else, but considering again that a non-Overwatch organization is in command of Echo’s crate, it seems unlikely that the U.N. or organizations like Helix Securities would just let an Overwatch agent hold onto the key after the formal disbandment of the group.

And it seems especially unlikely that they would let a former Blackwatch agent and currently-wanted “outlaw” like McCree to hold onto it.

I think it’s much more logical that Sombra found the information for both Echo’s crate and the key, and then passed this intel onto McCree.

After all -

McCree is actually really, really good at sneaking into places and/or fighting his way back out.

And he specializes in heists.

Specifically heists of military-grade goods.

McCree had already made a name for himself as a member of the notorious Deadlock Gang, which trafficked in illicit weapons and military hardware throughout the American Southwest, when he and his associates were busted in an Overwatch sting operation.

- McCree’s Hero Profile

In fact, the covert ops mission that McCree is actually really, really bad at is:

Moira: McCree...we need to talk about your...Italian accent.

McCree: Well, I watched a bunch of old Spaghetti Westerns. I thought it was pretty good! Bone-a serr-a, signora. Can I-a get chu-a somethin’ ta drink?

Moira: Please, never do that again.

---

Reyes: This mess was all worth it to see McCree try and pass himself off as a waiter!

McCree: I thought I did just fine.

Reyes: ...You got fired from your cover job, Jesse.

McCree: The lady was being rude! She had it coming.

---

Going undercover.

(We’ll come back to this.)

Basically, I think it’s a lot easier - and actually pretty decently established in McCree’s character and lore - to reason that Sombra got the intel about Echo, handed it off to McCree, and let McCree do what he does best:

Steal stuff.

But then something interesting happens.

Recall occurs.

It’s possible McCree gets the key after Recall, of course. The timing of him actually getting the itself isn’t super important - just the fact that he already has it at the start of “Reunion” really implies a lot. But because most of the Recall-related shorts happen within a few days to a few weeks of “Recall” itself, it seems pretty likely that everything is kicking off all at once.

(In fact, I’m of the mindset that Reaper intentionally botched the “steal the Overwatch agent database” mission in order to push Winston into making the decision - the little clip at the end is very vague but seems to imply that Reaper is actually quite pleased with Winston’s decision. The entire mission is pretty pathetic in its design, and Reaper has several opportunities to kill Winston but never does. Yes, I am aware that Winston has plot armor, but it’s real weird that Talon’s using tasers when electricity puts Winston in super charged mode. But this is tangential, tbh.)

Again, while never stated, it is implied that several things begin moving and happening all at once, either directly because of Recall (e.g. Genji’s confrontation with Hanzo in “Dragons,” Mei’s awakening in “Rise and Shine,” Reinhardt’s decision in “Honor and Glory,” and now McCree’s shootout in “Reunion”) or as an overall consequence of Recall.

One of these is:

Soldier: 76 beginning a series of attacks and thefts from “multiple former Overwatch bases”.

So this is something that a few followers pointed out (and yes, something I had been considering for awhile):

Are Soldier: 76′s movements and attacks on former Overwatch bases being coordinated by Sombra, possibly in tandem with McCree’s work in the Southwest?

The answer is, possibly disappointingly, “I can’t say for sure either way.”

But it is interesting.

We already know that Sombra has some sort of connection to Soldier: 76. When exactly that connection is established is tricky to place: it could come after “Hero”, when she’s potentially able to strike a deal with him to get him to leave Dorado (e.g. “Ana Amari is alive. Want to know where she is? Get out of my city and I’ll send you the info.”). It could also come before that: we know Jack Morrison is pretty restless in the time between the fall of Overwatch and Recall (a span of 6 years), so they could easily have made contact with each other during that period.

There’s also the very tantalizing - if a little bit shoehorned in - possibility that Olivia “Sombra” Colomar is a Blackwatch agent.

There’s a single line in the second page of the Blackwatch Venice Mission dossier which states:

“Agent [REDACTED] also secured a position [REDACTED].”

There is the possibility that this line reads something like “Agent [McCree] also secured a position [as a waiter at Antonio’s restaurant]” or something...

But I don’t think it is.

For starters, McCree’s name is actually declassified in the memo:

In fact, the four main agents in the mission are completely declassified, so while it’s definitely possible that one of their names is in the Redacted spot, it seems unlikely.

It’s also possible that there is a future Blackwatch character we haven’t actually seen or met yet in the story. I’m not counting that out yet.

But I think a lot of people miss a few critical details about Sombra:

Sombra’s teddy bear Arturito has an Overwatch logo on it.

And though she absolutely was associated with Los Muertos:

Her relationship with the gang is more ambiguous and ambivalent than her Hero Profile implies.

And this is something I’ve said with stuff like Moira, and which is now pretty clearly demonstrated by things like Wrecking Ball and Ashe:

Team 4 deliberately leaves large gaps in character stories so that they can potentially fill those gaps with other connections or characters in the future.

People were shocked when they revealed that Genji was explicitly a Blackwatch agent and not just an Overwatch agent, but prior to that moment, nothing in Genji’s Hero Profile or his known backstory explicitly said that he was not a Blackwatch agent.

Similarly, in all the teasers, messages, and lore details that we knew about “Hammond”, nothing ever stated he was an ape or a monkey.

With Moira, her Hero Profile actually implied she was a Talon agent before she ever joined Blackwatch.

“...The shadowy Talon organization had already been supporting her for years, aiding her experiments in exchange for utilizing the results for their own purposes.”

(And frankly, I take a good deal of pride in having read the clues correctly for this well before the mode was playable: [Tweet 1] [Tweet 2])

And now Ashe.

Personally, I think Ashe is complicated because it’s pretty clear she wasn’t actually intended to be anything more than a single-short character (which has been stated several times by Story and Franchise and Team 4 alike), so while she was never originally part of McCree’s backstory, there was enough room in his story for her to be placed in.

Point is:

We go through this song and dance every time a new hero or plot twist is revealed. Sometimes - like with Moira or Wrecking Ball - the implication is already there, or the absence of evidence does imply something more. Sometimes - like with Genji and Ashe - there’s enough of a gap in a character’s history and backstory that something can be developed in a way the fans weren’t expecting.

So here’s the thing about the idea of “Blackwatch Colomar”:

Is there space in Sombra’s backstory for this “plot twist” to exist? Yes.

Will Team 4 actually do it? Only they know.

But as this entire post has shown:

Sombra has numerous connections to numerous characters - many of them Talon-aligned, yes, but several of them are former Overwatch or Blackwatch agents. Hell, she’s even connected to Zarya at this point, and Zarya is effectively a non-aligned character at the moment. She is implied to be the only character Reaper trust remotely genuinely in Talon, implied to be giving information to Soldier: 76, and is now implied to be working outright with McCree.

People seem to think that unreliable narrators can only work if they’re forcing a limited perspective on a situation or concealing “bad” truths from the audience.

But that isn’t necessarily true.

An unreliable narrator can conceal good intentions just as much as they conceal bad ones.

McCree: Is this what we’ve become, Gabriel? Gabriel: Blackwatch has always had one purpose: to do the real work of keeping the world safe. I thought you had the stomach for it. Looks like I was wrong.

And, as storytellers, the Overwatch development team is not beholden to tell you the truth - good or bad - either. They’re creating a story: they would much rather show you Sombra’s intentions - or Reaper’s, or Soldier: 76′s, or McCree’s - than tell you outright.

They’re not going to tell you that Sombra has a soft spot for Overwatch.

They would rather show you.

And to loop this all the way back around:

They’re not going to tell you how McCree got the information about the key -

And they’re not going to tell you how McCree knew the crate was on the train because -

"All I want is that crate.”

The dialogue shows more about his character and the situation than literally stating it.

So before we move on, just to summarize:

How did McCree get Echo’s key?

Well, Sombra probably told him after hacking some Helix or military system for it. McCree’s covert ops specialty is conducting heists and thefts, particularly in military bases, cargo, and supplies.

Where was the key located?

In the Southwest United States, or maybe somewhere on the West Coast. Just in the west, I guess.

Why was Echo’s case being transported?

Probably because whatever organization was “safeguarding” it started getting nervous about Soldier: 76 locating her first. Or because Recall was initiated. Either way, the organization runs the risk of her getting found and effectively rescued by either Soldier: 76 or Recalled Overwatch.

Why would Sombra help McCree and/or Soldier: 76?

Because it’s entirely possible for a character to be both ambitious, chaotic neutral, and renegade in nature while also being nostalgic, sentimental, or entertained by “the good guys.” It is canon to Sombra’s character that she actually does her hardest to motivate others to change themselves, to see the truth, or to find empowerment through information.

“Which brings me…to ‘Perspective.’ One of the things we really like doing with Overwatch is playing with perspective. We utilize perspective when we analyze or when we tell stories about characters, what they’re thinking, what their goals are. And we have a lot of unreliable narrators. We want people to pay careful attention to what characters think about in particular situations. We want them to use their judgment and their knowledge of a character’s thoughts to come up with their own ideas about the universe. You know, I’m asked often - with characters like Sombra or Soldier: 76, you know, ‘Are they anti-heroes? Are they villains?’ And I think, you know, you look at someone like Sombra, and it’s all about looking at, ‘What does she want? What is she willing to do to get it?’

“And you have to remember that when she’s telling you something, she’s serving her own ends too. So you know, you have to kinda make the decision for yourself. And I think you can take a character like Soldier: 76 - like obviously, he has this mission that he is on that he believes is good, he seems to be sometimes willing to do things which are… maybe not super heroic, and so it makes him complicated. We always have a lot of fun, uh - every once and awhile we’ll try and plot all the characters on like the traditional D’n’D alignment scale, and I think, you know, it’s fun exercise, but at the end of the day, I think what’s interesting about characters is that those alignments change depending on what situation you put them in, what’s important to them, and what decisions they have to make.”

- Michael Chu, GDC Spring 2017

Sombra can be and is the same character who has the ability to tease Reaper with a nickname only his “partner” has been allowed to call him, both as a reminder of what she knows about him and a callback to his internal motivations (protecting Jack).

In this regard, this aligns Sombra with characters like McCree, Soldier; 76, and Ana in methods and ideologies more than people realize. In the Recall-Masquerade-Searching era, none of these characters have any qualms about “breaking the rules” at this point, and yet all of them still find their motivations to be unified by a few things:

A sense of personal, often ambiguous justice.

A belief in protecting the innocent - but also punishing those who commit crimes.

The adaptability to work well “in the shadows”.

And mixed emotions on the newly recalled Overwatch.

And all this harkens back to:

Gabriel: Blackwatch has always had one purpose: to do the real work of keeping the world safe.

3. “You’ve never been one to shy away from a good tip.”

Let’s say that Soldier: 76′s actions - regardless of if they’re being coordinated with McCree’s via Sombra or not - do actually drive Helix Securities or whatever organization is holding Echo to desperation. They fill up a train with military weapons and her crate, hoping to transport it east to west to the other side of the country.

Perhaps they’re concerned that Echo’s key has gone missing, but they’re significantly more worried about the dude with an autoaim visor who just got the upgraded version of his favorite gun back.

This plays into McCree and Sombra’s hands pretty ideally -

Because what’s McCree really, really good at?

Heists.

And why is he good at heists?

Because even when he’s working alone, he still knows how to orchestrate them.

Because even though it’s been decades since they’ve actually last met -

McCree can still read Ashe like a god damn textbook.

Big train full of big guns, big bombs, big weapons?

That’s the kind of “merchandise” Ashe just can’t resist.

Work smarter, not harder.

The dialogue between McCree and Ashe implies that he was the one who “tipped off” the Deadlock Gang about the train:

McCree: Well, Ashe…I’ve been kinda busy.

Ashe: We’re pretty busy ourselves, so it’s awful convenient you showin’ up today.

McCree: …Yeah, you’ve never been one to shy away from a good tip.

Ashe: Hey! We worked hard for this score! You best move on now.

---

And even though it’s been decades, McCree still manages to get under Ashe’s skin right away. She doesn’t realize what McCree was actually implying (that he was the one who tipped off the gang), but instead bristles at what she thinks is the slight in his comment (that they get “easy tips” and therefore do “easy work”).

However, the whole conversation is meant to show you that McCree deftly set up the gang to basically do the whole heist for him. He rolls in after his phone call to the diner (which is actually operated by the Deadlock Gang), and thinks he has a enough time for a slice of pie and a cup of coffee.

He’s just a little bit off, though, because he only has time for two bites and one sip.

(But to McCree’s credit, maybe that’s all he wanted. He thinks the coffee at the diner “tastes like boiled dirt” anyways.)

So just a short one:

Who tipped off the Deadlock Gang?

Probably McCree, because he needed a way to get Echo’s crate off the train and he’s not really interested in repeating “Train Hopper”. Also because it looks like the military train was automated and running on a fast schedule.

4. “I’ve got some business to attend to.”

McCree: Well, that’s a story for another time, but I got a call. They want me, but really, they need you.

(McCree starts to walk away.)

Echo: Jesse, wait! What are you going to do?

McCree: I’ve got some business to attend to.

(McCree takes Ashe’s bike.)

McCree: Say hi to the monkey for me.

Echo: Monkey?

McCree, laughing: Scientist. Whatever.

---

At the end of the short, we get one last hint about what McCree’s been up to, where he’s been, where he’s going, and - more importantly - who he’s been around.

Again, just like Soldier: 76′s story, the timeline of McCree’s story skips ahead from the end of “Reunion” to this particular scene:

This is just like Soldier: 76 in that Soldier is literally shown in Dorado -

And then this is his next actual appearance in the plot.

The only thing that appears to have occurred in between “Hero” and “Old Soldiers”?

It’s hinted at in “Searching”, Sombra’s room in Castillo, and the Reaper sightings image in Necropolis.

Either Sombra is already connected to Soldier: 76 before “Hero”, or - like Zarya - she makes some sort of deal with him to get him out of Dorado and put him on the path to find The Shrike.

We can only guess at what McCree does in the few month span between “Reunion” and “Reflections”: perhaps he messes with Deadlock and Los Muertos some more. Perhaps he tracks their trade routes and arms-purchasing partners. Perhaps he keeps an eye on Helix-run facilities in the U.S. Perhaps he collects a few bounties. We don’t know for sure, but again, he leaves “Reunion” on Ashe’s bike and appears several months later in Dorado.

Again, the story isn’t going to tell you why he’s there or what he’s doing, especially if the Masquerade subplot is steadily being built up, but at this point, the evidence is pretty strong.

All in all, when we phrase it as a series of questions and look at the details provided throughout the game, comics, and shorts, we get a few straightfoward answers:

How did McCree get Echo’s key?

Sombra probably found the information and passed it off to him. McCree did what he does best and snuck into some sort of base and stole it.

How did McCree know Echo’s crate was being moved?

Again, the simple answer is that Sombra found the information. The group keeping Echo may have been worried about Soldier: 76′s actions or Recalled OW making moved to get her back, so they shipped her crate off with a bunch of other weapons.

What has McCree been “busy” with?

And

What is the “business” McCree has to “attend to”?

This one goes all the way back to “Retribution.”

McCree: This is all your fault, Reyes!

Reyes: I’m never gonna hear the end of this, am I?

McCree: I’m sure I’ll get over it…eventually.

Reyes: Good. Because I’m gonna need you, Jesse.

---

The straightforward answer is that McCree is still working as an underground Blackwatch agent.

As a reminder, another core component of the “Masquerade theory” is that Moira was the traitor who sold out the Venice Mission to Antonio, his forces, and probably the whole of Talon.

A key part of understanding Retribution is the realization that only four people knew the mission was occurring in the way that it was happening. These people were: Gabriel Reyes, Jesse McCree, Genji Shimada, and Moira O’Deorain. Jack Morrison and Fio the Blackwatch pilot knew the mission “was happening” but they did not have the details about it, and therefore are unlikely to have been the ones to have compromised it.

In fact, there are several interactions in Retribution that pretty blatantly imply this:

McCree: Aww, even though we snuck that surveillance system into Antonio’s office, our intel’s a little spotty. Genji: Next time, you should leave it to me. I can spy upon our enemies - unseen…and undetected.

A surveillance system was secreted into Antonio’s office and yet the Blackwatch team still missed key intel - because it is implied that someone on the team warned Antonio that his office was bugged.

Through the interactions with McCree and Genji, the player is meant to learn that both these characters are genuine and did not betray Talon. McCree is 100% furious about how the mission goes sideways, and Genji shows time and again that he hates criminals to a very personal and actually pretty harmful level (the implication being that a lot of his lingering resentments over his own family and brother are still present on his mind and emotional state).

That leaves Gabriel Reyes and Moira O’Deorain.

The game wants you to believe that Reyes somehow betrayed Blackwatch and Overwatch, but again -

What it shows you is actually very different:

Moira: Pity we’ll miss the masquerade - I have the perfect costume. Reyes: Didn’t think that would be your scene. Moira: There’s a lot of things you don’t know about me…

(source)

Moira: You did what needed to be done, Gabriel. Don’t apologize. Gabriel: I never have, and I don’t intend to start now. Someone has to be the one to get things done.

McCree: Better to kill them now than wait for another surprise attack! Moira, to herself: …ha, ironic.

McCree: …You seem awfully calm. Moira: I take it all in my stride.

---

The game wants you to play the detective and figure out the actual story being broken up and semi-concealed by four different, limited-perspective, unreliable narrators.

In fact, this is exactly why McCree becomes the lead narrator of the event, even though Reyes himself was the narrator in the comic.

This narrative shift has been used multiple times in Overwatch story events. The other obvious one is Uprising, where the comic is from Morrison’s perspective but the event shifts to Tracer narrating the intro and outro. However, you can see similar shifts in narratives in comics like “Old Soldiers” (starts with Soldier: 76, switches to Ana mid-way through), “Reflections” (starts with Tracer with interjections by Winston), and “Binary” (starts with Bastion, switches to Torbjörn).

And there are also many, many instances where a secondary POV character is implied but not explicitly told.

The list includes:

“Legacy”: main POV - Ana; implied POV - Widowmaker

“Masquerade”: main POV - Doomfist; implied POV - Reaper

“Searching”: main POV - Zarya; implied POV - Sombra

“Retribution” (the game mode) itself is effectively one of these, but with two implied POVs: McCree has become the main POV, but Reyes and Moira are the secondary, implied POV, and it is up to the player to sort through the mess of interactions and heightened emotions to realize the truth.

However, even if you don’t unlock the best interactions that show this, the ending by itself literally does:

It’s also pretty easy to figure out that - well - despite his anger, McCree doesn’t actually leave Blackwatch after the mission.

In fact, something Reyes says in his debriefing - to Morrison, Amari, Lacroix, and McCree (through the window) - convinces all of them that: 1) Reyes himself can still be trusted, 2) McCree and Genji can still be trusted, and 3) something much bigger than Antonio is threatening to undermine them.

Again, the game doesn’t tell you this, but it does show you what it is, 8 years later:

Moira: Our courageous cowboy… The years haven’t changed you much, have they, Jesse? McCree: Well, they certainly haven’t changed my feelings about working with you.

---

McCree: Always thought hiring you was a mistake. Moira: The best mistake one could ever make.

---

Soldier: 76: You were a disgrace to Overwatch. If I had known what Reyes had been planning, I would never have allowed it. Moira: It seems to me that it was convenient for you not to look too closely into Gabriel’s business… (Audio link)

---

McCree and Soldier: 76 believe that Moira betrayed Blackwatch.

Soldier: 76′s statement is clear, McCree’s is more vague but still gets to the point. Interestingly, neither Soldier nor McCree ever state directly that they think Gabriel Reyes betrayed Overwatch and/or Blackwatch. Soldier: 76 alludes to “what Reyes had been planning”, but he never says what that “plan” actually was, and if you’ve followed this blog long enough, you know that I believe Soldier is referencing Reyes’/Reaper’s plan is his reverse-infiltration of Talon.

But here’s the other thing about McCree and Soldier: 76′s awareness of Reaper’s goals:

It doesn’t actually imply their respective approvals of this method.

And we come back to the “issue” with Sombra again:

Connected characters don’t actually have to 100% like or approve of another character’s ideas, methods, plans, and strategies to cooperate with them.

It does not mean Sombra is or isn’t blackmailing them (or Reaper or Ana). It does not mean that they do or do not like Sombra or Reaper’s methods.

It is entirely possible for characters to have the same “good” intentions and the same aligned objectives without actually liking each other’s methods and tactics.

Like I said above, I personally think all these characters do actually get along, even if they occasionally frustrate or irritate each other (or disagree over methods). Taking “Retribution” and “Uprising” as windows into the different characters’ personalities and interactions before the fall, we see many examples where characters who are still allies or friends after the fall disagree or banter around with each other. Canon character who will eventually cooperate with each other in Recalled OW are Tracer, Reinhardt, Torbjörn, and Genji, and again, if this Masquerade theory is correct, then Reaper, Soldier: 76, Ana, and McCree are also still working together.

That said:

There’s a lot to imply that what Reaper and Soldier: 76 are doing in the present-day is simply a more extreme version of the roles they have always played with each other:

They’ve both gone “rogue”, yes, but one of them (Reaper) is playing “the bad guy” in order to convince Talon he’s 110%, totally serious about being part of their organization, while the other (Soldier: 76) is playing “the fallen hero” in order to convince characters like The Shrike (Ana) to join their plans.

I can’t really stress how much McCree’s actions in “Reunion” effectively parallel Soldier’s in “Old Soldiers”.

Everything from getting intel from Sombra, “setting up” a trap with a “rival” (personally, I think Ashe was 100% unwitting about McCree’s intentions, whereas Reaper’s actions and words in “Old Soldiers” are so blatantly out of place that it’s pretty easy for the informed reader to realize they’re fake at this point), down to the actual recruitment narrations.

“But I got a call - we’re getting the band back together. They want me, but really? They need you.”

The twist though?

(“You need me, Jack. You need someone to watch your back.”) Ana is not Echo.

And she quite literally “flips the script” on Soldier, to the point where he even jokes about it.

And like, even the last “conversation” in both the short and the comic parallel each other:

Ana: Just tell me one thing. What around you going to do when the fighting’s over?

Echo: Jesse, wait! What are you going to do?

Soldier: 76: I’m a soldier, Ana. Our war’s never over.

McCree: I’ve got some business to attend to.

I’d say that Sombra’s network of characters currently works like this:

“In the shadows” half: This half is composed mainly of Reaper and Sombra. This group is reverse-infiltrating Talon. Sombra runs the distraction element in order to get the other Talon member to trust Reaper more. Meanwhile, Reaper passes on information to Sombra that she either can’t access or isn’t “digital” (e.g. the identities of the Talon leaders). Because Reaper is deep undercover, he can’t be caught being “friendly” with Soldier: 76, Ana, McCree, Winston, and/or Tracer, but because Sombra is effectively passing (or stealing) information from Soldier: 76, Ana, McCree, and Recalled OW, Reaper is still able to coordinate missions with them. Many times, Reaper does something that “accidentally” causes these missions to fail (e.g. bringing tasers, not killing Winston, stepping on Winston’s glasses, etc). This group is an extreme version of Blackwatch.

Characters with a decent likelihood of joining this group in the future include: Widowmaker (if she can break her brainwashing), Moira (depending on if she picks Reaper over Doomfist), possibly Sanjay and/or Symmetra.

“Rogue vigilantes” half: This half is composed mainly of McCree, Soldier: 76, and Ana. This group has ambivalent feelings about both the plans for reverse-infiltration and recalling Overwatch. They’re not really for or outright against either plan. These characters have their own sense of justice and either do not agree with Reaper and Sombra’s methods or are not capable of enacting them. However, this group still has a massive pool of shared and individual skills that can still be effective in other situations, such as heists and thefts, information collection, bounty hunting, and “fringe support” in case something goes wrong. This group is an extreme version of Overwatch.

Characters with a decent likelihood of joining this group in the future include: Zarya (who is “lost” after “Searching” and looking for a new purpose), Hanzo (who rebukes both Genji’s offers and Doomfist’s, but who is interested in Ana’s methodologies), Symmetra (who will likely defect from Vishkar in the future)

In fact, while it isn’t 100% canon, I don’t think it’s a surprise that one of the OWL finals sprays included this group:

The other three sprays include two “canon groups”: Winston, Mei, Tracer, and Emily, and Reinhardt, Brigitte, Torbjörn, and Bastion. So while the above group of Hanzo, Zarya, Sombra, and McCree isn’t confirmed canon, it is definitely an interesting clustering of characters.

And this brings me to the very last part:

5. “Scientist...Whatever.”

McCree: Say hi to the monkey for me.

Echo: Monkey?

McCree, laughing: Scientist. Whatever.

If the rest of the short didn’t implicate McCree’s connections to Sombra and Reaper, then this part sure as hell did.

There are only two other characters in the entire playable Overwatch cast who call Winston the incorrect and joke term “monkey”:

Athena: Winston! He’s going to have all agents’ locations!

Reaper: I’ll be sure to send them your regards, monkey.

Winston: I’m not a monkey!

Reaper: (laughs)

Winston: I’m a scientist!

Reaper.

And:

Sombra: Isn’t it a little embarrassing to get beaten up by a monkey? Doomfist: Have you ever been hit by a giant, genetically engineered gorilla? I could arrange it for you…

Sombra.

The inclusion of McCree calling Winston “the monkey” wasn’t just a cute joke: it’s a pretty blatant reference to Reaper’s dialogue with Winston in “Recall.”

Considering McCree isn’t supposed to be in contact with his old commander and is also supposed to be mad at him, this is a pretty telltale sign of what he’s actually doing.

I went back and looked over Michael Chu’s statement about Reaper and McCree’s interactions in the Recall-Searching era and perhaps unsurprisingly, he doesn’t actually state that they’re not in contact with each other.

(source)

Question: “Some time back you said that McCree and Reinhardt don’t know that Reaper is Reyes. Do they not know because they’ve never met face–errm, mask-to-face, since the incident? I get the feeling that if McCree and Reaper met, McCree would know almost immediately who was under the mask, and Reinhardt would figure out if he fought Reaper in battle (because his only quote, “Traitor!”, is triggered when he kills him).”

Michael: “To clarify about the Reaper/Reyes thing, yes it is because they have not met in the “current day” of Overwatch. The interactions in the game are meant to be what ifs. I do think that McCree would know that Reaper was Reyes if he encountered him.”

What he says, quite literally, is that “they have not met in the ‘current day’ of Overwatch.”

And this is the exact type of vague wording that allows the team to do things like Blackwatch Genji, or Retribution Talon Moira, or hamster Hammond, or create Ashe.

Michael does not say “they haven’t met since the fall of Overwatch.” He does not say “they’re mad at each other.” He doesn’t say “they never communicate after the fall.”

This gives him a lot of room to change this situation as needed. McCree and Reaper could have met before Recall. They could have met up two, three, four years ago. They might not have met at all since the fall, and only communicate through Sombra, in which case, McCree picked up Reaper’s bad habit of calling Winston “monkey” through her.

They just literally haven’t met since Recall, through Reunion, through Reflections, through Masquerade, and probably through Searching, a time period which spans roughly one year to eighteen months (Recall occurs in Spring 2076 to Masquerade in Feb-March 2077 to Searching which is after Orisa is built in 2077).

And the final possibility:

Michael Chu just straight up lied about it.

Because again, the team has no obligation to tell you the plot of their story.

People seem to think that the developers have to be honest with them, especially when answering direct questions about the character or the game. This isn’t true at all. In fact, literally only a month ago, Bill Warnecke blatantly stated that “This patch does contain some balance tweaks and bug fixes, but it isn’t large due to any secret data preloading.” when that exact patch actually contained Ashe for the PTR.

Michael Chu has every right to be cheeky and vague when answering plot questions, and he actually does that pretty frequently:

Just like a magician has every right not to spill their secrets, writers and development teams have every right to keep major plot points, characters, and gameplay changes secret until they’re ready to share them.

Granted, this in turn means that you have every right as a customer not to support them. You shouldn’t take inappropriate or poor taste answers as replacement for good customer service or good fan interactions. If you find answers or statements unsatisfactory, you have every right to stop supporting the game or its developer. I’m saying this specifically because there’s one Big Name Game and Developer currently generating a ton of talk about horrific customer service and complete disregard for fans. Activision-Blizzard itself is not free from criticisms, and several aspects of Overwatch are part of that larger discussion.

But over the last two years of playing this game and becoming deeply invested in the story and world it is building, I’ve come to realize that many fan expectations for the team and for Michael in particular are extremely unfair. You wouldn’t expect your favorite book author or show runners to spoil their own content, and you shouldn’t expect that from a video game writer either. As I said in the paragraph above, this is separate from criticisms about poor fan interactions or poor customer service, or even separate from discussions about game design and game writing. I think there are arguments to be made that the writing in Overwatch struggles in many spots, or is too vague, ambiguous, and ambitious in other spots (such as Retribution, which had several subplots which went directly over most of the fandom’s heads), but expecting the lead writer to just tell you if McCree, Sombra, and Reaper are still paling around or working together to bring down Talon and help Recalled OW is in poor taste on part of the fans.

Summary:

To bring it all together, here’s how McCree fits into the Masquerade theory:

Eight years ago, the Blackwatch Venice Mission goes wrong. Reyes discovers that his “new doctor” Moira O’Deorain has betrayed Blackwatch and is a double-agent for Talon. He convinces Morrison, Amari, Lacroix, and McCree that Blackwatch and Overwatch as a whole are at serious risk of being compromised and endangered. Morrison suspends the Blackwatch division but allows Reyes, McCree, and Genji Shimada to keep operating as agents.

Reyes - with or without the other characters’ approval - beings making plans to reverse-infiltrate Talon to enact retribution on them and bring them down. At some point, he makes contact with Olivia “Sombra” Colomar. She may or may not be a Blackwatch agent herself.

However, the Venice Mission has shown Reyes something else:

McCree is not the agent capable of going deep undercover to protect Reyes’ back.

As I’ve written in “Long Reasons” and “Retribution and Reapercussions”, there are multiple instances in Retribution where McCree isn’t fully “in” on the delicate cat-and-mouse game Gabriel and Moira are playing. Gabriel is balancing a very difficult situation where he must keep Moira on his side because she is quite literally the only person who will keep McCree and Genji alive during this mess, whereas Moira doesn’t realize her cover has actually been blown and is still willing to go along with Gabriel and the team because she thinks she can still slip back into Overwatch without a hitch.

McCree, however, is sort of stuck in the unfortunate spot of being our “main protagonist” so he gets all the narrative clues without really figuring out what’s going on. In a classic spy thriller trope (or perhaps better as an ironic Holmes and Watson moment), McCree is the Watson or Lestrade to Reyes’ Holmes in this event (particularly funny given that McCree got a Sherlock Holmes skin for the Anniversary event immediately after).

What this does show, however, isn’t that McCree somehow isn’t smart or isn’t clever - “Reunion” very clearly shows he can be and is both. Instead, “Retribution” shows that McCree just isn’t very suited for the “real work” of going deep undercover and stringing smart, intelligent, ambitious, and uncompromising characters like Moira, Akande, Maximilien, and Sanjay along.

McCree “plays the fool” well in Retribution because he doesn’t fully get it in the moment.

Sombra, on the other hand, is much better suited for this role: she “plays the fool” well enough to distract other Talon members and draw their attention while letting Reaper “reap the rewards” and make the organization rely on him more and more. They need him to keep an eye on her, they need him to be an unkillable commander, and they need him to help shore up the slacking and ineffective Talon leadership.

And it works.

Reaper gets a spot in the council.

Sombra gets more critical intel about Talon’s structure and its connections to other organizations - such as Sanjay and Vishkar, which she can use to potentially turn characters like Symmetra away from Vishkar’s control.

Again, we don’t know exactly when this cooperation between Reaper and Sombra began, but it’s plausible it started just before the fall of Overwatch or shortly after.

Reyes needs someone to cover his back because as he goes deeper and deeper into Talon’s clutches -

His “partner” Jack Morrison cannot follow him.

(Not that Reyes wants to jeopardize Morrison, to be honest. Protecting Jack is Gabriel’s whole motivation to begin with.)

And one of his most trusted agents is absolutely terrible at going undercover:

Moira: McCree...we need to talk about your...Italian accent.

McCree: Well, I watched a bunch of old Spaghetti Westerns. I thought it was pretty good! Bone-a serr-a, signora. Can I-a get chu-a somethin’ ta drink?

Moira: Please, never do that again.

---

Reyes: This mess was all worth it to see McCree try and pass himself off as a waiter!

McCree: I thought I did just fine.

Reyes: ...You got fired from your cover job, Jesse.

McCree: The lady was being rude! She had it coming.

---

Instead, between “Retribution” and “Uprising”, Reyes starts putting McCree back on the types of covert ops missions he’s good at: sneaking into militarized hot zones, conducting basic reconnaissance, and setting up heists and thefts.

By “Uprising”, this appears to suit both the commander and the agent just fine.

But in the timespan between “Uprising” and the fall of Overwatch (approximately 1 year), things take a dramatic turn for the worse.

Reinhardt his forced to retire, a decision Torbjörn is furious with. We don’t know if Jack was forced by his own superiors to make the decision, or if he made the choice to potentially protect Reinhardt (either from double-agents or from harming himself in battle, tbh). However, this begins to isolate Gabriel and Jack from a support network that kept them secure from Talon.

And then at some point:

Ana loses a critical sniper battle against Widowmaker -

And Gabriel and Jack’s greatest ally is suddenly “dead” to the world.

Either shortly before or shortly after this, McCree leaves Overwatch.

It’s likely that McCree left for his own protection, otherwise he could’ve easily ended up “like Ana”.

...Or worse.

(It is strongly implied that Jack Morrison survived the Swiss Base explosion because he is genetically “enhanced”, something which McCree doesn’t have.)

Again, it isn’t surprising that McCree’s story effectively parallels both The Shrike’s (sharpshooter disappears and returns later as a bounty hunter) and Soldier: 76′s (commander and soldier loyal to BW/OW disappears and reappears later as a vigilante pursuing his own idea of justice). The three characters are unified by this trope and have connections to Sombra.

It also isn’t surprising that Sombra is essentially "a shadow” of the roles that Morrison and McCree had for Reyes prior to the fall: she is a reminder of all that Reyes stands to protect (Jack, the partner who called him “Gabe”) and the agent he considered “effective” and saw great potential in (Jesse, the agent he recruited). But in many ways, Sombra is far, far better suited to operate as Reaper’s partner-in-crime - the shadow to his smoke and mirrors - as he goes deeper and deeper in infiltrating Talon than either Soldier: 76 or McCree is.

Both Soldier: 76 and McCree are much better at blunter approaches to intel collecting and reconnaissance, and both are better at recruiting allies than Reaper’s “masquerading” persona. They appear to be operating on the fringes of both Talon and Recalled OW, searching for other methods that can work in tandem with Reaper and Sombra while not compromising either character’s cover.

And just to really hone it in:

[Such a short statement belies its astonishing truth: We have not seen the last of Overwatch. Being dismantled by the UN only drove them into the shadows.]

We really should have expected this from the moment Overwatch launched.

I mean -

The developers told us to pay attention to the shadows.

#long post #mccree #jesse mccree #sombra #olivia colomar #reaper #gabriel reyes #soldier: 76 #jack morrison #masquerade theory #my essays #my writing #this took me like a month to even attempt #end me #reunion #retribution #uprising

357 notes · View notes

okashiras · 5 years

Text

Notes: Supplementary reading and a sequel of sorts. Enjoy.

KPOP AU PART 1

ao3 link

30 March 2014

If you had told me 4 years ago that Sasuke and Sakura would never officially confirm that they’re dating but would instead, out of nowhere, announce their engagement, I would have laughed my fucking ass off.

Anyway, I’m briefly back from my hiatus. Cheers to all of us! We did it. :’) (Or rather, they did it?)

tags: #CAN YOU BELIEVE IT!??!!, #I CAN’T BELIEVE ITT, #text post

cherry-shadow asked: you are a fandom high priestess!! ur blog is like my sasuke x sakura bible. i missed ur blog, thank u for bringing it back. bless you!!! have a nice day!! :-*

You’re very kind! Thank you!

tags: #cherry-shadow, #ask

sumuwu asked: sandy here, i’m not even that big on kage or kunoichi but i’m so glad for them and for you guys!! i support their mutual hotness. i’m sure they’ll have beautiful and talented babies in the future!!

Thank you so much for your support for our favorite couple!

PS: I love SuMu sibs, too. I just haven’t posted about them (because I’m always on a SS high). Looking forward to their comeback.

tags: #sumuwu, #ask

Anonymous asked: OH MY GOD YOU’RE BACK!!!!!1 will ur inbox be open for info/translation/general questions?? Asking for a friend. Lol ok bye!!! I love u ;A;

Haha, yes! For now. I just needed an outlet for all this excess energy and excitement. Thanks for still having me! I’ll try to reply as much as I can. But no promises that I can answer them all. ;;

tags: #Anonymous, #ask

Anonymous asked: now that they’re confirmed to have been dating for years (!!!!), i couldn’t help but want to review their interactions. do u recall moments in shows and such where it looks like their members are teasing them??

The members of Kage and Kunoichi have been kind of friends in varying capacities since before they even debuted so they’d always greet and bow to each other during shows and events. Nothing really special there. Unless we reach. Which, as you know, is exactly what this blog is for.

Since Anon specifically mentioned members (plural), I will only address moments where multiple members do the teasing.

(2007) Kiba and Naruto are rowdy hype men while the three members are more reserved, except when Sai does weird dances at select performances. Which is why when Kunoichi did their first performance ever at the KChart Music Awards, we can see Sasuke in this fancam (link) looking like he’s reprimanding Kiba, Naruto, and Sai because it distracts him from watching the girls (or just one girl?) perform.

(2010) This Kunoichi fancam from Konoha Music Awards in November (link) shows the girls standing while Rock Lee performs on stage. On Sakura’s side, you can see members of a boy group who keep moving and shuffling around. Another fancam (link) revealed that it was actually Kage members trying to switch places with each other.

So the member order was as follows: Tenten, Hinata, Ino, Sakura, Kiba, Sai, Sasuke, Naruto, Neji. When Kiba realized who he was next to, he walked away and tried to get in between Sasuke and Naruto. The two finally budged after a while, but Kiba was still unsatisfied because Sai was still between Sasuke and Sakura. So he went back and whispered something to Sai who promptly moved away and followed Kiba to stand between Naruto and Sasuke. Sasuke is now beside Sakura. Mission accomplished, guys.

(2011) In this Kunoichi fancam reaction to Kage’s stage on the KChart Music Awards (link), everyone was standing up. Unfortunately, the members were situated at the back, and Sakura, wearing combat boots, was at a height disadvantage. But the members came to her rescue when it was Sasuke’s turn in the spotlight. Ino who was the tallest member of the night thanks to her sky-high platforms, and Tenten the actual tallest member were whispering to Sakura, and looked like they were reporting and giving her a blow-by-blow account of what was happening on stage.

(2013) In this fancam of Kage’s reaction (link) to Sakura accepting the Best Female Solo for Courage at the Golden Leaf Awards, we see Naruto and Kiba who are smirking as they turn to a decidedly blank-faced Sasuke. Neji turns to their direction too, looking mildly exasperated.

tags: #masterpost, #Anonymous, #ask, #all of naruto’s teasing warrants a post of its own tbh

Anonymous asked: “#all of naruto’s teasing warrants a post of its own tbh” DUDE??!! please make that post a reality!! please!!!! i’ll give u my first born!! :)))

Haha! Okay, since there’s a bunch of you asking in my inbox: yes, the Naruto masterpost is underway. It’s gonna take a while but please look out for it if not by the end of this week then next week. Kinda swamped with work at the moment.

tags: #Anonymous, #ask

Anonymous asked: love you’re blog! :) Just wondering, who’s you’re bias in Kage??

Thanks! My bias is Neji because he’s the most fabulous.

tags: #Anonymous, #ask

Anonymous asked: hi!! do u have a link to the interview where they talk abt that line from shadows?? thanks

There were different articles with varying quotes from that interview (during SAGE album promotion, the one held in Konoha Mountain Villa back in March 2012) so I’m translating by combining the info from these articles: (x,x)

Q: Naruto, was the line “You are the sunshine in spring” from “Shadows” written for someone in particular?

Naruto: Uh, that’s— It’s not my place to say, sorry. Sasuke?

Sasuke: No comment.

Q: Is it perhaps about Hinata? She has the ‘sun’ character in her name.

Naruto: She does?

Sasuke: I wrote that line.

tags: #Anonymous, #ask

SS movie date in Wave Country (2012)

I just needed to update this post in light of new information.

In the Kage Konoha Mountain Villa interview 2012 (the one I linked in the previous post), Sasuke was recorded saying: “I like classic action movies. The most recent one I saw was In a Grove (藪の中 Yabu no Naka).”

Two months prior, Sakura uploaded a video of the instrumental ‘Prologue’ originally from the soundtrack of a film Rokurota. Both In a Grove and Rokurota are films by the director Makino Chikao which led people to speculate if the connection ends there or if there’s more. So I did a little investigating.

Sakura posted the video on the evening of 31 January 2012. During that time, Sakura was in Wave Country where she was a guest performer for Kage’s show in Sector D District. I searched the cinemas around that area and found one that at the time was having a director Makino Chikao retrospective. (You can check out their site here: link) I wasn’t able to see the list of films exhibited to confirm but I have no doubts that both In a Grove and Rokurota were screened there, especially since both films are critically-acclaimed and universally loved. And it’s likely that Sakura and Sasuke went to these screenings together.

Furthermore, you know what’s in front of Kaiza Theatre? An Owson grocery mart, aka the same one where those pictures of Sasuke and Sakura were taken the same year (link). See the side by side comparison (link) and note the same shelves and wall paint. And of course, those photos led to Danzo’s damage control denial of the dating rumors, and then Sasuke’s infamous “[KGE] is just a workplace” statement. Y’all know the rest.

tags: #text post

Anonymous: any opinions on danzo? lol

None. Hope he enjoys retirement.

tags: #Anonymous, #ask

yrzra asked: Hi! What’s your favorite Sakura era/hairstyle?

All Sakura is good Sakura to me! But if I have to pick one, I’d say when she came out with chin-length hair on her solo debut. It signified a new era, a new sound, and I was honestly blown away when I first saw it. That’s why it holds a special place in my heart.

tags: #yrzra, #ask, #little known fact: i prefer sakura’s solo songs, #but i still love kunoichi very much, #ino can step on my neck anytime

Anonymous asked: Wasn’t there an analysis of Heaven and Earth mv about Sakura’s romantic relationships? Or do you know the post I’m referring to?

Hm, sorry, I don’t remember that.

tags: #Anonymous, ask, #i personally don’t think it’s about her relationships at all?, #just about striving for self-improvement?, #which is a common theme in her lyrics

Masterpost of notable moments of Naruto being the SS fan club president

Note: As promised, here it is. If you have anything else to add, please don’t hesitate to reply/message me.

Let me preface this with a little background on Uzumaki Naruto. Naruto and Sasuke are the closest to each other in Kage not only because they are the two youngest members of the group, but also because they started training in KGE in the same year. The other trainee who started the same year they did was none other than Haruno Sakura. The three of them were said to be friendly even after they debuted in their respective groups. And it’s because of this that I believe they are privy to each other’s lives and relationships, and would, like any regular friends, every now and then tease the crap out of each other.

(2007) [VIDEO STAR] - Naruto talks about Kage members + colors 20070728

Naruto’s first solo guesting in Video Star variety talk show. There was a part where he was asked to describe the members of Kage via color association. (@ 2:11)

Izumu K: So black for Sai-kun, red for Kiba-kun, white for Neji-kun—

Naruto U: Yeah— Oh, no, not white. Ivory. Neji is very specific about this, you see.

Kotetsu H: Right, right.

Izumu K: What about Sasuke-kun?

Naruto U: Sasuke is... pink. Yeah. Pink. Pretty and memorable color. Lots of energy. (laughs)

Kotetsu H: Pink? For Uchiha Sasuke-kun? Really? Isn’t that a bit— (laughs)

Naruto U: Oh, you know what, scratch that. He’s gonna send me angry texts if he sees this. Okay, I’ll change it. Let’s see...

Kotetsu H: (laughs) Why would he?

Naruto U: Got it! Green. Nice, refreshing green.

Izumu K: Konoha green.

Naruto U: Yeah, yeah. Sure, green. (turns to the camera) I changed it, Sasuke! If you’re watching this, don’t be mad at me. (laughs)

Kotetsu H: Sasuke-kun, please take it easy on Naruto-kun.

Izumu K: Okay, what about you?

Naruto U: Orange, of course!

Pink is too obviously referring to Sakura/her signature hair color which is especially obvious since Kunoichi just debuted around the time of this interview, so Naruto changed it to green to prevent Sasuke’s wrath. But you know what else is green? Sakura’s eye color. Thanks, Naruto! Your subtlety is unparalleled.

(2007) KAGE reaction to KUNOICHI performance - MINDBLOWER + BLOOM @ Konoha Music Awards

Sasuke is a famously stoic cold city guy at award shows, especially when sat beside Naruto who dances exuberantly to every other performance. That is, until Kunoichi debuted. Sasuke would begin showing signs of life whenever Kunoichi performed, like foot tapping, some head bobbing here and there, and some stray finger flicking actions during the Mindblower chorus.

Anyway, in this particular performance, Naruto elbow nudges Sasuke on his side (pretty hardly, if Sasuke’s annoyed expression is anything to go by) just as Sakura’s verse is about to come on. (@ 1:32)

(2008) [FULL/ENG SUB] [HD] 080805 Idols Weekly EP 56 - KAGE Part 1

KAGE’s appearance in Idols Weekly where Naruto said he would join Kunoichi because his group kept betraying him, and then he said he would drag Sasuke along with him. He didn’t get to elaborate on why exactly because he was cut off by Sasuke’s glare.

Okay, this is kind of a reach but they were all just previously nailing the Bloom choreography, and then Naruto was dragging Sasuke specifically to join Kunoichi. Why just Sasuke? All of Kage are on friendly terms with Kunoichi members. That’s why I’m inclined to believe Naruto was teasing him because Sasuke has eyes on someone in Kunoichi. And we all know who.

(2009) [Music Bank K-Chart] 2nd Week of January - SN, Sound5

Sakura had the opportunity to host Music Bank for January. At the time, Sasuke and Naruto were promoting their subunit single “The Valley.” On the one episode that month where they performed, during the K-Chart announcement part, you can see Naruto subtly (not really) pushing Sasuke to his right. When the camera switches to wide shot, it appears that Sakura was on standby from hosting duties a few feet away over at Sasuke’s right side the whole time. (@9:42)

(2010) Sasuke was in Snow Country on a personal schedule and posted a rare picture of himself. Well, kind of. It was him looking like a hypebeast cryptid wearing multiple layers of winter clothes and scarves, against the backdrop of flower trees in Land of Spring (Snow Country’s capital). Captioned: ”wish you were here.” (My god he is so basic sometimes, I can’t.)

Anyway, on the said post, Naruto left a comment of around 15 cherry blossom emojis.

Cherry blossom = Sakura. King of subtlety…

Sasuke deletes this post five minutes later (which would have been suspect if he wasn’t such a serial post deleter). But luckily, we still have a screenshot which includes Naruto’s comment.

[IMAGE: @sasuke_deleted]

(Also note that a month prior to the announcement of their engagement, Sasuke and Sakura were reported to have had a rendezvous in Snow country. That place must be significant to them and Naruto being in their inner circle probably knows why this early on.)

(2010) [20102310] Naruto’s KLIVE Chat

Naruto was promoting his solo mini album and did a KLive broadcast where he called some Kage members. During his phone call with Sasuke, out of nowhere, Naruto mentioned Sakura. (@ 40:07)

N: Anyway, Sasuke, aren’t you preparing for your final show this week?

S: Mm.

N: All Kage members are supporting you. Not me, though. But the rest of them do, apparently.

S: Make yourself useful and promote my show.

N: I’ll do you one better. I’ll call Kunoichi and ask them to come to your concert.

S: What?

N: Yeah, I’ll personally pick Sakura-chan up and make sure she’s there.

S: [unintelligible]

N: Sasuke, what?

S: I said you’re an idiot.

(2011) Sakura was reported to have fainted from exhaustion after the last set at Kunoichi’s concert late October 2011. (This was the third time it had happened [that we know of!!!] and it honestly says a lot about what little regard KGE had for their artists.)

Meanwhile, Kage was doing their second to the last fanmeet scheduled in Earth Country. But on that night, Sasuke and Naruto took a red-eye from Iwa to Konoha. There are no pictures, only some K-netizens reports of Sasuke and Naruto entering Konoha General at around 8 am. (Some eyewitness accounts said that Sasuke appeared to be bringing a pillow.) At 10 am the same day, Naruto was spotted in his orange BMW convertible hanging around the KGE building, while Sasuke was nowhere in sight.

It can be surmised that Naruto, being a good friend, accompanied Sasuke so he can visit Sakura. But there’s more.

Konoha General to KGE building is a one-hour drive, but seeing how Naruto got his car and a new set of clothes, he most likely headed to his apartment first, which would add more or less 30 minutes to his journey. If he arrived at 8 am in Konoha General, but was already in KGE building by 10, that would mean he only stayed in the hospital for about 15 to 30 minutes at most.

I imagine what happened was: Naruto accompanied Sasuke from Iwa to Konoha, probably said hi to Sakura for a bit (if she was already conscious by then), and then promptly left them alone to have their moment. :’)

(2011) 30 October. Sasuke’s K-D Magazine photoshoot previews were released. Sakura liked one of the posts from the K-D account. Later, she posted a cute video selfie with heart eyes filter with ねぇ聞こえますか？(Can You Hear Me?) an old love song, playing in the background. Her timeline was probably filled with Sasuke’s pictures that she just had to post some kind of lovey-dovey reaction to it. A few hours later, Naruto commented with a (very knowing) smirking face emoji.

[IMAGE: @narukage_likes]

(2013) 8 August. Naruto posted a picture of two mochi (pink and blue) from Amaguriama, with the caption, “Look how sweet my friends are.” He tagged Sasuke in the blue one. Who else could the pink one be?

[IMAGE: @narukage]

That’s all I know for now. Naruto hasn’t updated his account with anything SS-related since the engagement was announced, which is really odd for him. (Maybe he’s still busy partying because his OTP is canon?) When he posts something, I’ll update this accordingly.

tags: #masterpost, #text post

bl00m asked: THANK YOU SO MUCH FOR THAT MASTERPOST!! My life is significantly better because of it! But just wondering, since Sakura and Ino refer to themselves as best friends, do we have an Ino-teasing-Sakura-about-Sasuke moment, too?

Seems to me like Ino is much too professional to tease so I only found a couple. Hope that’s okay.

(2007) K-D Kunoichi Feature (magazine issue published around the time after Kunoichi’s debut):

Q: Out of the four of you, Ino and Sakura were the first ones to sign under KG and become trainees. What were your first impressions of each other? Has it changed now?

Sakura: I thought Ino was full of confidence and charisma and that hasn’t changed until now.

Ino: Sakura used to be really shy and quiet but clearly she has bloomed since then.

Sakura: Having someone my own age really helped, I think. We pushed each other to work and get better. It was kind of a friendly rivalry.

Ino: Yeah, rivalry, not just in terms of work, though. I used to have a crush on another trainee at that time, and then one day, Sakura announced that she—

Sakura: Oh my god! Can we not?

They didn’t outright say that it was Sasuke whom Sakura and Ino were crushing on, but it’s kind of general knowledge that Sasuke was quite popular with the KGE trainees not only because he was the younger brother of Akatsuki’s Uchiha Itachi but because he is good-looking and talented, so it’s not a stretch to assume Ino was talking about Sasuke and was teasing Sakura about it.

(2009) [VIDEO STAR] - Kunoichi (FULL EP) (@14:23):

Izumu: Any music you’re currently listening to?

Tenten: Believe it or not, I’ve been listening to a lot of trot music recently, like Might Guy, and stuff. I like the joy in it and I would like to also bring that kind of energy on stage someday.

Sakura: Creation , the album by Tsunade. I’m interested in albums that have some sort of narrative or a theme that makes everything cohesive, as opposed to trying to make hits after hits and then just compiling them all in the end. She’s certainly not the first to do something like it, but I thought it was groundbreaking for a pop artist, so…

Ino: We like Kage, too, don’t we, Sakura?

Tenten: (laughs)

Sakura: I— Well, everyone likes Kage for sure.

Kotetsu: Right, you did collaborate with them on a song in their album last year.

Sakura: Yeah.

Ino: (quietly) Is that what the kids call it these days?

Tenten: (laughs)

That innuendo, though.

tags: #bl00m, #ask

Anonymous asked: it’s funny reading your posts now and realizing how much it all makes sense like how did no one else (but us) seE THIS COMING??? we’ve endured being called DELUSIONAL for years!!!! i feel so vindicated now so i’m literally never gonna shut up about this LMAO

RIGHT?! I’m sure I’m not the only one who has remained quiet and kept to myself when I’m with other fans because I’m in the minority for shipping Sasuke and Sakura while most of them shipped the boys with each other. I don’t really mind it, but, you know, when it’s real, IT’S REAL.

And it feels so good to be right.

tags: #Anonymous, #ask

Anonymous asked: how’s life for a grown ass adult still projecting on other people’s relationships like ur 13 lmfao

How’s life for someone who has to type with only 2 brain cells?

tags: #Anonymous, #ask

kageyah asked: gawd, what a rude anon that was. don’t let those lowlifes bother you. i’ve been enjoying your recent posts a lot and it’s so fun to see you back again on my dashboard. i missed you sm. ^_^

Kags!! Thank you! I missed you, too! Nah, don’t worry. Sasuke and Sakura are getting married so I’m unfazed and unbothered by virtually anything. Haha!

tags: #kageyah, #ask

lildonut: i love your blog!!!! that masterpost gave me life!!! i was wondering if you have any fic recs?? Thanks <3

Thank you! I don’t really read fics, sorry. I have a very little scope of imagination so reality is enough to keep me interested. But maybe someone here can help you? Anyone?

edit: Thanks, @darliang!!

These, our bodies, possessed by light by RikkudoS — “‘Tell me we’ll never get used to it.’ Sasuke and Sakura through the years. Canon.”

Cherry Bombs by xXxFullMoonxXx — “Double dates are easy enough. That is, until you end up falling for the wrong person. High School AU.”

Of Demos and First Kisses by sugimura — "5 times Sasuke and Sakura wrote songs together and the 1 time they didn’t. Canon."

Under the Same Sky by msshkshmt — “Uchiha Sasuke expects to die in battle. But seeing this pink-haired girl cry for him (again and again), makes him wish that wasn’t the case. Ninjas AU.”

tags: #lildonut, #ask, #fic recs

Anonymous asked: Do you have any idea as to when and how exactly Sasuke and Sakura started dating? Other than the 5 years that Sasuke mentioned in his fan page message? Thanks! Love your blog!

Thanks!

By the way, I love how Sasuke is known to be very private with his personal life and relationships but would, intentionally or not, obliquely reveal details like how they’ve been dating for 5 years already.

Anyway. Well, I can’t really say anything with certainty but if I were to extrapolate and make an *educated guess*, I’d say they probably started dating officially mid to late 2009. As far as I can recall, that’s also when dating gossips about them started popping up. Also the fact that they started wearing matching white gold bands late ‘09-early ‘10 (I’ll make a separate post about this later) just solidified to me that they really did start dating in 2009.

Prior to my projected time, their collaborations have been frequent, starting with Sakura helping to write a song for Kage, and then both of them being featured on each other’s solo projects. And even before that, it’s kind of general knowledge that they’ve been fairly close as trainees (not to mention, Sakura has allegedly been crushing on him before), so they already had that foundation. There’s that mutual respect for each other and each other’s talents that, over the course of their collaborations, probably grew into something more.

tags: #Anonymous, #ask

Anonymous: re: how sasuke and sakura started dating, i would also like to add that since they are the most hardworking out of the members of their respective groups, they are probably the trainees who used to work overtime the most and got close because of it, probably helped and looked out for each other too. sakura used to say dancing wasn’t her strongest suit while it came naturally for sasuke so maybe he helped her with that. conversely, since sakura is reportedly an A+ student, she must’ve helped him with studies as well. they probs already have a mutual understanding but couldn’t be official cuz of the dating ban. ^_^

Ah, I’m actually not entirely sure if the dating ban is real, but what you’ve said is possible. Can’t say anything conclusively, though.

tags: #Anonymous, #ask

Anonymous asked: wher do sassuke and saura have sex???

How tf would I know lol

tags: #Anonymous, #ask

List of alleged Sasuke x Sakura couple items

These are only the more important, more unique items. So don’t bother sending me pictures of them holding identical paper bags from Sannin. They aren’t the only idols who shop from that brand.

***

(2009-2010) White gold band

Sasuke is not that big on accessories. If we do see him fully accessorized, it’s because he is styled for promotional materials, and stage or music video looks. Otherwise, he doesn’t wear much accessories other than a standard watch, etc. That’s why it was so glaringly obvious when he started wearing a white gold band on his left pinky finger (note: pinky = pink = Sakura, lol!) in December 2009, which led fans to speculate if he is in a relationship. Everyone was suddenly on the lookout for a similar ring worn by idols and celebrities. Especially Sakura whom Sasuke was rumored to be dating that year.

Sakura accessorizes quite a bit but has never been seen wearing the said band. That is, until she had a fan meet in March of 2010. Sakura fansite First Love took HQ pictures of her in the event. In one of them, she leaned over while signing an autograph for a fan and consequently revealed the necklace she’s wearing inside her blouse, and behold, the white gold band hanging on it. It took quite a lot zooming in and adjusting the photograph which is why the legitimacy was contentious among fans, but you can see it for yourself here.

[IMAGE: White gold band]

[IMAGE: Sasuke Konoha airport pic white gold band]

[IMAGE: Sakura necklace zoom in]

***

(2011) Chair

Sakura posts a picture of her succulents by the window of her house, the chair from Sasuke’s Heavenly Hand music video is seen in the corner. It’s a one-of-a-kind modern chair by Konoha master carpenter Kanna, so it couldn’t have been a duplicate.

[IMAGE: MV screenshot]

[IMAGE: @sakurah]

***

(2012-2013) Ceramic vase

Sasuke posted a picture of a Hanasaki-style ceramic vase by Masho’s protégé ceramist, Kanyu, which was exhibited and auctioned at Leaf Gallery, and captioned it (now deleted) “Mine.”

[IMAGE: @sasuke_deleted]

The following year, Sakura posted a photo of her bed after a concert tour with the caption “Home Sweet Home.” On the bookshelf on the right side, the same vase is seen. Note the pure white color and cracks on the surface that resemble intertwining flowers.

[IMAGE: @sakurah]

Did he give it to her or was she able to procure an identical one? I’m inclined to believe in the former, but either way, cute.

***

(2013) Chambray shirt

Sakura was photographed at Konoha airport wearing a chambray shirt, which is similar to a shirt that Sasuke was wearing in the behind-the-scenes photo of his album back in 2009. The shirts have an identical tear at the left collar.

According to fashion fansite SakuraCloset, this shirt is from Sannin Men’s chambray shirt. This is how it originally looked on the runway. No tear.

[IMAGE: Sannin RTW F/W 2006]

So it’s either a huge coincidence that Sasuke and Sakura have identical tears on the same brand of shirt, or it’s just the same shirt that they share for some reason*.

*They were dating.

tags: #masterpost, #text post

Anonymous asked: you forgot the beanie that often sasuke wears at airports which was spotted worn by sakura.

You mean in the Road of Life webisode from last year? No, it’s the same color but they’re different. Sakura was wearing a fisherman beanie, while Sasuke usually wears a slouchy one.

tags: #Anonymous, #ask

mindbl0wn: do you know what the strong 100 will be about? Love ur blog ^_^

Sorry, it took a while to answer this. According to these articles (x,x), it’s gonna be a heist film with an all-female cast. Sakura’s appearance will be brief (a cameo maybe?) but apparently she does her own stunts.

tags: #that’s my girl, #mindbl0wn, #ask

Anonymous asked: lol i still keep seeing antis tryna say sakura might be doing it for attention and sasuke is just pity marrying her or using her as a beard to cover up another relationship or sth man i can’t with them anymore

I really worry about people who spread stuff like this. Like, please give your faves the credit they deserve!

Sasuke “ I-take-relationships-very-seriously” Uchiha marrying someone for shits? They can��t even make him forego his IG feed aesthetic to promote his group/members’ stuff, let alone force him to marry someone out of pity or publicity or whatever.

And Sakura. Why would she marry for publicity? She’s already famous and influential on her own, and not to mention, rich from all the songwriting royalties among other things. She doesn’t need clout. Least of all from Sasuke or the Uchiha. Like 90% of the hate directed towards her come from ugly Sasuke/Hoekage stans and weirdos who have conglomerate boners. She need not subject herself to all that.

They are also, by the way, at the height of their respective careers. If they cared all that much about their image, wouldn’t they wait until they’re in their early 30s to marry like most idols? They could potentially be throwing away endorsement deals from brands who prefer celebrities who are single to appease the fans who feel like they have some sort of ownership towards idols.

And yet! And yet despite everything, they chose to make their relationship public in their own terms.

(Also, note the timing of their announcement. It’s a few months after Hatake Kakashi became the new CEO. It’s like the management up until then has been the main reason that has kept them from coming out with their relationship, which is why the ‘secrecy’ of it felt kinda half-hearted and they’ve been [knowingly or not] dropping hints.)

Clearly, they just didn’t care and they couldn’t wait to spend the rest of their lives married to each other. It’s not that deep. You don’t have to like it. But if you love them as you claim, then respect their decision and stop spreading rumors like that.

tags: #Anonymous, #ask

WAIT WHAT

tags: #text post

OH MY GOD OH MY GOD OH MY GOD OH MY GOD OH MY GOD OH MY GOD

tags: #IS THIS REAL, #AM I DREAMING, #GUYS!!!!!!!!!!, #text post

THEY REALL YDID IT OH MY GODD!!!!11 ;;;

tags: #text post

Un-Follow Me Now, This Is Gonna Be the Only Thing I Post About For The Next Week. Ive Wanted This For Years Fuck. What The Fuck.

tags: #text post

Anonymous: Lol theres still a few months before the wedding date so they might still cancel it and break up lmfao xD

I delayed answering this to avoid jinxing it but guess what, babe:

BREAKING: UCHIHA SASUKE AND HARUNO SAKURA OFFICIALLY GET MARRIED

July 17, 2014

Uchiha Sasuke and Haruno Sakura have made it official!

Yesterday, the two were reportedly spotted at the Konoha offices to file for their marriage registration. On July 17, the two officially got married in a private ceremony.

The couple initially announced their engagement last March, with the wedding that was supposed to be held November 5 later this year.

Representatives say that the newlywed couple “opted for a small and private wedding along with their loved ones, in favor of donating the expenses that was supposed to be for their ceremony to the pediatric ward of Konoha General Hospital.”

Uchiha Sasuke is best known as a member and the primary lyricist of boy group Kage under KG Entertainment. Haruno Sakura is known as a member of girl group Kunoichi under the same company. Both have gone on to have successful solo careers.

Congratulations to the happy couple!

source: knewsdaily

tags: #Anonymous, #ask

Sasuke and Sakura: We will get married on November 5 this year.

Also, Sasuke and Sakura: sothatwasafuckinglie.jpg

tags: #WHEN WILL THEY LET ME LIVE!!!!!, #text post

I’M SHAKINGG;;

tags: #REFRESHING EVERY 30 SECS FOR UPDATES, #text post

SAKURA IS SO BEAUTIFUL

tags: #THAT’S IT, #THAT’S THE POST, #text post

Attendees’ social media posts (so far)

Kakashi: posted a photo of the still empty venue, but everything is prepared already. The flower ceiling is especially striking. (There appears to be not more than 30 chairs for the guests. I guess it really is a small wedding.)

“I’m on time for once. #SasuSakuCouple #AmIDoingThisRight #lol”

[IMAGE: @kh_tactics]

Ino: posted picture of Sakura holding a bouquet of Baby’s Breath flowers, smiling contently.

“My baby girl is married! I’m so emotional right now and can’t even form a proper message. I’m proud to have seen you blossom right before my eyes, and I feel lucky to get to call you my best friend. I wish you all the happiness in the world. I love you!”

[IMAGE: @xxinoxx]

Sai: posted a video of Naruto and Kiba having a dance showdown at the reception.

“#lit”

[IMAGE: @sai_00]

Hinata: posted a picture of the flower arrangement at the table.

“Congrats”

[IMAGE: @hinata_hyuuga_official]

Kiba: posted a group selfie of the Kage boys being rowdy, Sasuke and Neji looking unimpressed in the back.

[IMAGE: @kibakage]

Tenten: posted a group selfie of Kunoichi being cute.

[IMAGE: @10ten]

Neji: posted a photoset of miscellaneous aesthetics of the wedding (floral ceiling, the food, the lights, details of Sakura’s veil), and a selfie.

“S/S 2014”

[IMAGE: @neji_]

Itachi : posted (1) a photoset of the groom’s and bride’s parents—first photo is a formal one, on the second one, they’re doing finger hearts.

“#familyphoto”

(2) a picture of the silhouettes of Sasuke and Sakura facing each other, seemingly in a happy conversation.

[IMAGE: @itachiuchiha]

tags: #no update from naruto yet, #king of being late, #masterpost, #text post

I know it’s a private affair and I respect that but...

But would it seriously be too much to ask for a proper picture of the newlyweds??

tags: #i love you itachi-nii but what the heck was that??, #do you need your eyes checked perhaps?, #or am i too pedestrian to appreciate the high art-ness of it, #probably that, #in any case: i need the pics PLEASE, #i’ve been a good person, #i deserve this, #text post

Anonymous: do think it’s possibel that sakura is pregnant that’s why they were so quick to marry. Pls reply

Highly unlikely. She would’ve been showing by now and looking at the photos we’ve seen, her stomach is very much flat. Moreover, she was just shooting an action movie where she does her own stunts. You think they’d allow a pregnant woman to do that?

tags: #Anonymous, #ask

Anonymous: YO DID YOU SEE SAKURA’S UPDATE JUST NOW?!?!??!!111

YES!!!! I’m translating it but I’m trying to wait if Sasuke posts something so I can translate that too and (rightfully) post them together.

tags: #Anonymous, #ask

SASUKE

tags: #text post

Sakura and Sasuke post-wedding social media updates

Sakura posted a pic of their hands with the rings, a bouquet of flowers visible on the side, with the caption:

“Today we got married.

We had deviated from our original plan because we wanted to do something meaningful and more like us. As a result, we have decided to just keep the ceremony quiet but, rest assured, full of love.

I’ve never felt so loved as I do at this moment and that’s in huge part because of all of you who have been congratulating us warmly, and have been so patient and understanding of our decisions every step of the way.

Please continue to look kindly upon us as husband and wife. Thank you.

- Sakura“

[IMAGE: @sakurah]

Sasuke, of course, never does what you expect so he didn’t post a message. Instead, he cleared out three rows of his feed with plain white tiles to have a single picture of Sakura looking beautiful in her wedding dress in the middle. The colored picture especially stands out in his generally grayscale feed.

Moreover, he is now following 1 account: @sakurah.

[IMAGE: @sasuke]

tags: #text post

Masterpost of notable moments of Naruto being the SS fan club president

Note: As promised, here it is. If you have anything else to add, please don’t hesitate to reply/message me.

EDIT: Naruto posted a photoset: (1) the newlyweds smiling arm in arm, Sasuke gazing warmly at Sakura, (2) same as the first but they’re looking at each other and smiling, (3) Naruto gets in the picture to pose with the two.

“Why I believe in love”

[IMAGE: @narukage]

Tags: #MY JOB HERE IS DONE, #update, #masterpost, #text post

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#apparently u can't underline on tumbl......#so maybe reading on ao3 is cuter but do whatever u please #fic poop #kpop au #this is uhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh #sasusaku

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nigeiadigitalmarketingcompany · 5 years

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Why We Need Publicly Owned Energy for a Green New Deal

Digital Elixir Why We Need Publicly Owned Energy for a Green New Deal

Public ownership can create hundreds of thousands of jobs in generating energy and in new industry supply chains. There are very few places in the UK where renewable energy can’t happen – wind and solar can be delivered almost everywhere. This creates a huge opportunity to reverse decades of underinvestment in ex-mining communities decimated by Thatcher.

Platform estimates that 40,000 existing oil workers (direct and supply chain) may need to be in a different job by 2030. But their research shows, with ambitious government policies, we can create three to four times as many jobs in clean energy industries.

Right now, government is undermining renewable energy with regressive policies, failing to give vital support to onshore wind and solar – and renewable energy jobs have plunged by a third. This is a disaster. The government needs to reinstate subsidies for solar and deliver an onshore wind boom.

Workers and climate change protestors joined together in an 11 day occupation against the closure of the Vestas wind turbine factory in 2009. (The company has now created some new jobs but not as many as it axed). We could take control over decisions like this – with a publicly owned British company with a long term strategy for turbine manufacture, with workers, citizens and the public on the board.

Offshore wind is touted as a success – but the real story here is that the public is missing out by leaving it to non UK companies (public and private) to pick up the benefits. We should be following the example of countries like Denmark and Sweden – their publicly owned companies DONG and Vattenfall own 32% and 6% of UK offshore wind capacity, respectively. We need our own ‘Waterfall’.

The Labour Energy Forum report ‘Who owns the wind?’ proposes the creation of four major publicly owned offshore wind companies: Scottish Wind, Energy for Londoners, Wind of the North and Floating Cornwall. These would lead the way in investing in and directly operating publicly owned offshore wind capacity. Effectively they would also act as anchor institutions, boosting local and regional economies.

The public sector can build its renewables capacity and expertise and ultimately deliver far more efficiently than the private sector. Modelling work by Frontier Economics for IPPR shows how full public ownership through construction and operation can generate substantial savings for consumers because of the lower cost of capital. In addition, there are the profits coming back to the public purse – Swindon Borough Council has a solar bond that generates £1 million every year.

Connecting Communities to the Grid

The National Grid – which transmits electricity and gas across the country – and the regional distribution companies which distribute energy – were built for an age of coal, oil and nuclear. The future of energy is decentralised and renewable. We need to own this vital infrastructure so we can upgrade it.

The National Grid and regional distribution companies don’t answer to you and me – they answer to often very distant investors. If you’re based in London, your electricity is distributed by UK Power Networks, owned by a Hong Kong company led by one of the richest men in the world. Your gas might well be distributed by Cadent Gas – recently found guilty of leaving residents without gas for up to five months, and putting 775 blocks of flats in danger by keeping no inspection record – owned by a consortium including Macquarie (an Australian investment bank), CIC Capital (owned by China Investment Corporation) and the Qatar Investment Authority.

These private energy monopolies often make it difficult for community groups who want to develop new renewable energy projects, so the process is slower and more expensive than it should be. Communities in Harris and Lewis have been slowed down by National Grid in their effort to develop a wind farm. Communities in Cornwall were told by Western Power Networks (owned by shareholders in New York) that new solar farms would require ‘quite expensive’ investment in infrastructure.

Under public ownership, National Grid and the regional distribution companies would have a duty to work closely with community groups to develop new renewable energy, and to steward public assets and land. In Germany, renewable energy producers have a guaranteed right of access to the electricity grid.

‘Public-Common partnerships’ can be developed – this means councils create shared institutions with cooperatives or community interest companies to manage common resources in a democratic way. In Wolfhagen in Germany, the town’s energy utility is jointly owned by the municipality and a new cooperative. Community energy projects can also be rolled out to power a solar railway (the ‘Riding Sunbeams’project) to help decarbonise transport.

As Andrew Cumbers points out, in Denmark, the government has encouraged local, decentralised wind power on a huge scale, through funding and support for local, collective ownership of turbines. The Danish Wind Turbine Owners Association is an independent, democratically elected membership association set up to represent these small scale, private and cooperative owners. With 5000 members, it provides a strong voice for local communities on energy policy.

Supply Companies That Work for All of Us

Customer satisfaction with the Big Six companies is low. Only 32% of the public trust the energy industry. Tying ourselves in knots to create markets and choice in every sector doesn’t make sense. Energy customers don’t want to switch – 61% of us have never switched company or only switched once – so we pay a loyalty penalty.

Citizens Advice has also shown how we overpay because of the way energy is regulated – this amounts to £11 billion over the past 15 years. The poor are hit hardest, spending 14% of their income on energy and water.

It doesn’t have to be this way. Corporate Watch research suggests each UK household could save £158 a year if energy was publicly owned. Across Europe, bills are around 30% lower when energy companies are in public ownership.

Publicly owned energy supply companies would have a duty to make sure everyone has access to affordable energy. This could include progressive tariffs to tackle over consumption and fuel poverty at the same time by charging high use households more while giving everyone some free energy – alongside a ‘no cut off’ policy.

Forward thinking councils are already created new, inspiring, publicly owned supply companies – with Nottingham-based Robin Hood Energyboldly leading the way and setting up 10 white label partnership agreements with local authorities around the country. Bristol Energyand The People’s Energy Company are also breaking new ground. We need to sign up to get our energy from these companies – then build on these exciting options across the country. Ultimately when we get the privatised energy companies out, regional distribution companies could offer supply to people in the area, but with local companies taking over wherever they exist.

The Green New Deal should also mean we are energy citizens not energy consumers. We’re all part of the war effort against climate change.

Ann Pettifor points out that there are 27 million households in the UK, most built in the Victorian era. We have some of the least efficient housing in Europe, and the highest proportion of fuel poverty – 11% of English households. The Green New Deal is an opportunity to change all that. Every house can become a power station, with double glazing, insulation and solar panels (unless it’s about to be rebuilt).

Trusted, publicly owned companies can create new jobs for advisors to go door to door. Pettifor proposes a ‘carbon army’ of workers, highly qualified, skilled and unskilled workers to retrofit and reconstruct our homes and buildings, advise on cutting energy use and bills and roll out smart meters. This would pay for itself, boosting employment and tax revenue in every region of the UK.

PCS describes the situation perfectly: ‘There is no bailout for the publicly owned climate bank as we’ve already been doing insolvency with the planet for far too long’. We have to ‘remove capital from the driving seat of energy transition.’

Renewable, zero carbon energy. Upgraded infrastructure. Affordable energy for all. And all of it creating new, green, permanent jobs. Let’s do it. Whether you’re a citizen, a worker, part of a community group – or all three – your country needs you.

This article was taken from a recent report published by Common Wealth

Why We Need Publicly Owned Energy for a Green New Deal

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sugiraj-mga2020mi5016 · 3 years

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reflective essay

REFLECTIVE ESSAY

My portfolio shows extensive experience working with VFX, video editing, logo reveals and digital painting. For example, I did a ten second video clip on the topic of global warming for which I came up with an original concept to experiment with a fire simulation. My freelance work also contains digital painting for clients in which I digitally painted their portraits. For another project, I chose the logo of a famous brand and created a ten second logo reveal video. In my free time I created a landscape and fantasy character for a flexible man, inspired by the character of the Captain in Fantastic 4.

In other areas of experimentation, I downloaded a random video and created a motion tracking video. My first attempt was a failure, but I refused to give up, and finally succeeded on my fourth attempt. I created a Mother’s Day poster in which I tried to portray women’s strength and power and the love between mother and son.

I was also inspired by a Ramzan poster I saw on a website and created a Ramzan poster. I experimented with breaking away from the typical use of the color green for Islamic subjects by using blue for the design.

I have also experimented extensively with 3D. I have created several objects including a wine bottle, laptops, a low poly home and shops. I also created a logo using the Tamil letter ‘m’ for a foreign client. They were very impressed with the final product as working with Tamil can be quite challenging.

I created a lyrical video for my song for which I researched about how to create lyrical videos. In my own ideas while I was creating lyrical videos I was firstly confused with that because I had to merge two different ideas into one and I tried my best in first attempt and felt that lyrical texts are to sync the song then I made and this video is also added for my portfolio.

When I began my research for component 1, I took VFX for my research topic. It was a fantastic opportunity to broaden my learning. I focused on the South Indian cinema and advertising sector, as well as on a little bit of Hollywood. I learnt how the VFX industry grew, and gained an understanding of where it is headed in the future.

To study the evolution of the VFX industry, I studied two cinematic eras, and then compared them. The rapid growth of the industry is impressive, and suggests that it will one day come to dominate the way we make films in the future.

For my showreel, I wanted to create real time action to which I could apply my VFX work. Although this was challenging, I really put my heart into it in order to create something that can be a real show-piece to propel me in my career. The line I chose as my starting point and inspiration was ‘The boy has unnatural powers’.

I wrote a story of three scenes based on this in which the boy enters a room. There is a rope hanging over a box in the corner. He takes the rope and begins to twist it. The rope catches fire and begins to burn, opening a portal through which we see a sky and forest. The boy enters this portal, and finally sees a waterfall before him. I faced a number of challenges developing this scene, working with light, rotoscoping, and with my choice of colors. Eventually I had to ignore a few elements in order to complete the work within the short time limit.

As part of my second year work, I also worked on my resume. My instructor suggested that I change a few elements to make it more eye-catching, as well as simpler in design. After that I reworked my resume as he suggested from scratch by listing all the experience I have as a motion graphics artist, beginning with my work on a Tamil movie. I was initially a little confused about what to mention in my experience, but after a few sessions, I was much clearer on how to analyze my past work experience and how to list it chronologically. I was finally able to complete two versions of the resume as well as a cover letter in which I was able to talk about my roles on various free-lancing jobs as well as my coursework. My first resume was points form resume other one was with little bit description about my experience for example I would work as a motion graphics artist and I talk about which kind of work I did and what kind of issue and trouble I faced

Towards the end of the second semester, I had my stage 1 interview session with a person from the industry. It was an amazing learning experience on how to attend an interview and to respond confidently, as well as dress presentably. They asked me three main questions. They asked me why I chose this field as a career. I spent a long time answering this question. The interviewer was very impressed with my portfolio, especially the piece on global warming. She finally asked me how I felt I could contribute to their company, and I enjoyed answering this question in some detail. At the end of it, I felt my confidence really grow, and feel much more prepared to face an interviewer in the future.

Towards the end of this program I had a lot of problems and issues with my pc, which seriously impacted my ability to complete work before the deadline. I also had power supply issues, and unfortunately missed an important feedback session. All of this was hard to resolve due to the lockdown and pandemic issue. However, I was able to find a supplier who was able to fix my PC, and I managed to get back on track to finish my pending work and incorporate feedback on various projects.

Summary of entire studies

This module has helped me to promote myself and my talent as a VFX artist, shown me how to work on a resume, as well as how to present myself in personal statements and letters by researching the goals and values of the company I am interested in and showing that I value their work, and want to be a part of it. This experience gives me a lesson learnt that I have to put into my company and I hope that will work perfectly and in future I will make my company to be famous and put my best efforts in my field.

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joehas · 4 years

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Q&A with John O´Loughlin.

A BIT ABOUT YOU

Q1 Who are you and what do you do?

I am Joe Haslam and I´m the Executive Director of the Owners Scaleup Program and a Professor at IE Business School in Madrid. At IE, I teach classes on scaling and scaleups to University level students, to MBAs and to Senior Executives.

I´m also a director a number of companies, mainly scaleups or startups started by serial entrepreneurs. I do a lot of speaking at conferences (now mostly virtual) as well as writing and podcasting.

To quote Peter Drucker “Entrepreneurship is risky mainly because so few of the so-called entrepreneurs know what they are doing” Having spoken to maybe 500 founders in the last ten years, I´ve a fair idea what you should not do to scale a business. I put the emphasis on not making known mistakes so that you give yourself the best chance to figure out what it is you need to do.

Q2. What is your background?

After graduation from UCC, I went to London to work for Perot Systems as a Consultant. That was a great status job but it was no way to live so I came back to Ireland.

A group of us left consulting to set up a company called Marrakech during the dot com era. We raised over seventy million dollars and grew to over 250 people. This is where my interest in scaling up comes from.

After four years, I moved to Madrid to do an MBA at IE Business School. The first weekend, I met this girl and we are still together. In terms of lifestyle, I think that Madrid and Berlin are the two best cities to live in Europe.

Q3. Favourite business news resource?

CB Insights is a wonderful resource. It tells you, often on one page, who the cool companies are in each sector. My students absolute love this visual storytelling.

I used to read The Economist every Saturday morning when it arrived on paper but I got out of the habit of doing this when i subscribed online instead. This makes no sense, I know, but habits are powerful.

My news now comes from links I find on Twitter. I think it´s a wonderful resource and it allows me to keep in touch with the news from places i previously lived in. You don´t have to live in Silicon Valley anymore to keep in touch with what is going on there.

Q4. If I was to ask for a business book recommendation?

Trillion Dollar Coach: The Leadership Playbook of Silicon Valley's Bill Campbell is a great way to understand the importance of coaching. Coaching is much misunderstood. It´s not about telling someone what to do but to help them to find the answers themselves. Business should be like sport where everyone has a coach.

I think every man should read The Female Eunuch by Germaine Greer. It has helped me a lot to understand how women feel in certain circumstances. Some men think they are helping but they are doing exactly the wrong thing.

Scaleup books are many. The best is Scaling Up by Verne Harnish. High Growth Handbook by Elad Gil is very Silicon Valley but also very well structured. Blitzscaling by Reid Hoffman is a strategy I disagree with but you have to read it anyway. Scaling by Roland Siebelink makes the really important points in a way that you cant miss them. Growth and Scaleup Enablers for SMEs by Veijo Komulainen is deceptively useful.

Q5. Are you listening to any good business podcasts at the moment?

Like a lot of people, I listen to Kara Swisher and Scott Galloway twice a week. I can see why it annoys people but its makes business fun and that is welcome. In contrast the a16z podcasts are much richer in content but you do have to force yourself to listen to the end.

In terms of scaleup resources, we are very well served. There is Scaleup Valley by Mike Dias, Masters of Scale by Reid Hoffman, Notion Capital´s “Pain of Scale” and The Scaling Startups Podcast by Ross Sheil.

While listening in the car or walking to work is better than nothing, I also recommend that you group listen. By this I mean to schedule a meeting with the management team. Listen to it together and then discuss immediately.

Q6. What’s your best bit of business advice?

I have got loads of this.

Find out what you are good at and get even better at it. Find out what you are bad at and get other people to do it.

Getting a “No” only means “no” today. Failure is part of the process of growing, so don´t take it personally. If you are shooting for big things then you should expect to fail.

Follow up. I see this all the time. Someone makes an intro, you have a meeting but you move onto another meeting before mining the first one fully.

Vulnerability is a super power. Ask for help. People are mostly good and will help if you are open about asking for it.

Q7. What do you do to wind down/relax?

I run 5km, 5 times a week. I also swim 1,000 meters twice a week. I hate bicycles though so I am not a Mamil.

As you get older, if you don´t do physical exercise then everything falls apart. Also it´s a time to think. And thinking cannot be done in short batches. I can think of many problems where the solution only came after thinking uninterrupted about it for more than half an hour.

Stress is a real issue so i try to have one entire day every week when i have no meetings or deadlines. This takes the pressure off and lets me go into random areas as opposed to the here and now. We have really only four productive hours a day, so I try to block off those and then do other not so intellectual tasks the rest of the time.

ABOUT YOUR BUSINESS

Q8. Why are you in the news?

I´m never not in the news. It´s part of my job to be in the news! Last week it was Saudi Arabia, the week before India, the week before that South Korea.

Engaging with people is how you learn. I´m really hard on my students who come to class just to listen. E.M. Forster's quote “How do I know what I think until I see what I say” captures this exactly.

To quote a friend of mine from a private conversation “clear, strong writing was now a differentiator in the tech industry in the same way design had been in the early 2000s, when Apple schooled everyone on what actually created value. Tech companies had spent ten years catching up on design, investing in talent and buying up studios—but they didn’t yet correctly value written communication. Internally, to customers, or to the public”

Q9. What is your biggest business challenge at present?

I have never had any expectation of stability so the Coronavirus disease (COVID-19) is just what it is this year. There are always challenges, they just have different names.

It is now more difficult to travel to Madrid for the Owners Scaleup Program, particularly from Latin America. A good Professor can creates an atmosphere in a classroom that is hard to match online. They also miss out on the social part of the program. Eating Cachopo and drinking Mencia in Restaurante Asturiano Carlos Tartiere is an important part of the Program.

I used to travel 20 weeks a year to promote IE Business School so that doesnt happen either anymore. Nothing beats going to a country to get to know something about the people in your classroom. In February, I did a six city tour of Mexico (Monterrey, Guadalajara, Mérida, León, Querétaro, CDMX). I haven´t left Spain since.

Q10. What are you doing to address this?

We have moved online. But not online just in the sense of recording a video but my classes are now live. Death by Powerpoint is now gone as everyone is much more comfortable contributing from their happy place. On video, everyone is equal.

I was also very lucky in that three years ago, I agreed to shoot something called a High Impact Online Program (HiOP) which is series of short videos and readings which is more like a Netflix series than a class. We .. ahem ... scaled up the course on Scaleup.

IE invested a lot of money in a production team to create this, especially as everything was new so we didn´t really know what we were doing. I am also using something called the WOW Room a lot more for classes. This has 48 screens shaped in the form of a “U” and with up to 200 degree vision. The reality now is that Professors are turning into TV Presenters.

Q11. In terms of your scaling journey, why have you picked the UK?

In most countries in the world where I visit, the term scaleup is unknown. The exception is the UK where because of the work of the ScaleUp Institute, I´m usually not starting at zero.

Going back to about 2014, a series of reports were done by organisations such as Deloitte and PWC as well as institutions such as the LSE highlighting the importance of SMEs to the UK economy and what could be done to scale them up.

While the situation since then has not got noticeably better, the UK has managed to put place a lot more of what SMEs need to scaleup than other countries have. As an example the Enterprise Investment Scheme (EIS), the Seed Enterprise Investment Scheme (SEIS) and the Social Investment Tax Relief (SITR).

Q12. Where are the biggest opportunities in your sector over the next 3 years?

If there is a case for Brexit at all it is based on the idea that convergence and cooperation has dampened animal spirits of UK Entrepreneurs. Now that Brexit has happened, there is an element that average is over and that it´s get big or die.

One student of mine compares it to Russia's Shock Therapy is the aftermath of the dissolution of the USSR. It is likely that some people who have always had the ambition and the capability will use Brexit as the trigger to make aggressive bets and to double down on a new business model to catch an exponential wave.

While this is easier said than done, I think every SME needs to take a hard look at itself and redefine challenges as opportunities to grow. There is help out there and people who want to see you succeed.

Joe Haslam 1 December 2020

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preciousmetals0 · 5 years

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Google’s New CEO; Kodiak’s Rally Is Unbearable; Tesla Stock $1

Google’s New CEO; Kodiak’s Rally Is Unbearable; Tesla Stock $1:

Mr. Trump’s Wild Ride

Hold on to your hats, ’cause we’re going on quite a ride over the next week.

Yesterday, President Trump appeared to punt the U.S.-China trade deal until after the 2020 elections. Today, however, we’re getting a different story. (And if you’re not used to this back-and-forth by now, you’re not paying attention.)

Bright and early this morning, Bloomberg reported that the U.S. and China are moving even closer to a “phase-one” trade deal. Where is Bloomberg getting its information?

Why, the infamous “people familiar with the talks,” of course!

According to these people, the two sides need only agree on issues including Chinese agricultural purchases and which tariffs to roll back. The “people who shall not be named” also said that the markets were making too big a deal out of Trump’s off-the-cuff comments about stalling until 2020.

What’s more, a phase-one U.S.-China trade deal is expected to be reached before tariffs rise on December 15. That’s in less than 11 days.

The Takeaway:

Aside from the obvious “we’ve heard all this before,” there are three very important points to take away from the Bloomberg report:

S. Trade Representative Robert Lighthizer’s office hasn’t responded to the report. So, no official confirmation from the U.S. side.

The Chinese Ministry of Commerce hasn’t responded to the report. So, no official confirmation from the Chinese side.

President Trump hasn’t directly commented on the potential deal.

Great Stuff regulars will remember back on November 5, when I asked: “Who’s winning the U.S.-China trade war?”

At the time, I posited that China had the upper hand due to the reported promise of massive tariff rollbacks. Media reports at the time indicated that at least $112 billion in tariffs were on the table to pass a phase-one deal.

Just three days later, President Trump put the kibosh on the tariff rollback — essentially taking the whole deal off the table.

I’m sure you can see where I’m going with this.

President Trump has the last and final word in these trade negotiations. A deal will happen if he wants one — his own words, paraphrased, not mine.

So, call me pessimistic … call me a bear … call me whatever you’d like. I’ll be playing it safe and holding my enthusiasm until a deal is actually signed and we can read the details.

In the meantime, there’s nothing that says we can’t profit off the continuation of the Great Stuff Trade War Cycle chart. I just updated it this morning:

I’ll add one more thing here. If you are trading this cycle, remember that we have just 11 days until the December 15 deadline for tariff increases. We could go through this cycle rather rapidly if U.S. representatives, China or Trump decide to get chatty.

Be warned: Trading the chart might not be for the faint of heart over the next week.

The Good: Turn the Page

It’s the end of an era at Alphabet Inc. (Nasdaq: GOOG).

Google cofounders Larry Page and Sergey Brin are stepping down from their positions at Alphabet. Taking their place at the head of the world’s most popular search engine is Google CEO Sundar Pichai. Pichai will now head both Google and its parent company, Alphabet.

Despite the high-profile announcement, Pichai and Chief Financial Officer Ruth Porat have essentially run Alphabet for some time now. Pichai actually testified in front of Congress in 2016 … not Page or Brin.

So, what does this mean for investors? Pretty much nothing. Honestly, Pichai unofficially took the reins of Alphabet nearly two years ago. It should still be business as usual.

However, analysts are speculating that we may finally see YouTube revenue figures. Alphabet wasn’t required to disclose these figures before because Page — the company’s appointed decision-maker — didn’t see them. Seems like an odd loophole in reporting requirements, but it is what it is.

Pichai, however, does see these reports. So, investors might finally get a peek at YouTube’s revenue.

Whether that’s a good thing or a bad thing remains to be seen.

The Bad: Weak in the Force

For all intents and purposes, Salesforce.com Inc.’s (NYSE: CRM) earnings report was spot-on.

The company beat both top- and bottom-line expectations, with earnings up 32% and revenue soaring 33% year over year. Subscription revenue spiked 32%, and even billings were above the consensus estimate of $3.89 billion.

Guidance is where things started to go wrong … if you can call it that. Forecasts for the 2020 fiscal year were above Wall Street’s projections, but Salesforce put 2021 revenue projections below the consensus estimate. How far below? About $500 million.

If you’re thinking that this isn’t a “bad” quarterly report at all, you’re not alone. Analysts from Morgan Stanley, Goldman Sachs, RBC Capital Markets and Wedbush Securities all came out to defend Salesforce’s quarterly report.

That’s quite a star-studded cast. And it might explain why CRM is down more than 3% after what was a solid financial performance. Essentially, there’s too much optimism on CRM right now. So much so that a $500 million miss on revenue guidance two years from now is enough to prompt investors to sell.

That’s bad. It’s a sign that CRM might need a profit-taking correction to wash out the weak hands before the shares can turn higher once again.

The Ugly: The Un-Bear-able Rise

In the past three trading sessions, shares of Kodiak Sciences Inc. (Nasdaq: KOD) have surged an astonishing 100%.

Part of the reason is the increased bullish hype in the biotech sector, driven by merger and acquisition speculation.

But the big reason is that Kodiak just sold a 4.5% royalty right on potential global net sales of its experimental drug for eye disease, KSI-301. New York investment firm Baker Bros. Advisors shelled out $225 million for the rights.

Investors are excited because now Kodiak has the cash to fund operations through the next couple of years, at least. But Kodiak doesn’t get all that cash up front. It’ll need to pay $100 million just to close the transaction, and it’ll need to reach 50% enrollment in two late-stage clinical studies of KSI-301 in treating retinal vein occlusion, or blocked blood flow in the eye.

By now, you’re probably wondering why this is “ugly.” Well, the $225 million apparently wasn’t enough for Kodiak. Or, it saw the massive run-up in its shares and decided to take advantage of the situation.

Today, the company announced it was pricing a public offering of six million common shares at $46 per share — 55% above last Friday’s closing price.

This is clearly a smart business move, but my mind can’t get past the convenience of the offering or the KOD share dilution.

Once again, I think there is just too much optimism floating around out there. This is definitely a “buyer beware” situation.

Just when I thought I’d seen everything.

Hollywood is actually making WeWork: The Movie. I kid you not. They’ve even gotten Charles Randolph, the writer for The Big Short, to do the script.

This brings up two points. First, Hollywood really is out of good ideas. Second, who wants this movie? I’m not going to see it. If you’ve followed Great Stuff through the WeDebacle, you already watched this live.

Then again, given the media reports of former CEO Adam Neumann’s pot smoking and parties … this could be a fun ride. Look, I even made a poster for it:

(Side note: Did anyone actually see The Disaster Artist? I thought not.)

Great STUF: Buy Into Tesla for $1!

Did that heading get your attention?

I thought it might. You’re probably thinking: “There’s no way I can buy into Tesla for $1. It’s more than $300 per share, you fool!”

First, there’s no need for name-calling. I’m rubber and you’re glue, after all.

Second, yes, there is a way. And none other than Banyan Hill expert Paul Mampilly himself has the answer!

Paul found the quickest and easiest way to buy into some of the most exciting and explosive stocks on the market. Paul likes to call these his STUF stocks — a handy little acronym for the key stocks that represent the heart of Bold Profits: innovation, future, new-world ideas and tech that changes the way we live.

This is truly great STUF … if you catch my drift.

I know you’re dying to know more, so read Paul’s latest article now! Here, I’ll even give you the link: “Easiest Way to Buy STUF Stocks (Ex: Buy Into Tesla for $1).”

Now, what’s better than a Paul article explaining how to buy into Tesla for $1? A video of Paul explaining how to buy into Tesla for $1!

[embedded content]

But wait! There’s more…

Paul has a free report on all of his STUF stocks, and you can get it right here! (Did I mention it was free? Of course I did.)

You’re still here? OK. You want more Paul. It’s understandable.

The only way to truly satisfy your craving for STUF stocks (and Paul Mampilly) is to check out his newsletter, Profits Unlimited.

Click here to find out how to start your STUF collection now!

(I feel like there are too many exclamation points down here. Are there too many? Nah. Just the right amount.)

Until next time, good trading!

Regards,

Joseph Hargett

Great Stuff Managing Editor, Banyan Hill Publishing

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goldira01 · 5 years

Link

Mr. Trump’s Wild Ride

Hold on to your hats, ’cause we’re going on quite a ride over the next week.

Bright and early this morning, Bloomberg reported that the U.S. and China are moving even closer to a “phase-one” trade deal. Where is Bloomberg getting its information?

Why, the infamous “people familiar with the talks,” of course!

What’s more, a phase-one U.S.-China trade deal is expected to be reached before tariffs rise on December 15. That’s in less than 11 days.

The Takeaway:

Aside from the obvious “we’ve heard all this before,” there are three very important points to take away from the Bloomberg report:

S. Trade Representative Robert Lighthizer’s office hasn’t responded to the report. So, no official confirmation from the U.S. side.

The Chinese Ministry of Commerce hasn’t responded to the report. So, no official confirmation from the Chinese side.

President Trump hasn’t directly commented on the potential deal.

Great Stuff regulars will remember back on November 5, when I asked: “Who’s winning the U.S.-China trade war?”

Just three days later, President Trump put the kibosh on the tariff rollback — essentially taking the whole deal off the table.

I’m sure you can see where I’m going with this.

President Trump has the last and final word in these trade negotiations. A deal will happen if he wants one — his own words, paraphrased, not mine.

So, call me pessimistic … call me a bear … call me whatever you’d like. I’ll be playing it safe and holding my enthusiasm until a deal is actually signed and we can read the details.

In the meantime, there’s nothing that says we can’t profit off the continuation of the Great Stuff Trade War Cycle chart. I just updated it this morning:

Be warned: Trading the chart might not be for the faint of heart over the next week.

The Good: Turn the Page

It’s the end of an era at Alphabet Inc. (Nasdaq: GOOG).

So, what does this mean for investors? Pretty much nothing. Honestly, Pichai unofficially took the reins of Alphabet nearly two years ago. It should still be business as usual.

Pichai, however, does see these reports. So, investors might finally get a peek at YouTube’s revenue.

Whether that’s a good thing or a bad thing remains to be seen.

The Bad: Weak in the Force

For all intents and purposes, Salesforce.com Inc.’s (NYSE: CRM) earnings report was spot-on.

That’s bad. It’s a sign that CRM might need a profit-taking correction to wash out the weak hands before the shares can turn higher once again.

The Ugly: The Un-Bear-able Rise

In the past three trading sessions, shares of Kodiak Sciences Inc. (Nasdaq: KOD) have surged an astonishing 100%.

Part of the reason is the increased bullish hype in the biotech sector, driven by merger and acquisition speculation.

Today, the company announced it was pricing a public offering of six million common shares at $46 per share — 55% above last Friday’s closing price.

This is clearly a smart business move, but my mind can’t get past the convenience of the offering or the KOD share dilution.

Once again, I think there is just too much optimism floating around out there. This is definitely a “buyer beware” situation.

Just when I thought I’d seen everything.

Hollywood is actually making WeWork: The Movie. I kid you not. They’ve even gotten Charles Randolph, the writer for The Big Short, to do the script.

Then again, given the media reports of former CEO Adam Neumann’s pot smoking and parties … this could be a fun ride. Look, I even made a poster for it:

(Side note: Did anyone actually see The Disaster Artist? I thought not.)

Great STUF: Buy Into Tesla for $1!

Did that heading get your attention?

I thought it might. You’re probably thinking: “There’s no way I can buy into Tesla for $1. It’s more than $300 per share, you fool!”

First, there’s no need for name-calling. I’m rubber and you’re glue, after all.

Second, yes, there is a way. And none other than Banyan Hill expert Paul Mampilly himself has the answer!

This is truly great STUF … if you catch my drift.

I know you’re dying to know more, so read Paul’s latest article now! Here, I’ll even give you the link: “Easiest Way to Buy STUF Stocks (Ex: Buy Into Tesla for $1).”

Now, what’s better than a Paul article explaining how to buy into Tesla for $1? A video of Paul explaining how to buy into Tesla for $1!

[embedded content]

But wait! There’s more…

Paul has a free report on all of his STUF stocks, and you can get it right here! (Did I mention it was free? Of course I did.)

You’re still here? OK. You want more Paul. It’s understandable.

The only way to truly satisfy your craving for STUF stocks (and Paul Mampilly) is to check out his newsletter, Profits Unlimited.

Click here to find out how to start your STUF collection now!

(I feel like there are too many exclamation points down here. Are there too many? Nah. Just the right amount.)

Until next time, good trading!

Regards,

Joseph Hargett

Great Stuff Managing Editor, Banyan Hill Publishing

#Timor Invest

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eclecticsheepfire-blog · 5 years

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We Discover the Best Keywords to Rank Your Site with Affordable SEO Package Plans

This section may take you through the keyword selection procedure. Especially, we will go into detail about locating keywords to rank for in a highly competitive sector.

Signup for our Affordable SEO Packages Plans plus services where you can rank your website on the first page of google. In addition, we offer a trial service before you begin.

What are Long Tail key words?

They differ from regular keywords in their length and specificity.

A normal keyword might be"graphic designer" Depending on where you are, the cost of an AdWord for this particular term could be quite hefty. Ranking organically for that term would be an uphill battle.

The strategy we will get into will ultimately position one to rank high organically for that brief, aggressive keyword.

But it starts with rank for long tail keywords .

A very long tail key word is any very long phrase or question someone would type into Google that would lead to your product or service.

Here are some examples for long tail keywords stemming from the regular key word"graphic designer":

?"how can I choose a graphic designer"

?"exactly what does a graphic designer do"

?"how much do graphic designers bill"

?"finding a good graphic designer"

?"graphic designer logo examples"

As you may see, long-tail keywords consist of whole, or partial, phrases or questions related to the companies or services you would like to entice customers for.

Why Select Long Tail Keywords?

In our era of advertisements, paying for ads that say,"Hey, I am the very best bankruptcy attorney in New York. Hire me! Look how good I am! I went to Harvard," doesn't cut it anymore.

Google Answer Box

Among the most prosperous features Google has started using in search results is called the Google Answer Box or Rich Snippets. The majority of the queries that trigger an answer box reply follow a"how" or"what" paragraph structure, which creates a long-tail keyword.

The idea behind the concept is to offer a user with a quick and accurate response to a question without needing to read an whole article. And it's working beautifully for Google, as click-through prices have increased more than 30 percent when results show up in the answer box.

Listed below are a Couple of examples of the answer box in action:

Most people's search questions have become longer and more specific, which is why it is imperative to implement a long-tail keyword plan.

Voice Search

Why are search questions becoming more and more special?

Voice hunt, the primary culprit, is on the upswing. It's estimated that 40% of adults conduct at least one voice hunt per day.

If people perform a voice search, they tend to utilize more natural language, leading to longer queries. (thus the importance of long-tail key phrases, yet again.)

They are being replaced by"the way to describe butter" and"how to produce a raised garden bed." This trend is guiding how Google's AI and machine learning technology rankings search results.

It's geared toward helping users find more contextualized searches instead of exact keyword matches.

In an unsaturated market, it's easy to position for easy key words such as"paintball field Tampa," which was the first website I ever rated on the top of Google's initial page. There are only a couple of paintball fields in Tampa, so getting on the initial page was relatively straightforward.

Provided that you had a site, you're guaranteed to rank on the first two pages of Google. Sticking to this keyword research process I am going to teach you in this section will prop your site in the very top section of Google in no time.

Saturated Markets

In a highly competitive marketplace like"bankruptcy lawyer New York," you would use this exact same exact keyword research process, except it will need more ingenuity in the selection of your keywords.

For exceptionally competitive niches, you will implement a very long tail keyword selection plan. Let us jump in and find out why You Have to adhere to the long tail keyword research strategy:

People are turning to the internet to answer as many queries as possible before they even consider hiring a professional. This applies to most product and services purchases.

Once individuals have spat out the information they seek, then they're going to start searching for somebody to hire or some thing to buy.

The guy/gal using a $300 AdWord distance near the peak of the first page of Google that says"Look at me! I am a bankruptcy lawyer! Hire me now!"

Or the guy/gal that gave them a great deal of free valuable content that answered every single question they introduced?

Additionally, as soon as you get started ranking for a great deal of long tail key words for your organization, as a byproduct, you will automatically begin ranking for the brief, aggressive search phrases, like"bankruptcy lawyer" and"graphic designer" if you follow these steps.

The best thing about ranking organically in Google is the fact that it is free of charge.

Another interesting fact is people that typically scour the web for replies before hiring or purchasing something tend to be high quality customers that will be loyal to you - provided that the service or product is high quality.

Ensure that you are great at what you're doing.

Even the biggest, greatest collection of posts that answer every possible question about your service or product can not outweigh a barrage of negative Google, Facebook, Yelp, and Social Media ratings for not delivering as promised.

This book will go ahead and assume you are good at what you are doing and care for your clients. Onward!

How to Locate Long Tail Key Word:

Step 1: You need to make a list of any and all questions or phrases that come to mind which you have to do with your company or service.

I strongly advise you to use Google Sheets, which resembles a cloud version of Excel, to make your own idea storm.

Step 2: At a separate browser tab or window, open a Google search window. Place your cursor in the search bar and begin typing any and all questions pertinent to your business that come into your mind.

Watch carefully as Google automatically attempts to pre-fill the search bar using a prediction of what you're typing.

Everything Google is attempting to pre-fill and forecast while you type are often hunted long tail key words you need to document on your idea storm. Check it out:

Step 3: Once you find a related question or term, type it out in the column and row in the Google Sheet. List each separate question or phrase at its own row under the first column like so:

Keyword Search Term

What kind of bankruptcy should I file

What Type of bankruptcies are there

Pro Tip: Sort as slowly as possible, character-by-character, which means you don't miss any of the precious search phrases Google is serving to you on a silver platter.

Step 4: With the predicted search query shown above, click on the top query . You will find another precious gift from Google that resembles that:

Guess what these are? Yes. Yes, they're, in fact, more frequently searched long tail keywords to grow your own Keyword Idea Storm.

Step 5: Add them ALL to a Keyword Idea Storm.

Step 6: Go back into the second predicted search phrase from the very first step,"what sort of bankruptcies are there," and hunt for this term in Google.

Then, scroll to the bottom of the first page and include those gold nuggets for your Keyword Idea Storm:

Step 7: Repeat steps two through six till you have exhausted every possible search phrase.

Remember to enter all the search phrases you find at the bottom of the first page of Google into the main search bar to find more common search phrases at the base.

Keep typing in ideas for questions and phrases relevant to your company in the main Google search bar and looking for predictively-filled search terms.

Step 8: When you thought it was over, there's one more place you can find certain words related to the key word for your post. These kinds of words are known as LSI keywords.

LSI stands for"Latent Semantic Indexing" key words, which is just a fancy term for key words associated with a specific topic. So instead of keyword matching, Google is more interested in topic matching.

An LSI key word for the video game Halo would be Xbox. Even though the words are totally different, Halo is a video game that is played on the Xbox video game console, as well as computers. That means you can see the contextual relationship between them.

LSI key words should be used in context with your subject matter. The importance of utilizing LSI keywords is becoming more prudent as the inherent artificial intelligence continues to consider search questions in a contextual way, versus specific phrase matching.

To quickly locate LSI keywords for your articles, use this handy tool from LSI Graph to conduct a question: https://lsigraph.com/

By the end of the Keyword Idea Storm procedure, you should have a large number of long tail keyword search terms to operate with.

Depending on your niche or market, you may have 10-20 stone, or up of 50+. Get creative and try to think about your products or services in multiple dimensions from several angles.

Want help with your SEO Solutions Website and SEM Applications for Social Media? Have a new site rather than showing up anywhere on google, yahoo or bing? Try us out for a month we'll rank your site in the search results in no time!

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newstfionline · 6 years

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The False Promises of Worker Retraining

By Jeffrey Selingo, The Atlantic, Jan. 8, 2018

When Travis Busch graduated from high school in Jefferson, Iowa, in 1999, he followed many of his classmates on the well-plotted and well-trod path to college. Busch took classes at Iowa Central Community College during the day and worked part-time at night on the floor of a local factory that made stock tanks for horse and cattle farms. But after a year and a half in college, he dropped out to work full time.

“I didn’t want to go to college in the first place,” he said. “I was already making money. I didn’t see why I needed it.”

Fast-forward to January 2017. The factory where Busch worked was sold to a company that moved its operations to Kentucky and laid off the workers in Iowa. Before he lost his job, Busch met with local workforce officials who presented him three options: apply for an apprenticeship, go back to college, or try his luck on the job market with only a high-school diploma.

“I had a long conversation with my wife and decided that I didn’t want just a job, but I wanted a career,” Busch said. “I wanted to go somewhere where I wouldn’t have that feeling they are going to lay me off. I wanted job security.”

For Busch that job security would come from installing and repairing heating and air-conditioning systems. But on the day he went to sign up for the HVAC program at Des Moines Area Community College, the coordinator he was scheduled to meet with wasn’t there. Instead he bumped into the head of the tool and die program, Charlie Peffers, who took Busch on a tour of the college’s labs. “He showed me the machines and really sold the program,” Busch said.

What ultimately persuaded Busch to give the tool and die program a try were Peffers’s comments about the job outlook for his graduates, who make parts for a variety of industrial machines. Most second-year students in the program were already working part-time. Companies came to campus every other week to recruit students, offering full-time jobs that started around $40,000 a year. And some students graduated with multiple job offers.

Busch, who began classes in the tool and die program this fall, is the type of worker that politicians love to trot out when they talk about how job retraining is the answer to putting Americans back to work. But in many ways, Busch is one of the lucky ones. A relatively small chunk of the Americans who missed the conventional on-ramp to higher education and a career out of high school are now getting a second chance at a well-paying job through retraining.

Worker retraining is a classic chicken-or-egg dilemma. Employers don’t want to expand or relocate without the availability of an already-skilled workforce. Workers who have been laid off through corporate downsizing or because their jobs were shipped to a foreign country don’t want to dedicate the time and effort needed to go through retraining without the pledge of a sure-fire job with the same or a better paycheck.

So when you plug real people into the easy fixes designed by policy wonks, the situation suddenly becomes more complicated: Older workers who haven’t seen the inside of a classroom for decades are frightened by going back to school. Men don’t want to train for the jobs that are left in town, particularly in health care, because of the stigma of being employed in occupations traditionally filled by women--a phenomena that Lawrence Katz, a Harvard University labor economist, has frequently called an “identity mismatch,” rather than a skills mismatch. And in a country founded by people on the move, unemployed workers are unwilling to relocate to find work.

No wonder President Trump was able to tap into the nostalgia of unemployed and underemployed workers in working-class communities during last year’s presidential election with promises to bring back jobs in the coal mines, the textile plants, and the steel mills. Such blue-collar workers, most of them lacking a college degree, are these days being hit particularly hard by job losses on two fronts. The first is a wave of automation that has caused nearly nine in 10 manufacturing jobs to disappear since 2000, according to an analysis by Ball State University. Second is trade. A paper published last year by three economists concluded that Chinese imports alone eliminated some 2.4 million jobs in the U.S. since the beginning of the century.

For many dislocated workers--or employees who were terminated and are unlikely to return to that job or even that industry--it’s often easier to collect unemployment or other cash benefits that come along with training and then either remain jobless or patch together work that doesn’t require learning a new skill or acquiring a college degree. But that’s not a recipe for sustainable careers or even long-term work. As a result of the 2008 recession, the U.S. shed 1.6 million manufacturing jobs requiring just a high-school diploma; only 200,000 returned.

The fastest-growing jobs in the country require training and education beyond high school. Between now and 2024, according to Georgetown University’s Center on Education and the Workforce, the United States will be home to some 16 million openings for middle-skill jobs--those that require more education than a high-school diploma but typically not a bachelor’s degree. Some 40 percent of them pay more than $55,000 a year; another 14 percent pay more than $80,000. The National Skills Coalition has found that these jobs in sectors such as computer technology, health care, construction, and high-skill manufacturing account for 53 percent of the labor market, but only 43 percent of middle-skill workers are sufficiently trained.

“The U.S. faces a serious skills gap,” said Secretary of Labor Alexander Acosta in June when announcing the administration’s executive actions to expand training opportunities, mostly through apprenticeships. Referring to the discrepancy between what employers need and what skills workers have, he pointed out that the U.S. has 6 million jobs--1 million in the health-care sector alone--the most since the Labor Department started keeping track since last decade.

But even as members of the administration pay lip service to job training, it has joined other politicians in making cuts to the programs. Dollars delivered to the states through the federal government’s primary workforce-retraining program have been slashed by 22 percent since 2009, and in his first budget earlier this year, President Trump proposed further cuts. Despite decades of investments by the federal government in a patchwork of job-retraining efforts, most have been found to be ineffective according to numerous studies over the years, and it remains unclear to experts whether the programs are even up to the task of preparing workers for the new economy.

Take the program aimed at workers whose jobs have moved overseas: the Labor Department’s Trade Adjustment Assistance fund. It has been around since the early 1960s, and in recent years has paid upwards of $11,500 per eligible person for training. But a 2012 assessment of the program found that, four years after completing training, only 37 percent of its employed participants were working in their targeted industries. Women and younger workers were more likely than other workers to undertake training through the fund, and the incomes of older participants, in particular, never caught back up to their earlier wages.

The trade-assistance program is just one of 47 federal job-training programs across nine agencies that the Government Accountability Office identified in a 2011 report. Most were tiny and mainly served the unemployed struggling to find work. The Workforce Innovation and Opportunity Act signed by President Obama in 2014 was a bipartisan attempt aimed at consolidating the hodgepodge of programs.

Still, federal retraining programs remain rooted in the industrial era in which they were created and have largely failed to evolve with the global information-based economy in which technical know-how trumps muscle.

“In previous decades, we’d have down cycles where workers were laid off and then they’d be called back,” said Mary Alice McCarthy, the director of the Center on Education & Skills at the left-leaning think tank New America. “Now there is a restructuring in most industries where people aren’t ever going to be called back or ever find jobs in that industry again--and we don’t have training systems that allow for that.”

Workforce-development officials and labor economists describe four main trends in the job market that make the road from unemployment to retraining more treacherous now than it was even a decade ago. These trends, according to observers, have turned the government programs to support dislocated workers into relics of the past.

First, entire occupations and industries are expanding and contracting at an alarming pace, and the skills needed to keep up in almost any job are churning at an increasingly faster rate. As a result, there is often a gap between the jobs employers need to fill at a given moment and the skills of available workers. Both employers and trainers are partly to blame for this mismatch. Companies typically are reluctant to reveal their hiring plans too far in advance of filling the actual openings because they don’t want to tip off competitors. Meanwhile, colleges can take months, even years, to design and advertise new programs; the requirements for a degree take another two years, further delaying graduates’ entry into the workforce.

The federal government has called for better cooperation between industry and community colleges in designing programs that prioritize what it refers to as “demand-driven training,” so that dislocated workers aren’t learning skills that are outdated by the time they graduate. Some schools, like Des Moines Area Community College, have expanded their non-credit programs to get new classes up and running more quickly than in the past and teach students just enough to start a career. The college now offers 15 non-credit certificate programs enrolling roughly 450 students; the classes cost as little as $89 and as much as $1,000-plus a pop. Some 85 percent complete the programs, compared to just 39 percent of community-college students nationwide who graduate within six years.

Unlike the associate’s-degree programs offered by Des Moines, the goal of these weeks-long boot camps isn’t to teach students everything they need to know to be great in a job, said Michael Hoffman, the college’s executive director of continuing education. “They need a job tomorrow, not two years from now,” Hoffman said. “So we ask employers what a base program would be to get them the skills to secure an interview.”

As an example, Hoffman pointed to a local hospital that was struggling to hire food-service employees. It partnered with the college to design a semester-long culinary program that teaches students just enough to get a job at the hospital. Once on the job, graduates of the program can retroactively apply to receive credits for the classes they completed that count toward further education if they wish to pursue it. “Our programs are very fluid because we want to get students into the job market as soon as possible,” said Kay Maher, who helps students enroll in workforce-training programs at the college.

States themselves are often an obstacle in getting displaced workers back on the job. The second major development in retraining displaced workers for new careers is that states have increasingly added onerous licensing requirements for many jobs to ensure safety or quality of services. A study by the Brooking Institution’s Hamilton Project estimated that, because such requirements discourage people from pursuing some careers, the rules have resulted in 2.85 million fewer jobs nationwide. The study found that around 30 percent of American workers need a license to perform their jobs; in the early 1950s, less than 5 percent did. About 800 occupations--from emergency medical technicians to cosmetologists to interior designers--are licensed by at least one state.

Third, as Hoffman alluded, speed matters when it comes to enrolling into training programs workers who were recently laid off. A significant delay--a wait of a year or more--often permanently hinders a worker’s chances at finding a new career and limits his or her lifetime earnings. Retraining is most successful when workers actually start it before they leave their old job. “If you wait until they are out of a job, the emotion of losing a job comes into play; they start to get accustomed to not working, they get rusty,” said Jane Oates, who was an assistant secretary in the Labor Department during the Obama administration.

Indeed, the analysis of the Trade Adjustment Assistance program conducted for the Labor Department in 2012 found that those who enrolled in training within 13 weeks of applying for unemployment benefits ended up working significantly more weeks, and earned more, than workers who entered training a year or more after a job loss.

The fourth major development is that the pathway to retraining these days almost always runs through a college campus. Even most manufacturing jobs now demand some sort of education after high school. But many of the workers who require retraining dropped out of college, if they went at all. Perhaps the biggest hurdle in retraining displaced workers is that some of them have little interest in going back to school.

For a few, a rejection of higher education might seem rational. After all, why would someone in his 50s who hasn’t been in a classroom in decades dedicate a few years to train for a new job surrounded by people half his age and then start on the bottom rung of the career ladder? So for many of these displaced workers, it is just easier to opt out of the workforce altogether, particularly for men. The share of American men in their prime working years (25 to 54-years-old) but not employed has jumped sharply in the last four decades. Today, one in five of them isn’t in the labor pool at all. “We can’t build an economy with that many people not participating at all,” Oates said.

After completing the degree in the tool and die program next year, Travis Busch is looking forward to finally having a career and “making some real money.” Peffers, the program’s head, describes Busch as an exemplary student who has quickly risen to the top of his class. But if not for a random encounter on the day he visited the college, it’s very possible Busch would have been enrolled in the HVAC program, if he was in school at all. Who knows what retraining would’ve led to.

And that’s the dilemma facing many workers as they consider whether to enroll in retraining programs: They don’t always know what they’re best equipped to do and so pick new careers that might be familiar to them, rather than something that is a good match. The Labor Department’s study of the trade-adjustment program found that job trainees who received career assessments were more likely to get a job after training than those who didn’t because they made better-informed choices about the training options that were most beneficial.

The update to the Workforce Investment Act passed by Congress and signed by President Obama in 2014 prioritizes programs that help workers understand the connection between continuing education and work. It authorizes the use of federal funds, for instance, to pay for instruction in math and literacy skills when training for a specific occupation, something that wasn’t allowed before as basic education and training were seen, and in many cases still are seen, as two separate services by Washington policymakers.

“Retraining is held up as some sort of savior to displaced workers,” said Didier, the former head of the Newton Development Corporation, who now works at Des Moines Area Community College where she helps the college link up with businesses that have training needs. “But without a specific job at the other end, no one is going to waste their time retraining just to retrain.” Because when it comes to learning and work, the most important thing is work itself.

#Worker retraining #job training #retraining

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