#she chatted to me about the job and my experience for like 50 mins so that is also promising?

[littlehen]

.

[fanfics-for-the-hockey-fan]

My Treasure - William Nylander

Request: Can you do one where you are pregnant with William nylanders baby and getting hate and he makes you feel better

Getting pregnant at 24 was definitely not a part of my 5 year post college plan. Then again falling in love wasn't one of my bullet points either. But when my period was over a week late I knew that everything was about to change. William was thrilled when he saw the bolded word on the pregnancy test, immediately wanting to tell anyone he could. I was a little more hesitant to share the news.

I knew that I wanted children someday and those feelings intensified once my relationship with William became serious, I just figured we would be married and I would be a little more secure in my teaching job before we would add a baby to the mix. We told our families first and they were all excited and happy for us, same with friends and teammates. The real problem came when we started to share the news with the rest of the world. On William's social media everyone was happy for us and wishing us well, but mine is where all of the hate went.

She probably got knocked up so he couldn't leave her.

Hopefully you don't gain too much baby weight, you could already stand to lose a little.

You're not even pregnant with his kid I bet, just went to the guy with the biggest paycheck.

I did my best to delete the comments as soon as I saw them, hiding them from William so he wouldn’t get upset. Some people didn't get the hint after the first deleted comment and I would end up blocking them. Two weeks after announcing our pregnancy the nasty comments were outweighing the nice ones of my post. My pregnancy hormones went crazy one day when my pants didn't fit for the first time of the pregnancy and William was away on a road trip until the morning.

I canceled my plans to go get dinner with some friends and instead had a pity party in some of William's clothes with ice cream and reading through all the horrible things that were being said about me.

I can't believe he is still with her, she is not pretty enough for him.

Fat cow

You are going to ruin his career with the child.

I cried myself to sleep on the couch after midnight and didn't wake up until someone was brushing some hair out of my face. Slowly opening my eyes I saw a concerned William kneeling on the floor in front of me. "Ellie, what’s wrong? Were you crying?" I sat up, making room for William next to me before he pulled me into his lap. "Your friends texted me last night and told me you skipped on going to dinner with them. Is everything okay? Is the baby okay?"

"The baby is fine, I just couldn't find anything that fit comfortably with the bump. I had a pity party with ice cream and must have fallen asleep." Everything I said was true, I just left out one major thing.

"I'm sorry babe, but can I finally buy you some new maternity clothes? Please." He gave me puppy dog eyes as he begged, causing me to laugh and turn to face him more.

"You love shopping more than I do."

"Is that a yes? I'm taking that as a yes. Go get ready, shopping might take all day." With that he was carrying me down the hall, laughing the entire way. When he finally set me down I managed to find a t-shirt dress that wasn't too uncomfortable and proceeded to get ready.

***

After a full day of shopping William took me out to dinner at our favorite Spanish restaurant. I excused myself after we ordered a bunch of small plates to share to run to the bathroom and when I got back William was standing at the table with a large plastic bag and shaking hands with the owner. "What's going on?" 

"I thought you might be more comfortable if we went home and ate. I've kept you busy most of the day so I know your feet must be bothering you." His tone was off but I brushed it off as we headed out. The drive home was a tense silence without even the radio playing.

I didn't say anything until we were in the apartment and William started slamming cabinet doors as he got plates. "What's wrong?"

"I just don't get why people spend so much time trying to make other people down! Like, what does it do for them?" He had a fire in his eyes I had only ever seen on the ice, and I wasn't sure what was causing it.

"I'm going to some more context here. Did something happen at the restaurant?"

"Before we left the last store I took a couple of pictures for our shopping day and posted them to Instagram. I thought it was no big deal, just sharing what I was up to on a day off. And then when you were in the bathroom your phone started buzzing like crazy so I thought someone was trying to call you. But all of your notifications were for Instagram, and I know I shouldn't have opened the app on your phone but I thought maybe it was your girlfriends' group chat and Sophie finally got engaged." I let out a small chuckle at that, we basically were taking bets on when her and her high school sweetheart would finally take the next step.

"I'm guessing that isn't what you saw." I knew what he was going to say next but I was hoping with every fiber of my being that I was wrong.

"No, I saw the worst of humanity in your DMs. I just- how can people be so cruel?" William slumped into the bar stool next to me at the island as I reached for my phone having to see what was sent to me now. "Ellie…" I ignored his worried warning as I opened up the app, going to my DMs.

Fat cow, you only got pregnant so that you could lock in some who is far too good for you. I hope he sees he could do so much better and kicks you out before that baby ruins his career and life!

So you are just using him for his money. I bet the baby isn’t even his, probably a teammate who makes less. Whore!

Bitch, why are you even with Willy? He is a literal hockey god and from what i can tell you are just some stupid high school math teacher. He can do so much better than you. 

There were over 50 messages just like those, all sent within the last hour. I didn't even dare look at the comments on my latest post, even though it was a few days old the braver trolls put their nasty messages there for the whole world to see.

"How long has this been happening?" I had hopped off my stool, going to plate up the food we brought home and trying to avoid the conversation I knew we needed to have. "Ellie… Please talk to me. How long?"

"Honestly, since we started posting that we were dating. It's gotten worse since we posted that we are gonna be parents."

"Why didn't you tell me?"

"Because part of me thought that if I just deleted the messages and comments that it wasn't real. That if I was the only one who knew that I could just pretend that it was all in my head. Then there is that stupid voice in my head that likes to play up my insecurities, that made me feel like if you saw what people were sending me that you would believe it. And I know that thinking that is stupid and unrealistic but it can sometimes be the loudest thing in there." William also got off his stool, coming to stand right in front of me. He kissed my forehead before cupping my cheeks and holding eye contact.

"Min skatt, never feel like you have to hide this from me. You are the one I am in love with and want to spend the rest of my life with. You are the only one that can make me smile and laugh when I am in a bad mood after a game. You are the only one I see myself growing old, and possibly bald with." I let out a gasp at the word bald, he was so protective about his hair.

"See, the rational part of me knows all that."

"Well, let me make it clear to every part of you. I love you with every fiber of my being and as soon as I meet with your father next week to ask for his blessing, I will be asking you to marry me."

"Will…"

"But I am going to need you to act surprised when I ask." That got a small chuckle out of me. 

"I'll do my best." William's stomach growled then, making both laugh. "Let's eat before your stomach starts communicating with us again." William just nods, a thoughtful look on his face that I'm sure would cause problems later but right now I just wanted to live in the happy moment.

After reheating the food and settling at the kitchen island to eat, I went through and deleted all the DMs and comments. I barely registered what they said as I deleted. What I didn't know was Will was looking at the comments as I deleted before pulling out his own phone. It was only when my phone buzzed with another notification that I found out what he was doing. 

@williamnylander tagged you in a post

The post was two pictures side by side; the first was from our first date at a Christmas market, all bundled up and snuggled into each other as we took the photo in a mirror. The other picture was a selfie he took of us at my last doctor's appointment for the pregnancy, both of us were all smiles as I sat on the exam table with a picture of the sonogram on the screen behind us.

Two pictures of the love of my life. One from our first date, where I was a clutz and spilt hot chocolate all over her light grey coat and she still agreed to a second date. The other from a few weeks ago when we got another look at our baby. 

I can say without any doubt that having Ellie in my life has only made it better. She has become my sounding board for when I'm frustrated, my motivation to score more goals, and my ray of sunshine on any cloudy day. 

I knew from that first date that Ellie was the one for me, no one can tell me otherwise. And now she is carrying our first child. My heart continues to grow and fall in love with this amazing, kind, dedicated, caring, loving, and perfect woman each day.

I am so lucky to spend time with you each day and anyone who says otherwise is wrong and jealous of what we have.

Min skat, I am so excited to watch our family grow and experience the joys and challenges of parenthood with you. Ellie I love you and can't wait to see where we go next. 

Together.

The tears started flowing before I even read the caption, the pictures enough with my pregnancy hormones. But the words William managed to write push me over the edge, I was crying at the love he put into the words but also laughing at the not so subtle 'fuck you' to all the nasty people who sent you messages.

"Did I overstep? I don’t want to embarrass you."

"It's perfect. You're perfect. I love you."

"I love you too, and I plan on showing you that everyday. Even if it is something as simple as an Instagram post."

"It's not just the post, it's that you are saying to all the people who see your pictures and then come trash talk to me that you know about them. And that will probably stop some of them from doing it again. And anyone who doesn't get the message gets blocked."

"Good. Now, let go watch some TV and cuddle." Nodding grabbing my plate of food, following William to the couch before curling into his side.

As William pulled up the next episode of a show we were binging, I thought of something. "You never have told me what 'min skat' means."

"It means 'my treasure'. And it reminds me how lucky I am every day to have you in my life."

[rootcut3]

Free Tarot Card Analysis

If https://tarot-masters.com show up, connect them to someone keeping that sort of character. One more benefit is that email psychic readings have a tendency to be a fixed price, so you don't need to fret about acquiring the mins. Depending on the equipment you contend your disposal, you might possibly enjoy a complimentary tarot analysis from anywhere, including your home computer, a laptop, a tablet computer, mobile app, or a smart device. A video clip reading permits you to interact in person with a psychic tool. These complimentary analyses are the closest thing to being in the very same space as a psychic, as well as you can obtain a better feel for the person by seeing their face as you talk. I drew the Grim Reaper in this forest atmosphere with all these plants and also life and butterflies that symbolize adjustment and makeover. With each other, the Major as well as Minor Arcana cards develop a extensive pictorial language. It is essential to keep in mind that all the responses we seek exist innately within the deck, with each card illustrating a person, scenario, or prospective outcome. Given that there are obvious puzzles or concealed agendas with tarot card, the capability to determine meaning lies within your own narrative analysis. The Significant Arcana cards represent huge, innovative influences. They stress our trips as well as each stands alone as a effective message, representing life-changing motions that define the starts or ends of cycles. Last but not least, and a lot of interesting component - Tarot analysis of each person of my group. It was a fun session for my friends as well as myself, we 'd definitely recommend to everybody to experience it yourself. I have actually read cards as well as doing healing work for ten years now. Many individuals wish to really feel even more directly attached to their fortuneteller and discover that video provides them the appropriate experience. 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The cards are numbered to stand for terminals within our better journey via life; their sequential order reveals the death of time. Allow's speak about the structure of the deck and the significances of its cards. Any enchanting practice-- tarot card, astrology, or spell job-- is based upon the Hermetic axiom "as above, so listed below." In other words, the macrocosm of the universes is mirrored in the microcosm of specific experience. As necessary, the whole universe exists within a tarot card deck, with each card representing a person, place, or event. These icons are illustrated in both the Major Arcana cards, which speak to better tricks, and also the Minor Arcana cards, which speak with lower keys. Once you have the inquiry in your mind, it's time to shuffle-- and also there are numerous ways to do so. The overhand shuffle includes holding the deck of cards in one hand as well as utilizing the other to relocate cards from one side of the deck to the various other. You can additionally " reduce" the deck by splitting it into numerous heaps and after that incorporating them into one once more. Or you can attempt spreading out the cards facedown on the table and also sweeping them right into a big, unpleasant stack before tapping them right into place again. Routines are an vital way we refine occasions, as well as even if you're skeptical, the act of following a routine and also treating your cards with respect and value can be alter just how we perceive the globe. After you allow your reading to process, be grateful, clear your cards, as well as make sure to save it in safe and also secure area. Tarot relies on signs pulled from a variety of human consciousness. There are lots of decks offered, each with their very own special collection of icons and also systems. You'll have to create stories making use of the symbols of the deck in your analysis, so choosing a deck whose art work resonates with you is very important. One of the most common deck and also a great way to start is the Rider-Waite deck. There are nevertheless a myriad of choices to select from, but we have actually developed a minimalist deck which makes analysis somewhat easier. Whether you are single or in a partnership, this spread can assist you comprehend what actually matters to you so you can travel on in the best direction. When you are ready to start your Tarot card analysis, scroll up as well as choose your cards. This is the moment to enjoy what you have sown, since you are guaranteed of a bumper crop on both individual as well as specialist fronts! Those travelling on a business journey will discover things working out. Health and wellness appears fine, yet the cards recommend not to take every little thing for given. There are 12 different Zodiac signs, and everyone's sign corresponds to their birthdate. With greater than 1,700 psychic consultants to choose from in more than two dozen groups, you have much more choices absolutely free psychic analyses on this platform than anywhere else. Psychic Source uses totally free psychic analyses for the first 3 minutes in addition to rates as low as $0.66 per min if you pick to continue your analysis after the cost-free trial. By dealing with a dream interpreter during complimentary psychic readings, you can begin to understand your desires. Are there specific numbers that seem to be recurring in your life? A cost-free psychic numerology analysis can aid you discover why these numbers are so popular in your life as well as what they suggest. Sometimes described as astrology analyses, a horoscope reading utilizes the signs of the zodiac to aid predict your future and give insight into your personality, connection compatibility, and extra. Some psychics use brand-new customers the chance to obtain an answer to a inquiry at no charge by providing the very first couple of minutes of psychic readings totally free. These totally free analyses are done by actual psychics, as well as if you like the experience, you can continue your session, generally at a affordable price. This type of complimentary on the internet psychic analysis can be incredibly useful if you find yourself in a damaging pattern, really feel unconfident, or require unbiased answers from someone with clairvoyant understanding. Maybe you have a recurring desire, as well as you're not sure if your subconscious is attempting to inform you something. The 20 various spreads readily available at FreeDivination are meant to offer you various choices on what sort of reviewing you're seeking. The website uses you some advice on selecting from a deck for love, profession, or general life issues, and after that moving forward with what you see. Because of the pandemic, there are numerous psychic reading sites that are using cost-free mins and also steep price cuts to help their clients make it through these tough times. I have a committed adhering to on Instagram and remarkable returning consumers. I've worked with individuals from Brazil, Belgium, Germany, Canada, Sweden, England, Malaysia, Denmark, Singapore, Australia, and also the checklist just takes place. One girl from Mexico also messaged me in Spanish; we did the reading via Google Translate. Digital readings cost me practically nothing to generate and were veiled under a U.S.-based business so I could avoid the visa internet. Initially we did a brief meditation which aided to soothe our minds, then Shilpa described concerning Tarot decks as well as messages of the Tarot card.

In a lot of decks, the Lovers shows 2 individuals in a yard with an angel floating in the sky above them, possibly in the Yard of Eden. The Marseille shows three people, and also a grumpy-looking cherub aiming an arrowhead at them from over. Jodo pointed to the sunlight at the top of the card, where said cherub was emerging. Prior to you attend your tarot reading session, attempt to get as clear as possible on what it is you want advice on. This will help you locate the experience you want as well as additionally help your visitor specify the analysis for you. You may have been told ahead to your tarot card reading with a clear concern and an open mind. This suggestions is typically duplicated since it's thought about to be the most effective method to get the most out of the experience. Throughout the session I will do a reading which will certainly offer clearness as well as bring about an understanding of what the tarot is communicating about your present, previous and future. Likewise, Sarber informed EXPERT that as soon as you finally begin, a essential to getting proficient at reviewing the cards is to pick one that represents you. the much more that you bond with your deck, the far better analyses you'll give-- as well as obtain. Today, there are thousands of tarot card readers throughout the world. After hearing my tale of the Fatality card, Howe let's out a laugh. "I really enjoy the Fatality card, it's the one that always appears in the movies," she begins. "The Death card, in my experience, doesn't really imply fatality.

[gearstorm40]

Free Tarot Card Reading

If these show up, relate them to a person with that type of character. An additional benefit is that email psychic analyses have a tendency to be a set price, so you do not need to fret about acquiring the mins. Relying on the equipment you contend your disposal, you could potentially appreciate a free tarot reading from anywhere, including your home computer, a laptop computer, a tablet computer, mobile app, or a mobile phone. A video clip analysis enables you to connect face-to-face with a psychic medium. These cost-free readings are the closest thing to being in the exact same room as a psychic, and also you can obtain a much better feel for the person by seeing their face as you talk. I attracted the Grim Reaper in this forest environment with all these plants and also life as well as butterflies that symbolize adjustment as well as makeover. With each other, the Major as well as Minor Arcana cards create a extensive photographic language. It is essential to bear in mind that all the answers we seek exist innately within the deck, with each card illustrating a person, circumstance, or prospective end result. Considering that there are clear problems or hidden programs with tarot card, the ability to recognize indicating lies within your own narrative interpretation. The Significant Arcana cards represent huge, cutting-edge impacts. They stress our journeys and also each stands alone as a powerful message, representing life-altering movements that specify the beginnings or ends of cycles. Finally, and many exciting part - Tarot card analysis of each individual of my team. It was a fun session for my friends and myself, we 'd most definitely suggest to everybody to experience it on your own. I have actually been reading cards as well as doing recovery work for 10 years now. Many individuals want to really feel more personally connected to their tarot reader and find that video clip supplies them the ideal experience. They also supply five complimentary mins at the beginning of your call and also offer phone, e-mail, and also live chat alternatives like Kasamba. These are several of the functions you may intend to search for when choosing a top tarot reading service. https://tarot-masters.com uses a cost-free 3 minute tarot analysis, plus 50% off your very first session, that makes checking out Kasamba much less of a financial threat. My name is Eva Delattre as well as I have been practicing the ton of money telling arts for virtually thirty years. I wanted to share my understanding of tarot analysis by offering a completely cost-free draw utilizing the 22 Major Arcana of the tarot card. Cupid's Oracle Cupid's Oracle uses the love tarot to assist you check out the future of your lovemaking. These vibrant cards show up during significant transitions, signifying distinctive moments of change. The cards are phoned number to represent terminals within our greater journey via life; their chronological order discloses the passing of time. Allow's talk about the structure of the deck and the meanings of its cards. Any type of enchanting practice-- tarot card, astrology, or spell job-- is based upon the Hermetic axiom "as above, so below." In other words, the macrocosm of the cosmos is mirrored in the microcosm of specific experience. As necessary, the entire cosmos exists within a tarot card deck, with each card standing for a person, location, or event. These symbols are depicted in both the Major Arcana cards, which speak to greater secrets, as well as the Minor Arcana cards, which talk to minimal secrets.

As soon as you have the inquiry in your mind, it's time to shuffle-- and also there are several methods to do so. The overhand shuffle involves holding the deck of cards in one hand as well as making use of the various other to relocate cards from one side of the deck to the various other. You can likewise " reduce" the deck by splitting it right into numerous stacks and then combining them right into one again. Or you can try spreading the cards facedown on the table and sweeping them into a huge, untidy heap before tapping them into location once more. Rituals are an essential way we refine events, and even if you're unconvinced, the act of following a routine as well as treating your cards with respect as well as significance can be alter just how we view the world. After you enable your analysis to process, be grateful, clear your cards, and also see to it to store it in risk-free and also safe and secure place. Tarot counts on icons pulled from a wide variety of human awareness. There are several decks readily available, each with their very own unique collection of icons and also systems. You'll need to produce tales making use of the signs of the deck in your analysis, so picking a deck whose artwork reverberates with you is important. One of the most typical deck as well as a terrific way to start is the Rider-Waite deck. There are nevertheless a myriad of choices to select from, yet we have actually created a minimalist deck that makes analysis rather easier. Whether you are single or in a relationship, this spread can assist you understand what really matters to you so you can travel on in the ideal direction. When you prepare to begin your Tarot card reading, scroll up and also pick your cards. This is the time to gain what you have sown, since you are guaranteed of a bumper crop on both individual and also professional fronts! Those taking a trip on a organization journey will certainly find points working out. Wellness shows up fine, but the cards suggest not to take every little thing for given. There are 12 different Zodiac signs, and each person's indicator corresponds to their birthdate. With greater than 1,700 psychic consultants to select from in greater than 2 dozen categories, you have more options free of charge psychic readings on this platform than anywhere else. Psychic Resource provides free psychic readings for the first 3 minutes along with prices as low as $0.66 per min if you select to proceed your analysis after the complimentary test. By collaborating with a dream interpreter throughout complimentary psychic analyses, you can start to comprehend your desires. Are there details numbers that appear to be repeating in your life? A complimentary psychic numerology reading can help you find why these numbers are so noticeable in your life and also what they mean. Occasionally referred to as astrology readings, a horoscope reading utilizes the signs of the zodiac to help anticipate your future and give insight right into your character, relationship compatibility, and also more. Some psychics supply new clients the possibility to get an response to a question at no charge by providing the first couple of minutes of psychic analyses completely free. These totally free analyses are done by actual psychics, and also if you like the experience, you can proceed your session, normally at a discounted rate. This kind of cost-free on-line psychic analysis can be extremely valuable if you find yourself in a damaging pattern, really feel insecure, or need objective answers from a person with clairvoyant understanding. Maybe you have a recurring dream, as well as you're uncertain if your subconscious is attempting to inform you something. The 20 various spreads offered at FreeDivination are suggested to provide you various selections on what type of reading you're trying to find. The website offers you some advice on selecting from a deck for romance, profession, or general life issues, and after that moving forward with what you see. As a result of the pandemic, there are a number of psychic analysis websites that are offering cost-free mins as well as steep price cuts to help their customers survive these difficult times. I have a devoted following on Instagram as well as wonderful returning customers. I have actually worked with individuals from Brazil, Belgium, Germany, Canada, Sweden, England, Malaysia, Denmark, Singapore, Australia, as well as the listing simply goes on. One girl from Mexico even messaged me in Spanish; we did the analysis via Google Translate. Digital analyses cost me nearly absolutely nothing to generate and also were veiled under a U.S.-based business so I can avoid the visa net. First we did a brief reflection which helped to soothe our minds, then Shilpa clarified about Tarot card decks and messages of the Tarot. In a lot of decks, the Lovers reveals two people in a yard with an angel hovering overhead above them, maybe in the Yard of Eden. The Marseille shows three people, and also a grumpy-looking cherub intending an arrowhead at them from over. Jodo pointed to the sun on top of the card, from which claimed cherub was arising. Before you attend your tarot card analysis session, attempt to get as clear as feasible on what it is you desire guidance on. This will certainly aid you find the experience you seek and also aid your viewers specify the reading for you. You might have been informed ahead to your tarot analysis with a clear concern and also an open mind. This guidance is often duplicated because it's taken into consideration to be the best means to obtain one of the most out of the experience. During the session I will certainly do a reading which will give clarity and also bring about an understanding of what the tarot is conveying regarding your existing, previous and also future. Furthermore, Sarber told EXPERT that as soon as you ultimately start, a crucial to getting efficient checking out the cards is to select one that represents you. the extra that you bond with your deck, the far better analyses you'll provide-- and also get. Today, there are thousands of tarot card visitors around the world. After hearing my story of the Death card, Howe allowed's out a laugh. "I really love the Fatality card, it's the one that always appears in the movies," she begins. "The Fatality card, in my experience, does not in fact imply death.

[regressionanxiety]

From Russia With Love (1963)

Time for that second Bond movie y’all! Like last time it is basically me recapping the movie with my own comments thrown in so you know, spoilers (also one for the last season of Designated Survivor, because I’m like that). 

Ah after a brief look through the barrel of the gun we enter the classic Bond cold open for the first time! Bond is playing cat and mouse with a broad shouldered blond in a fancy garden with statues and hedges and shit. The blond man pulls a wire out of his watch and strangles Bond, oh no! Flood lights turn on and we see many men wearing the exact same outfit (black on black, turtlenecks). The man is congratulated on his perfect time (1 min 52 sec). Then we take a look at Bond on the ground, wait, it isn’t Bond? It’s a mask! It is another man, still dead though.

INTROTIME! This time it is the credits projected onto a dancing woman's body (007 of course gets the breasts). The great thing about this franchise is that it will never let you forget just how misogynistic it is. 

This time we start in Venice. We know this because there are canalboats and a big sign that says that we’re at “Venice international grandmasters championship” A chess tournament then, and on the board of the next match is a reminder that we are a long time ago and that czechoslovakia is still a thing (also the indoor smoking), just like on one of the maps we had when I was a kid in school because they couldn’t afford to replace it. Anywhoo, Venice, chess.

Scene change, we’re now in a floating lair (a boat or maybe I should say ship, big yacht?), there’s a small aquarium with fish that eat each other, a white cat being petted by hands attached to a man whose face is not yet revealed who is issuing commands to a russian woman. He/they are SPECTRE of course, our old enemy. She is “number three”, he has a hideous ring with the SPECTRE octopus symbol. Number 5 joins them, he is the Czechoslovakian chess player (Kronsteen???) (who won), together they discuss their evil plan. They are stealing some decoding machine from the Russian in order to do so they need a female from the Russian cryptography section in Turkey and British intelligence, they will of course not know that they are being used. Bonus: They may get revenge for the murder of Dr. No. Number 5 has made it obvious that it is a trap because British intelligence won’t be able to resist it. 

Now we’re back at the estate of the opening scene, where fake Bond was killed. Blond Man is tanning on a blanket, a blonde woman is joining him as a helicopter carrying Number 3 arrives. 

Ah, those lazy bottle bleached days...Nr. 3 is looking for a Grant, ostensibly the Mr. Blond. They walk through the tranining facilites and the guy who met Nr. 3 brags about them using live targets on occasion, because training is well and good, but cannot replace experience. She finds him acceptable. I like Nr. 3, she’s a little subvertive (but of course she is evil *eyeroll*). 

Ah, here appears a Russian woman, presumably the aforementioned “female” Tatiana Romanova (wow, such russian). Nr. 3 has reading glasses thicker than coke bottle bottoms.

Those subtitles say “I will obey your orders” and so she will, otherwise she’d be dead. Nr. 3 is not to be trifeld with. Romanova has been hand picked to be a seductress, to Bond presumably. Who we meet in the next scene, he’s in a boat with a woman, Syliva, who caresses a scar on his back and asks if it is from another woman who was jealous, “yes, but I haven’t turned my back on one since” he replies. We met Sylvia in Dr. No, he had to leave for Jamaica then. Their little outing is interrupted by beeping that means Bond must phone the office, which of course needs him, and so Sylvia doesn’t get quite as much attenton as she wanted, but he makes time for some “lunch”.

Back at M’s office they realize it’s a trap (Nr. 5 was clearly  correct in is analysis of British intelligence), but Bond is intrigued once he sees the picture of the stunning Romanova, of course. 

Enter Q, Bond gets toys this time around! Not just a new gun like last time, now he gets a suitcase with twenty hidden rounds of ammunition, a secret throwing knife, and AR7 folding snipers rifle, .25 caliber with infrared telescopic sight, some hidden 50 gold sovereigns in the handle, a tin of talcum powder that is teargas that will explode if you open the suitcase in the normal way, instead Bond must first turn the catches horizontally, then open normally. Bond thinks this is ridiculous.

Then he says goodbye to Miss Moneypenny with the traditional flirtation that goes nowhere and gets his plane ticket to Istanbul, gives Miss Moneypenny the picture of Romanova and writes “from Russia with love” on it. Oh Bond...

 He lands in Istanbul and someone is following him already, because of course they are, two mustached men as well as the SPECTRE hired Grant. The mustaches are hunagrians hired by the russians according to the driver, “they follow us, we follow them, it’s a sort of understanding we have.”

The driver takes him to Kerim Bey, who says the driver is is son, so are all his top employees because blood is the only thing to be trusted. I think he is in for a rude awakening at some point. Kerim warns him that it is a foolish endeavor and that he should spend a few days enjoying Istanbul and then go home. 

We see Grant again, with someone gagged and bound in the back seat. Bond goes to his hotel, and it’s no dump, he’s in room 32, and it comes wired with bugs, luxurious! Bond asks for a new room because “the bed is to small”, they agree to show him the bridal suite

Meanwhile Grant dumps the car and the body of the man in the back outside the Russian consulate (I think), so that they will suspect the British, and as Nr. 3 says “the cold war in Istanbul won’t be cold very much longer”

The next morning Ali Kerim Bey’s office is bombed as he’s about to have sex with a woman who moaned his name until he put his papers down and gave her attention. She’s a spy for sure, because he’s not that interesting. Bond shows up later and he and Kerim Bey go down under the building, where there is some underground cave/channel and a boat (and rats). 

Kerim Bey has a fuckin telescope under the Russian consulate! He runs through who is who, including the beautiful Romanova. They decide it is best Bond doesn’t go back to his hotel. Now they trick their tail and go visit Kerim Bey’s “Gypises” who he uses “Like the Russians use the Bulgars” this is going to be some racist stereotypical nonsense isn’t it?

Some Russians (one of them they saw in the telescope and is probably the guy who made the mine that blew up Kerim Bey’s office) are up to something, seeing Bond & Kerim Bey’s arrival.

Ah yes, two girls are in love with same man and are threatening to kill each other, it will be settled in the “gypsy way” whatever that is. Kerim Bey and Bond are invited to a table with them “I hope you are good at eating with your fingers,” he tells Bond. Ah, of course, belly dancing, a lil throwback to the intro credits that.

While Bond is being entertained, the Russians are creeping in. Mr. Grant of SPECTRE is also lurking about. The two women who are in love with the same man fights each other, just as one has a bottle over the other’s head the Russians crash the party. Fighting ensues, Bond saunters through with ease, or the secret aid of one SPECTRE agent who needs him alive long enough to aid with the decipher acquisition. Remember Bond has yet to meet Romanova, he’s only been here one night! 

Bond has saved their leaders life, and is now “his son”, and asks if they can’t stop the “girl fight” - Oh Bond, they don’t need you you ass. The man says he can decide. 

They are delivered to his tent and he is told to decide, it fades out to him saying “this might take som time” followed by a Connery smirk (he’s a very pouty man isn’t he? Also he’s in his thirties here...)

Bond and Kerim Bey go to take out the Russian who attacked the, since Kerim Bey has been shot, Bond has brought his little folding rifle. Kerim Bey insists on shooting even though he only has one arm. Bond lets him. There is a secret hatch in the wall, opening in the mouth of a woman who is postered there, ample opportunity for some jokes about her pretty mouth that...

Bond is back at his hotel now, doing the most human thing I’ve seen him do, kick of his shoes. Then he orders breakfast for one at nine, green figs, yogurt and coffee, very black. He slowly undresses and makes his way towards the bathroom, he sniffs something strange in the air. THen he hears thumps. He grabs his gun and goes to check it out, wearing nothing but a towel.

Enter Romanova. Naked, in bed. They greet, he tells her she is beautiful, she tells him she think her (very small) mouth is too big, he thinks it is just the right size and they kiss, or rather he kinda rubs his mouth against her. Really, I never enjoy kissing on screen, but Connery is terrible at it. He asks her for blueprints of the consulate, she promises it, but they will fuck first. She’s got one job, lay back and think of Russia. Nr. 3 & Grant are outside filming. It’s a porn now, I’m sure you can track down a recreation of this as an actual porn somewhere, rule 34 and all that. 

I hope his dick is better than his kisses Ms. Romanova. The next day Romanova and Bond meet at St. Sophia, the Russian’s Ukrainan is following. Tourists are getting a very monotonous tour. Grant takes care of the Ukraininan as she’s about to steal the information left for Bond. 

Bond & Kerim Bey have a chat about how mysterious it was with the Ukraininan, and Bond also says that Romanova will do anything for him, Kerim Bey does not believe that, he’s sure she’s a double agent. Bond says he only wants the dechiffrerer anyway, Kerim Bey asks “is that all?” and they have a chuckle. 

Bond & Romanova meet on a boat, he has a camera that is really a tape recorder and he asks her questions about the decoding machine. She asks if he will make love to her in Englan, he says yes and we see M and the rest of the office listening to the tape. M ends up throwing Miss Moneypenny out of the room, she looks like she’s about to start laughing. She of course can listen in via the intercom at her desk, M. knows this and asks her to send Bond a “cable”. M. gives Bond the go-ahead for the deal over the decoder. Bond tells Romanova it will be on the fourteenth, not the thirteenth, even though it will be.  

Bond walks into the russian consulate, a convenient bomb, set off by Kerim Bey in the tunnels below, causes chaos and he seeks out Romanova and the device. They escape down into the tunnels, but oh no, the rats!

They must go another way than inteded, Kerim Bey leads the way! They escape the Russians aboard a train, but Gran is of course there, they are playing straight into his hands, oh no! Will Bond get out of this pickle? The question should really be will Kerim Bey and Romanova get out of it.

One of the russians got onto the train after all, Benz, and they seek him out, stuff a handkerchief in his mouth and Kerim Bey sits down with him, to keep him company until it is time to get off. Well, that is until Kerim Bey is murdered. Grant of course, but they seem to think the Russian and Kerim Bey did each other in. Bond takes Kerim’s yellow cigarette holder or whatever, and looks sad. He has lost a friend.

 The train trundles past Kerim’s son who is supposed to pick them up along the tracks and he is confuse. Bond takes out his upset on Romaonova, demanding the truth from her. 

At six thirty-three the train arrives in Beograd. Where another of Kerim’s sons await, getting terrible news. Grant is doing his usual lurking about. Bond gives the son Kerim’s items and jumps back onboard. Next stop: Zagreb, where Bond asked someone to meet him, but Grant takes the mans place. They re-board. Bond sends Grant (maquerading as Captain Nash) and Romanova ahead of him to the restaurant wagon. Then proceeds to sneak into Nash’s suitcase. 

During the meal Grant spills Romanova’s drink, refills with a little something extra. Pretty sure Bond sees it, but lets it pass. Romanova feels unwell on the way back. They put her to bed, then Bond puts a gun to Grant, who smooth talks his way out of it, shows Bond a map and stuns him with the handle of his gun (a lot of that going round in this movie). They’re in the same space as the suitcase with the tear gas, and I’m sure Bond is going to get out of this pickle by tricking him to opening it so that the tear gas booms him. 

Now for the villain tells too much talk! yay! I love these, they’re so ridiculous (spoiler for Designated survivor, in season three when Maggie Q’s character is just killed with a comment about how in real life that’s not how it goes, I was howling, and crying as she was the only reason I bothered watching still, very okay with it being cancelled). Bond is being a classist prick as usual and says he should have known since Grant ordered red wine with fish (PS. I’ve drank an entire bottle of cheap red as I watched this, hence the deterioration in uh, quote accuracy and “proper” language). Bond is all “you SMERSH people” smh, but then realizes that, no of course, SPECTRE! Ah, acronym soup.

I still can’t believe this guy is in his thirties here. Anywhoo. Grant says “I don’t mind talking, I get a kick out of watching Mr. Bond finding out what a bloody fool he’s been making of himself. We’re pro’s Mr. Bond.” 1. If you were pro’s you would have shot Bond already 2. I’m sure he’ll use that damn suitcase against you! Grant admits that Romanova doesn’t know she’s working for SPECTRE, that she believes she is doing this for SMERSH. Grant also calls Bond “old man” and who is older? I cannot tell. 

Here we go, Bond tricking him to opening the suitcase by promising him the 50 sovereigns. Fighting time! Here comes Grant’s watch wire, but Bond isn’t so easily offed when he’s real aaaand he off’s Grant with the very same wire. Beautiful. Bond then takes his cash and calls Grant’s body “old man”. I’m ded. 

The train starts hooting, there’s a truck on the tracks. Bond grabs the half conscious Romanova and drags her off the train with him. She falls asleep under a bush. He sneaks around some more, looking to get Grant’s men. He knocks one out, ties him up, throws him in the truck. Then he throws Romanova on a literal (truck) bed of flowers before getting in the truck himself. They’re driving off in the night, then the day. A yellow tailed helicopter, suspiciously like the noe nr. 3 arrived in when she picked up Grant comes at them. Bond runds around and let the helicopter chase him. This is terrible. Alright scenery though.

Bond hides in a convenient rock formation and brings out his rifle again. Guy in helicopter is about to throw down a hand grenade, but Bond and his .25 rifle shots him in the arm so he drops the grenade INSIDE THE HELICOPTER

Once again Bond survives through luck. Now they’ve arrived at a boat (still following Grant’s escape route I guess) and the driver is out of luck, once they’ve reached full speed Bond pushes him overboard. They’re headed for Venice (from Croatia if I’m not mistaken). 

Cut to the floating lair of guy with white cat, where nr. 3 and 5 are meeting with him, and she, of course, gets blamed for the failure, despite having  followed the plan. She says Bond was the reason, but five won’t hear it. That poor cat isn’t being petted right. She thinks she’ll be killed now, but instead guy with cat (number one) gives five a kick with a poisoned blade that came out of his boot. Three is now very keen on getting Bond so she will live. 

 Now Bond is in a boat chase, the chasers shoot out all the fuel barrels. So Bond lets them all plop into the ocean, then makes them go boom with a signal gun. I’m not sure that’s how that works, but okay. They loose their chasers. 

Now we’ve come full circle, back where we started. Venice. Hotel room. Maid shows up, pretty sure it’s number three here to steal something. A time for Romanova to figure out her loyalties. She picks Bond. I must admit I’m a bit sad, three was a good character to root for, but only if she ran her own evil empire.

“James, behave yourself, we are being filmed.”

“Oh, not again.”

THE END. 

except not quote because James Bond will retur in GOLDFINGER. See ya soon Mr. Bond. 

[citrinecoven]

I need to get some things off my chest...

For the last 2 months I have been in school taking a web dev course, i came from working in retail for 8 years straight and was hoping to change my “career path”. But all kinda sorts of weirdness are going on in my school... Before i start writing about the weird stuff that goes on in school, i want to say that I have realised on my own that web dev is not for me. I need something a bit more creative, a bit less technical... maybe web design? who knows... that’s not the point. I’m just saying this to preface that school didnt make me “give up”, it just helped. Right so... I go to a school for adults that teaches lots of techie stuff like web dev, app dev, ui/ux design, etc... They use a lot of more modern teaching styles, one of them being that they heavily rely on self-learning. They also focus a lot on the job market, meaning school work is done the way it actually should be done if you were a web dev in a company. 

The school also requires a 90% attendance rate in order for you to receive your certificate at the end of the course. The catch is tho if you are 30 mins+ late, you get written down as having missed a half day of class. if you are 1hr+ late, on paper,  you have missed a whole day of class. So if you have really bad luck with traffic/trains/busses a few times, you could essentially be f*cked... So first day we all agree that we should text our group chat when you’re running late, just a sign of respect towards your teachers and other student.  ✔️ -Cool, i definitely agree with that. This works wonderfully for the first 2 weeks, everyone is texting when they’re running a bit late and so is the teacher. Then one morning, my comrade students and i are waiting for our teacher but he’s already 10 mins late... no text... and he ended up being 2 hours late.  And the next day again... This keeps going on for a while... people pay a minimum of 10k for these courses and after i got a bit fed up i did the math and turns out for every hour we don’t have a teacher in, we each lose aprox. 50£. But hey, i have a friend who works at the school so i decide to talk to her about this issue. she’s very understanding of the issue and tells me she’ll bring it up during their next staff meeting. but she says she’s sure all they will answer is that “well this is a course that is heavy on self-learning, this is what they signed up for”. 🤷‍♀️ -Fair enough lads, but hey a text like we agreed upon couldnt hurt then maybe... Then things get a bit weirder, we are in a building that houses many different companies and there is common areas with a kitchen and seating, meeting rooms etc... suddenly all the admin staff, including my friend, are sitting in the common areas all the time and my friend lets me know the school will be moving theyre renting a new building. the admin staff will already be moving there in a week so they didnt renew the rent for their offices. The next week comes around and admin are still sitting in the common area, my friend complains because they promised theyd have the keys to the new building by now and could start moving their offices. - We’ll come back to this later it’s a few days after this or a week maybe? and we all receive an email where we get asked to rate our experience at the school so far. We get all the students togheter and we get told by one of our instructors “fill out the score email, oh btw you need to rate atleast a 9 if you’re having a good time, anything below that is not acceptable“ Another student and i look at each other and make a weird face, because why are you telling us how to rate our experience? Anyways i get petty, ask them if it’s anonymous (it was) and rate them a 5 and tell them i’m not impressed with (at this point) teachers being late everyday without letting us know and using self-learning as an excuse.💁‍♀️ From the next day on, i follow class from home via video call for about a week because my lumbago+sciatica had gotten rly bad. near the end of the week my friend texts me “hey, has someone come in and talked to the class yet?” and i’m like “oh hey, i havent been in this week bcause of health issues so i dunno?” and she tells me she doesnt work there anymore and my brain is just like “??!🤯?!?” She goes on to explain to me that she had been working so hard, hitting all her targets, so when the big bosses came in and called her into a meeting room she thought they were going to praise her but instead what she got was “you’re no longer needed” together with almost all of the other staff...🙃 So i get back to school, my back is a bit better, i ask students about those ppl that came and talked to them and so basically the school is calling it quits. Now i only have a front-end web dev course, one of my friends in school has a full-stack course and now they won’t be receiving the back-end (or second half) of their course and finding a back-end web dev course is not going to be easy and will be very expensive. And throughout the day i hear so many other students talking about this and freaking out over what theyre gonna do... so we’re the next week, monday was a bank holiday, tuesday morning i go in and i’m there all alone... so i text the group and apparently theres no class today because there’s no teachers available... so i text my usual teacher to see what the plan for the week is and basically he can’t find any guest teachers and we’re essentially off all week unless anything changes (it didnt) so at this point we haven’t had class for a week, this is a short course, a week of missing information is critical...  However in that week i’ve realised that this just isn’t for me, i don’t have the right way of thinking and problem-solving, it’s a bit sad but it’s fine. if it’s not for you, it just isnt.

and guess what... it’s monday and i’m in my bed writing this petty review of my school experience because there’s no class again... I have so much more to say but this is already so long...

[fyrapartnersearch]

rEEE writers inbound

hey there! i’m rhys. i am 22, live in the ct, and love ooc chatter! my ooc is pretty lax, but i promise my writing is a helluva lot more formal. i write in third person, past/present tense, and paragraph form. im not a rapid-fire writer, and won’t be able to constantly get replies in every day (i can get responses in anywhere between every couple of days to a week or two). however, i will ALWAYS put tlc into all of my posts and characters! i write anywhere between 300-900 words. it’s definitely alright if you don’t feel up to that amount at any given point, but i do appreciate keeping it somewhere in this range. im very wordy, and can spew out a novel if im excited enough lmao

  my limits are pretty general; i will not do beastiality, pedophilia, vore, or scat. i can indulge in a variety of kinks, but if it’s a little much for any average person, i’m less likely to write it out (i.e extreme ddlg or adult babies, furries, extreme pet play, etc.) but i can be persuaded to lightly touch on certain kinks as long as they’re not 10000% filth lmao i cannot, and will not, do seme/uke or top/bottom dynamics. absolutely not. queer relationships shouldn’t be defined by whose taking the D. i dont want to interact with squeamish little femboys, or awful macho men with downright rapey tendencies. versatility is key, and power struggles are what i live for! i will, however, indulge in BDSM dynamics with certain plots— although, domination isn’t always about penetration, you know?

  give me characters with aspirations, hopes and dreams, and crushing past experiences that flesh them out into who they are. no one is perfect, and we all have things that rear their ugly heads in the dark. problematic characters, male or female or anything in between, are everything. i love lgbtq+ characters, as i am part of the community myself, and will almost always be more inclined in writing queer characters. not to say i won’t write for strictly straight pairings, m/f, but usually i am iffy when approached with it if i am just meeting you.

  i write for all genders, ethnicity, and orientations! you can find a few writings examples of mine here. i am pretty welcoming of most things. smut, of course. some kink a little out there that you want to suggest? let's do it, dude. i am super OOC friendly and i am pretty much a garbled mess when i get to know you!  i’m a social person— i feel like a burden if you’re not into chatting with me, so please, if you’re not looking to be both a writing partner as well as a friend, i might not be the gal for you. i am open to crooked relationships, ones that don't function right, dark/morally corrupt characters, unconditional love, etc. my interests fluctuate! i am down, 24/7, guys! i only roleplay over email, but will ooc chat over discord or hangouts! here's a list of fandoms and pairings below that i am looking to write for atm. i do have many more, but these are just the ones off the top of my head!

_________

  Borderlands

Handsome Jack/Rhys

Handsome Jack/Rhys/Nisha

  Life is Strange

Max Caulfield/Chloe Price

Max Caulfield/Kate Marsh/Victoria Chase

Nathan Prescott/Warren Graham

Rachel Amber/Chloe Price

Frank Bowers/Damon Merrick

  DC

Dick Grayson/Jason Todd

Dick Grayson/Slade Wilson

Dick Grayson/Wally West

Harley Quinn/Pamela Isley

  Batman: Telltale Series

Bruce Wayne/John Doe

Bruce Wayne/Selina Kyle

Bruce Wayne/Harvey Dent/Selina Kyle

  Marvel

Stephen Strange/Tony Stark

Bucky Barnes/Sam Wilson

Thor/Bruce Banner

Peter Parker/Harry Osborn

Peter Parker/Wade Wilson

Wade Wilson/Vanessa Carlysle

Gwen Stacy/Peter Parker/Harry Osborn

Peter Parker/Wade Wilson/Vanessa Carlysle

  Uncharted

Nathan Drake/Samuel Drake

Nathan Drake/Harry Flynn

Chloe Frazer/Nadine Ross

  TTGOT

Asher Forrester/Gwyn Whitehill

Rodrik Forrester/Arthur Glenmore

Mira Forrester/Margaery Tyrell

Gryff Whitehill/Elaena Glenmore

Gared Tuttle/Finn

Gared Tuttle/Josera Snow

  The Walking Dead

Rick Grimes/Negan

  TWDG

Javier Garcia/David Garcia

Clementine/Gabriel Garcia

Clementine/Louis

Clementine/Violet

Marlon/Louis

Javier Garcia/Paul “Jesus” Rovia

  Far Cry (3-5)

Jason Brody/Vaas Montenegro

Jason Brody/Bambi “Buck” Hughes

Ajay Ghale/Pagan Min

Ajay Ghale/Sabal

Ajay Ghale/Sabal/Amita

Rook/Joseph Seed

Rook/John Seed

Rook/Faith Seed

  Punisher

Frank Castle/David Lieberman

Frank Castle/Billy Russo

  Mass Effect: Andromeda

Scott Ryder/Reyes Vidal

Scott Ryder/Gil Brodie

Scott Ryder/Peebee

Sara Ryder/Peebee

Sara Ryder/Vetra Nyx

  Kill Your Darlings

Lucien Carr/Allen Ginsberg

  ____________

Onto original plots!

——————

  Office romances/BDSM/Friends with benefits-turned-lovers

okay, so, i had this type of roleplay with someone a while back. maybe more than two or three years back that i fell out of contact with and i could never really get it out of my head because it was probably one of the best character-building stories i’ve ever taken part of. :’) i don’t remember their name, but i do hope they’ll contact me again if they ever see this. while some of this may seem specific, none of it is concrete and i promise i am very easy to get along with and very accomodating! the plot i remember had three different relationships— completely different people, with different lives and different worlds, with only one common thing between them being that they work in the same building. we can do all three, or we can do a few, or even  one! i dont mind.

  **pairing A; M/F preferred (lol i know broke my own rule, but i adore femdoms! extra: please come with an open mind. this is not a 50 shades AU, and i do not want it to be.) this one is between a CEO and an intern in their senior year of college. The CEO is a femdom, and freshly out of divorce, takes a liking to the clumsy intern who’d spilled coffee on her more than once. The intern has never been in a relationship with an older woman, let alone one running a multi-million dollar company, but hey, isn’t that the dream for some broke twenty-something down on his luck? She introduces him to BDSM, and while he’s hesitant, the idea is as exciting as it is frightening. He accepts her offer— while it’s difficult at times, he begins to learn more about her. Her ex-spouse, her young child, and her unwillingness to develop a sincere relationship with him. She’s had subs before, and while she tells him he isn’t disposable, he begins to feel it was the truth. He grows to have feelings for her, and while she isn’t too keen on admitting it, the feeling is mutual. I’d love to explore their dynamic in and out of sex, and the conflict between the intern and her ex-spouse. I love age gaps, and think it would be awesome to see them develop over time to find common ground to establish a personal relationship and trying to even out their power imbalances. I don’t mind playing either the CEO or the intern, but I am leaning more towards the CEO. :V**

  **pairing B; M/M preferred (this one is waaay more gritty and more dub-con than anything so please beware!) this one is between two higher-ups who have been butting heads for years— and occasionally, sexual tension neither have acted on. A is a snarky, openly gay man, and probably what some would consider shallow and noncommittal. B is a brooding, closeted ‘by the book’ type well into his thirties, and refuses to engage in anything sexual with men despite his obvious attraction; B has younger siblings he takes care of as well as his mother, and being the oldest son and only provider, hasn’t done a thing for himself in twenty years. A lives completely alone, complete with a bachelor pad and, the influx of flings that went nowhere past sex, and has risen to the top with his own sheer will. they have conflicting motives, and while both of them have an intense hatred for each other, they’ve never engaged in physical altercations in fear of losing their jobs. one day, A jabs a little below the belt, and finally, B starts swinging. this fight turns into something way more heavy in the company parking lot. what happens between them in the long run is something desperate, needy, and longing for real affection. it began as a mindless need for sex, angry and mean and formal, with B being especially unwilling to ‘give up’ his masculinity and ever be on the receiving end in fear of losing the control he needs to keep this up. i’d love to see them begin to see each other in a different light, and changing each other for the better. i’d also love to see A showing B that sex doesn’t have to be meaningless, and that he doesn’t need to fear letting A be in control. And B showing A that commitment isn’t as terrifying as it may be, with them gradually going from rivals, to friends with benefits, and eventually lovers. i, again, don’t mind writing for either! **

  **pairing C; F/F preferred. (aaa this pairing is way more fluffy and sweet, with hurt/comfort as a stable of their dynamic.) this one is between two small-office employees in the company. A is fairly tame at work in order to support her sibling(s), of which she has adopted from her father’s custody years ago. she is fairly confident with her sexuality, and while not being the type to frequent clubs, is dragged along by a few friends and there, meets B. B is a young woman who just recently got out of a relationship with an abusive ex fiance— B has only ever been with that man, and was never confident in exploring her sexuality due to a religious upbringing and parents who were dead set on traditional values. she’s never strayed from her ex, and while he wasn’t faithful or remotely good to her in return, she was heartbroken with their split. months after, he returns to the city and B’s close friends decide to take her out on a girls’ night to make her feel better— B coincidently sees her ex, and feeling childish and unattractive, heads off to the bar to get a drink. she’s nowhere near a drinker, and just before she does drown her sorrows, is hit on by A. while initially shocked, B is flustered and finds herself immediately attracted to A. they have a one-night stand, and while B believes that A would just leave in the morning, A instead lays with her until she wakes up, and leaves her number. B is too anxious to text her. they bump into each other at the elevator that Monday. they agree to be just friends, until B knows what she wants. A is willing to wait. B might have a crush, and A is intent on building B up to love herself and her body. i would overall prefer to write for A, but if you’re dead set, no prob!**

  Serial killer/1960’s/Small town sheriff

no preferred pairing! would love, love, love to see something between a serial killer and a small town sheriff in the mid-to-late sixties. we could make up a new little town, or find one to our liking! A is the sheriff who had been born and raised in this town with a good home life, loving parents, and a steady moral compass, albeit trapped in a loveless marriage. they know everyone, and every nook and cranny of the place like the back of their hand. this is the type of place where people don’t have to lock their doors at night, or constantly watch their kids when they’re out in the yard playing. that is, until people start going missing and horrifyingly mutilated bodies began to pop up around town. B is a well-liked baker in town; known to be genuinely friendly and kind, B has a very corrupt past. both of their parents were heinously abusive, and as a child, B developed sociopathic tendencies. B was inherently spiteful of the town and the people in it, for leaving them to rot in hell for eighteen years, and for never reaching out. B formed a god complex, his intentions to ‘purify the corrupt’. they keep tabs on almost everyone in town, and the victims they do take are put in the soundproof basement of his home to be ‘baptized’; tortured, beaten, and mutilated beyond recognition. A and B are friendly with each other as A comes to the bakery every morning, with B’s motives completely unbeknownst. one night, A, frustrated and pissed from the dead ends of the case of the decade, decides to head to the bar and relax. B is the one face A didn’t mind seeing that night, and one thing lead to another, with A and B in a dark alley getting each other off— i definitely see this as B grooming A to be a complicit pet, and when A gets closer and closer to figuring out who the killer is, he forms a deep connection with B. B develops a possessiveness over A, along with that sense of ownership he’d established between them. B manipulates A, coerces him into a false sense of security, and eventually— A finds out, and while B initially thinks to kill A, A is corrupted by B and forms some kind of stockholm syndrome for B. it’s up to A on whether or not they turn B in, or cover the killer’s tracks. B, despite his very sick and repulsive nature, develops a true infatuation for A, as close to love as they were ever going to get, and A is desperate enough to please B that they’ll do anything to not disappoint them.

  Post apocalypse/decades later/immunity

no pairing preferred! the plot I had in mind is loosely based off of a video game called "The Last of Us", which i am sure most of you have a general knowledge of! (definitely check it out if you don’t :O it’s a great game!!) the prompt i was shooting for goes something like this; in a post-apocalyptic world where a pandemic has killed off most living species, character A is a lone wolf with little to do with other people that don't benefit him, except for a select few. A is especially rough around the edges, as he's lived through some sick shit and lived to tell the tale. A had once been part of a group dedicated to finding a cure, but things went south, and a lot of people died. A had a close bond with the leader of said group, and coincidentally they were the only survivors. their past together, having been deeply demented and twisted, caused them to fall out. said leader has rebuilt a new group in the ten years since the last time they'd seen A. character B is the only known immune person alive, and has dedicated their life to being a resource to finding a cure. A and his (current) contact/partner in crime have something taken from them, and are determined to get it back. they do some searching, and are confronted with this group-- they have what they need, but are only willing to give it to them for a favor in return. no one can outrun their past forever. so, this plot isn't concrete. things can be changed, we can do whatever we want, and i am happy to comply to any revisions or suggestions! i'd really enjoy taking on A, if that's alright!

  TREASURE HUNTERS/ANCIENT CURSES/LOVE-HATE DYNAMICS/MODERN

treasure hunters!!!! yES!! think Uncharted or Tomb Raider. an architect/treasure hunter is being funded an expedition to find a lost treasure and they are forced to bring along a reporter in order to receive the funds. the reporter and architect certainly dont get along in the beginning— they bicker, and clash on most fronts. the expedition wasnt meant to be dangerous. what was initially thought to be a simple job turned into something treacherous; bandits, a team of hired hitmen and their leader looking to take the treasure for themselves, and some rather supernatural elements that they both couldnt quite put a finger on. the treasure hunter and the reporter have to work together to get out of this alive, and get to the artifact before someone else does. (the “treasure” is definitely up for debate!! we can chose a real life lost treasure, or just make one up!! it can be anywhere around the world, and everything is at our disposal).

  DEMON/INHERITANCE/HUNTERS/MODERN

character A has an awful time living in the city— alone, and without mom's guidance, completely lost. one day they receive a call about a deceased relative, one they'd never heard of, one that apparently left their estate and everything in it in their will to A. with nothing but the clothes on their back, A took a shot in the dark and drove out to this presumed "estate" come early summer, only to find that it's a mansion in a tiny little town with an eerie vibe and populated by the typical small town churchgoers and farm folk. living in this town was a hell of a challenge; everyone was nice, too nice, and people started to go missing. character B is an exceptionally charismatic, charming person and the only mechanic/handyman in town. A and B become friends, partially, when A needs to fix up the piping in their estate. A stumbles upon the attic one day, and for once, they start to get why this whole town reeked to the roots in weird shit-- their deceased relative was tracking something here in this town, having to do with all of the MIA townsfolk. DR has a board of possible suspects, and at the center? B. A shrugs it off as their relative having been paranoid, but the longer A stays in this town, the more apparent it becomes that DR wasnt crazy. B is, in fact, not the murderer, instead a supernatural being (open for debate! im on the fence with demons, vampires, etc.) on a mission to track down the monster, same as DR. i am so down for internal struggles, sweet gestures, and overall, two people just trying to make it work! i could also see A being hella paranoid that B is the monster, and maybe tries to throw cloves of garlic at them only to realize thats not exactly how this monster hunter business works lmao

  DEPRESSED WRITER/YOUNG MUSE/between 1920’s-1960’s/sex, drugs, & the american dream

m/m preferred! A is a severely depressed middle-aged man believing his life has been wasted. his wife left him with their child at her hip, his career was in a rut, and he had nothing left to live for. opting for suicide, he goes out one evening to purchase a bottle of gin to down with a handful of prescription sleeping pills when he returned to his apartment. instead of going directly home, he’s swept in by the music in an underground club for queers. there he meets B; all encompassing, angel faced, and the only person A didn’t know how to look away from. B is a former US Navy Seal, aspiring musician, and avid indulger of the human body— A stays a little too long, owlish and red, and after the show, B approaches him with a cattish smile. they spark a friendship, and A is thrown down the rabbit hole when B introduces him to his social circle, filled to the brim with drag queens, junkies, queers, and the overall unusual— he integrates into this community, his contemplation of suicide only a distant memory, and begins to find himself extremely attracted to B. he lights a fire in A, something dangerous and unquenchable, and A finds himself drawn in by the unpredictability. A embarks with B on a journey of self exploration, passion, and inevitable love in a world that scorned the oddities of human attraction and anyone who dared to be free.

  thanks for your time! if you've read through, please contact me at dotiscat@gmail.com on email or rhys#3615 on discord and mention kiwi somewhere in your initial message. n_n

  Rhys xoxo

[eznews]

When her middle school closed in March, Garvey Mortley stopped going to lacrosse practice and playing drums in the school band. With so much time at home, she leaned into another interest: Roblox, an online gaming site and app with Lego-like characters and millions of virtual worlds to explore.

Sprawled on the floor of her living room in Bethesda, Md., Garvey began logging more hours in the online universe, building virtual houses, adopting digital pets and racing other players in obstacle courses. She said she now plays Roblox on her laptop for up to five hours a day while chatting with friends on her phone, up from an hour or two before the pandemic.

“It’s like my main passion,” said Garvey, 12. “It’s pretty diverse, and you can meet people around the world.”

The coronavirus has created some pandemic winners as people shop in droves on Amazon, buy Peloton bikes to exercise at home and head to drive-in movies. For children, there are pandemic victors, too — and chief among them is 14-year-old Roblox, which was already popular but has become wildly so since people have been urged to stay at home.

Since February, the number of active players on Roblox has jumped about 35 percent to reach 164 million in July, according to RTrack, a site that tracks Roblox data. About three quarters of American children ages 9 to 12 are now on the platform, according to Roblox. And players spent 3 billion hours on the site and app in July, twice as much as they did in February, the company said.

Inside Roblox, which is free to play, gamers create an avatar. They can play the site’s millions of games, bringing their character into environments ranging from tropical islands to haunted castles and bustling towns. Their avatars can engage in first-person combat, decipher puzzles or participate in egg hunts while chatting and interacting with other players. Gamers pay real money — often $5 or $10 at a time — to become premium members and to purchase an in-game currency called Robux, which lets them buy clothing, weapons and even hot air balloons for their characters.

“At a time like this, where people are housebound, being able to escape into the digital world and have these kinds of fun, imaginative experiences with a friend, is very, very relevant,” said Craig Donato, Roblox’s chief business officer.

For players, Roblox has an element of never-ending discovery because independent developers create more than 20 million new games a year for the platform. And for those developers — who are mostly teenagers, college students and young adults operating solo or with a small team — the recent spike in Roblox’s popularity means boom times for them, too, since they get a cut of the money that users are spending on their games.

Image

Anne Shoemaker, who develops Roblox games, said she has made about $500,000 through Roblox, most of that since March.Credit…Gabriela Hasbun for The New York Times

One beneficiary is Anne Shoemaker, 20, who said she moved from Palm Coast, Fla., to Silicon Valley two years ago with $100 in her pocket to live near other developers as she coded games for Roblox. For a while, she said, she didn’t earn enough from the platform to justify turning it into a full-time job.

But after the pandemic hit, Ms. Shoemaker saw a surge of interest in her two Roblox games, Mermaid Life, a fashion-focused role-playing game, and My Droplets, a pet simulation game. Players have paid for extra content in those games, and for the hats she made for users’ avatars that she sells across the site.

Ms. Shoemaker said she has now made about $500,000 through Roblox, most of that since March. Before the pandemic, she could afford to pay just one or two people to help her. Now her game studio, Fullflower Studio, employs 14 contractors and she is plotting new games.

“It feels incredible,” Ms. Shoemaker said. “People used to tell my mom, ‘Stop letting her play this video game; it’s not going to get her anywhere.’ And it’s getting me somewhere.”

Roblox said it has more than 2 million developers, 345,000 of whom make money and who split their profits 50-50 with the company. Dozens of the top developers make millions of dollars, the company said, and top games in the past have generated an average of $2 million to $3 million a year.

Revenue from Roblox’s mobile app, which most players use, totaled $493 million in the first half of the year, up from $228 million in the same period a year ago, according to SensorTower, an analytics firm. Roblox declined to disclose its financials, except to say it was cash-flow positive.

Roblox, which is based in San Mateo, Calif., was founded in 2006 by Erik Cassel and David Baszucki, who were engineers and entrepreneurs. Mr. Baszucki is the chief executive; Mr. Cassel died of cancer in 2013. The start-up has raised $335 million from investors including Meritech Capital Partners and the Chinese internet giant Tencent. In February, when it raised fresh financing from investors including Andreessen Horowitz, it was valued at $4 billion.

In the Roblox game Jailbreak, people’s avatars are prisoners attempting to escape from jail or are police officers trying to keep them imprisoned. Credit…Roblox

In Roblox’s early years, its growth was slow. But activity began picking up in 2015 and 2016 as technological tweaks made it easier to play on phones and Microsoft’s Xbox. Roblox has now become at least as popular as Minecraft, one of its main competitors, said Craig Sherman, a venture capitalist at Meritech.

Even with its recent surge in activity, Mr. Sherman said, Roblox is “on the cusp” of more growth. He said the platform has become a foundation for people to start businesses on, similar to YouTube.

“Roblox is becoming this generation’s version of going to the mall or downtown with your friends, and Covid probably helps accelerate that,” he said.

Some children who grew up on Roblox have never left. Alex Balfanz, 21, started coding games on Roblox when he was 9. In 2017, as a high school senior in Orlando, Fla., he released a Roblox game called Jailbreak, in which people’s avatars are prisoners attempting to escape from jail or police officers trying to keep them imprisoned.

Mr. Balfanz said he watched in astonishment as Jailbreak tallied more than 70,000 players at once on its first day. The game has now been played more than 4 billion times and makes several million dollars a year, which Mr. Balfanz said he splits with his business partner.

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In the pandemic, Jailbreak has reached even greater heights. Mr. Balfanz said that on the best days, the game has 80,000 to 90,000 people playing at once, compared with 40,000 to 60,000 before.

“It was a pleasant surprise, something I hadn’t really thought of happening in the midst of all the unfortunate circumstances brought by the pandemic,” he said.

With his earnings, Mr. Balfanz, now a senior at Duke University, said he has taken some vacations,paid his college tuition (Duke’s tuition is nearly $60,000 a year) and bought a Tesla. He has attained celebrity status on Roblox, and said he is swarmed by star-struck players whenever he logs on.

“It’s like my main passion,” Garvey said of Roblox. “It’s pretty diverse, and you can meet people around the world.”Credit…Andrew Mangum for The New York Times

But the dangers of the offline world have sometimes seeped into Roblox, including reports of extremist groups attempting to recruit children and the appearance of sexually explicit content in games.

Mr. Donato said that safety was Roblox’s top priority. The company reviews game content, has extensive parental controls and filters profanity and personally identifiable information out of chats, he said.

“We see all sorts of major real-life events, from Covid-19 to racial discrimination somehow impacting our platform,” he said.

Back in Bethesda, Garvey recently used Roblox to educate others on racism. When players participated in virtual Black Lives Matter protests in the game this summer, she noticed some were darkening their avatar’s skin color, ostensibly a statement of solidarity with Black people. But to Garvey, who is Black, it seemed more like “virtual blackface.”

Garvey urged Roblox players to dress their avatars in Black Lives Matter T-shirts instead of changing their skin color.Credit…Andrew Mangum for The New York Times

So Garvey made a YouTube video explaining the history of blackface in the United States and urged Roblox users to dress their avatars in Black Lives Matter T-shirts instead of changing their skin color.

“I took an educational route,” Garvey said. “I was trying to just seem a little helpful, not just angry at everyone.”

Garvey’s mother, Amber Coleman-Mortley, said she was proud of how Garvey reacted. She said she views Roblox as an ideal place for education, especially with in-person learning and socializing curtailed.

“Play is the way that the human mind learns best,” she said.

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[chaoticneutralwriter]

02; 0.5% Chance

In which you recall how you possibly got the job

idol!jimin x staff!reader (ft. bff!yoongi)

genre: mostly fluff, comedy and hints of other genre as it goes on

word count: around 1k

In relation to this

“So how did you manage to get hired anyways?”

Your body jerks with a start and you nearly drop your phone, startled by not expecting the man who had been so diligently working on his computer, headphones covering his ears to really talk to you after your brief chat 2 hours ago. You turn your head to face him from the small lounge couch he had fit into his studio, still turned towards his dual monitors but he had shifted his headphone to one side so that his left ear was exposed.

You took a moment to silently breathe out from the shock you had earlier before sinking lower into the cushions. “I…They really liked me.”

“Uh huh.” The sarcasm lacing around the edge of his tone gave way that he picked up on your hesitancy.

“What? It’s true!”

“You know BigHit prefers hiring seasoned workers in all their departments and yet not only are you the youngest staff member, to my knowledge, you were also an active fan before that.”

“You’re talking as if we’re not the same age.”

“12 days older.”

You kiss your teeth in annoyance. You decided to let that one slide because you’ve both been over this way too many times. "And is there a requirement that a person should not be a fan of BTS in order to be hired by the company?”

“I’m just saying BigHit wouldn’t risk hiring someone as young as you on top of knowing that you were a huge fan.”

“And my credentials of 4 years of schooling, fluent in 5 languages, and a year experience of co-op are not valid.”

He swivels his chair ever so slightly just to give you that dead-eyed stare to which you return. It only goes on for half a minute before you break eye contact first. You hate to admit it but he’s right. Even you were sure there was only going to be a 0.5% chance of getting hired. But the universe works in mysterious ways and here you are, chilling in the Genius Lab with the -self-proclaimed- genius himself.

“…It’s embarrassing.” You muttered after a moment of silence.

He hums. “How?”

“I’m not saying that it’s that reason for sure…but…” You trail off, already feeling the heat crawling up your neck. “Why are you asking all of a sudden anyways? Shouldn’t you be working on some ground breaking beats?” It was a feeble attempt at changing topics but…

“I’m taking a break; a genius needs inspiration and what better way than to hear the miraculous story of how a fan went from buying the albums of her favourite idol group to getting them signed and for free anytime she wants.”

You blink incredulously at him because there’s just so many lies within that short sentence that you would’ve thought he would be the one to sing that solo track.

He shrugs and even throws in a slight pout. It was just your luck that you picked a day to hang out with Min Yoongi when he was in those moods. Must be all that caffeine. Or lack of sleep. Regardless, you have his full undivided attention and it doesn’t look like he’s letting you off this time because apparently this is the one time where things aren't ‘too troublesome’.

You swallow and as casually as you could, you recounted the memories of the interview. “Well…during the interviewing process, everyone was given a questionnaire.” You pause, hoping Yoongi would lose interest by the way you’re dragging things out.

Nope, still listening; he even nods for you to go on, which you do (begrudgingly).

“You know, basic questions like ‘why are you interested in this position?’, ‘what are your hobbies?’, ‘have you heard of BigHit?’ and ‘do you know BTS?’; those sorts of questions.”

He snorts but nods again and you accept defeat at this point. You’re not getting out of this one.

“And I’m sure it was meant to be something fun for the interviewee but one of the last questions was, ‘if you met your favourite idol on the street, what would you do?’”

“And…?”

You inhale, bracing yourself. “And…. I answered,” You side eye Yoongi, stalling but he only looks back with an expectant tilt of his head for added effect, “-that I would probably run away.”

It came out in a rushed, jumble mess of words that you were sure he wouldn’t understand any of it but oh no, genius Min Yoongi who raps 48 syllables in 4.2 seconds will not be beaten out by someone who stumbles over saying ‘nice to meet you’.

He blinks and you were naive enough to think that maybe he didn't understand you but that hope shatters as fast as it came because he snorts, loudly this time, and he’s doing a poor job at trying to hold back his laugh.

“Wow,” He chokes out, still struggling to maintain a serious air even for his sake. “You…What?” And the resolve breaks completely and he gives in, throwing his head back, mouth agape in a silent laugh and shoulders shaking. He looks at you glaring at him and the sight reminds him of an angry bunny and that causes him to double over in laughter again (except this time there’s some noise).

“Are you serious?” He gasps out after a while, still all gums and eyes threatening to disappear into half moons. You struggle for words as your face simultaneously heats up to a temperature you were sure you would start combusting (and you really wish you did). Yoongi is still trying to gather himself but he’s still shaking his head and muttering to himself about your answer, like he can’t grasp the idea that a fan who claims to adore and love their idol so much would actually run away at the chance to meet them in person. He finally turns to look at you and you shoot him a look that you hoped conveyed the message of ‘don’t’.

“You really are weird.”

“Thanks Yoongi. Bye Yoongi.”

As you exit his studio, you still faintly hear his chuckling as the door shuts and you find yourself unable to stay mad at him (he’s not wrong when he said you were weird). Honestly, if it weren’t for an elevator, a tub of frozen lychee jello shooters and 50 cent, you probably wouldn’t have befriended Min Yoongi at all.

The universe really does work in mysterious ways.

[jarigendut]

An ode to the playlist of my life

Note: The content of this post is based on personal experiences with some strong sentences. Read with caution.

For people whose escape method is modern entertainment, when the weather is just perfect, we encounter a story that hits too close to home and stays right by the heart, in a frequency tuned to our steps.

Years ago, when I spent my days in a boarding house for university, Reply 1994 (tvN, 2013) was that story for me. Messy romance aside, Shinchon Boarding House was full of people like me: excited, lost, scared, frustrated, wounded, but slowly crawled their way forward.

Years after, as I graduated and started working, Hospital Playlist (tvN, 2020) is the new champion.

I hope that, to you, I will become A perfect piece of memory like a sunset And will remain without regrets like a picture Oh that reminds you of our precious green days

To be frank, I did not know much about what my life would be like when I first chose medicine as my major. Then reality hit. From internship to real work, currently an ER doctor. I deal with people who think they are entitled to everything fast because they have money, people who are unable to do anything because they have no money, people who think too highly of their titles, people who talk tons but do nothing, people who only hear what they want to hear, people who don't really care working together, or people who look at me like I am a salesperson for drugs and medical tools. Contradictory needs and goals. Limited resources. Language barriers, which end up in misunderstandings. Replacing lunch with antacids because there is no time. Asking questions like, "Do I really need to smile even when they curse at me?" at 3 AM. Double it up ever since the pandemic hits as everyone looks at COVID like it's a conspiracy created by healthcare workers to fill our pockets. I 'work' even when I'm not at work. Then residency in neurology for four years if I'm good enough to pass the exams this month, with similar stuff repeating every day until I retire.

I wonder what Hospital Playlist looks like to non-healthcare professionals. I often stare at the series in disbelief. How lucky are the twin interns for having such great residents and professors to tail around. How lucky is that student who mistakenly shaved a patient's head for receiving such understanding from the patient and his family. How lucky is that foreigner with brain hemorrhage for getting support from the hospital's daddy-long-legs for his surgery and treatment, knowing that it may take weeks for him to recover. How lucky it is to have higher-ups in management who seem to be generally kind human beings. How lucky it is to work in a hospital that looks as comfy as a 5-star hotel connected to a mall. At least we have those nice things in fantasy.

On the other side, the life of the residents is something I'm very familiar with. What do people feel when resident Seok Min explains stuff like a robot? When Jae Hak shares how he gets on his knees to get his patient to accept treatment just to save him his job, looking obviously miserable and disgusting as he does it? When he breaks down in front of some fruits with a thank-you note? When life still gives him more lemons with being scammed whatsoever and he still has to stay professional? When Min Ha is at her limit handling her patients and covering for her MIA coworker? When her patient constantly calls for her, yells at her, gets into a complicated medical situation, and still has to keep her shit together to save two lives when she can barely stay awake? When her professor acknowledges her struggles and her efforts? And then to see how those little "thank you"s and "you did your best"s at the end literally pull them back to sanity, to keep their lives going no matter how hard it is?

I feel like an orange being peeled open and squeezed dry at those moments.

I'm complaining, yes. Even though I should not, since this is the consequence of choosing the major in the first place. Even if I didn't know better, it was still my choice. Alas, as Namjoon said:

I run faster than those dark clouds I thought that’d make it alright But, it turns out I’m just a mere human

To round up my misery, Hospital Playlist shows me the life I have always dreamed about. Waking up every day to a job I can do well and generally enjoy, hanging out with my friends at a restaurant when I get off work, going for karaoke or play games together when we are free, setting time away or buying things for myself, dating or divorcing when I want to, singing alone at church or wherever as I like, getting myself checked and treated when I'm sick - in short, finding that balance between the human me and the professional me. Chae Song Hwa embodies so many traits I wish to have when I'm in my 40s or 50s. Her gang reminds me of my group of (close?) friends from uni time who I only see through our group chats. It's hard not to be envious. I mean, look at Kim Jun Wan slicing Song Hwa's ex with his eyes because the latter thinks a man and a woman can't be true friends. Can my friends and I last through another 10 or 20 years? If I lose them, will I find someone else like that? The world on screen is fantasy, so I begin to wonder whether it is actually possible to reach that point in reality.

To me, who is going to wear this white coat and title and carry my kind of personal baggage for the rest of my life, Hospital Playlist is beautifully brutal. It is unbearable like a mirror at times, but it gets me regardless. So here I am, waiting for another ride with Shin Won Ho PD-nim and his gang starting tomorrow. It sounds strange to hope for another beautifully brutal story, so let's just say that I'm looking forward to spending my days with such a warm, comforting show as we all deal with the highs and lows of life.

[riichardwilson]

By Listening to Her Customers, This Entrepreneur Found a Larger Audience — And a Greater Mission

Michelle Kennedy launched the Peanut app to help moms. But now, the app is out to help all women.

March 4, 2020 15+ min read

This story appears in the March 2020 issue of Entrepreneur. Subscribe »

Michelle Kennedy arrived at lunch, nervous about the conversation she was about to have with her best friend. It was 2016, and Kennedy had just made a big career decision. She was going to leave her job as a tech exec and launch a new app for moms. It was exciting — a new adventure, a massive market, a lot of potential upside.

But the downside was this: Her best friend, BBC journalist Sophie Sulehria, had been struggling for years to have a baby. In fact, at the time, Sulehria had just completed her third failed round of in vitro fertilization, and it was taking a toll on her mental health. Kennedy didn’t want to add to the burden.

“It was a very bad time. My husband and I were really suffering,” says Sulehria. “When Michelle said she had something to tell me, I thought, Oh God; she’s having another baby! But she told me about the business, and she was so worried: ‘I don’t want to be your best friend who’s not only got a kid but also has a mum business — I don’t want to alienate you.’ ”

Related: 6 Reasons Moms Make the Best Entrepreneurs

But Sulehria was supportive. She knew the business was a fantastic idea, even though her exclusion from its target audience was killing her. So she asked Kennedy for a favor, as a friend and as a hopeful mom. This would be the earliest feedback Kennedy would receive as an entrepreneur, and although she wouldn’t know it yet, it would set the tone for how she would build her business — by listening to, and quickly responding to, the needs of the community it serves.

“I said, ‘Promise me one thing: When this app becomes successful, create a piece of it for people like me, a place where women having fertility issues can find support and friendship and discussions and information, because wouldn’t that be fantastic?’ ” Sulehria recalls. “And Michelle literally looked at me that day and said, ‘I promise.’ ”

Image Credit: Courtesy of Peanut App

Today, Kennedy’s company is called Peanut, and it has a million users and $9.8 million in funding. But back in 2013, before Peanut was even a twinkle in its founder’s eye, Kennedy was a rising star in the dating app world. She was deputy CEO of a European dating network called Badoo, and she also had a role in launching the brand Bumble, which would go on to become one of the industry’s major players.

Kennedy’s life was changing. Her personal dating days were behind her. She’d just given birth to her son, Finlay, and didn’t have many girlfriends with kids in her hometown of London. She wanted to find some like-minded women at a similar stage of life, but all she could find were archaic message boards and Facebook groups.

“The products available to me were all, quite frankly, crap,” Kennedy says. “Nothing represented me as a mother.” At the same time, she was watching a flood of utility-based applications enter the market — new ways to order food or pick up your dry cleaning — and felt that a huge opportunity was being overlooked. 

“Women are 50 percent of the population the last time I checked, and motherhood, in some way, will touch everyone’s life,” she says. “But no one is touching this space?” 

She came up with an idea for a networking app for moms and called it Peanut, after her nickname for her baby bump when she was pregnant. But she didn’t feel ready to take the leap — until three years later. “There were just signals in the market,” she says. “People were starting to talk about motherhood differently because we’d started to talk about womanhood differently, and it just felt like the right time.” In 2016, she began ideating in earnest, brought three trusted team members on board, and got to work. 

Peanut set out to embody the voice of modern, millennial motherhood. The team wanted it to function as a friend — one who understands that being a mom is a big part of a woman’s identity, but it’s not her entire identity. They spent a lot of time defining its voice. Users, for example, would be addressed as “Mama,” which tracks in both the United Kingdom and the United States and has a playful edge.

In February 2017, just a few months after she shared her plans with best friend Sulehria, Kennedy brought Peanut into the world, launching in the U.K. and the U.S. A simple beta version allowed women to create a profile, swipe to explore other women’s profiles — like on a dating app — and chat. 

The reaction was instantaneous. Thanks to some earlier-than-planned press coverage from the London Evening Standard, thousands of women flooded the beta offering, and Kennedy had fast validation. But the new users also revealed a vulnerability. Much like with dating apps, where happy couples no longer need the app, women were ditching Peanut once they’d made a new friend. “And why wouldn’t they?” Kennedy says. “You don’t need to make a new girlfriend every day — and in that case, you maybe don’t need to continue using Peanut.” 

Related: Debunking Three Myths About Women in Tech

This was a problem in need of solving. And as it turns out, users were already proposing a solution. “A lot of our users were saying, ‘Wait; how do I ask all the women on here a question? How do I share this article with all the women in my neighborhood?’ ” Kennedy says. “We had always planned to build community-based features, but our users let us know that we’d have to build them a lot quicker than planned.”

So the team hustled to launch community-wide message boards (called Peanut Pages) and group chats (Peanut Groups). Kennedy and her team thought they knew exactly how women would use these features; they expected to see chatter around the usual early-­motherhood pain points, like getting babies to sleep or working through pregnancy discomfort. But they got something much different. 

“Women were sharing about really intimate stuff: relationships, love, sex, work, money, housing, social issues,” says Kennedy, whose team kept an eye on developing conversations via a combination of artificial intelligence and human monitoring of message boards. “We had to stop and say, ‘Wait a minute. Why are these conversations happening on Peanut?’ And it’s because they just aren’t happening anywhere else — you’re not going to post on a local Yahoo message board about postpartum sex or frustrations with your partner. This has to exist in a private network.” 

While some popular topics did prove to be playful (“boobs and books”), the majority had a more solemn tone — and one in particular was being discussed at a surprisingly high volume. 

“So many women were talking about trying and struggling to conceive baby number two,” says Kennedy. “Maybe they were going through IVF, or had just suffered a loss, or found they were facing infertility, or had been diagnosed with endometriosis or polycystic ovary syndrome. Whatever it was, there was so much conversation.” 

Kennedy immediately thought of her best friend, Sulehria. She knew the facts were brutal: One in eight women will be affected by fertility issues, and one in six will experience a miscarriage. She also knew that the emotional burden was vast. “The most poignant thing Soph ever said to me was, ‘You know, I could use someone other than you to talk to,’ ” Kennedy says. “So now here we are with Peanut, and if all these women are talking about their struggles to conceive baby two or three, what about the women who haven’t had a baby at all?”

Kennedy planned to serve this audience someday; after all, she’d made a promise to her friend. But she thought it would be a long time from now, and a small part of a much larger pie. Now, by following her users’ lead, she realized she had it wrong. She needed to fulfill this promise fast — and the opportunity could be very big.

Image Credit: Courtesy of Peanut App

Women who struggle with fertility issues have already given their community a name: It’s TTC, for “trying to conceive.” Across the internet, there’s evidence of these women craving connection. Search #TTC on Instagram and you’ll find 1.4 million posts; #TTCcommunity has more than half a million posts; #TTCaftermiscarriage has nearly 82,000. 

But those makeshift communities, as the Peanut team saw it, weren’t working. “These women are making use of existing social networks, but they’re not finding a real community,” says Hannah Hastings, Peanut’s head of growth and brand marketing agency. “Instagram is a public space. If you choose to have a private profile, discovery is limited. So you’re either sharing personal information publicly or cut off. It doesn’t solve the need.” 

Sulehria backed that up. She found no comfort in the major social media networks, and in-person support groups were too far from where she lived. “Plus, the face-to-face thing is so daunting — to walk into a room and say, ‘Hi; I’m having this mental health problem,’ ” she says. “I just wanted something I could look at and engage with while I was lying in bed.” 

Peanut had identified a problem worth solving, but the team knew it couldn’t just create some new message boards called TTC and invite their users in. The psychological struggles facing the TTC community are significant and nuanced, and the internet can quickly become an emotional minefield. 

“There are articles and articles out there saying, ‘If you’re going through [infertility], just get off Facebook,’ ” says Barbara Collura, president and CEO of Resolve: The National Infertility Association. “Because the moment someone inevitably drops an ultrasound photo on there, it’s like…Oh my God. Women feel bombarded by this day in, day out. People stop going to the mall, restaurants, family events. So in a digital space, they want to feel safe. Anyone who’s trying to be inclusive to an audience of people who are trying to conceive has to be übersensitive.”

Keeping these sensitivities in mind, Kennedy decided to shield the TTC community from the rest of the app. Peanut TTC would function almost like a separate platform and have its own onboarding process. That way, TTC users wouldn’t accidentally stumble upon conversations from happy new moms (though they could opt in to see everything else if they wanted).

After that, the Peanut team had to dive into the nuances of the TTC world, and they leaned heavily on Sulehria as a guiding voice and gut check. Kennedy also asked Sulehria to connect her with other women who’d been struggling to conceive and may be willing to share their experience. Slowly but surely, a small but mighty focus group helped her build this new product with care. 

Related: How 2 Entrepreneurs Built a Membership Community for Working Moms

The team learned, as an example, that there are plenty of tensions within the TTC community that Peanut would have to contend with. “A woman who’s been trying for five months and a woman who’s been trying for five years are in very different positions,” Kennedy says. “To put them in one bucket? That’s not the experience we want to give users.”

Kennedy had started to see evidence of this earlier. On Peanut, where some women had created fertility-related message boards, there was a lot of debate about which posts belonged. “A woman who had become pregnant posted an image of her positive pee stick, which can be really triggering for other women,” she says. “We’d get notifications and reports, and we’d also see our users say to each other, ‘Hey, maybe you should take it down, or post it somewhere else.’ ” 

So in Peanut TTC, the company created UX solutions for those sensitivities. Blurred filters can be applied to potentially sensitive content (flagged by the creator or other users), and women will have to opt in to see those messages or images. The team developed proprietary artificial intelligence, which monitors group discussions and flags any comments that may not suit the brand’s ethos. “If a user is writing a comment and we detect an element of negativity, the app will say, ‘Hey, are you sure you don’t want to rephrase that? Peanut is a place of supportive conversation,’ ” explains Hastings.

In November 2019, after nine months in development, the company launched Peanut TTC. The community grew quickly, and user engagement skyrocketed — 60 percent above Peanut’s typical engagement.

It’s a good start, but Kennedy knows there’s a lot still left to do. She wants Peanut to expand its sensitivity features, improve how it matches women with relevant groups, and create room for TTC women to celebrate their pregnancies. And, more important, she also wants to keep following this line of thinking — watching how people use her product, and reacting with new solutions. She’s already seeing many options: Women are using the app to talk about raising teenagers, fighting chronic health conditions, sex after the age of 50, and more.

“Women have all these different life stages,” Kennedy says. “We can be the product that helps you find other women like you at every stage.”

Image Credit: Courtesy of Peanut App

Peanut is still in that early stage of a tech company’s life, when user growth is prioritized over profit. Which is to say: The app is free to use and makes no money. But Kennedy is building a monetization strategy based on premium products or in-app purchases. Imagine a user paying a small fee for direct access to a respected doctor, or an expert who can quickly and personally respond to a health-related question. 

Maybe it’s a great idea. Maybe it’s not. Maybe women will be interested in using it, but not so interested in paying for it. Either way, Kennedy believes she’ll find her answer, so long as she keeps engaging and listening to her users. 

To do that, her team is hustling to repeat the success of TTC with other communities. Later in 2020, for example, they’ll roll out Peanut Meno, for women approaching and going through menopause. 

They also go beyond just monitoring conversations on the app. Peanut formally recruited some of its most engaged users to serve as MVPs — Most Valuable Peanuts. The brand ambassador program rewards some users with a tote bag or a sweatshirt when they share the app with other women. Other MVPs do more structured work, like distribute flyers at local coffee shops or the library, or organize a group meetup. The tasks are paid (“If I’d pay someone else to do the job, why wouldn’t I pay my user?” Kennedy says) and selected at the leisure of the user; some women have earned up to $500 in a month.

In Kennedy’s eyes, it’s a small expense to elevate the insights of Peanut’s most tuned-in community members. Her 1,500 current MVPs are, indeed, incredibly valuable. “They’re the women creating our product,” she says. “We look at the data, listen, engage, and implement. We get feedback, iterate, and do it again. And when we don’t get it right, we have 1,500 women ready to tell us how to fix it. And those 1,500 women know, because they have direct access to our million women, engaging with them, organically and naturally, day after day.” 

Related: Why Investing in Women-Led Startups Is the Smart Move

Kennedy calls this a “constant user feedback loop,” and perhaps nobody better embodies that than an MVP named Tricia Bowden. She’s a former marketing agency exec who, in 2017, moved back to New York after spending a year on the West Coast. She had a 1-year-old son and was new to life as a stay-at-home mom, and a lot of the friends she’d returned home to weren’t yet mothers. “I Googled ‘Meeting mom friends’ and came across Peanut,” Bowden says. She joined, started lining up playdates, and before too long had a reliable network of friends close by.

Her passion for the brand grew fast, and Bowden soon became one of Peanut’s most valuable MVPs, and one of the loud voices pushing Peanut to expand to the “Meno” community sooner than later. Kennedy was impressed and gave her a promotion: In January, Bowden started a full-time gig as Peanut’s head of strategic growth and partnerships for the New York market, where the company will build out an office later this year. 

Bowden’s first order of business is to optimize and scale the existing MVP program, rolling it out on a hyperlocal, local, and national level — which is to say, Bowden basically became the feedback loop. She’s a user who helped shape Peanut, who then joined Peanut, who is now helping Peanut find and attract more people like her, who, of course, will then go on to shape Peanut anew.  

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source http://www.scpie.org/by-listening-to-her-customers-this-entrepreneur-found-a-larger-audience-and-a-greater-mission/ source https://scpie.tumblr.com/post/611675537099849728

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By Listening to Her Customers, This Entrepreneur Found a Larger Audience — And a Greater Mission

Michelle Kennedy launched the Peanut app to help moms. But now, the app is out to help all women.

March 4, 2020 15+ min read

This story appears in the March 2020 issue of Entrepreneur. Subscribe »

Michelle Kennedy arrived at lunch, nervous about the conversation she was about to have with her best friend. It was 2016, and Kennedy had just made a big career decision. She was going to leave her job as a tech exec and launch a new app for moms. It was exciting — a new adventure, a massive market, a lot of potential upside.

But the downside was this: Her best friend, BBC journalist Sophie Sulehria, had been struggling for years to have a baby. In fact, at the time, Sulehria had just completed her third failed round of in vitro fertilization, and it was taking a toll on her mental health. Kennedy didn’t want to add to the burden.

“It was a very bad time. My husband and I were really suffering,” says Sulehria. “When Michelle said she had something to tell me, I thought, Oh God; she’s having another baby! But she told me about the business, and she was so worried: ‘I don’t want to be your best friend who’s not only got a kid but also has a mum business — I don’t want to alienate you.’ ”

Related: 6 Reasons Moms Make the Best Entrepreneurs

But Sulehria was supportive. She knew the business was a fantastic idea, even though her exclusion from its target audience was killing her. So she asked Kennedy for a favor, as a friend and as a hopeful mom. This would be the earliest feedback Kennedy would receive as an entrepreneur, and although she wouldn’t know it yet, it would set the tone for how she would build her business — by listening to, and quickly responding to, the needs of the community it serves.

“I said, ‘Promise me one thing: When this app becomes successful, create a piece of it for people like me, a place where women having fertility issues can find support and friendship and discussions and information, because wouldn’t that be fantastic?’ ” Sulehria recalls. “And Michelle literally looked at me that day and said, ‘I promise.’ ”

Image Credit: Courtesy of Peanut App

Today, Kennedy’s company is called Peanut, and it has a million users and $9.8 million in funding. But back in 2013, before Peanut was even a twinkle in its founder’s eye, Kennedy was a rising star in the dating app world. She was deputy CEO of a European dating network called Badoo, and she also had a role in launching the brand Bumble, which would go on to become one of the industry’s major players.

Kennedy’s life was changing. Her personal dating days were behind her. She’d just given birth to her son, Finlay, and didn’t have many girlfriends with kids in her hometown of London. She wanted to find some like-minded women at a similar stage of life, but all she could find were archaic message boards and Facebook groups.

“The products available to me were all, quite frankly, crap,” Kennedy says. “Nothing represented me as a mother.” At the same time, she was watching a flood of utility-based applications enter the market — new ways to order food or pick up your dry cleaning — and felt that a huge opportunity was being overlooked. 

“Women are 50 percent of the population the last time I checked, and motherhood, in some way, will touch everyone’s life,” she says. “But no one is touching this space?” 

She came up with an idea for a networking app for moms and called it Peanut, after her nickname for her baby bump when she was pregnant. But she didn’t feel ready to take the leap — until three years later. “There were just signals in the market,” she says. “People were starting to talk about motherhood differently because we’d started to talk about womanhood differently, and it just felt like the right time.” In 2016, she began ideating in earnest, brought three trusted team members on board, and got to work. 

Peanut set out to embody the voice of modern, millennial motherhood. The team wanted it to function as a friend — one who understands that being a mom is a big part of a woman’s identity, but it’s not her entire identity. They spent a lot of time defining its voice. Users, for example, would be addressed as “Mama,” which tracks in both the United Kingdom and the United States and has a playful edge.

In February 2017, just a few months after she shared her plans with best friend Sulehria, Kennedy brought Peanut into the world, launching in the U.K. and the U.S. A simple beta version allowed women to create a profile, swipe to explore other women’s profiles — like on a dating app — and chat. 

The reaction was instantaneous. Thanks to some earlier-than-planned press coverage from the London Evening Standard, thousands of women flooded the beta offering, and Kennedy had fast validation. But the new users also revealed a vulnerability. Much like with dating apps, where happy couples no longer need the app, women were ditching Peanut once they’d made a new friend. “And why wouldn’t they?” Kennedy says. “You don’t need to make a new girlfriend every day — and in that case, you maybe don’t need to continue using Peanut.” 

Related: Debunking Three Myths About Women in Tech

This was a problem in need of solving. And as it turns out, users were already proposing a solution. “A lot of our users were saying, ‘Wait; how do I ask all the women on here a question? How do I share this article with all the women in my neighborhood?’ ” Kennedy says. “We had always planned to build community-based features, but our users let us know that we’d have to build them a lot quicker than planned.”

So the team hustled to launch community-wide message boards (called Peanut Pages) and group chats (Peanut Groups). Kennedy and her team thought they knew exactly how women would use these features; they expected to see chatter around the usual early-­motherhood pain points, like getting babies to sleep or working through pregnancy discomfort. But they got something much different. 

“Women were sharing about really intimate stuff: relationships, love, sex, work, money, housing, social issues,” says Kennedy, whose team kept an eye on developing conversations via a combination of artificial intelligence and human monitoring of message boards. “We had to stop and say, ‘Wait a minute. Why are these conversations happening on Peanut?’ And it’s because they just aren’t happening anywhere else — you’re not going to post on a local Yahoo message board about postpartum sex or frustrations with your partner. This has to exist in a private network.” 

While some popular topics did prove to be playful (“boobs and books”), the majority had a more solemn tone — and one in particular was being discussed at a surprisingly high volume. 

“So many women were talking about trying and struggling to conceive baby number two,” says Kennedy. “Maybe they were going through IVF, or had just suffered a loss, or found they were facing infertility, or had been diagnosed with endometriosis or polycystic ovary syndrome. Whatever it was, there was so much conversation.” 

Kennedy immediately thought of her best friend, Sulehria. She knew the facts were brutal: One in eight women will be affected by fertility issues, and one in six will experience a miscarriage. She also knew that the emotional burden was vast. “The most poignant thing Soph ever said to me was, ‘You know, I could use someone other than you to talk to,’ ” Kennedy says. “So now here we are with Peanut, and if all these women are talking about their struggles to conceive baby two or three, what about the women who haven’t had a baby at all?”

Kennedy planned to serve this audience someday; after all, she’d made a promise to her friend. But she thought it would be a long time from now, and a small part of a much larger pie. Now, by following her users’ lead, she realized she had it wrong. She needed to fulfill this promise fast — and the opportunity could be very big.

Image Credit: Courtesy of Peanut App

Women who struggle with fertility issues have already given their community a name: It’s TTC, for “trying to conceive.” Across the internet, there’s evidence of these women craving connection. Search #TTC on Instagram and you’ll find 1.4 million posts; #TTCcommunity has more than half a million posts; #TTCaftermiscarriage has nearly 82,000. 

But those makeshift communities, as the Peanut team saw it, weren’t working. “These women are making use of existing social networks, but they’re not finding a real community,” says Hannah Hastings, Peanut’s head of growth and brand marketing agency. “Instagram is a public space. If you choose to have a private profile, discovery is limited. So you’re either sharing personal information publicly or cut off. It doesn’t solve the need.” 

Sulehria backed that up. She found no comfort in the major social media networks, and in-person support groups were too far from where she lived. “Plus, the face-to-face thing is so daunting — to walk into a room and say, ‘Hi; I’m having this mental health problem,’ ” she says. “I just wanted something I could look at and engage with while I was lying in bed.” 

Peanut had identified a problem worth solving, but the team knew it couldn’t just create some new message boards called TTC and invite their users in. The psychological struggles facing the TTC community are significant and nuanced, and the internet can quickly become an emotional minefield. 

“There are articles and articles out there saying, ‘If you’re going through [infertility], just get off Facebook,’ ” says Barbara Collura, president and CEO of Resolve: The National Infertility Association. “Because the moment someone inevitably drops an ultrasound photo on there, it’s like…Oh my God. Women feel bombarded by this day in, day out. People stop going to the mall, restaurants, family events. So in a digital space, they want to feel safe. Anyone who’s trying to be inclusive to an audience of people who are trying to conceive has to be übersensitive.”

Keeping these sensitivities in mind, Kennedy decided to shield the TTC community from the rest of the app. Peanut TTC would function almost like a separate platform and have its own onboarding process. That way, TTC users wouldn’t accidentally stumble upon conversations from happy new moms (though they could opt in to see everything else if they wanted).

After that, the Peanut team had to dive into the nuances of the TTC world, and they leaned heavily on Sulehria as a guiding voice and gut check. Kennedy also asked Sulehria to connect her with other women who’d been struggling to conceive and may be willing to share their experience. Slowly but surely, a small but mighty focus group helped her build this new product with care. 

Related: How 2 Entrepreneurs Built a Membership Community for Working Moms

The team learned, as an example, that there are plenty of tensions within the TTC community that Peanut would have to contend with. “A woman who’s been trying for five months and a woman who’s been trying for five years are in very different positions,” Kennedy says. “To put them in one bucket? That’s not the experience we want to give users.”

Kennedy had started to see evidence of this earlier. On Peanut, where some women had created fertility-related message boards, there was a lot of debate about which posts belonged. “A woman who had become pregnant posted an image of her positive pee stick, which can be really triggering for other women,” she says. “We’d get notifications and reports, and we’d also see our users say to each other, ‘Hey, maybe you should take it down, or post it somewhere else.’ ” 

So in Peanut TTC, the company created UX solutions for those sensitivities. Blurred filters can be applied to potentially sensitive content (flagged by the creator or other users), and women will have to opt in to see those messages or images. The team developed proprietary artificial intelligence, which monitors group discussions and flags any comments that may not suit the brand’s ethos. “If a user is writing a comment and we detect an element of negativity, the app will say, ‘Hey, are you sure you don’t want to rephrase that? Peanut is a place of supportive conversation,’ ” explains Hastings.

In November 2019, after nine months in development, the company launched Peanut TTC. The community grew quickly, and user engagement skyrocketed — 60 percent above Peanut’s typical engagement.

It’s a good start, but Kennedy knows there’s a lot still left to do. She wants Peanut to expand its sensitivity features, improve how it matches women with relevant groups, and create room for TTC women to celebrate their pregnancies. And, more important, she also wants to keep following this line of thinking — watching how people use her product, and reacting with new solutions. She’s already seeing many options: Women are using the app to talk about raising teenagers, fighting chronic health conditions, sex after the age of 50, and more.

“Women have all these different life stages,” Kennedy says. “We can be the product that helps you find other women like you at every stage.”

Image Credit: Courtesy of Peanut App

Peanut is still in that early stage of a tech company’s life, when user growth is prioritized over profit. Which is to say: The app is free to use and makes no money. But Kennedy is building a monetization strategy based on premium products or in-app purchases. Imagine a user paying a small fee for direct access to a respected doctor, or an expert who can quickly and personally respond to a health-related question. 

Maybe it’s a great idea. Maybe it’s not. Maybe women will be interested in using it, but not so interested in paying for it. Either way, Kennedy believes she’ll find her answer, so long as she keeps engaging and listening to her users. 

To do that, her team is hustling to repeat the success of TTC with other communities. Later in 2020, for example, they’ll roll out Peanut Meno, for women approaching and going through menopause. 

They also go beyond just monitoring conversations on the app. Peanut formally recruited some of its most engaged users to serve as MVPs — Most Valuable Peanuts. The brand ambassador program rewards some users with a tote bag or a sweatshirt when they share the app with other women. Other MVPs do more structured work, like distribute flyers at local coffee shops or the library, or organize a group meetup. The tasks are paid (“If I’d pay someone else to do the job, why wouldn’t I pay my user?” Kennedy says) and selected at the leisure of the user; some women have earned up to $500 in a month.

In Kennedy’s eyes, it’s a small expense to elevate the insights of Peanut’s most tuned-in community members. Her 1,500 current MVPs are, indeed, incredibly valuable. “They’re the women creating our product,” she says. “We look at the data, listen, engage, and implement. We get feedback, iterate, and do it again. And when we don’t get it right, we have 1,500 women ready to tell us how to fix it. And those 1,500 women know, because they have direct access to our million women, engaging with them, organically and naturally, day after day.” 

Related: Why Investing in Women-Led Startups Is the Smart Move

Kennedy calls this a “constant user feedback loop,” and perhaps nobody better embodies that than an MVP named Tricia Bowden. She’s a former marketing agency exec who, in 2017, moved back to New York after spending a year on the West Coast. She had a 1-year-old son and was new to life as a stay-at-home mom, and a lot of the friends she’d returned home to weren’t yet mothers. “I Googled ‘Meeting mom friends’ and came across Peanut,” Bowden says. She joined, started lining up playdates, and before too long had a reliable network of friends close by.

Her passion for the brand grew fast, and Bowden soon became one of Peanut’s most valuable MVPs, and one of the loud voices pushing Peanut to expand to the “Meno” community sooner than later. Kennedy was impressed and gave her a promotion: In January, Bowden started a full-time gig as Peanut’s head of strategic growth and partnerships for the New York market, where the company will build out an office later this year. 

Bowden’s first order of business is to optimize and scale the existing MVP program, rolling it out on a hyperlocal, local, and national level — which is to say, Bowden basically became the feedback loop. She’s a user who helped shape Peanut, who then joined Peanut, who is now helping Peanut find and attract more people like her, who, of course, will then go on to shape Peanut anew.  

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source http://www.scpie.org/by-listening-to-her-customers-this-entrepreneur-found-a-larger-audience-and-a-greater-mission/ source https://scpie1.blogspot.com/2020/03/by-listening-to-her-customers-this.html

[scpie]

By Listening to Her Customers, This Entrepreneur Found a Larger Audience — And a Greater Mission

Michelle Kennedy launched the Peanut app to help moms. But now, the app is out to help all women.

March 4, 2020 15+ min read

This story appears in the March 2020 issue of Entrepreneur. Subscribe »

Michelle Kennedy arrived at lunch, nervous about the conversation she was about to have with her best friend. It was 2016, and Kennedy had just made a big career decision. She was going to leave her job as a tech exec and launch a new app for moms. It was exciting — a new adventure, a massive market, a lot of potential upside.

But the downside was this: Her best friend, BBC journalist Sophie Sulehria, had been struggling for years to have a baby. In fact, at the time, Sulehria had just completed her third failed round of in vitro fertilization, and it was taking a toll on her mental health. Kennedy didn’t want to add to the burden.

“It was a very bad time. My husband and I were really suffering,” says Sulehria. “When Michelle said she had something to tell me, I thought, Oh God; she’s having another baby! But she told me about the business, and she was so worried: ‘I don’t want to be your best friend who’s not only got a kid but also has a mum business — I don’t want to alienate you.’ ”

Related: 6 Reasons Moms Make the Best Entrepreneurs

But Sulehria was supportive. She knew the business was a fantastic idea, even though her exclusion from its target audience was killing her. So she asked Kennedy for a favor, as a friend and as a hopeful mom. This would be the earliest feedback Kennedy would receive as an entrepreneur, and although she wouldn’t know it yet, it would set the tone for how she would build her business — by listening to, and quickly responding to, the needs of the community it serves.

“I said, ‘Promise me one thing: When this app becomes successful, create a piece of it for people like me, a place where women having fertility issues can find support and friendship and discussions and information, because wouldn’t that be fantastic?’ ” Sulehria recalls. “And Michelle literally looked at me that day and said, ‘I promise.’ ”

Image Credit: Courtesy of Peanut App

Today, Kennedy’s company is called Peanut, and it has a million users and $9.8 million in funding. But back in 2013, before Peanut was even a twinkle in its founder’s eye, Kennedy was a rising star in the dating app world. She was deputy CEO of a European dating network called Badoo, and she also had a role in launching the brand Bumble, which would go on to become one of the industry’s major players.

Kennedy’s life was changing. Her personal dating days were behind her. She’d just given birth to her son, Finlay, and didn’t have many girlfriends with kids in her hometown of London. She wanted to find some like-minded women at a similar stage of life, but all she could find were archaic message boards and Facebook groups.

“The products available to me were all, quite frankly, crap,” Kennedy says. “Nothing represented me as a mother.” At the same time, she was watching a flood of utility-based applications enter the market — new ways to order food or pick up your dry cleaning — and felt that a huge opportunity was being overlooked. 

“Women are 50 percent of the population the last time I checked, and motherhood, in some way, will touch everyone’s life,” she says. “But no one is touching this space?” 

She came up with an idea for a networking app for moms and called it Peanut, after her nickname for her baby bump when she was pregnant. But she didn’t feel ready to take the leap — until three years later. “There were just signals in the market,” she says. “People were starting to talk about motherhood differently because we’d started to talk about womanhood differently, and it just felt like the right time.” In 2016, she began ideating in earnest, brought three trusted team members on board, and got to work. 

Peanut set out to embody the voice of modern, millennial motherhood. The team wanted it to function as a friend — one who understands that being a mom is a big part of a woman’s identity, but it’s not her entire identity. They spent a lot of time defining its voice. Users, for example, would be addressed as “Mama,” which tracks in both the United Kingdom and the United States and has a playful edge.

In February 2017, just a few months after she shared her plans with best friend Sulehria, Kennedy brought Peanut into the world, launching in the U.K. and the U.S. A simple beta version allowed women to create a profile, swipe to explore other women’s profiles — like on a dating app — and chat. 

The reaction was instantaneous. Thanks to some earlier-than-planned press coverage from the London Evening Standard, thousands of women flooded the beta offering, and Kennedy had fast validation. But the new users also revealed a vulnerability. Much like with dating apps, where happy couples no longer need the app, women were ditching Peanut once they’d made a new friend. “And why wouldn’t they?” Kennedy says. “You don’t need to make a new girlfriend every day — and in that case, you maybe don’t need to continue using Peanut.” 

Related: Debunking Three Myths About Women in Tech

This was a problem in need of solving. And as it turns out, users were already proposing a solution. “A lot of our users were saying, ‘Wait; how do I ask all the women on here a question? How do I share this article with all the women in my neighborhood?’ ” Kennedy says. “We had always planned to build community-based features, but our users let us know that we’d have to build them a lot quicker than planned.”

So the team hustled to launch community-wide message boards (called Peanut Pages) and group chats (Peanut Groups). Kennedy and her team thought they knew exactly how women would use these features; they expected to see chatter around the usual early-­motherhood pain points, like getting babies to sleep or working through pregnancy discomfort. But they got something much different. 

“Women were sharing about really intimate stuff: relationships, love, sex, work, money, housing, social issues,” says Kennedy, whose team kept an eye on developing conversations via a combination of artificial intelligence and human monitoring of message boards. “We had to stop and say, ‘Wait a minute. Why are these conversations happening on Peanut?’ And it’s because they just aren’t happening anywhere else — you’re not going to post on a local Yahoo message board about postpartum sex or frustrations with your partner. This has to exist in a private network.” 

While some popular topics did prove to be playful (“boobs and books”), the majority had a more solemn tone — and one in particular was being discussed at a surprisingly high volume. 

“So many women were talking about trying and struggling to conceive baby number two,” says Kennedy. “Maybe they were going through IVF, or had just suffered a loss, or found they were facing infertility, or had been diagnosed with endometriosis or polycystic ovary syndrome. Whatever it was, there was so much conversation.” 

Kennedy immediately thought of her best friend, Sulehria. She knew the facts were brutal: One in eight women will be affected by fertility issues, and one in six will experience a miscarriage. She also knew that the emotional burden was vast. “The most poignant thing Soph ever said to me was, ‘You know, I could use someone other than you to talk to,’ ” Kennedy says. “So now here we are with Peanut, and if all these women are talking about their struggles to conceive baby two or three, what about the women who haven’t had a baby at all?”

Kennedy planned to serve this audience someday; after all, she’d made a promise to her friend. But she thought it would be a long time from now, and a small part of a much larger pie. Now, by following her users’ lead, she realized she had it wrong. She needed to fulfill this promise fast — and the opportunity could be very big.

Image Credit: Courtesy of Peanut App

Women who struggle with fertility issues have already given their community a name: It’s TTC, for “trying to conceive.” Across the internet, there’s evidence of these women craving connection. Search #TTC on Instagram and you’ll find 1.4 million posts; #TTCcommunity has more than half a million posts; #TTCaftermiscarriage has nearly 82,000. 

But those makeshift communities, as the Peanut team saw it, weren’t working. “These women are making use of existing social networks, but they’re not finding a real community,” says Hannah Hastings, Peanut’s head of growth and brand marketing agency. “Instagram is a public space. If you choose to have a private profile, discovery is limited. So you’re either sharing personal information publicly or cut off. It doesn’t solve the need.” 

Sulehria backed that up. She found no comfort in the major social media networks, and in-person support groups were too far from where she lived. “Plus, the face-to-face thing is so daunting — to walk into a room and say, ‘Hi; I’m having this mental health problem,’ ” she says. “I just wanted something I could look at and engage with while I was lying in bed.” 

Peanut had identified a problem worth solving, but the team knew it couldn’t just create some new message boards called TTC and invite their users in. The psychological struggles facing the TTC community are significant and nuanced, and the internet can quickly become an emotional minefield. 

“There are articles and articles out there saying, ‘If you’re going through [infertility], just get off Facebook,’ ” says Barbara Collura, president and CEO of Resolve: The National Infertility Association. “Because the moment someone inevitably drops an ultrasound photo on there, it’s like…Oh my God. Women feel bombarded by this day in, day out. People stop going to the mall, restaurants, family events. So in a digital space, they want to feel safe. Anyone who’s trying to be inclusive to an audience of people who are trying to conceive has to be übersensitive.”

Keeping these sensitivities in mind, Kennedy decided to shield the TTC community from the rest of the app. Peanut TTC would function almost like a separate platform and have its own onboarding process. That way, TTC users wouldn’t accidentally stumble upon conversations from happy new moms (though they could opt in to see everything else if they wanted).

After that, the Peanut team had to dive into the nuances of the TTC world, and they leaned heavily on Sulehria as a guiding voice and gut check. Kennedy also asked Sulehria to connect her with other women who’d been struggling to conceive and may be willing to share their experience. Slowly but surely, a small but mighty focus group helped her build this new product with care. 

Related: How 2 Entrepreneurs Built a Membership Community for Working Moms

The team learned, as an example, that there are plenty of tensions within the TTC community that Peanut would have to contend with. “A woman who’s been trying for five months and a woman who’s been trying for five years are in very different positions,” Kennedy says. “To put them in one bucket? That’s not the experience we want to give users.”

Kennedy had started to see evidence of this earlier. On Peanut, where some women had created fertility-related message boards, there was a lot of debate about which posts belonged. “A woman who had become pregnant posted an image of her positive pee stick, which can be really triggering for other women,” she says. “We’d get notifications and reports, and we’d also see our users say to each other, ‘Hey, maybe you should take it down, or post it somewhere else.’ ” 

So in Peanut TTC, the company created UX solutions for those sensitivities. Blurred filters can be applied to potentially sensitive content (flagged by the creator or other users), and women will have to opt in to see those messages or images. The team developed proprietary artificial intelligence, which monitors group discussions and flags any comments that may not suit the brand’s ethos. “If a user is writing a comment and we detect an element of negativity, the app will say, ‘Hey, are you sure you don’t want to rephrase that? Peanut is a place of supportive conversation,’ ” explains Hastings.

In November 2019, after nine months in development, the company launched Peanut TTC. The community grew quickly, and user engagement skyrocketed — 60 percent above Peanut’s typical engagement.

It’s a good start, but Kennedy knows there’s a lot still left to do. She wants Peanut to expand its sensitivity features, improve how it matches women with relevant groups, and create room for TTC women to celebrate their pregnancies. And, more important, she also wants to keep following this line of thinking — watching how people use her product, and reacting with new solutions. She’s already seeing many options: Women are using the app to talk about raising teenagers, fighting chronic health conditions, sex after the age of 50, and more.

“Women have all these different life stages,” Kennedy says. “We can be the product that helps you find other women like you at every stage.”

Image Credit: Courtesy of Peanut App

Peanut is still in that early stage of a tech company’s life, when user growth is prioritized over profit. Which is to say: The app is free to use and makes no money. But Kennedy is building a monetization strategy based on premium products or in-app purchases. Imagine a user paying a small fee for direct access to a respected doctor, or an expert who can quickly and personally respond to a health-related question. 

Maybe it’s a great idea. Maybe it’s not. Maybe women will be interested in using it, but not so interested in paying for it. Either way, Kennedy believes she’ll find her answer, so long as she keeps engaging and listening to her users. 

To do that, her team is hustling to repeat the success of TTC with other communities. Later in 2020, for example, they’ll roll out Peanut Meno, for women approaching and going through menopause. 

They also go beyond just monitoring conversations on the app. Peanut formally recruited some of its most engaged users to serve as MVPs — Most Valuable Peanuts. The brand ambassador program rewards some users with a tote bag or a sweatshirt when they share the app with other women. Other MVPs do more structured work, like distribute flyers at local coffee shops or the library, or organize a group meetup. The tasks are paid (“If I’d pay someone else to do the job, why wouldn’t I pay my user?” Kennedy says) and selected at the leisure of the user; some women have earned up to $500 in a month.

In Kennedy’s eyes, it’s a small expense to elevate the insights of Peanut’s most tuned-in community members. Her 1,500 current MVPs are, indeed, incredibly valuable. “They’re the women creating our product,” she says. “We look at the data, listen, engage, and implement. We get feedback, iterate, and do it again. And when we don’t get it right, we have 1,500 women ready to tell us how to fix it. And those 1,500 women know, because they have direct access to our million women, engaging with them, organically and naturally, day after day.” 

Related: Why Investing in Women-Led Startups Is the Smart Move

Kennedy calls this a “constant user feedback loop,” and perhaps nobody better embodies that than an MVP named Tricia Bowden. She’s a former marketing agency exec who, in 2017, moved back to New York after spending a year on the West Coast. She had a 1-year-old son and was new to life as a stay-at-home mom, and a lot of the friends she’d returned home to weren’t yet mothers. “I Googled ‘Meeting mom friends’ and came across Peanut,” Bowden says. She joined, started lining up playdates, and before too long had a reliable network of friends close by.

Her passion for the brand grew fast, and Bowden soon became one of Peanut’s most valuable MVPs, and one of the loud voices pushing Peanut to expand to the “Meno” community sooner than later. Kennedy was impressed and gave her a promotion: In January, Bowden started a full-time gig as Peanut’s head of strategic growth and partnerships for the New York market, where the company will build out an office later this year. 

Bowden’s first order of business is to optimize and scale the existing MVP program, rolling it out on a hyperlocal, local, and national level — which is to say, Bowden basically became the feedback loop. She’s a user who helped shape Peanut, who then joined Peanut, who is now helping Peanut find and attract more people like her, who, of course, will then go on to shape Peanut anew.  

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[cgsolano]

Ciao ciao 2019. Here we are, 2020.

I keep doing this on the last day of the year... I was thinking of starting yesterday, but I guess there are things that never change... So yes, here we are... at the doorstep of 2020. A new year, a new decade.

Twenty years ago I was still living in Texas, working for Motorola. Making preparations for the infamous Y2K --which was such a big disappointment. A big nothing burger. Ten years ago, I was living here in Illinois, working for Kraft. Going through the motions of their Leadership Program. And now, I am entering 2020 building software at Walgreens. More mature, growing a beard and with a lot more salt in my hair --the pepper is clearly getting overpowered.

2019 was not a bad year. Before we go into the chronicle of the year, here’s my takeaway from it...

I was able to remain healthy, the same as my family. More than ever, I realize that without health you have nothing. A friend of mine, Kim, passed away from cancer. It did hit me, because she was such a good person. Full of life, laughs, art, music, love for her daughters and her husband. I have a painting I bought from her hanging in my room. She started making these to support her cancer treatments. In the end, she passed away peacefully at her home and surrounded by her family and closest friends. Godspeed, Kimmy.

Make every effort to remain healthy. Eat well, try to squeeze in some exercise --even if it is not at a gym: park your car the furthest you can so you can walk, take the stairs instead of the elevator, walk to the store and carry your bags. If you can’t change your circumstances, don’t let the circumstances change you. Don’t let stress take over your life. Beat anxiety. And if you see that the circumstances are changing you, change them instead. Someway somehow.

I also had the chance to make significant new connections and rekindle existing ones.

One of these new connections was so unexpected and a blessing to me. She lives her life with no regrets. She lives by her beliefs and is true to herself and what’s important to her. She’s all out there. ALL! And I love that! Because not everybody is or can be --or is willing to be. And it’s such a refreshing thing to see and learn and feel. Not everybody walks the talk, and she’s passionate about walking her talk, unfiltered. This year I became a better person because of her.

So, make the effort to make interesting and new connections. There’s a whole world out there. And connecting with people just enriches your own life. Go and rekindle your interesting old connections as well. You never know what new surprises you’ll get from people you thought you know.

I also reminisced about being young (a teen), and having my own problems and challenges. Sabina turned 14, and she’s in 8th grade. Making a decision on what High School to attend, and making it happen, is such a big deal --at least here in The Chi. Studying, prepping for the placement test, taking tutoring on weekends, HS open houses, homework, practice tests, gymnastics, friends,, family. Wherever she lands, I know she’ll do great.

Support the teens in your life. It is such an emotionally fragile stage. They look up to you, adults. They really do. And I am happy to say that we were able to support her every step of the way.

Finally, I am receiving this new year with open arms. Completely open to opportunities and challenges --even if they rock the boat hard. Even if they change the life I’ve known for the last 2 decades...

And talking about boats... If I can leave you with a thought:

“Disturb us, Lord, when we are too well pleased with ourselves, when our dreams have come true because we have dreamed too little, when we arrive safely because we sailed too close to the shore. Disturb us, Lord, when with the abundance of things we possess, we have lost our thirst for the waters of life,  having fallen in love with life, we have ceased to dream of eternity, and in our efforts to build a new earth,  we have allowed our vision of the new heaven to dim. Disturb us, Lord, to dare more boldly, to venture on wider seas, where storms will show your mastery, where losing sight of land, we shall find the stars. We ask you to push back the horizon of our hopes, and to push us into the future in strength, courage, hope, and love.”

― Sir Francis Drake

This 2020, dare more boldly. Be happy, and be well. Happy New Year!

Now, below is my personal account of 2019... So, if you’re interested, keep reading!

So, here’s the customary account of 2019...

I ended up at 50% goal, again... I tried to read 12 books this year, but I ended up at 6. Not great, but here we are... Can I read more? Sure. Do I spend inglorious amounts of time on wasteful activities? Absolutely. But you know, some of these wasteful activities also give me joy. So, are they really wasteful? Something to think about. Anyways, this is what I read this year:

Bad Blood -- This book is INSANE !!! I absolutely loved it! A story of greed, ego, tech and deceit It has everything! I’ve been in the medical devices/pharma world for a little over 5 years now, and this account of events is completely crazy. Go pick it up, now!

Netflixed -- This was another great book about our beloved streaming company. The epic battle between Netflix and Blockbuster has no equal.

The Road to Chapultepec Park -- This dystopian book was marginally ok. I picked it up because 1) it’s the end of the world and 2) because it talks about the journey from the US to Mexico City by a group of people during the end of the world as we know it due to climate change. Chapultepec Park, which I know and have walked, becomes a sanctuary during this time and people are trying to get there by any means.

Small Fry -- So, everyone who knows me knows that I am a fan of Steve (Jobs), but not an Apple fanboy. I’ve read a lot about Steve but this book, written by Lisa, his daughter, gave me a completely different view of Steve and his life. There were new things I learned about him, and I realized this book humanizes him, a lot. He had his own problems, and insecurities (!!!), and demons to exorcize, and amends to make, he bit his nails. I absolutely loved it.

Midnight in Chernobyl -- Wow. This book was such an amazing read. This book, which can be considered an end-of-the-world type book, was crazy --and more because it was REAL! This is the very well researched account of what happened before, during and after the Chernobyl catastrophe more than 30 years ago. You can’t even imagine. Go get it!

The Handmaids Tale -- This is another dystopian book. And before I watched the series, I wanted to read it. What a harsh world... and with all that’s been happening in real life, not only here in the USA but in other countries, it is such a cautionary tale. I will not spoil it, but this is a very good read about a very bad world.

I’ll try to read at least 8 books this 2020. If I can’t do 12, maybe I can do 8 since I’ve been doing 5-6 books a year for a while now. And whatever goes above and beyond that, it’s all for the win.

I also traveled a little here and there. The highlights were, in some chronological order, as follows...

Las Vegas for the Dynatrace Perform conference, staying at the Cosmo, which was amazing! I want to go again. Vegas is such an amazing place! I don’t think I did any shows or concerts this time :-( But I did go to a couple of cool places: TAO and Marquee. These were amazing venues and great experiences.

We went to Holland, MI. We were there for a bat mitzvah for one of Sabina’s friends. This was such a great experience! The small town is amazing and has great breweries and things to do.

Ah, and Mexico in the summer. Never ever disappoints. Had the chance to see family and old friends in Mexico City, Queretaro and Tequisquiapan. Great food, great chats, great activities. This time we flew directly into Queretaro instead of Mexico City. What a difference! Way smaller airport, no traffic, no waits. And the drive from Queretaro to Tequisquiapan is just 20 mins --compared to the 3+ hours we would normally drive from Mexico City due to traffic and distance.

I also went to Monterrey, Mexico. There is some very interesting stuff happening there... I will not say more, but there’s stuff happening. I had the chance to reconnect with old friends during this very short trip and to eat amazing tacos. Those norteños really know their meats.

Sports and concerts? I went to see the Rockies vs Cubs, Giants vs Cubs, Packers vs Bears on opening day, Knicks vs Bulls, Nets vs Bulls, Cowboys vs Bears for Santiago’s birthday and Bulls vs Hawks. Definitely a lot of sports this year! And I’ve really enjoyed it. Santiago absolutely loved his first football game. There was this specific run that Trubisky did and scored... Santi and I hugged and jumped and screamed. What a moment. I don’t think we did as many concerts as we should. We did go see the Chicago Sinfonietta and it was outstanding.

Other things we did... A couple of times to Steppenwolf Theater --which I don’t think we do enough. Teatro ZinZanni which we did for Adriana’s birthday and was absolutely amazing, BATL Axe Throwing which is insanely fun, Hamilton for Sabina’s birthday which she loved, Champions of Magic for Christmas Eve for the whole family, Lincoln Park Zoo to see the lights, watched Star Wars: Rise of Skywalker, and had a memorable Christmas Eve dinner at Tocco in Winnetka, IL. For New Year’s we’re going to Bodega Sur, which will be amazing for sure.

Health? Well, as I mentioned, I kept myself out of trouble. Continued with the excuses to not exercise more. However, I think I ate well all things considered. I was able to maintain my weight throughout the whole year --which is a huge accomplishment in my mind. If I’m not exercising, at least I am eating well and not gaining weight. I tried to do some personal training/gym, but I almost died... I guess I need to come back little by little. I’ll try other avenues and see how it works out.

I grew a beard. And I like it.

I’ve also been learning (or trying to) some Italian. And it has been going well, I think. I listen to Italian podcasts and follow Italian people on Instagram. I use Google Translate a lot and it has definitely helped me. I listen to Italian music in my car. La dolce vita, baby!

Finally, I’ve been cooking a new tech concept with a friend of mine... Let’s see how that develops in 2020. We think there’s potential. This has to do with Blockchain... and has a social conscience. So it’s geeky, and it helps people. What else could I ask for?! Stay tuned...

Well, I guess that’s that... 2019 was a very good to all of us. And we are grateful about all things experienced and received. Let 2020 be as good, or better! Thanks for reading!

[daniellapaganoposts-blog]

#33 - Interview with Honour the Ocean Beach Survey Officer

Sunday, November 3rd, 2019 at 7:01 pm

Duration: 15:34 min

Interviewer:Ok, so the first question is what was your role in Positive Change for Marine Life?

Interviewee: I was a data survey officer I think was the title… maybe clarify with Zoe what our official title was but yeah, it was a data surveyor. So we um, what our was, was we would go down to the beach every, every Saturday. Um, every fortnight on a Saturday morning usually around 830 to 9. Sorry, Daniella, did you want the detail of the role?

Interviewer: Yeah, please, please, whatever you can give me.

Interviewee: Yeah, so um, we would meet fortnightly Saturday mornings, um, we would advertise on Facebook and we usually have between about 6 to maybe 10 participants?

Interviewer:Hello?

Interviewee: (breaking up) Oh, can you hear me?

Interviewer:Sorry, now I can hear you.

Interviewee: Excellent. We had um, one morning we had Ziggy Alberts come and do like a guest appearance and we had the news reporters there and I think we got about 35 to 40 participants. But what we is um, we would segment the beach into four 50-meter sections so you’ve got, um, you got four 50-meter transect, sorry. So, 250 meters in total, um, we—I would um measure those 50 meters out and then we would go down to the beach and we’d tell—explain to everybody ‘okay, we want everyone to pick up rubbish in this 50 meters segment, um transect’ and then we would put all of that into one bag as like, section 1 and then we would do that four times over and then we would come back up to the beach, empty each transect out individually and then we would go through that and we would sort trash into soft plastics, hard plastics, paper, cardboard, um, and it got really nitty gritty down to like um, plastic cutlery, plastic straws, lighters, so it was very like, um, it was very specific and then we would enter that data into a spreadsheet on Excel on Google Drive. So it’s accessible to everyone within the organization.

Interviewer: Um, how did people find out about the beach cleanups?

Interviewee:Um, usually through word of mouth, or Facebook.

Interviewer: Okay.

Interviewee:So, so most—like a lot of the time it was friends, um, even though it might be me running the beach clean , a lot of people that were part of Positive Change would come and volunteer as well as a maybe a few friends would come along. And then maybe we might get three or four people on Facebook as well as people would just come and join maybe for like half the time who saw us doing the beach clean. Like people were really interested in being a part of it, so that you might even get people who have been just like picking up trash along the beach on their own accord, and then they’d want to add it to your transect and you’d say, ‘well, sorry, this is part of like a scientific data survey research study’ so you can’t actually add it to these transects but ‘hey, well done, congratulations, maybe go put it in the trash can’. Like people would just would want to join for hat validation of being a part of something bigger.

Interviewer: Oh, cool. Yeah. Why did you get involved with Positive Change?

Interviewee: Um, a lot of my volunteering before Positive Change was as like my study reflects, um… I'm interested in like people and psychology. So, a lot of my work was with like Red Cross and working with homeless or whatever it may be. It was always volunteering to do with people and then um, I kind of figured maybe going to the source and helping with an environmental action would be more beneficial, which, I did find it a bit more rewarding. So I came to volunteering for Positive Change because Zoe… she was a data survey officer. She saw an advert online on Seek or Facebook or something, I can’t remember where she saw it. I had at the time being volunteering—or I was in the process of becoming—have you heard of the Boomerang Bag Initiative?

Interviewer: No.

Interviewee: So, it’s this other, like, initiative that’s kind of going around Australia where by like groups of people would come together and they’d sew bags to leave at supermarkets and then people, like, it’s supposed to be like a trust—a trust system where people will take a Boomerang Bag and use it and then bring it back when they remember to bring their own bag next time or whatever.

Interviewer: Oh, that’s so cool!

Interviewee:And I was—someone had asked me like, as soon as I said I was interested, they were like, ‘oh, sweet can I just hand over the entire project to you’ and I was like ‘well, hang on, I don’t even know how to make the bags or anything’ so it was a bit overwhelming and I spoke to Zoe about this and she was ‘like maybe, maybe you can come volunteer for Positive Change, like you can do the data survey stuff’. So, I ended up doing that instead and Zoe got sort of, I don’t know if you want to use the word ‘promoted’ but like she was in charge of all the data survey people so, yeah, she was like ‘well come and work on the team’ and yeah, that’s how I got the role.

Interviewer: Nice. What was the training process like to prepare for this—uh, for the job that you had?

Interviewee:Yeah, so, um, we… what did we do? Um, I had to—sorry I just got a bit distracted. We had… who was it? It was me and Zoe—I can't remember fully. Anyway, two of us were taken by an experienced data survey person. So, we keep all of our equipment and things at the Life Saving Club in Byron, so they took us there, showed us everyting and pretty much ran a beach clean whilst explaining how to do it. So we were just there sort of watching and then the next time we went it was like, the two of us ran the beach clean whilst the supervisor or the person who had experience watched us and made sure we were doing everything right and if we had any questions, and then pretty much from there… Um, at the time we had a really strong team, so we always had two of us to run them. Um, so there was kind of always someone to fall back on and, you know, ask questions and figure it out together. So yeah, we had two sessions, two beach cleans where we had somebody there and then from then on we were kind of left to our own devices.

Interviewer:Wow, that's cool I didn't… I didn't even know they like, yeah you could store it in the Life Saving Club. Um, and what sorts of resources or materials did you use during that time for the cleanups?

Interviewee: Um, what kind of equipment? We had like the little grabby sticks, like the—

Interviewer: --I'm sorry, like, um, in what terms of like, like did you guys have any like resources or materials for the public to view and to see like… was there—

Interviewee: --So like promotional sort of, and informational?

Interviewer: Yeah.

Interviewee: Yeah yeah yeah. We had, I think we had about five different brochures to sort of read what from—starting from like where Positive Change began, what they do now, um, you know, their India initiative where they’re doing, um, waste conservation, um… There was, um, a big, like, board that said you know like, ‘beach clean and programs down on the beach, come join’, um… So there was, yeah there was always lots of sort of, um, reading material and information, I suppose.

Interviewer: Cool. And then based on after gathering the data from the beach cleanups, what were the next steps after getting all of that data, like did you—yeah, what was the next steps in terms of like the community and putting anything into action after the data analysis?

Interviewee: Um, that was sort of where we got caught because we didn't—our team was, yeah, I don’t know, we had lots of ideas, um and I think we kind of just didn't have maybe the follow-through that we required to really—you know like, we could—from the data you could see where the plastic was coming from, like that was getting caught in the rocks. You could see specific venues there were, um—where the waste is coming from and ideally it would have been great to talk to those venues and like, um, help them through—maybe, maybe help them find solutions. Um, but as I said, I think we just didn’t have the time and the resources as a team to, um, sort of follow through with that and make a solid impact. We did have a—and I think Karl will still probably be working on it. It’s um, and like, everything that I say—I haven’t been involved in Positive Change for a year now, so I’m kind of removed from it all, um, but we had this, uh, initiative called… Can you—check with Zoe, um, shit… It was, um, yeah, like flag this moment as like a question for Zoe but we had this initiative where we’re going around to companies and we were like making them partners with Positive Change, so we like, we’d like advertise them as a, um, plastic-free venue, so they would like have someone come from Positive Change to help them be less- plastic-waste-orientated.

Interviewer: Oh, cool.

Interviewee: But they kind of had to say—yeah yeah yeah, like, we were going around, um, but it was kind of like the venue had to be willing to have us there.

Interviewer: Right. Is that part of Activ8 for the Ocean?

Interviewee: No, that was going around to schools and stuff, there’s another initiative, um…

Interviewer: Like, Business Sustainability?

Interviewee:Yeah, yeah.

Interviewer:Okay, cool. Yeah I’ll definitely double-check with her on that and then just my last question, in what ways are you continuing to pursue your passion with protecting the ocean>

Interviewee: Um, at the moment, it’s sort of just my personal interactions, and like, I suppose, now’s not—like an amazing time to be chatting about it because traveling, you have very little control of your environment. And I’ve been really personally juggling with the things that I am seeing overseas and the lack of initiative. Like, for example, I’m in Greece on a Greek island and there's no—there’s no fresh running water, like you can’t drink from the tap, um, so everyone buys drinking water in plastic and I found out that only 2% of their waste on the island is able to be recycled, the rest just goes to general waste. Um, but, so like educating people that I come into contact with, like, okay if you boil kettle, that kills the bacteria in the water that they say is in the water, so technically you should be able to drink the water, right?

Interviewer:Mhm, yeah.

Interviewee:So, um, I suppose for me my personal journey with waste management is interacting people on an everyday basis while I’m traveling. Um, talking to people, finding more out, becoming more knowledgeable on this topic, so like, when I do wanna talk to people I have like, some kind of backing information. And then waiting for my postgraduate to happen, I think that's gonna be a real, a real milestone for me to start researching in the field of sustainability and environmental psychology, um, and then just, um, yes I supposed since stopping with Positive Change, I’ve gone more, on, a more personal journey, like how can I—I can’t change everybody around me, right now, like, I can’t change me. So like, just being as sustainable as possible, you know, in the house especially, Zoe and I, our house, we want to be as sustainable as possible. We're pretty much zero-waste if you don’t count our housemates. Um, that's sort of what we’re doing with our (phone cut off) and trying to minimize our waste and minimizing the impact on the the ocean.

Interviewer:Nice, awesome, thank you so much for this. This was awesome.

Interviewee: You’re welcome.

Interviewer:I had one question that’s not related to the interview, just if you were curious if you know this person…

[2013-life-calendar-blog]

Camp 2018

Day 3: had a very fun camp fire, I feel so happy. I love hanging out with all of the people from Europe they are super funny! Met some of the cooks who are also nice. Sang campfire songs and chatted all night. The sky had so many stars. Got to witness multiple people having their first roasted marshmallow ever (Lizzy and Sophie).

Day 4 a person from Costa Rica was supposed to get antihypertensives before he came but he never went. Came in with chest pain. We couldn't find the bp cuff so searched for it. Took his blood pressure and it was super high so he told him to sit down. Measured it again and it went down + his chest pain went away. We were worried that we would have to call 911. Asked other nurses for antihypertensives but we don't have that here. They told their supervisors and said we had to wake up Sadie (which was annoying, and we just thought it was angina so we didn't wake her up).

Day 5: enjoyed the sunshine, worked out, played basket ball which was super fun!!!!! Got closer w everyone.

Day 8:

Very fun chatted with auggie and em all night about his girls and life

me and 2 of my friends were in the kitchen at like 11 just eating strawberries with chocolate cause my friends (auggie) is the baker for the camp. Basically tom Thomson (from the group of 7) got murdered on this lake and his body was found ON MY ISLAND. Anyways so we were talking about him and the lights in the kitchen started flickering. We then made a joke saying ouuu it's probs tom Thompson and I was like Emily pass my my phone incase tom shuts off the lights. Then I was saying how once when I was younger we asked for a sign from playing ouiji and the phone went off the hook. Then all of a sudden right after I said that the power went out in the kitchen so we were in the pitch black and it went out on the whole island. But it wasn't raining or anything so there was no reason for it to go out.

8. today in the morning I was like my brain was playing tricks on me after that last night I kept hearing someone walking behind our cabin (which is rocks and water so no one would be back there) and she was like WHAT THE FUCK I heard that too and just thought I was imagining it so I didn't say anything last night

Also went on a canoe trip I portaged the canoe on my shoulders alone for the first time it was so fun v proud of myself. Also learned how to stern the canoe. Learned about different things: cedar tread high in vitamin C, the British were dying of scurvy and asked the aboriginal ppl for help and they showed them to make Cedar tea. Ate wild blueberry leaves (tasted like ripe blueberries and have all of the antioxidants in them that blueberries do), wintergreen leaves (good in tea very minty), can use the sap from a cedar tree to help make a fire, its very sticky!!

July 17- so far it's been very busy. Dealt with an asthma exacerbation. Had Frankie a cute little girl who was obsessed with me always coming in for hugs (I miss her). Did 2 lice parties, one with 4 older girls (took 6 hours) one with 3 younger girls. Mikayla got a boyfriend at home wooo, but the guy here that likes her is sad. There's a nest and 3 little eggs hatched eggwardo Shelton and birdidette. 3 girls in inferm are so nice, chloe is very chill. Georgia and Sasha are hilarious!!!! Went sailing with Georgie and Mikayla and had the best time ever!!!!!!!!! I was so so happy. Javier said he misses me and started sending me hearts AHHHH he's so cute!!!!!!!!! Got to run a sexual health talk about STIs, contraception etc. I'm so happy and love it here

June 28 sat and played cards with Nikki Sophie, lizzy, and Emily on the diving tower. had the staff auction today which was so funny people spent $80 to make their friend chug a coke in front of the crowd, they did a big talk about raccoons at ahmek and had a big thing hiding behind the tarp. Then they took the tarp down and it was a door to the guys cabin. One dude bet $800 to get his door back. Another bet $1400 to get his walkie talkie LOl so funny

July 29- today was wild a 19 year old girl thought she may be pregnant I gave her a pregnancy test and it came back positive. She was super excited but anxious about telling her mom. I got to experience this for the first time which was cool and something I've never done before. Also a camper said she fainted for 30 mins in the past, she said she faints 1-2 times a day when doing lots of activity. She isint on any bp meds but takes 6-8 grams of salt a day. None of this was on camper files. She leaves on trip tomorrow. Said she had to stop swimming cause she thought she may faint. Had to interview her and got an extensive history took her standing and sitting bp, checked heart rate and stats. Relayed the info to doctor sarah and she said I did a great job, wooohoooo

July 30- camper FAKES having heart palpitations and fainting for 30 mins. We hold her back from trip and her dad fucking says she's lying about everything and her symptoms are nonsense.

August 2nd - best day at camp ever. We got to put sparkles all over us for campchella. Jermey had them all over his beard(the resident). We are snow cones, went on bouncy castles, hit eachother off these stands with big poles,  did karaoke to don't stop believing (with the med staff) and went on the slip in slide which was so friggen fun!!!!!!!!!!! I'm so happy :)

August 8th- this 7 year old girl had been found on the ground after fainting multiple (around 4) times, her vitals and blood sugar were normal. We had called her parents cause we were very concerned I asked a counsellor to watch her faint, and turns out she was just falling on the ground and pretending to faint loooool. She braced herself and would squint her eyes. We told her that if it continued she would have to stay in the infirm. I participated in the bouleé which is a canoe race. Our time was 15 mins 13 seconds. We then dunked our canoe and played on the water tramp with the sun setting a magnificent pink, it was so beautiful and fun. I'm so happy

August 9 The bar was so great, they had a computer plugged into a speaker so we got to YouTube the songs we wanted and be our own DJs. The bus ride was also so fun!!!!! We had to paddle from the island to the bus. On the way back it was so dark, there are lights all over the lake and one of the lights is our camp so it was a big challenge trying to figure out how to get home. Also in the middle of the lake Mikayla and I were paddling and then all of a sudden tipped over by accident. It was so weird cause we didn't even feel wobbly but then we were in the water with all of our stuff, our rain jackets on and shoes. It was very funny, we both were dying laughing. We had to do a T rescue so that we could get back in our canoe cause it was filled with water. I was very smart though cause I made sure my purse was strapped on before we left just incase we tipped and I also put mine and mikayla's phones in a ziplock bag (go drunk shea!!!!). Then we got home and ate Cheetos and chocolate. It was a great night!!!!! Still getting chirped by everyone for tipping

August 11- went to boots and hearts!!!! Had so much friggen fun! A nice cute man named Jordan saved our lives cause our dick head cab driver wouldn't drive us to line 7. Chilled w the pals, saw Vince connor and Liam which was nice. The gals were super pumped to see me. We played frizzy bat, lots of drinking games and chatted. Saw Parker Jackson and he told me he is still in love w me, we dated 4 years ago how peculiar!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

August 13- today was my last intake day, very bittersweet feeling!!!!!! It went by so quickly, only 1 person had lice (much better than our 10 person staff lice party). We got to swim and I paddle boarded with the tocos they are so cute!! I also played this or that while the kids jumped in the water. Today was a great chill day. One toco broke her tooth in half on a rock, she didn't even cry or anything (very proud). For treating a poison ivy rash all over this girl's body we are using prednisone, you have to be careful and slowly taper this medication. She started with 30 mg once a day and then went down to 20 mg once a week. Rash is causing burning and pain, it went away but 3 days later it came back so we had to give her more prednisone.  

Aug 14

Good day got to relax in the sun and swim. Started making my paddle, it is hard work!!! The girl with the poison Ivy's rash continued spreading. they think she may have a hypersensitivity to the meds and this is a delayed reaction of it. She took 20 mg of reactine and 50 mg benadryl. We will see if this helps

Aug 15

The camper from before with the "heart palpitations" is back. She said that she had heart palpitations twice on trips and then listed the 2nd 4th and 5th day??¿ she said the last time she fainted was 2 weeks ago doing a science experiment when the last time we spoke to her it was kayaking and then playing tennis with her brother. Before she said she fainted for 30 mins 2 years ago, now she's saying it happened 1 month ago??? This girl is FUCKED. I'm so angry that she keeps doing this. a girl in her cabin fell off of a horse, so they think she is doing it so that she gets some attention back. I'm going to scream.

August 19th

Council ring

Where are you mike? I'm right here pat,*bonk with sock*

August 20th

Got to watch all of the 50 days paddle in, was so wholesome, very proud of them. Georgia came and gave me a big hug awwwww!!! Wait nvm lmao the doctor found a louse on my fucking ear, must've been from Georgia hahahaha, that's okay still such a good day. Then watched the final play which was AMAZING momma Mia was so good!!! Then went to a dance which was so LIT, everyone was in a small circle inside tables. A girl got hit in the head with a jug and was bleeding everywhere, cleaned her head and tonja applied glue. Contacted parents

August 22nd

Was trying to say boo or bubs accidentally called emily boobs lmao, did inventory got to pop some staff infection wounds like pimples which was AWESOME!!! Mikayla and I are brain dead and hyper and laughing about the stupidest s things hahaha. Did inventory and lots of intakes of kids from trip. Game night final banquet was SO FUN!!!!! Had mozzarella sticks, guac, enchiladas, spinach dip and lots more. Monopoly would go around putting people in jail and everyone would stand up and diss eachother. One of ours to chess was there ain't now yawns on us their ain't no yawns on us there may be yawns on you pawns but their ain't no yawns on us CHECKMATE! Giant mosquito attacked me wahhhh.

Aug23

Finished inventory. Rose fainted in the canoe was hyperventilating had to calm her down. Mikayla threw tape at me and I threw my phone across the room on the floor to catch the tape

Cute things campers have said

-Willa: comes to infirm and says arm hurts counsellor says what, you said your leg hurts! Then Willa goes it moves, oh look now it's in my tummy.... ouch now it's in my neck.

-evy: says she can't see and won't focus on me and says: where are we?? Counsellors scared that she has heat stroke. I take her with me to the inferm and she is limping walking really slow and saying she's going to faint. Keeps asking where she is. Then I say don't be homesick you only have 7 days left. She stands up normally and says 9 then starts limping and saying she can't see again lmaooo.

-Christina: health checks we ask her if she's been sick at all in the last month, she thinks for a few seconds and says I'm positive I had diarrhea once then pauses and says ya I'm positive. Then she leaves and we hear her counsellors say: don't lie to the nurses. Then we see her running back to the door and she frantically knocks on the door and says: I didn't have diarrhea

-Christina- gets belly button cleaned because she has an infection. She always comes in and lifts her shirt up so she can get it cleaned and today she walked and and pulled down her pants and then goes oops I forgot

-Greer: see at first I would have said that you saying my nose will get bigger if I like wasn't true but like... you're a nurse so you know

it's like chill

Chelsea

me:" so what happens when you eat red food colouring, how are you allergic to it?" Her: " I get aggressive" me: "what do you mean by that" her: "I get violent"