#so I only apply to the stunted conversations aspect and even then when I do have conversations I wouldn’t consider them shallow

[seilon]

my mom was just talking to a friend on the phone and she was complaining about how all zoomers either can’t hold conversations without them being stilted and shallow or they basically traumadump and talk too much about their emotions and im just…… she is a psychologist. specifically a college counsellor. almost all of the zoomers she talks to are. literally university students assigned to her to seek out long term therapy for trauma, stress, anxiety, depression, behavioral and social issues, etc……….

what does she…expect……… to hear…….????

[snlhostharry]

romeo and juliet thing

harry styles x reader

“rivals” to lovers au 

~3k words

warnings: cursing, mentions of sex 

my piece for @meetmeinfleetwood ‘s to lovers challenge, congrats on your milestone! 

a/n: amazing thing I realized while writing this: if you don’t put it off you can actually get it done in a reasonable amount of time... I will not be applying this to any other aspects of my life 

You’ve come to enjoy album release parties. The first one you’d ever been to was the one for your first album, something someone from your publicity team has put together, which they did a decent job on but you did not have a good time. You were so nervous about the album coming out at all that you tried to use alcohol to calm your nerves, so you can’t really remember anything about it besides briefly throwing up in the bathroom. After that incident, you resolved not to drink before the party ever again and the next few you’d been too for other artists were actually fun in their own special ways. 

By the time your second album is on the cusp on release, you’ve decided that you deserved it after the mess of writer's block you’d gotten in the middle of trying to write the thing, which had gotten so bad that you’d been called into a “special meeting” by management where they talked for what felt like hours about deadlines and marketing and basically tried to intimidate you into finishing faster. Something happened that allowed you to finish, it was an odd timing but it did help. 

But that was ages ago, and you’re trying to focus on the party. 

Which is easy enough, winding through the room talking to friends and investors, small talk is easy when you're trying to avoid something else. You’re talking to someone who’s name you are definitely not going to remember when this is over, when out of the corner of your eye you think you see someone who should definitely not be here. When you're finally released from said conversation you walk around the room, trying to find the intruder. You make your way all the way back to the bathroom, when suddenly the person you’ve been looking for slams right into you. 

You’re far enough in a corner that you think no one can see you, which is good because if anyone got photos of the two of you together you would never hear the end of it. Harry Styles looks at you like he’s been caught in the act, the guilty expression not leaving his face even as he says, “Funny seeing you here.” 

“At my own party?” You ask. 

He licks his lips, trying to buy time to think of something to say. “Before you say anything,” He says, treading cautiously, “I was told to come here.” 

You narrow your eyes, “By who?” 

“Someone who works for me,” He replies, “Which means that someone who works for you gave them the information.” 

You groan, “Of course they did, well at least make sure they get your good side when someone comes around to take photos.” 

He smiles at that, “That’s every side, love.” 

You shake your head, typing a message on your phone and quickly sending it, “It’s not but it’s cute that you think so.” 

“Ignoring that little comment,” He says, seeing that your attention is divided between him and the person you seem to be very angrily texting. “It’s a good song you wrote, I’m excited to hear the rest of the album.”

“Oh,” You say, eyes widening, “Thank you..?” He tilts his head to the side gently, clearly his way of asking a question without actually asking a question. “Sorry, I just didn’t realize we were doing the thing where we pretend this is normal, and you are normally at my party.”

He laughs, “Didn’t know there was pretending involved.” 

“I’m just so used to pretending to loathe you all day everyday that it's just so natural,” You say, and wait to see if he’ll get the joke. 

He shrugs, “Really? I don’t think of you all that much.” 

Your phone buzzes in your hand before you can respond, one message sits unread underneath the ten you’d sent a few minutes earlier in rapid succession. Honestly? I invited him because I thought it would be fun. Of course that would be her rationale for not telling you about this very obvious stunt. Inviting your “rival” to your album release party is the perfect way to get your name in some headlines conveniently before the whole thing goes live, not like you need them but then again you do pay people to manage this kind of thing so they figure they should be doing something. 

Oh yeah, Harry is supposed to be your “rival.” Think of some of the most infamous musical feuds of all time, and then knock it down a few pegs, and that’s where you would put yours and harrys. No one knows how it really started, something between a couple of twitter stans you’ve been told, but it suddenly gave each of your respective “people” the genius idea to milk that kind of exposure for all that it’s worth. The two of you have been pit against each other ever since the release of your debut albums, both self titled and both released within two weeks of each other. It hasn’t harmed either of you, being compared to the other, since you’re both pretty evenly matched in terms of talent. 

It seems to only exist to make the occasional headline when the media remember that it “exists.” There have been headlines wondering if you’ve mentioned him in tik toks (you didn’t) in instagram posts (you were shading someone but not him) and if this whole thing started due to a one night stand that went the wrong way (definitely not). 

You pull yourself back into the conversation, realizing you're being rude trying to think of something to respond to the text message. “I’m sorry, you were saying?”

“Who are you rage tweeting over there?”

“Rage texting actually,” You say as another one comes through, “Fucking Melanie.” 

“Unfortunate that her parents gave her that as a first name.”

You look up at him right away, “Not funny.” He laughs at his own joke anyway, “Melanie-” You say, holding up your phone for dramatic effect, “Is the head of the PR team, which is three people but anyway she is the one who seems to have coordinated this whole thing as a prank on me apparently.” 

“It’s kind of funny,” He says. 

You narrow your eyes at him, “I’m sure from your point of view it is.” Suddenly, someone comes rounding the corner near where the two of you are standing, and you freeze on instinct until they pass right in front of you without even looking in your direction. You realize that in a panic, you’d grabbed onto Harry’s hand and you decide that the two of you are going to have to finish this conversation somewhere else. “Come with me,” You sigh, leading him through the back of the room all the way to a small door that leads to an outside area at the back of the venue. You look at him again, his eyes glinting in the lights hanging above your heads. “What were we talking about?”

“Are you ever listening to me?” He asks, half joking. 

“Don’t take it personally I’m only half listening to everyone,” You answer, “It’s called multitasking.” 

“Seems tiring.” 

“Better than being bored,” You say.

He looks at you for a second without saying and then shoves his hands in his pockets, “Why are we out here again?” 

“I’m trying to figure out what’s the game plan here, if you’re supposed to be seen here alone, seen with me, if I’m supposed to throw some kind of tantrum about it.” 

“Besides the one your already throwing?” 

You stop looking at your phone, “Ouch.” 

“Punishment for continuing to ignore me.”

You turn off your phone and hold it in your hand gently, giving him your full attention. “I’m listening, but only if you’re going to say something that it’s some kind of thinly veiled insult,” You click your tongue, “You’re one of those guys who flirts by making fun of girls aren’t you?” 

He thinks about it, “That’s a type?” 

“Yeah, for people who are still mentally in high school.” 

“So you wouldn't be interested then?” 

You smile, thinking about it. Here’s the thing, despite the fact you very much have been pretending to loathe Harry Styles for two years just so you don’t slip it if someone asks, you recognise now that he is objectively attractive. The curls, and the eyes and the borderline too busy suit jacket he’s wearing (that both of you know costs an exorbitant amount) is all contributing to a look that is working for you at the moment. Also working in his favor? The semi enemies to lovers arc that you have going on in your head. “Despite the fact that I think that kind of flirting is beneath you, at this moment, it’s currently working for me.” 

You take a step forward, closer to him, and suddenly your phone starts going off again. You check it briefly, trying very much not to ruin the moment but very cognizant of the fact that this is your party and people are going to start noticing if you're gone. You look down, see it’s not a life or death emergency and look right back at Harry. “Let me guess,” He says, “She wants you to kiss me for the cameras?”

You laugh, “No, but I’m going to do it anyway.” You kiss him, he leans in and you think that you might just seal the deal with harry styles out on this very nice patio when your phone rings again. You pull away when it’s clear that whoever it is needs you desperately, you look at the message, and groan, “Fucking Melaine.” You look towards the door and back at Harry, “Okay this is not over, but I have to go take care of stuff, so just meet me here after the whole thing is over and we will finish this thing.” 

“Really?”

“Oh yeah,” You smile, “We could be an epic novel of forbidden lovers, like Romeo and Juliet without the ending.” You pause, “Well maybe with the end if Melanie kills me with her bare hands for not talking to this producer she wants me to meet.” 

“Later, then.” 

You take him back to your apartment that night. And you invite him back the next day, and then the week and then a few more times after that. As much as you had meant it a joke at the time, the kind of forbidden lovers aspect of trying to keep this whole thing under wraps is sexy in a way that you would never admit outloud. 

You’ve both become shockingly adept at sneaking in and out of apartments, neighborhoods (Harry has multiple priorities; why that is you're not exactly sure) and sometimes clubs if you're in a group and it’s dark enough that you think no one will see you. 

“Should I climb up through the window?” You ask Harry as you stand in the backyard of his house in London,  swimsuit clad even though you’ve gone nowhere near the pool. 

Harry looks at you from his place on the ground next to you. He’d refused to get a chirhair to sit on, so he just sits on the ground, looking out over the pool and the fence. “Why would you do that?” 

“Romeo and Juliet thing, didn’t he climb through the window to see her?”

He shrugs, wrapping his arms around your bare legs in some attempt to keep your attention on him, “I don’t know, never read it.” He laughs a little, “But I think if you did that some pap would catch you with your ass hanging out of my window.” 

You laugh too, “And you would never fucking stop laughing at that.” 

“No, I would not.” 

You kick your leg out so that you almost hit him right in the face, “Fucker, I thought you were over being mean to me as a tactic. You have successfully romanced me.” 

“Really? Because you’re staring at the house like you’re going to kill me for my money.” 

“You’d put me in your will? That’s sweet,” You turn to him, pulling your sunglasses onto the top of your head. 

“You are so hot right now.”

“It is hot,” You say, looking out at the clear sky, “What an observation.” 

“You’re screwing with me.” 

“Because I’m too tired to screw you at the moment,” You say, “Can’t we just enjoy one day in one of your two properties out in the sun before you start making me exercise?” 

“I wouldn’t call it that.” 

“It is work,” You say, rolling your eyes. “I’ve been thinking about that song you played yesterday, I think it needs to be less.. Ethereal.” 

“What does that mean?” 

You sit down next to him, laying your head in the grass. “Harry Styles is a rockstar, if you’re going to do a sad song, which seems to be your specialty, it needs to at least have a beat.” 

“People don’t want to dance to sad songs.” 

“Dude,” You say matter of factly, “Of course they do, I do and I think I speak for a very large section of the United States population.You need a sad song you can at the very least scream too, if not full out dance.” 

“So what’s your suggestion?” He asks. 

“Add more guitar,” You tell him, “Like a lot more. Take all the lyrics you have and put them on a track that sounds like it should be about your new puppy or something.” 

“Who writes songs about puppies?” 

“It was an example, H.” You sigh, “but you get the point.” 

“I’ll think about it.” 

“Don’t be like that.” He doesn’t say anything for a while, and you let it go as one of his moods for a while. But it goes on for longer than you thought it would be, and eventually you sit up. He’s staring down at his phone, frozen, and then he starts typing without saying anything to you. “What are you looking at?” You ask him, and he doesn’t say anything. “What is it H?” You ask again. 

“Fuck it all,” He says, dropping his phone to the ground, and covering his face with his hands as he laid down with his head in the grass. 

You pick his phone up off the ground and see that he’s opened twitter. Staring right back at you is a picture of the two of you kissing outside a small restaurant from the night before, you rack your brain trying to think if you saw anywhere when you were there and you swore you didn’t. Like it or not, everyone is going to know about the two of you now, including Melanie who had told you not to interact with Harry after the party expressly. “Shit,” You say, and your phone begins to ring the sound of Temporary Fix filling the small backyard. 

“Fucking Melanie,” Harry says, still lying on the ground, “She’s going to ream me.” 

“Well at least she’ll do it to both of us,” You groan, not even bothering to go and get your phone. You stand up, as a tension headache begins to form in your temples, “Well I’m going to get into the pool.” 

“Now?” He asks you. “Seems like the perfect way to avoid this problem, doesn’t it?” 

He also gets to his feet, and takes your hand, “Yeah it does.” 

And together the two of you jump into the pool. 

It’s an hour before you finally call Melanie back, even though you meant to avoid it for at least another hour. You sit at the kitchen counter while Harry takes a call in another room, dreading this call because you do not want to hear her yell at you for nothing, mostly because you're a grown woman and are above being lectured. 

“Were you just not going to tell me about this?” 

“Yes, that was the plan.” 

“I told you not to-”

“Yeah but I had already made plans by then that I couldn’t cancel.” 

“There was one man in the entire world, who you couldn’t fuck-”

“I know, what are the odds?” 

“Could you please stop fucking with me for one second?” She says, “This is serious.” 

“It’s not that bad, for you I mean.” You shrug, “I mean for me my personal business is all out on the internet now and I’ll be permanently known as one of Harry Styles’ girlfriends but for you what’s better press wise than a good ol enemies to lovers arc? I won’t tell anyone the enemies part wasn’t real if you won’t.” 

You hear her sigh from the other end of the phone, and then tap her nails against the desk. “You might be onto something there.” 

“I’m always onto something Melanie, I’m the artist here aren’t I?” And you hang up, before you say something that you’ll regret. You’d meant what you said, you were mostly just uncomfortable with everyone knowing who you're dating, especially the harry twitter stans who are known for being very excitable to say the least, you could see why they liked him so much but you would be lying if you said they didn’t scare you. You think of all the interviews you’ll do in the future where people will ask about him, about your relationship and maybe about how it ended. 

Harry comes back into the kitchen and grabs two beers from the fridge. He opens both and sets one out in front of you. “How did it go?” 

“Fine,” You say. You look at him, “Is this the part where we break up because you can’t be seen with me?” You put your face into the counter and let out another groan. 

“Never,” He says, taking a drink, “No one else I would rather weather this shit-storm with.” 

You smile, “Same here.” 

[httplovecraft1890]

The Theme of Free Will in Yandere Simulator

So in the past, I’ve speculated at length about what some broad story points might be for Yandere Simulator and while I’ve revised my opinion on the significance of a character like Fun Girl (her statement of “YOU BELIEVE EVERYTHING I SAY. I WONDER WHAT ELSE I CAN TRICK YOU INTO BELIEVING?” feels a bit embarrassing in hindsight) I do think there are broad strokes that can be taken from what I wrote and applied to newer story points that’ve been shared with us since. You can consider everything below a refinement of those original ideas, I suppose. Let’s start by going back and revisiting Saikou Corp. Note: some of this information doesn’t have a specific source other than vague recollections aside from what YandereDev has said on Twitter, Reddit, etc. so apologies in advance.

What, exactly, do we know about Saisho Saikou? If we’re taking Fun Girl less as an actual plot point herself and more as a vehicle to deliver exposition to the audience then we can summarize a fair few things:

He was drafted into the service of the Imperial Japanese Army at age 17 in the closing days of the war. This retroactively confirms his date of birth was some time in 1928, meaning Saisho is 91 in 2019.

Saisho was confined to kitchen duty after being transferred to Okinawa at first. This changed after a bomb tore his dorm apart and he was trapped with the corpses of his friends for hours until he was rescued by other troops. During the attempted retreat after their rescue operation he called them cowards for wanting to fall back in the face of American forces. The memories of being stuck there with his dead friends still haunts him.

After being moved to a bunker, he was under constant stress from air raids and a chronic lack of sleep as well as malnourishment. When the U.S. finally found their hiding spot he tried to pull a pin on a grenade but it failed to detonate; he was promptly captured afterwards.

- From the June 1, 2018 Fun Girl text files We know little of his life after the war at the moment other than in 1946 he was reduced to running the company that would become Saikou Corporation out of his family’s garage (much like the company it parodies, Sony, was forced to do at first in our world by its creators). Given his later characterization I suspect that he probably ruthlessly took advantage of the breaking of up so many of the zaibatsu (large financial or industrial conglomerates owned by specific families; Mitsubishi is an example) by the American occupying forces following the war. In the decades following his country’s defeat Saisho created an enormous megacorporation that makes most of the consumer products seen in Yandere Simulator’s universe. As Headmaster Shuyona later relates to us, once he puts his mind to something he never takes no for an answer. Aside from the obvious wealth aspect that it grants him, though, what else is at work in his mind?

Like so many others, the defeat of Japan in the war simply unimaginable to him and, as far as he’s concerned, even if everyone else surrendered he never did.

The brainwashing and propaganda of the early Showa period never left him; as more and more Western influence began to creep into Japan, the more he began to freak out about it. Progressive politics and democracy are things he utterly despises.

Unsurprisingly, his reactionary politics have a racial component to them. For Saisho, the only people fit to rule the world are the Japanese and that if only everyone else realized it, there’d be a worldwide utopia. Though not outright confirmed, this also goes some way to explaining the almost eugenics-like obsession with ‘purity’ in the modern Saikou clan.

Even so, probably through careful PR stunts and knowing when to keep his mouth shut, Saisho’s worst beliefs aren’t known to the public.

- From the December 1, 2018 build’s Fun Girl files

It’s with some surprise then we know for a fact that Saisho wanted his firstborn daughter to inherit the company after he was ready to retire and only kept his son, Megami’s dad, as a backup. Despite the grueling and inhuman training that each Saikou generation seems to be put through, it seems that Saisho did genuinely love his daughter based on what Headmaster Shuyona confirms in Headmaster’s Tape #1. While this seems incongruous at first with his far right politics I think it’s helpful to see it less as a belief in equality between men and women, but instead that since she was a Saikou, she was inherently a cut above others because of that. Not many fathers would have schools built for their children in their honor if something wasn’t genuine, I think.

Megami’s aunt is a very interesting character at the moment. We know nothing about her other than the fact that she was first in line for the proverbial throne and hasn’t spoken to Saisho in 30 years because of him disowning her after they got into an argument. Fun Girl seems to hint that the conversation revolved around her trying to remember a supposed sister of hers (i.e., her) but this might just be her trolling us all. I think there’s something else very important given that time frame we also need to keep in mind: the date. What’s 30 minus 2019? 1989.

If we assume for a moment that Akademi opening its doors in 1985 was her first year, then following traditional Japanese high school length, it stands to reason her graduation occurred in 1988. The following year, Ryoba’s murder of the girl who was almost certainly Headmaster Shuyona’s daughter must’ve sent serious shock waves through Buraza Town. Megami’s aunt would’ve probably followed the proceedings with a lot of interest and I think a reason she parted ways with Saisho is because Saikou almost certainly tipped the scales in favor of Ryoba during her trial against the journalist. Why? Because of the country’s insanely high conviction rate. It’s greater than 99%. You’d practically need a miracle to get through it all and make the person who tried to take you to court look like a monster for doing so - something we know she pulled off. It’s not something that she could’ve done on her own without money changing hands or judges being properly blackmailed and flipping the media circus around. Headmaster’s Tape #6 also confirms that by 1999 Ryoba had seemingly regular contact with Saisho and Megami’s dad but it’s easy to extrapolate that they must’ve been speaking with one another prior to then; after all, just because Shuyona didn’t know about it doesn’t mean it didn’t happen (it doesn’t help him either that Saisho almost certainly sees him as a useful idiot). Learning a dark secret like this about your own family, coupled with the hell they put you through growing up, would break anyone and I think it’s a good explanation of why she left. If we accept that Saikou Corporation are Ryoba’s and Mr. Aishi’s employers then several things fall into place - why they haven’t ever had to move, why they live in a well off neighborhood, how they can simply up and leave for 10 weeks at a time to a foreign country - and the picture comes into focus. One of the things that Fun Girl seems to confirm is that Saisho’s love for Japan is equally as strong as what Ayano feels for Senpai. Knowing what we know about how the Aishi family curse seems to work, that’s pretty bone chilling. Coupled with every other horrible thing he thinks, combined with his vast wealth and influence, and it’s a recipe for disaster. The question becomes, however, what the point of all of this is. What could a murderous young woman possibly offer one of the most powerful companies in the world? Her body and mind. Stick with me here. Pretend you’re a scientist working for Saikou Corporation and you’re tasked with finding out what makes Ryoba tick; we’ll ignore for the moment any possible supernatural angle that the story might develop to explain their condition. The Aishi ‘curse’ seems to be a psychological condition, effecting the maternal line, that results in its carriers possessing severely stunted emotional growth, antisocial personality traits, flat affects, monotone voices, etc. This begins to alter in the host, however, an intermittent time after puberty in their late teens when, through various circumstances, meeting an individual causes an unknown psychological trigger to occur, acting as a kind of drug that for a time rewires the brain to enter a euphoria-like state wherein they begin to function on a neurotypical level, but only in contact with the source of this change (19 being the median age when an Aishi woman typically marries their victim). What if you could isolate the factors that cause such a thing to occur? 30 years is a long time to study something, after all, and decades’ worth of research must’ve meant some kind of breakthrough. Assuming that Saikou Corporation is like any other megacorporation in fiction then they’re sure to have their hands in medical technology. Imagine taking the research you’ve done on a so-called ‘yandere’ and began to try recreating it. After all, the idea of being able to use certain external symbols or things as stimuli is practically dystopian in its usefulness. Like, say, introducing a corporate symbol and ensuring its customers only felt a sense of satisfaction when buying a certain product.

Let’s go further than that. What if you could engender the same feelings of emptiness, followed by unbridled joy, when looking at something as simple as a flag? Not only could you brainwash an entire nation, but any other place on earth that allows the services you provide as a global company...

From this perspective, the “why?” of Saikou Corporation involving themselves with Ryoba becomes evident. After coming to this piece of speculation, if it is the case, something else also really clicked for me. Two things, actually. The first is that it’d give new meaning to the speech Megami tells you on the Skype chat you can have with her at school:

Is someone there?...Ah! It's you...Why have you come here? Have you come here to taunt me? Do you even know who I am? I know who you are. I know WHAT you are. My father won't allow me to attend school while you are..."active". He has a reason for tolerating your presence at this school. I don't. You are a vulgar creature that is only allowed to exist because you serve a purpose. If it was my decision, then every last one of you would be exterminated. Have fun while you can. If you and I ever cross paths...you're going to have a bad time.

The purpose is to further Saikou Corporation’s knowledge of the yandere condition and to find further ways to exploit it. Megami’s dad is in on this scheme and has purposefully kept Megami off campus while Ayano is on her murder spree as a way to keep her safe. What’s more, Ayano isn’t the only yandere that’s active either. Such a statement is more revealing than you might imagine it to be too. I think it’s pretty accepted at this point that the journalist’s wife was a yandere herself. He tells us as much in Mysterious Tape #6

But as soon as we met, she wanted to spend every waking moment with me. She wouldn't let me out of her sight, and got possessive if another woman so much as looked at me.

I quickly began to depend on her for everything. It wasn't long before I couldn't live without her. I certainly wasn't in any state to take care of myself... I was like an adult-sized baby. Helpless and vulnerable. Who knows...maybe that's what she was attracted to. Maybe she just wanted to experience the sensation of owning a person. Maybe she wanted to keep a human pet.

Isn’t it odd how she showed up in his life only a year after his ordeal with Ryoba in court? How his marriage to her didn’t involve them leaving the town at all? If I were him, I would’ve probably left it behind a long time ago, especially if it brought up memories as traumatic as what he’d experienced (and the fact he was directly threatened by Ryoba too). But instead his marriage and alcoholism caused him to never get out until it was too late. The timing seems... convenient, doesn’t it? Almost as if it were planned.

It wouldn’t be hard, I think, to sic some girl afflicted with the condition on someone either in hopes they’d ‘imprint’ on them or alternatively try to induce that very same response in them somehow. It’s a safe bet, again, considering how long Saikou Corp. would’ve had to pour over the data they’d collected. There surely would’ve been theories on how it happened and they’d be unethical enough to try it on human test subjects. So if they could do that, who might it happen to?

I think that an overarching narrative theme in-game is going to be that of free will. Let’s consider for a moment both Megami and Ayano as parallels to one another. Both are incredibly driven women who will stop at nothing to get what they desire - order for Megami, Senpai for Ayano - with familial histories of treachery and abuse. If Megami’s life has been lain down before her without her having much say in the matter, how does this similar struggle reflect in Ayano? Arguably, Megami could have everything she ever materially wanted in life just as Ayano has in the form of the feelings Senpai gives her but the issue goes deeper. If the price for Megami was having every moment planned out for her, is it not possible that the feelings Ayano has are just as manufactured? I don’t mean that in the ‘love at first sight’ kind of way; I’m questioning if the meeting with Senpai was something that was set up for her to go through, a test to see if this poor schmuck could be the thing that would let them begin to move onto a new test subject to put them through their glorified obstacle course (Akademi). Not to mention the fact that it essentially occurs right after Ryoba and Mr. Aishi leave for America is an immediate red flag. If Megami is trying to stop Ayano, though, then it must mean that she’s rebelling against the wishes of Saikou Corporation itself. After all, they don’t want something that they’ve put years of investment into slipping through the fingers if they can help it. The end game she has in mind is anyone’s guess at this point but I suspect it will be the purge of anything related to the above secret project. As such, there’s going to have to be someone to offer us an alternative to bringing down the current iteration of Saikou - and I think we also have an inkling of who’s going to aid us in bringing her down.

Kencho is emblematic of the status quo. He desperately desires his father’s approval (the one who’s likely continuing his father’s wishes and pursuing this whole endeavor to begin with) and will do anything to gain it. If Megami steps out of line too much, he’s certain to know that means she’ll fall from grace. He’s only been prevented from doing anything about his current situation because he’s only second best and hurting Megami would upset his dad. However, if she were to have an unfortunate accident... well, it isn’t as if he could be ignored anymore. In exchange, I imagine he’ll give Ayano exactly what her mother had: a nice house, a life untouched by anyone who’d take Taro or Taeko away from her, and a way for the two of them to have children if you go the latter route. All Ayano has to do is just give in to being a pawn like her mother did, like Kencho did, and like his father did. Or she can, at last, have the first real choice she’s ever had in her life by siding with Megami and tearing it all down (with Senpai still the promised reward in exchange for her help, certainly...).

[caoimheorourke]

What I Have Learnt On My Year Out

Going through school I always cringed at the thought of those days being the best of my life because I rarely enjoyed school, I loved the social aspect of school but the rest was white noise to me. I struggled with really debilitating depression and anxiety from around the age of 14 that lasted all through my teens with episodes happening in my life now but not as severe. School was a huge trigger for me, I was never myself. I was simply there for a bit of entertainment and leave again if I did even go in. I was so caught up on trying to plan what to do for my future that it made me feel like an outsider because I didn’t have the same interest in going to college as some of the other girls in my year. My expectations for myself were far too high and unrealistic and it added to a whirlwind of stress,anxiety and panic attacks.

The day the CAO was due I still had no interest in applying and hadn’t a notion of what to put down on my form. I was on my phone in my friends living room unphased that I had five minutes to apply but my bank card wouldn’t work. To me it opened my eyes to the lack of importance college had bestowed on me at the time because my main goal was just to survive long enough to get out. Every week I would have a wasted careers guidance class where the girls would go through their options whilst I was spinning around in an office chair refusing to be involved in a conversation where I felt I would be pitied for not following the same path that everyone else was on. I would wander the halls and wait for a teacher to pull me aside for a chat because I knew I could sweet talk my way out of it. I would do anything to not sit in a classroom and only be able to compare myself to the academic girls around me.

When it was our graduation I had a huge sense of pride because the only thing I wanted from school was to physically get out of it and let the world take me. I never got emotional about leaving or not seeing anyone again because anyone that I wanted in my life was in it and I knew they’d stay in it. I had finally wrapped my head around the years of grief I had put myself through, the added stress  and the unnecessary pressure. I was free. It was a surreal feeling that I thought my idea of life was finally about to begin. It was so close in my reach.

I was dreading getting my results. I knew I hadn’t done enough work due to poor attendance and the fact that every time I tried to study I would have a panic attack. We got called into the principal's office one by one. I was used to being in there for my weekly pep talks that I always looked forward to. I got asked my plans for the year, all of which unrealistic but it was my first time ever having plans that I was excited for. I didn’t wait to compare points or see anyone else jump around, I knew what I had gotten and the pleasure was simply getting through it. Passing everything I thought I would fail, the only reasonable thing to do was head to the pub.

During the summer I went back to work in a restaurant in town. I got offered hours during the winter so I was happy with the permanence of my position. In Mid July I had to see the doctor about really horrible panic attacks I had been having. For days I couldn’t look at anyone without crying. It dawned on me that I didn’t know who I was and hadn’t a clue what I wanted. I was so shocked that I would have nothing to go back to in September. I felt so lost and almost like a failure listening to the excitement of everyone going off to their dream college courses. I have never been the person to be jealous of others so I was shocked by what was going on. There were no teachers telling me what to do, no career guidance and no pep talks and it scared the shit out of me. I began to set little goals to achieve in different time frames which helped me keep my focus. The life I expected wasn’t being handed to me on a silver platter like I expected and I did not like it.

In January the restaurant closed down with no warning. My life officially had no stability and I spiralled. I had no confidence in anything I was doing. The only skill I thought I had was waitressing, it killed me. I loved my job so much, I loved meeting people, I loved the people I worked with and I loved the feeling of giving to people. I tried applying for jobs and got nothing back for three weeks until I got the job I presently have. It brought back so much for me, I was finally on the way back up. It made me realise how disposable I was and I hated it. I learnt the most in the last few months. I learnt how to be forced to work with a new team and embrace the changes that happened which I now know were for the better.

My year out wasn’t what I expected. I thought I would have seen and done so much more. The simple joy of it is that I have seen so many more sides to myself and I am learning more about myself everyday. People grow at different stages through their life, I felt as if mine was stunted until I got forced out of my comfort zone. I thought my life beginning was when I got a good job or finally decided what course I wanted to do but it was so much more to me. My life began the second I had to make the changes to make a better me. As boring as my year out sounded I wouldn’t change a thing. I was expecting to be living it up in different countries but I also learnt that flights are more expensive than I thought. A year out is about finding what you want to do for your future not your life because things change too quickly.

I presumed success was linked to making money and social standards but I have learnt everyone has different definitions. If I were to define success in my world it would be waking up in comfort. Meaning no dread or anxiety that sounds like a dream to me and for the first time ever every day I feel closer and closer to it. I would suggest a year out to anyone, everyone needs time to meet themselves and see the brighter side of life. College isn’t something that would be on the top of my list because I have so many more things to figure out. Everything happens for a reason, life always has to run its course and sometimes it can be scarier to go with it rather than against it. Your life starts when you decide, don’t start on someone else's time.

Caoimhe.

[homenum-revelio-hq]

Welcome to the Order of the Phoenix, Nicky!

You have been accepted for the role of DORCAS MEADOWES! Your application was amazing! I really enjoyed seeing how well thought out this version of Dorcas was in your mind. I can clearly see where she’ll fit in and can’t wait for her to start blowing shit up! The Order needs someone to rock the boat and you’ve brought that through in your application!

Please take a look at the new member checklist and send in your account within 24 hours! Thank you for joining the fight against Voldemort!

OUT OF CHARACTER:

NAME: Nicky

AGE: 30+

TIMEZONE: EST

ACTIVITY LEVEL: Medium, sporadic; I work retail hours which means that my schedule is not consistent between days. I expect to be able to make several replies each week, however, and am available to check-in or chat often. Tuesdays and Thursdays are the only time I’m really out-of-touch for considerable periods on a regular basis although in general I have more free time in the latter half of the week than I do at the beginning – and of course when Winter Holiday Shopping Season rolls around I will be more absent than usual!

ANYTHING ELSE: For experience, I have played in and adminned several roleplays, 90% of them Harry Potter-based, with a little time doing indie rp as well. I mostly only rp on tumblr (I like the visuals!) but I’ve been around for several years now. I tend to be long-winded but value content over quality, and don’t care about “length matching” on replies. I will also basically always post images with my replies because it’s an integral part of the “acting” experience for me, but I have no objection if my interaction partners prefer to go straight-prose in their posts. No triggers, although I would appreciate it if any posts involving the deaths of cats (or kneazles) could be tagged so I can brace myself or skim over them!

CHARACTER DETAILS:

NAME: Dorcas Dembe Meadowes 

(her parents named her Dorcas for grace–it means “gazelle”–and because her father just liked the way it sounded, and Dembe for peace to honor their hopes for the world and her future; while she is hardly clumsy, aside from that there seems to be little of Dorcas’s names in her attitude or personality…especially not of her middle name! So much for the wizarding superstition that a child’s names can be prophetic…)

AGE: 18

GENDER & SEXUALITY: Dorcas is a cis-gender witch who uses she/her pronouns. I haven’t settled 100% on her sexuality (given the time period, I expect she hasn’t either) but I’m leaning heavily toward her being either a lesbian or a bisexual. I plan to start the game with her being somewhat aware of her preferences, but not having sorted it all out yet. While romance is not a priority in terms of plots I’m seeking, I am definitely interested in Dorcas exploring and discovering more about herself and her identity throughout the game. I think she’s definitely someone who would throw herself into the idea of being Out (and damn the consequences – as usual) which may be especially interesting if it serves as a stumbling block for friends or fellow Order members (or potential/current romance partners) who come from a more conservative (muggle?) background and aren’t keen on her flaunting that.

BLOOD STATUS: half-blood

HOUSE ALUMNI: Hufflepuff (certainly never a prefect, although she did fly Reserve on the Quidditch team as a Beater for two years, playing in a total of one match)

ANY CHANGES: None!

CHARACTER BACKGROUND:

PERSONALITY: 

“Brash enough to be a Gryffindor,” is something people say about Dorcas a lot – but only because they’re missing the point of Hufflepuff House, Dorcas insists. Hufflepuffs aren’t dull, mild stick-in-the-muds any more than any other House; they just have that reputation because they have more follow-through. Gryffindors are useless after the initial rush of bravada and adrenaline has worn-off; Ravenclaws are too easily distracted overall; and Slytherins are too quick to jump for the new advantage to see things through. Hufflepuffs, though, Hufflepuffs know how to focus. And while Dorcas might be quick to jump into a fray, she is no quitter. She’ll never admit a cause is lost (even when she should), never give up on anyone or anything…unless they betray her. Dorcas is an open-hearted, amiable, outgoing soul who is quick to offer friendship to others, but she is unforgiving and unshakable in the grudges she holds against those who let her down. Small things she can forgive, of course – she’s no monster and no one is perfect! But true, genuine betrayal? Of person or principle? That, she will not tolerate.

Dorcas herself is not always easy to tolerate either. Stubborn and blunt, she speaks her mind (even when perhaps she ought to keep it to herself) and her skill in tact and tempering is stunted from disuse. She redeems herself somewhat with those who can bear-up under her brusque honesty by being a loyal and helpful friend, but even that is sometimes negated by her devotion to whatever plan or purpose currently dictates her motivation. It’s not that she’s unkind – just something of a bulldozer. When Dorcas Meadowes decides to do something, she sees it through and damn the consequences – whether that be the numerous detentions she served in school, the bruised feelings of friends and foes alike, or the bridges she has (mostly metaphorically) burned behind her, she will not balk or hesitate even if it kills her (and everyone around her). And with the higher stakes at which the Order of the Phoenix operates, it just well might.  

BRIEF OVERVIEW OF FAMILY: 

The only child of Olive Blott and Thewton Meadowes, Dorcas grew-up in a comfortable, secure, sedate, middle-class magical home. Her parents doted without spoiling her and while she never wanted for anything much, she wasn’t the kind of child who was showered with expensive brooms or designer robes – which was just as well, as Dorcas wouldn’t have cared much for those sorts of over-priced trinkets anyway. Like Dorcas, her parents were solid, hard-working Hufflepuffs (they had met in school; although they hadn’t been in the same year to share classes, they shared plenty of time in the common room and cheering for their friends together on the Quidditch pitch) but unlike them, her work-ethic was rather flexible about where it was applied. Maybe that was an innate aspect of Dorcas’s personality, or something she learned from her non-Hufflepuff friends at school…or maybe, something she picked up from her grandmother. Zawedde Meadowes was a firebrand, an iconoclast, and a fighter. She taught her granddaughter not only how to fight, but when to fight. (Dorcas may have learned that lesson a little too well, with none of the accompanying “and when not to fight” counterpart.) It was Grandma Zawe who broke the erstwhile “purity” of the old Meadowes family line when she married into it – but after seven years as a muggle-born student in Slytherin, some disapproving family glares (and hexes) weren’t enough to make her break a sweat. Despite her more conservative son and daughter-in-law’s efforts to temper Zawe’s outspoken attitude and boundless confidence, Dorcas learned a lot from the grandmother who often served as babysitter while mum and dad were working in the bookshop. Olive and Thewton would have much rather their little girl were a little bit meeker and milder. More willing to go with the flow, like they do; to not cause a fuss. But “fuss” is what Dorcas excels at. The older she got, the more she has come to look on her parents with bemused and at times almost condescending affection. How could they be so content with a world that was so unfair? Keeping their heads down might have kept the shop free of controversy, sure, and that kept them profitable and free of the sort of attempted censorship that louder opinions often garnered, but it didn’t do anything to change things. While Zawe doesn’t know the full extent of Dorcas’s activities with the Order of the Phoenix – nor, indeed, does she know for sure exactly what the Order is nor that Dorcas is a member of an illegal vigilante group – she knows that her granddaughter is up to something dangerous and illicit, something that mirrors her own not-so-long-ago-as-all-that battles against Grindewald. Having personal experience with war makes Zawe aware of just how much danger her granddaughter may be in, but it also makes her proud. When she entertained little Dorcas with stories of her wartime activities, she never thought she might be preparing the girl for her own battles – but if that is where the world is now, so be it. Zawe continues to encourage Dorcas just as she always has, whether that be with playing alibi for mum and dad or by offering words of advice and encouragement after a particularly difficult battle or frustrating conversation with the Order’s more stick-in-the-mud members. Dorcas may have learned the value of hard-work from her parents, but she learned the importance of standing her ground from her gran. With those two elements combined, she’s proven herself a true force to be reckoned with – at least when she’s doing something she thinks matters. (Otherwise…well, “lackluster” would be a generous way to describe her effort.)

OCCUPATION:

Dorcas works as a part-time assistant at the family business, Flourish & Blotts, the main bookseller in Diagon Alley. Her parents would be a lot happier about the fact that she’s showing an interest in the family business if she would actually show an interest – but half the time she cuts out of her shifts early, or sprints in late, or calls-off altogether. If she weren’t family, she’d have long ago been fired, but how do you fire the woman who’s going to inherit the place one day? Scolding her doesn’t seem to help; she either shrugs it off or stomps off, claiming she has more important things to do. What can she be up to that’s keeping her so preoccupied?

ROLE WITHIN ORDER/THOUGHTS ABOUT THE ORDER:

As one of the newest – and also one of the most openly passionate – members of the Order, Dorcas ought to be sitting back and following the lead of her elders and proving where she can be most useful. Instead, she’s causing something of a stir with her big mouth, blunt criticism, and insistence on doing things differently. Dorcas wants the Order to be more proactive, even if that means being more violent. She’s not afraid of collateral damage; this is a war, after all! People get hurt in war, and letting things drag-out because you don’t have the conviction to do what needs to be done is only going to get more people hurt in the long run. So far, she hasn’t swayed anyone who matters to her side – not Kingsely, not Moody, not [Alice] Longbottom, and certainly not Dumbledore. But she is riling-up the younger members, which can be both good and bad: it’s hard to make proper plans when a quarter of the room won’t stop shouting, but it’s also hard to sink into morose despair when there’s a wild-haired girl barely out of her Hogwarts robes shouting in your ear about “taking the fight to Voldemort directly, what are we waiting for?” She has become something of a pivot point within the group – not yet carrying enough weight to tip the balance of power or force any major confrontation or schism, but enough to make people think. Enough to make people argue. Enough to stir things up – which is exactly what she wants. Dorcas has no time for complacency; that’s her parents’ stock in trade, not hers. She is so adamant about not waiting around in fact that she has branched-out on her own private “missions” outside Order edict, support, or sanction – which isn’t quite crossing the line, because it’s not as though they’re an army with orders to follow. They’re a group of desperate vigilantes all pitching-in together to stop a great evil…but Dorcas is pitching a little harder than what some people are comfortable being associated with. So far Dumbledore hasn’t said much about Dorcas and her methods one way or the other – but with how preoccupied he’s been with his own secretive efforts, one has to wonder if he’s had time to notice? Worse (or better, depending on your point of view), she’s convinced other junior members to go along with her on her mad, reckless crusades – acts that the Daily Prophet more often than not labels terrorism. They’re too skittish and scared to understand the difference between what she does and what the Death Eaters do, that’s all – them, and all the complacent fools sitting huddled in their houses, waiting for someone else to come and save them. Dorcas thinks that the Order has been coddling these people too much, letting too many wix get away with sitting on the sidelines by not forcing them to take sides – by letting them bury their heads in the sands and pretend that if they ignore the strife all around them, it will go away. She knows better, and she thinks she can force those layabouts to pick up wands and pick a side if she just rubs their noses in it a bit more. If she brings the war to them, they won’t be able to sit back and marinate in their timid apathy; they’ll have to join the fight, because when she’s through there won’t be any sidelines left in which to hide. Voldemort won’t stand a chance then, not once the rest of the magical community finally gets off their arses and admits that some wars need fought. She has no time to wait for the Ministry, they’re a lost cause – and she’s running out of time (or maybe just patience) to wait for the Order either. Dorcas is going to save the world – and if she has to burn down half of it in the process, so be it.

SURVIVAL: Dorcas’s safety net is her family; it always has been. They may not be enough to protect her from herself this time, though – but she hasn’t been involved in the war for long. She’s still living at home but spends more than a few nights each month crashing at the Potter estate, her room at her grandma’s flat, or with someone else in the Order after a mission or a meeting that runs late – or while she’s waiting for her wounds to heal enough to be able to go home without causing too much outcry. Her parents just think she’s “staying with friends,” as youngsters do – and that’s not technically a lie. Even the people in the Order with whom she doesn’t get along are companions in arms, and that’s almost the same thing as friends surely. Whether she’ll be able to maintain her parents’ ignorance for much longer may be a moot point; someone like Dorcas burns so brightly she may well burn out before there’s time for suspicions to raise.

RELATIONSHIPS: 

NOTE: this is all very much first impressions based on bios etc and subject to change when characters are actually claimed and backgrounds plotted; ergo if you see anything in here about your character that doesn’t feel like it “fits” or you have a better idea for or just aren’t in the mood etc – splendid! Any and all of this can be changed, and is just a basis for what I’m going to springboard off to start with until other options can be discussed or developed! In general, Dorcas’s relationships with the rest of the Order are…okay. She’s new, so some of them don’t trust her yet; she’s reckless, so some of them never will. On the other hand, she’s enthusiastic in her commitment, and that’s something of a breath of fresh air amidst a war that’s starting to seem to some to be unwinnable. Definitely she’s a divisive figure – you can’t easily ignore or turn a blind-eye to Dorcas Meadowes, she’s too loud. Too demanding. Too sure that she’s got the right idea to win this war. That doesn’t mean everyone (or even a majority) agree with her methods, and that can make her easy to dislike – or resent. If she’s so willing to accept collateral damage, then how could the Order continue to hold its head up in moral superiority to their opponents? But what if she is right, and only more extreme methods will win the day? Doesn’t that mean the rest of the Order are failures…or cowards? For some people in the Order, it’s easy to say that Dorcas is wrong (or right), requiring only a simple gut-check to know. For others, the question she forces is much more uncomfortable to confront. For many, that makes Dorcas an uncomfortable person to be around – or someone who causes their temper to snap faster than even she maybe deserves, lashing-out at her rather than facing their uncertainty about themselves. She’s a catalyst, and those are not always well-liked by the people thus catalyzed. As for Dorcas’s feeling about some fellow Order members in specific… James Potter. Everything she knew about James before she joined the Order was that he was a bold, reckless, slightly-wild wizard who never passed-up the opportunity for a prank or a laugh or a spot of danger. He was supposed to be some kind of “golden boy” idol for fun-loving troublemakers. So she expected something…more. What she found was someone far too meek, far too reliable, far too tame. What happened? Was his reputation always a bunch of hot air, or has he just lost the will to fight? Regardless, Dorcas is disappointed – but maybe he’s salvageable. Sometimes she thinks she can see a spark in his eye when she’s outlining a scheme; sometimes she thinks if she can push his temper far enough over the edge maybe he’ll snap out of this funk and get back to the person he should be. Maybe he’ll stop letting Moody and Kingsley and Lily Evans hold him back and he’ll actually get off his butt and do something! Caradoc Dearborn. The man’s a bit of a stick-in-the-mud, sure, but he’s a reliable stick-in-the-mud. (If they had more Hufflepuffs in the Order, they wouldn’t all be sitting on their hands like this!) And no coward either – just too cautious for Dorcas’s tastes. She thinks she can fix that, though. He just needs more of her influence and less of Moody’s and Shacklebolt’s sense of caution. Needs to push himself out of their shadow and back into the proper fight. Dorcas is convinced that’s where he wants to be, too – she just needs to show him how to get there. Shouldn’t be too hard. (If some Death Eater had murdered her mother…!) And once he does, he won’t suffer from the sort of second thoughts and backtracking that plague so many of their fellows and keep the Order locked in this endless cycle of act-regret-act-retreat; Hufflepuffs get things done. She won’t deny that it’s nice to have a “familiar” face in the Order too – even if he’s too old to have actually shared time at Hogwarts with Dorcas, they both come from the cozy Hufflepuff cellars and the dedicated Hufflepuff work ethic and that’s pleasantly familiar; just talking to Caradoc for a little can be a balm to her otherwise jangling nerves or anxious energy. Emma Vanity. If Dorcas has a best friend in the Order, it’s got to be Emma. Which is odd, maybe, because Emma Vanity is not the sort of person one would expect someone like Dorcas to be friends with (or the other way around!) but here they are! They came into the Order together, and so far Emma’s seemed happy to stick at her side through thick-and-thin (and through older, more cautious Order members lecturing them both into behaving more – as if anyone ought to “behave” during a war!) and Dorcas is both glad and grateful. She acts like she doesn’t care if no one likes her – but it’s nice having a friend who always does. Emma’s refined and delicate high-society manners don’t even get on Dorcas’s nerves the way such things do with most people…maybe because with Emma they seem natural rather than forced, or maybe it’s because Emma is always so quick to follow Dorcas’s lead without acting like she’s lowering herself. Maybe it’s just because Emma’s pretty manners remind Dorcas of her late great-aunt – the one “old school” Meadowes who actually got along with Dorcas’s muggle-born grandmother, and who was always the nicest part of family gatherings for Dorcas. Emma has more gumption than people give her credit for, too – even if she does have to pushed into it, most of the time. Good thing Dorcas doesn’t mind doing a little bit of pushing. Benjy Fenwick. Him losing his Quidditch career like that was a waste – Dorcas saw him on the pitch enough in school to know that – but the sport’s loss was the Order’s (and her) gain, so she can’t be too sad about it (even though she tries to make sure she acts like she is, if the subject ever comes up; her focus might be a little narrow but she’s not mean!). She feels a little protective – no, a little proprietary toward him, too. After all, she was the one who knew he’d be a great fit for the Order; she was the one who knew he’d be of great use to the Order. (It’s not all running into battle and sprinting away from arrest; there are so many other skills that matter just as much!) The one who knew he was looking for somewhere to belong and was clever enough to offer that. That means he’s “on her side” – regardless of his thoughts on the matter, maybe! It’s not like she’s taking advantage of him, either; she’s just doing what’s best. For everyone. Including Benjy! He’s happier now than he was when he was just sitting around moping, right? So well done, Dorcas! And if that means she has access to a semi-professional Healer who won’t ask questions or go tattling to Moody or Kingsley or Dumbledore if she and a few mates come in all banged-up right after someone’s set-off an explosion in Knockturn Alley or started a fire at some pure-blood estate…well, that’s just a nice side benefit, really. Sirius Black. Dorcas doesn’t trust him. He can be a lot of fun, and can even be a lot of use – but if there’s a candidate for “most likely traitor” it’s Sirius Orion Black. Something about him just rubs Dorcas the wrong way (maybe it’s the fact that she doesn’t like the parts of him she does like; maybe it’s just knowing how his relatives treated her relatives once upon a time – but Dorcas doesn’t believe in inherited guilt any more than she believes in inherited purity so it can’t be that!) so even though he’s one of the few in the Order who really seems to get what she’s pushing for, who really seems to be on board…there’s a little nugget of suspicion. He just seems to be trying too hard all the time – as though his rebellion against his family were pure performance. The fact that he “broke it off” with the Blacks too early to be able to give the Order any real information about his family’s (very very likely) support of Voldemort is awfully convenient. The fact that his “disreputable best friends” are two half-bloods and a pure-blood rather than, say, any muggle-borns or anything really objectionable is awfully convenient too. Almost like the sort of friends someone who believed in blood-purity but wanted to pretend they didn’t would acquire. (He seems to respect James – the pure-blood – the most, too. How convenient.) He even inherited a nice convenient little chunk of money from some uncle, didn’t he? Almost like his family wanted to make sure that he had enough to live on while he was “cut off” from their fortunes… Oh yes, there are a lot of things about Sirius Black’s story that are just a little bit too convenient for Dorcas to easily swallow. A lot of things that would make him the perfect spy for the people who share his surname…and the person a lot of them are almost certainly working for. The fact that there’s never been any proof just shows that Sirius is more subtle than he lets on, that’s all – unless he isn’t the spy. (But if not, who is?) Dorcas isn’t sure – and she isn’t one to turn down a gift horse just because she thinks it might bite her fingers off. As long as Sirius wants to help her plot some mayhem, she’ll take that help and even enjoy herself along the way – and she certainly isn’t going to say anything to undercut the support he sometimes offers her when a big argument gets going about how proactive (or not) the Order should be. But she’s going to keep an eye on him, anyway…someone should.

OOC EXPLORATION:

SHIPS/ANTI-SHIPS: 

I have no ships in mind for Dorcas. Speaking generally, I think she is likely to be the kind of person who tumbles passionately into and out of love, and for the most part the “cause” comes first and “happily ever after” is for quitters – or at least, that’s the outlook on which she will insist both to herself and to others; her heart may disagree however, and Dorcas is not one to be ruled by common sense or cold logic, which could potentially place her in interesting circumstances. For individual characters, I’m keen to bounce Dorcas off of both those who agree and disagree with her – and regardless of whether they end up sporting romantic inclinations toward one another or not, I’m particularly interested to explore her relationship with Emma Vanity. Also her relationship with James Potter, but I’m definitely not seeing any potential for romance there! XD

WHAT PRIVILEGES AND BIASES DOES YOUR CHARACTER HAVE? 

One might think that having a Muggle-born grandmother she so adores and looks up to would leave Dorcas free of any traces of blood-prejudice – but one would be wrong, because Dorcas did still grow-up in the magical world and it is far, far too easy to internalize the prevailing attitudes of one’s society even when one ought to know better. Oh, she’s no blood-supremacist – but has she ever looked at a talented Muggle-born with shock at their skills because she expected less of someone with Muggle parents? Of course she has. Part of that comes from her own grandmother’s stories, even: knowing how hard Zawe had to work to keep up with housemates who knew so much more than she did about everything when she started at Hogwarts, Dorcas knows that Muggle-borns are starting-out a little behind the rest of the class…and when you “know” that and grow-up surrounded by a society that’s all-too-quick to assume anyone of Muggle origins is “less than” everybody else? It’s all-too-easy to fall into the same lower expectations…even when you tell yourself it’s just “more impressive” coming from someone like that. The fact that Dorcas doesn’t believe herself to have any sort of anti-Muggle-born prejudice really only makes it worse, because if confronted about it she’d only get defensive and argue the point – she isn’t, she can’t be. Don’t be silly. She’d never! She also shares most of the same other base prejudices common to magical society: werewolves are unclean and dangerous, giants are stupid and violent, goblins are greedy and unstrustworthy… All the “classic” prejudices that become so ingrained in society that it can be hard to even notice them until you know they’re there. Being a half-blood with such close Muggle-roots means thar Dorcas herself falls on the middling-low end of the privilege/prejudice ladder, which gives her just enough social stigma that she can sit back and blithely convince herself that she isn’t prejudiced while still giving her enough of a privileged position to make her life comfortable. No, she’s not some pure-blooded toff with connections stretching back halfway to Merlin who can wink-and-nod their way out of an altercation with the law…but she does fall well within the borders of Ordinary Citizen, nothing too fishy or objectionable about her to make somebody look twice or doubt her word. Plus she’s got the convenience of a recognizable and respected family to fall back on when she trouble comes calling – particularly in the form of the M.L.E.P., who are usually inclined to cut her some extra slack. (“Her parents run Flourish & Blotts, after all, my kids got their schoolbooks there! Go ahead and let the lass off with a warning there John, she’s just blowing-off steam, you know how kids are! No harm done…”) Her time with the Order is just enough for Dorcas to begin noticing this – which is both uncomfortable for her to have to own-up to in her own mind, and convenient for a woman with an agenda like hers. Knowing she can get away with a little bit more than she ought to is going to come very much in handy for dear Dorcas…even if the concept sticks in her craw.

WHAT ARE YOU MOST LOOKING FORWARD TO? 

I am honestly just so excited to get to explore the imperfections and prejudices within the Order; too often fandom makes 99% of the characters in HP so black-and-white in terms of good-vs-evil when most of them aren’t. Sure, there are extreme end-of-the-spectrum characters like Voldemort and Bella and Umbridge who are pretty much Pure Evil (and the occasional opposite end like the hardly-flawless-but-wholly-good-hearted Luna Lovegood) but for the most part, the people in this story are just people. (All that “both light and dark inside us” blah blah blah stuff.) But when you only focus on the Good Guys vs Bad Guys – particularly when the cause the bad guys are fighting for is so bad – it’s easy to gloss-over the flaws in the people fighting against them; easy to forget that they aren’t always great too. Easy to forget that just because you’re fighting against a group of people trying to enshrine prejudice as near-holy writ in their society doesn’t mean that you’re automatically free of prejudice yourself. (Maybe some of the people in the Order are there because they oppose blood-supremacy, but does that mean they like werewolves? Doubt it! Or what about the ones who come from Muggle roots who thus have Muggle prejudices that the wizarding world has little of – racism, for starters! What about queerness? Is it more tolerated in a magical society where people can change genders as easily as they transfigure themselves into rabbits and armchairs, and where marriage has always been about preserving the family line more than romance so who cares what the gender of your “bit on the side” is as long as you produce a proper heir? Etc. What about religion? I doubt too many wix go in for Muggle religions, when so many of those belief systems take the tactic of “thou shalt not suffer a witch to live!” so how does that conflict play-out between those who grew-up with one foot in the magical world and one in the Muggle? So many options for turmoil!) Just because someone is paying enough attention to know that Voldemort is evil doesn’t even mean that they don’t share some of the same ideals being spouted by the Death Eaters – maybe unconsciously, maybe to a lesser degree, etc…but still there, in their head. Internalized. Needing to be unpacked, confronted – but fandom does so little of that. Good Guys are Good, End of Story. The Order were all friends who got along, la la la! Nope. Don’t think so. The Order was made up of a bunch of scared, desperate, angry, beleaguered people (several of them outcasts in their own way) fighting life-and-death battles against an enemy they couldn’t always even find, opposing their own government in many ways in order to “do the right thing” – fighting a war that half the populace would rather just went away. Even if they had all started as buddies, that would have been enough strain to crumble half their friendships by the end – and conversely, to forge people who otherwise have nothing in common into lifelong mates. The interpersonal relationships and inevitable clashes and arguments and confrontations – those are going to be awesome. I’m so excited.

ROULETTE IDEAS (OPTIONAL): 

Firstly let me just say that I am happy to offer Dorcas up for any plotting purposes needed – whether that be her little group doing something destructive or illegal, a line that shouldn’t have been crossed, an injury or death that can be blamed on her directly or indirectly, kidnapping (with temporary hostage-plotting of Dorcas; I can sit out a bit no worries!) and rescue mission, whatever! Even if it’s not a plot drop about her, feel free to make use of Dorcas in any sort of inciting incident required; I’m not possessive! As for specific ideas… -Epidemic: because disease doesn’t seem to be something the magical community has to really deal with much (got a cold? Take a Pepper-Up Potion and it’ll go away in an hour!), not the way Muggles do, so I think it would be interesting to have a sudden outbreak of something (something Muggle or something magical?) run rampant through Wizarding England, particularly right now mid-war. (Perhaps rumors will fly that it’s deliberate – but from which side? And engaging in biological warfare in magical war, really??? Are we Muggle barbarians now??) Something strange and uncommon for them to deal with…something that will drive people in to St. Mungo’s in larger-than-usual droves and leave the potioneers and herbologists working overtime and meanwhile there’s a bloody war on we’re busy enough already do you mind? -Someone Gets Bit: either there’s a second werewolf in the Order now (has Remus been exposed yet? Guess it’s his responsibility to play Lycanthropic Yoda – or if he’s still closeted, time for a Guilt Waterfall deciding whether or not to out himself and help out! uh-oh!) or it’s a Bill Weasley/Lavender Brown situation where the offending werewolf wasn’t transformed but oh no lycanthropic taint now what? and general panicking with a heavy side-helping of bigotry whoops! Maybe the Death Eaters get wind of the fact that the Order has a Pet Werewolf, so they sic their own (not so) tame puppy on them with an ambush by Fenrir Greyback and his buddies…or they could decide to fuck with the Order by using Transfiguration to fake a werewolf pack attack, and everyone panics over the bites that are actually harmless but too late to take back anything they said or did when they figure it out whoops – basically just the Death Eaters pulling a nasty prank (because the Marauders aren’t the only immature asshole wix out there lol) but also has the potential “side benefit” of the Order risking exposure by going to St. Mungo’s to get treatment etc….idk this one sounded better in my head before I started detailing it, but I’m sharing it anyway in case it triggers a better idea with someone else! XD -Fake Defection: probably making use of a temporary secondary character, or as a potential idea for someone who wants to join the game only for a few weeks (due to scheduling issues or attention span or whatever) and then write their character out: a Death Eater makes contact with someone in the Order and wants to defect! Everyone is equal parts excited/suspicious! They are brought-in for debriefing and discussion! Things seem to be on the up-and-up…but they aren’t, it’s all a ploy by Voldemort and not a real defection at all but an attempt to worm a spy into the Order or at least sow distrust oh no! They make leading comments and sly little observations that has the Order distrusting each other as much as the supposed defector (who is the spy within the Order???) and eventually blows their cover either with a fight or by ratting-out some of their plans to the Death Eaters leading to an ambush etc etc…but in the meantime? At least one or two Order members thought they’d made a friend (and maybe they really had! but the Death Eater’s loyalty trumps their affection!) and that hurts. (Alt: if the player ends up falling in love with the character and wants to keep them, throw in a twist where the DE in question initially came in as a double-agent for Voldemort but then ends up falling for their new friends and even questioning their own prejudices as a result of direct exposure to the people they used to think weren’t people and now they have to work-out how to really switch sides without burning their bridges with the people who thought they’d already switched sides, whoops!) -Burning the Books: trouble at Flourish & Blotts! Maybe something nasty follows Dorcas home one day; maybe someone in the Death Eaters just gets offended at some of the product being stocked and Dorcas’s parents ignored the threatening letters and hints (because who would actually do any of those things? They’re just selling books! This is a civilized society!) so the Death Eaters decided to make a bigger gesture. Maybe it wasn’t even the Death Eaters themselves, but someone who was inspired by the current social strife and decided to act on their own agenda of hate for from arson-style censorship. How unsettled would Dorcas be to discover her safe-haven was a target now? Would it hit home hard enough to make her question her own policy of “collateral damage is inevitable, stop fussing!” that she’s been pushing? Would it inspire her dial-back her more extreme efforts – or only make her embrace them harder, because if even home isn’t safe anymore than all bets are off! Maybe it’s even all out of her hands by then; maybe it would be a wake-up-call to respect the rules of engagement more but it’s too late, her agenda has a life of its own and she can’t stop it now…so better run and keep up before you get run over? Or plant your feet and try to make a stand, even if you’re standing against what you used to advocate?

ANYTHING ELSE? nothing!

[sailor-cresselia]

Zi-O 19 and 20: lol whoops waited a long time, might as well do them at once!

~We now bring you our Quiz Saga Liveblog.~

WhiteWoz’s Storytime Void is infuriating. Both because it’s so visually cluttered with all of the times displayed, and because the MULTITUDE of ticking sounds.

I love that the boys don’t have to stay still to transform. Seeing their transformation backdrops follow them like this, as their running, it’s great!

(I’m still pretty sure that Oma Zi-O’s bizarre chair is his transformation backdrop, by the way. At least, assuming that he’s not Another Zi-O.)

Is that a GOOGLY EYE on Another Quiz’s forehead?!

Sougo’s using the gun mode an awful lot lately.

“That monster is mine.” Yeah, it sure is, buddy. It SURE IS.

Hm, don’t think I noticed last time, but “The lessons of the past can’t be clouded by lies” is what’s playing over the shot of Rider Woz in the OP. Does that apply to the lessons of the future, as well?

Hey, Kamen Rider Quiz. You’re a little overpowered, there. We’ve already got ONE reality warper affecting our actions. We don’t need two, thank you very much.

I can FEEL the ‘We are not okay with this fight’ just RADIATING off of both Sougo and Geiz as this guy’s attacking them.

Geiz is still immediately here for the Woz’s nicknames, and Sougo’s getting a kick out of ticking off ‘his’ Woz. I love it.

The Another Rider and the Original Rider both existing at the same time… I haven’t seen the rest of the episode, of course, but I’d guess it’s a combination of “someone brought Actual Quiz back in time”, “Sequence Breaking”, and “The rules of time travel aren’t nearly as set in stone as they have been led to believe.”

(Yes, I’m sticking to that particular gun, come Helheim or high water.)

Sougo has a point – BlackWoz doesn’t come along for the fights, like, ever. He didn’t last time against Another Shinobi, not really. Not on his own; he was following Sougo to try and keep him away. So YES, Sougo’s calling you out on being out of character.

HI YES have I mentioned I really like when this season does ‘parallel version splitscreen’ shots? Like, during the Gaim arc with the two Sougos, and during “Fourze and Faiz” with Sougo and Geiz in the two respective time planes. It’s GREAT.

It’s a thing that the past few seasons have done, actually – these sort of split-views of characters. Ex-Aid used it a number of times for Emu and Parad’s conversations when they were fighting each other, particularly as Mighty Brothers XX L and R, where they went back and forth showing the suits in the ‘real world’ and the civilians in a mirrory, shadowy mindscape. Then, in Another Ending, there were several times during Genm vs Lazer that Kiriya and Kuroto were juxtaposed with their Rider forms. THAT was played a lot in the second half of Build – scenes alternating between having the armor and the civilian talking in the middle of a fight. To say nothing of the Takumi/Sento swaps, where they would sometimes change which actor was present when Takumi was talking. Sometimes. I really like that ‘form meets function’ aspect – remind the viewer who is under the mask, or who’s in the pilots seat, and it’s just really cool. The synchronized alt-selves talking is just another extension of that, be it a time-displaced Sougo or a Woz from a different timeline altogether.

… um.

Actually, whatever happened to “3 days from now” Sougo?

Suuuure, these are the only two options. Riiiight. “Take Quiz’s power (and totally kill your friend)” or “No More Mutants Riders.” Yeaaaah, we’ll get RIGHT on that, thanks Woz’s.

AHAHAHA NO. Uncle Tokiwa… ‘given how long it’s been stopped’ that watch is a Tragic Keepsake for Quiz, isn’t it? I mean, he’s from the future and all, so.

“Oh! Sougo, you have a lot of friends who like clocks! This one can stay for lunch too!”

“Um, uncle, no, this one has directly tried to kill me, actually, so maybe not-”

Ohhh. Right… Assuming the ‘riders lose their memories without their powers’ is true, which the characters all still believe is, even though i’m not so sure…

Taking Quiz’s powers while he’s… um, 2040 minus 2019 is…

Taking Quiz’s powers while he’s 21 years in the past is NOT a good thing.

“You will soon be forced to make some rather merciless decisions. Consider this practice.”

HEY WHITE WOZ. I’m not liking your expressions here. That’s waay more sketchy than someone who ‘supports’ their ‘savior’ has any business looking. Like, not even a creepy adoration sketchy, just. Plain creepy.

Oh no, that’s right, Another Quiz is Actual Quiz’s father. And now Mondo says that ‘he was talented, according to [his] mother.” Which means that in the proper timeline that he’s from… he never knew his father.

(Re-Ray plays quietly in the background)

Sougo has ZERO points. Poor Tsukuyomi only has three. Mondo quit it, you’re the GUEST here. Show some mercy on your poor, moronic host.

Geiz, what’re ya doing sneaking downstairs? (It could only be Geiz, because he’s wearing pants that fit.)

(gasp) GEIZ! You’re not wearing your harness! I was starting to think it was part of you!

(Congratulations! You didn’t do a violence!)

~skipping to the fight~

INSERT SONG: GEIZ TIME!

Okay, but really, when are they releasing these? And how many more are we going to get? Because so far I’m liking what I’m hearing, from this one and from Sougo’s in ep 16.

Not really sure what those sound effects are with your Ex-Aid armor today, though, Geiz.

Decade!OOO is Tajador. We want our bird.

BUT. Sougo’s movements are… eerily Eiji-like right now.

Hey, didn’t I say something about ‘when he stops being a knock-off, that’s when we need to worry?’ That would have been… right, last time was when I was watching the raw of episode 15. When Sougo was pulling off a pretty decent version of the Rabbit Tank Sparkling finisher. And then in 16, he was using Mighty Brothers XX pretty accurately, as well.

HM.

They go for the finisher, and the music stops dead when Hora freezes time. It’s disconcerting enough when that they do that with the background music. When it’s VOCALS that cut out, it’s terrifying.

Neither Geiz or Sougo are meant to take attacks from other Kamen Riders. It’s why Geiz was so poorly off after that curb-stomp Sougo gave him in the first part of “OOO and Genm.” It’s why Decade dealt so much more damage to both of them. And they just got hit with each other’s finishers.

WhiteWoz cares not for your puny ‘morals’ or ‘sense of right and wrong’ or ‘geiz’s growing realization that he’s not going to be able to go through with killing zi-o’.

WhiteWoz cares not for anyone.

Hey, Showy McSynth Pop? I don’t think it counts as winning if you hack the timeline to let yourself win.

So, Quiz’s backstory is breaking my heart. He just wants to see if his father actually loved his mother. That’s tragic. “Until she knows the truth, I don’t think my mother will be able to move on.”

About as equally tragic? Sougo’s line. “I think I understand.” said hesitantly, as he sits down, with restrained movements. Usually, when he’s Sougo (as opposed to Zi-O), the kids arms are almost constantly in some sort of motion. But he folded them and sat quietly down.

Sougo… what happened to your parents?

Geiz, baby, please tell me that the attack is at least partly a stunt? That you talked to Mondo before you guys came here?

Geiz??

(enter episode 20!)

We’re back to BlackWoz’s Storytime Vault! Hooray!

So: Sougo gets BlackWoz to help him and Mondo get out, via nifty Magic Scarf powers. Hora brings Another Quiz with her. And WhiteWoz is a total creeper calling them cowards.

The sunlight light overtaking Geiz and going into the 20 Rider Kicks logo is GREAT. Not only is it a great method for a transition, but it keeps us from seeing what Geiz is feeling – which it needs to, right now.

I’m pretty sure that was a sigh of relief from Geiz when Sougo and company left, after all.

The sequence breaking Another Riders seem to be a lot MORE painful to become than the Regular Another Riders… and those were already painful to watch. (Another Quiz’s eyes flashed red and blue briefly when he transformed, that’s nifty!)

Yup, I was right. The watch is a Tragic Keepsake. It was Mondo’s dads, and I think it broke today.

Sougo shows off his ‘Low INT, High WIS’ stats again. Did terribly at the quiz last episode, but can tell that Mondo’s not just here for his mothers sake. (Sougo, what happened to your parents?)

Geiz asks Tsukuyomi what Sougo would do. Well, he asks what “Zi-O” would do, and I eagerly await the day we get to see “Zi-O” become “Sougo” for him. Please let it happen. I’m still upset that nobody expect for Kasumi and Kazumin ever called Ryuuga by his name, this is almost as bad.

When she says that he’d try and prioritize Mondo’s feelings, he replies that “I guess we’ll have to fight. Make sure you tell him that.”

I don’t think that’s what you actually mean, Geiz. I think you’ve got a plan.

I hope you’ve got a plan. … one that you’ll be able to follow through on, because we know full well how that original plan is going.

And through these last two scenes – inside and outside of 9-to-5, the piano version of Over Quartzer is playing. It’s a thing of beauty.

Hm. “I guess we’ll have to fight”… Geiz, you were talking about you and Sougo, as opposed to you and Mondo, weren’t you? Because you went straight for Zi-O, not for Quiz. Clever boy.

Wait, when did you get Build?! I get that the watches are interchangeable, but you’ve been running Ex-Aid a lot lately, too.

(Now I kind of want to know if the Cross-Z and Genm watches are compatible with the Decade adapter…)

Sougo took a BEATING with that Build finisher, didn’t he…?

Nah, not as much as he could have… it looks like Geiz was pulling his punches, so to speak.

Sougo pulls the ‘which Woz are you?’ gag, and actually gets BlackWoz to refer to himself as such. Sougo gets a kick out of that, Tsukuyomi is dully surprised, and Woz is disgusted with himself.

Heehee… neither of them are telling their respective Woz’s what their own plans are. And neither of them are actually agreeing with their respective Woz’s goals.

Pity the respective Woz’s don’t acknowledge that last fact.

Sougo asks what Geiz would do… and when Tsukuyomi tells him that Geiz asked her the same respective question about him… that seems to tell Sougo everything he needs to know.

Low INT, High WIS. Sougo, you’re a deceptively devious little twig, aren’t you?

(WhiteWoz, knocking Hora down wasn’t necessary. Because I don’t believe for a SECOND that Geiz did THAT.)

Sougo, you deceptively observant little twig.

“So… Tsukuyomi said that Geiz asked her what I would do. I know I would let them interact. So, if he’s doing what I would do, then that’d be why he attacked me up there. So now I have to hold up his end of what he would do, and go straight to getting rid of the obstacle. So, I’ll take on RiderWoz, and let Geiz lead the father-son chat.”

So… The HeiGen Forever movie IS, in fact, canon, then? Because that’s the Double Ridewatch right there. And- pft – the Gaia Memory shoulder pads are temporarily little stick figures – pftHAHAHA! And they do the pre-transformation pose before attaching – this is absurd oh my god!

Of COURSE beating Another Quiz could work with Kamen Rider Quiz!

If a Riders power can only exist at one point in time; which still sounds fake, but I’ll allow it for now; the one that comes later seems to take priority. All the previous Another Riders were made after the Proper Rider already existed. That’s why the watches that our riders use had to be picked up in the present day – that way, they came into existence after the Another Rider did.

The exception to that is Shinobi, who didn’t exist at all yet, and was rendered impossible by being his own Another Rider.

In this case, Kamen Rider Quiz technically is the later iteration. He became a Rider in the future, and he’s here via time travel. So, chronologically speaking, Another Quiz came into existence in 2019, but Kamen Rider Quiz does not exist yet. So he can be considered the ‘replacement’.

SOUGO NO DO THE FINISHER IN THE LIGHT I WANT TO SEE IT PROPE-

wait it’s a Double finisher with CYCLONE JOKER? Maybe I don’t want to see it properly, Joker’s finishers are usually borderline body-horror…

Okay no, we’re good, it’s still iffy but it’s not nearly Joker Extreme levels of iffy, so we’re fine. I am A-OK with this finisher being a bootleg.

RiderWoz is OP. Sougo’s REALLY hurting after that.

Sougo and Geiz are. Not. Meant. To. Fight. Riders.

This scene with Mondo questioning his father is absolutely heartwrenching you guys. Made even more so by the piano version of Over Quartzer picking up where it left off earlier.

And then RiderWoz just has to come in and ruin everything. And use some TOTAL overkill on those attacks – oh GOD with actual lightning bolts and everything, and I had thought Quiz’s attacks were brutal when HE was doing them?

WhiteWoz cares not for your puny human morals or ethics.

Hey. HEY. What did those two watches just DO to Geiz? The bizarre vision thing is one problem as is, the electric shock is another, but something ELSE about that just effected him. Poorly.

WhiteWoz is in some serious trouble.

Hey. HEY. ProperWoz. What is that watch you just handed to Uncle Tokiwa? Why do you have Sougo’s upgrade?

I am glaring in the directions of BOTH Woz iterations. You’re BOTH super sketchy. But at least the first Woz is a more tolerable type of sketchy. At least he doesn’t seem to delight in other peoples pain.

SO I’m having fun with this again! Just have to hold out hope that they know what they’re doing with the previous riders, and keep going!

After all...

Mondo doesn’t seem to have lost his memories, now does he?

[steebs-nerdy-corner]

Dresden Files RPG GM thoughts

So as some of you might have noticed, I’ve been involved in a Dresden Files RPG game, specifically as the GM, for a good long while now. I’m definitely still learning the ins and outs with my players, who have honestly provided good feedback and have been good sports about my relative inexperience. 

Still, I thought it would be interesting to share a few things I’ve picked up on during my months of providing stories and punching bags to my players.

1. Magic is extremely powerful in this game, but also a bit complicated

One thing that was pretty evident from the first adventure is that combat magic in the DFRPG is probably the most potent weapon in the game. While attacks that rely on skills such as Guns or Fists do not expend stress (basically your health and mana bars) to use, they only go so far in terms of damage they can deal. For comparison, military weapons in the game tend to be rated as Weapon:4, meaning that on a successful hit they deal an extra 4 points of damage. With magic, that weapon value can go to 7 or even 9, a massive amount in a game where you only get 4 points of physical stress unless you have supernatural powers.

Problem though: Magic in the game is also a bit complicated. With attacks using skills, its pretty much a roll of the dice and adding your skill points/stunts if they apply. With magic, you gotta choose how strong you want your spell to be, governed by one stat, roll to hit with another unrelated stat, apply specific bonuses if they’re using a focus, and see if they hit. And that’s if you’re just using regular evocation, and that’s if you manage to control the spell. There’s a bunch of rules governing the use of magic just in combat, and in honesty the book doesn’t use great terminology or explain it all that great. I essentially had to translate the book and put the steps on a bullet point list for my players, who are pretty much universally spellcasters of one kind of another, and even then we’re collectively still figuring things out.

On the first point, be very aware of how strong your enemies are if your group is loaded with spellcasters. Most of the time low to mid level foes from the book are gonna be mincemeat unless there’s some massively unlucky rolls on their end or yours (one of the toughest fights my players have had so far is a horde of confederate zombies, pretty much completely on accident).

On the second point, not every use of magic needs to be set up the way its written in the books (I think one of the supplementary books even points this out). A lot of times if my players are slinging magic and they’re not in regular combat, I abstract the spell down to a dice roll. Same thing with certain simple rituals. This way the game gets much more streamlined and the players feel like they aren’t bogged down by their magic powers.

2. Use a player’s opposites, not their mirrors

This is a big tempting one that I quickly learned to try and avoid. Everyone wants to see the big wizard’s duel, or the clash of the swordsmen, or the shootout between the gunslingers. The way that skills and combat work in this game though, those fights tend to be far more long and tedious than you would actually think. If you’ve got two similar characters in a dukeout, their skills more often than not cancel out, leaving them with nickel and diming each other till one drops, which honestly isn’t that fun to GM and I would guess not too fun to play through. Unless its maybe the dramatic culmination of a campaign, in which case elongating it makes sense, it just makes combat more tedious.

A good way to try and counteract this is trying to pair up your players against dissimilar opponents, or at least have a decent mix of different opponents. While there’s never a guarantee that the group will target their opposite, what with free will and all, it at least makes the combat less one note and at times far more dynamic. It also makes the players think about how to approach certain opponents differently.

3. Pay attention to group dynamic in “social combat”

So here’s an admission: I’ve pretty much abstracted social combat in the way its presented in the books. One of my earliest adventures featured an attempt at a social combat encounter, and it quickly devolved into essentially an interrogation with dice rolls. The idea of attack order in a conversation quickly felt like it was unnatural, and on top of that it was often very confusing as to which stats offered “attacks” or “defense” for each conversation option. While I may try to phase aspects of it back in, specifically so those characters that picked social skills don’t feel left out, I think it’s very important to know your group dynamic for social combat to know if it’ll work the way it’s written or not. Is there one or two smooth talkers in the group that people will turn to in social combat, or is everyone gonna join in? Do they want the “combat” to feel more like regular combat or do they want it to be more like a normal conversation? Are they the type to hold on to their thoughts till their opportunity or will they just kind of unleash their thoughts and opinions as soon as they think of them? These are the questions you have to ask before implementing this (in my opinion) very odd form of “combat”.

4. Keep track of mental stress for spellcasters

 This one I still get hung up on. While out of combat I tend not to care much about stress unless the spell they’re making is objectively massive or dramatic, I do try to keep track of the mental stress my players accrue in combat when they spellcast.

I say try because it’s very easy to overlook when you’re wrapped up in a combat session. Every spell a player casts in that scenario expends at least one point of mental stress, effectively limiting the most powerful weapons in the game. Considering how OP magic is, this is extremely crucial to keep track of as combat wears on so that your players don’t just end up laying down 12 point damage spells for 10 rounds straight. There’s a limit to magic, even in this game, and it shouldn’t be something the players solely rely on in combat.

5. Remind them of their options (occasionally)

 I can understand not being hold-hands Mcgee when GMing, but considering there’s about 3 major books of crunch to go through in the DFRPG, it can occasionally be advantageous to remind players of what they can do with their skills or powers. Crafting, for instance: magic isn’t just for blasting foes with lightning or summoning eldritch creatures, it can be used to craft potions or magical items, something unfortunately often overlooked in the wake of calling down fire from the heavens or tracking down magical murderers. Alternatively, skills like Resources or Scholarship can be useful in their own way, like getting certain bits of information normally inaccessible. While you don’t need to re-read the rules every session, it can be good to remind players of exactly what they can do with the spells and skills they have on their character sheet, giving their characters and the game more of a three dimensional feel.

6. Don’t be afraid to build from scratch

 No question, the “monster manual” for the game and the supplement Paranet Papers give a large number of foes for players to fight and NPCs to interact with, usually those either directly from the books or speculated from mythology/folklore. Thing is though, I feel like there’s a major danger in getting too complacent in the existing templates and things getting repetitive. In the books it unfortunately seems like opponents tend to either fall into the categories of vampire, undead, fae, denarian, fomor, or wizard, with things like ghouls and shapeshifters as minor categories seldom used. Don’t be afraid to change things up into more obscure deals like cryptids or local legends and give them unique spins to separate them from the usual suspects. Throw in different spirits, elementals, nymphs, sea/ monsters, boogeymen, there’s a whole supernatural world out there beyond the stuff usually cited for fighting fodder.

Hell, for one adventure my players were fighting what was essentially an undead construct made of reanimated bees. A zom-bee zombie, as it were. Get creative!

7. Don’t let them compel themselves into an early grave

This one’s connected to probably my biggest dumbass move as a GM. I had a very difficult adventure for my players lined up, something to really challenge them after several adventures where they pretty much breezed through the encounters.

The metaphorical storming of the castle required some planning, and in the process one of the players ended up compelling themselves, basically using a set of pre-assigned roleplaying attributes to move the story along, into acting as a distraction. I honestly should have put my foot down and made it clear that the person would die if they did that, but I think for some reason I was trying to be overly challenging on purpose. The character ended up getting taken out, which caused another player to compel their character into jumping out into the open to save them. That got their character taken out too. Before they even get to the bad guy’s lair they’re down two characters. A party split later and they’re all down for the count.

Compels are a very good friend of the GM in this game, especially if the players take to compelling themselves to get fate points. It saves you a bunch of trouble in the roleplaying department and its great fun. What isn’t great fun is having characters waltz into a situation that you know is completely deadly and just watching as they get slaughtered.

I could’ve cried “Well its your own fault for getting your characters taken out”, but you know what, no, it was my fault. I screwed over my own campaign and had to pull out a completely fresh one simply because I wanted a tough campaign for the sake of being tough. I apologized to my players in the next session and I learned something: tough for the sake of tough kneecaps the story, and being unforgiving just lands you in a story that isn’t fun for anyone. If someone is deep in their roleplaying and they do something that will immediately get them killed without their knowing, give them a second chance if its a genuine mistake. Your characters and their players are there to tell a story with you, not to be targets to make you feel like a badass GM. Compels are meant to make a story interesting, and its hard to have an interesting story when two characters immediately drop before the action even begins.

[t-baba]

How to Boost Your Developer Career with a Personal Brand

Personal branding is one the most (in)famous trends of the last decade.

In this article, I’ll talk about what a personal brand is and how building one can help boost your career. I’ll show you how to stake your claim in the online space as well as three paths you can follow to level up your brand. That’s plenty to talk about, so let’s get this started.

The argument for a personal brand as a developer

Our first stop is Wikipedia, where we can find the following definition:

Personal branding is the practice of marketing people and their careers as brands. It is an ongoing process of developing and maintaining a reputation and impression of an individual, group, or organization.

That’s the part most of people have in mind when they think about personal branding. They think about the current diva of the day. About famous media celebrities. About publicity stunts that are meant to push you into the limelight. About presenting a fake facade in order to obtain undeserved rewards. And many other less-than-pleasant examples.

However, there’s another aspect to personal branding — the other side of the coin, so to speak. Right after the definition above, the Wikipedia article has the following phrase:

In Be Your Own Brand, first published in 1999, marketers David McNally and Karl Speak wrote: “Your brand is a perception or emotion, maintained by somebody other than you, that describes the total experience of having a relationship with you.”

In other words, your personal brand includes what other people say about you when you’re not there. It includes your reputation, your body of work, the testimonials other people give about you. Nowadays it includes your tweets and your posts on Facebook. To many people, your pictures on Instagram matter just as much (if not more) as your contributions to open-source software. Want to travel in the USA? Be prepared to let them know all your social media accounts for the last five years. (Sources: Sophos and BBC). And the examples can continue.

Everything you say and do affects your public image and your reputation. And that can have devastating impact on your career. Remember the Aria Richards case back in 2013? She was a developer taking part in a conference where she published a tweet about some male developers making sexual jokes behind her, including their picture. In the fallout, one of the guys was fired, but Aria lost her job as well, because her action was deemed to be damaging to the reputation of the company employing her. (Sources: ArsTechnica and CBSNews).

Fortunately, it’s not just about mitigating possible damage. A great personal brand can increase your leverage at a level you wouldn’t dream about it. It can put you in a better light when applying to a new job, and you’ll have better negotiating power when discussing the salary and the perks of the position. If you have your own business, it can bring you more and better clients and projects. What’s not to like about it?

But there’s one caveat in all this: be authentic. Don’t do it to project something you aren’t, or as a money-grabbing move or, worse, to cover negative aspects. That’s the main reason people react badly when hearing about personal branding.

This subject alone (the pros and cons of personal branding) can fill a whole book and goes beyond the scope of this article. So, stop letting others write your story and take control of your narrative. All this being said, let’s push forward.

Stake your claim and establish your presence

The first phase in building your personal brand is staking your claim in the online space and laying down the foundations for further expansion. It is, in my opinion, the most important part of the process. If you do nothing else from the other things we’ll talk about later, but you work on this part, I’m confident you’ll get a lot further than many other people.

We’re currently living in the age of social media, so you might be surprised to hear that this foundation is actually your own website. Yes, a website. The old-fashioned kind, where you buy a domain name, arrange hosting and upload the files on the server for everyone else on the Internet to find.

“That’s the dumbest idea I’ve heard,” you might say. “I don’t need a website. I have my CV on LinkedIn, my pictures on Facebook and Instagram, my articles on Medium, my code on GitHub and I keep in touch with everyone on Twitter. Why would I waste time and effort with a website that I have to promote as well?”

From a certain point of view, all that sounds quite reasonable. But all those options have one thing in common: they’re all third-party platforms, and you’re actually renting the right to use them. You might not pay with money, but they are gathering data about you and your habits that’s either used to target ads your way or it’s passed to third parties for the same reasons. Remember, if you’re not paying for something, then you are the product being sold.

It all comes down to a simple truth: you can’t build your home on rented land. You can lose access to social media at any moment. All these platforms have somewhere in their terms and conditions a clause that allows them to terminate their service to you at any time without having to provide an explanation. Or your account could get hacked or deleted. Your tens or hundreds of thousands of followers? All gone in a blink of an eye if you lose access to the platform.

That’s why you need something you own completely — a place to present yourself without being beholden to a platform that only cares about their own interests. You need a way to gather contacts, followers, connections and clients and be able to keep them. Yes, websites and servers do get hacked. But in that case, all you need to do is install the latest backup and you’re up and running again.

Let’s get down to the trinity of items needed to establish your online presence:

A domain name

You need your own custom domain name for multiple reasons. It gives you more legitimacy and it opens the gates for further options down the road. www.johnnydev.com is a lot better than johnnydev2335.github.io, don’t you think? We can have a very long discussion over whether it’s better to choose a “brand name” or your own given name for the domain. However, that’s a conversation for another time and place.

Hosting

There are plenty options of free hosting for developers: GitHub Pages, Netlify and many more. In many cases, that’s all you need to have a website up and running. For some of the more advanced options, though, it’s better to get some classic dedicated hosting.

Custom email address

This is the same story as with the domain name above. I think we can agree that johnny@johnnydev.com is more professional than johnnydev2335@gmail.com or some other email address you created when you were 16 years old.

Now all you have to do is upload your site and let everyone know about it. You can go from something as simple as a single static page to something complex like a WordPress blog or a static site generator like Gatsby or Hugo. Don’t despair if design isn’t your strong point. There are plenty of free themes and templates available.

Remember, you don’t have to code the website yourself. You get extra brownie points and bragging rights for writing as much code as possible yourself, but that’s not a requirement. If time’s at a premium for you, just grab a free template or theme and get started. Be sure to check the code for any hidden, unpleasant surprises, though, or use trusted sources, like curated collections and communities. All major players, like WordPress, Gatsby or Hugo, come with curated themes that you can choose from.

Once you have a website

Congratulations! You just became the proud owner of your own piece of online real estate. You how have a place where you can link all your social media profiles, upload your CV, write some blog posts or even articles. If you want to take it even further and remove further your dependency on other platforms, you can start your own email list. But that’s a topic for another time. For now, we’ll focus on three paths you can take to further increase your influence, your reputation and, ultimately, your personal brand. These are paths that other developers have taken before, and they got a lot of benefits out of that choice. They’re also not mutually exclusive. You can mix and match until you get the combination that works best for you.

Continue reading How to Boost Your Developer Career with a Personal Brand on SitePoint.

by Adrian Sandu via SitePoint https://ift.tt/2RY9gXb

[buddaimond]

Interview: Good Time Filmmakers Josh, Benny Safdie And Robert Pattinson    

#Rob’s responses in bold.

Benny, you play this character who’s sort of mentally challenged, believably. I hadn’t seen you in other things and I didn’t know that was you until I had to look up other interviews. Was there someone who was the inspiration for that character?

Benny Safdie: Myself. I mean that in the most honest way. I feel I can relate to … If I were to take certain aspects of my personality and heighten them, I could really feel that. I can feel certain emotional insecurities, emotional detachment, wanting to just kind of close in. If I ratchet that to 11, I would be that person.

Clinically speaking, did you have a diagnosis in your mind when you’re writing that character?

Benny: He’s hard of hearing, he has deep emotional and social anxiety, and he has definite certain IQ deficiencies…

Josh Safdie: LD.

Benny: …so you kind of add that all together, and you get this guy who is uncomfortable a lot, because he’s comfortable only within what he wants. And now you have this guy, Connie, telling him, “You can do whatever you want, when you want,” and that is beautiful. That’s Nick’s paradise. But then it quickly becomes his nightmare, because he doesn’t know certain limitations to that.

Josh: Weirdly, we never had a clinical categorization, because Nick has never been clinically categorized. The first scene is him talking to a doctor [trying to determine that]. You could argue that he’s someone on the spectrum. You can argue that because he doesn’t have the social awareness that he doesn’t understand… Like that scene in the bank, in the middle of the bank robbery, that Connie turns to Nick and says, “What are you thinking about?” And Nick says, “Nothing.” The fact that Nick says nothing in that moment is so heroic to Connie, because anyone in their right mind, in the middle of robbing a bank, would be feeling everything but nothing. In that regards, he’s disassociated from society in a way. We’ve talked about that there’s a lot of LDs involved, learning disabilities. He’s very low IQ, and I think that had he gone through the system, probably he would be diagnosed with autism, but I don’t think that he’s an autistic guy. It’s more nuanced and tricky than that.

When you’re a non-disabled actor playing a mentally challenged character, how do you avoid being hashtag problematic?

Josh: Originally, when we first set about making this movie, our initial concept was, coming from Heaven Knows What, we were working with a lot of real people and using their real lives. Our initial concept was to cast somebody with a real disability. We worked with a lot of groups, a lot of developmentally disabled acting troupes, and we did extensive interviews with our casting director, and we ended up finding ourselves in a spot where it’s like, okay, we could cast somebody in this scenario, but the schedule that we had was so aggressive and the scenarios were so meticulous, that we would have ended up having to do things that morally I wouldn’t even feel comfortable doing, like manipulating somebody into doing things that they necessarily didn’t even want to do or have a full understanding of what they were doing. That’s kind of where we got to this place where Benny was like, “Listen. You guys wrote the character based on the character that I developed with Ronnie, I can play it.” Then Benny ends up having the wealth of knowledge of having done all these extensive interviews with people with real disabilities, so that he can also pull from.

Benny: Then I’m sitting there in the room with these people, and I’m realizing that there are… I’m feeling similarities to certain things that they are saying, and it’s just, I’m internalizing that and it becomes just a part of the character. I guess, also going into it, I never thought it would be … That it was a problem. I’m not thinking that this is going to be problematic, because I really do believe…

Josh: That you are Nick.

Benny: Yeah, I believe that there are emotions…

Josh: Nick is definitely inside of Benny. You can attribute that to a really messed up childhood of stunting things, developmentally, but then you figure out a way to get past it. But I think that that person is still in him.

Rob, do you think people still think of you as the Twilight guy, and on a scale of 1 to 10, how sick are you of this question?

Robert Pattinson: I don’t know. I guess to an extent. But, I’ve never been particularly… I don’t know. Someone was asking me the other day if I felt typecast by it. It’s always felt like such a specific character in itself, and it’s sort of different to who I was in the first place. I was never particularly worried. I just knew, as long as I could somehow keep getting jobs, then I want to do the opposite thing every single time from the last job. So I was never really worried about it. At the same time, you can’t force someone’s opinion of you to change, really. It either happens or it doesn’t. Yeah, I never get sick of questions. I love all the questions.

Sure, sure, sure. When you chose this project, it was more about being a departure from other things that you’ve done, than not specifically what you’ve become known for?

Pattinson: It’s never really from… I think, every single time I’ve tried to make a decision, which is sort of forward thinking, “Oh, this is a type of part I want to play,” or whatever, it always ends up, as soon as you find that part that you start to second guess yourself. I have a wide net of things that I’m looking to be inspired by. I mean, hopefully, the thing that inspires you it’s always hopefully surprising. I remember just seeing this still from Heaven Knows What, and then seeing the movie, and it was just… It wasn’t like, “Oh, that’s particularly the type of part I want to play,” or anything. It was, literally, just a lot of different things, and the energy of it.

Josh: We, upon our first conversation, the first seed of the idea, basically, the only thing we talked to Rob about was, we want to make this movie that’s kind of in this world of characters that investigates the American criminal, the prison ethos in America, and the only other person we know we want to be a part of this is Buddy Duress. Rob was like, “Oh, I loved him in Heaven Knows What. That’s amazing.” I think that the idea of playing opposite actors with no baggage… Buddy was not a first-time actor at that point, but he was relatively still… He’s definitely an unknown. So I think that that element was exciting, in some degree, at least I saw that twinkle in his eye.

I think that from our point-of-view, we weren’t interested in investigating the side of Rob that, as a performer, that was more of like a brooding, quiet type. Even in like the character that he does in Cosmopolis, or the character in Maps to the Stars or The Rover, these were characters that we weren’t interested in seeing him in. Because a) he’s already done it, and b) I was more interested in kind of the more manic side of him, the side of him that is super paranoid and questions the world and everything. The side of him that sends me conspiracy theories, and et cetera, et cetera.

Pattinson: It’s also that it’s quite a unique group of people to work with. I remember when we were in the prep time … There’s very few directors who, for one thing, have the connections to do some of the stuff, to meet some of the people and to have some experiences. The prep, I remember at the beginning, I really, really wanted to just go to spend two nights in jail. For, essentially, a make-up test. Because we were thinking at the beginning that I was going to have this fake nose and stuff. I was like, “How long can you do it?” It eventually got to the point that it was so complicated to do it. They know all these… The prison commission and stuff. It kind of went down that road. There’s very, very few directors that you can work with, or producers, or anybody, who it wouldn’t just be a, “No,” immediately. We like really went for it. The prison commissioner’s like, “Yeah, even if you’re in protective custody, it’s still too dangerous.” Then Sebastian, one of the producers, is like, “Why don’t you just get arrested?”

Josh: There was, for us… We wanted Rob to disappear in the city. I think the biggest triumph for us was that when he’s on the subway and nobody even acknowledges. Rush hour. We shot rush hour. The closest that anybody ever got to being, “Was that Rob?” During rush hour, where there’s a train packed with people. I’m telling Rob, “Closer, closer, closer.” He’s like, “My dick’s going to enter this guy’s face.”

Benny: But the closest we got was as he got off the train I heard, from his LAV mic, trailing away was, “Was that Rob? Was that Rob Pattinson?” “It couldn’t be.” It was like, “Yeah, right.”

You mentioned the prison ethos. Explain what, “I don’t even give a f*ck,” means to this group. It seems like their rallying cry, their aspiration. The worst thing you can say to these characters is to accuse them of giving a f*ck. What is that?

Josh: There’s this concept of kind of, “F*ck the Man,” in a weird way. If you care about what someone else thinks then you don’t know what you stand for. A whole part of the prison ethos, well, [not just] specifically in prison… I believe the prison ethos extends well past the penal system. I think it actually applies to people being in prison in their suburbans homes, and within their Twitter followers, and their weird echo chambers. I think that it does apply to that group. There’s like this idea of knowing what you stand for. Like, “I don’t give a f*ck what this person says, I know what I stand for. I know what my purpose is.” That’s a big part of the concept of being a man. What are you going to stand for? What are you going to stand up for? How far are you willing to take it?

The interesting part about this scene towards the end of the movie, between Buddy’s character and Rob’s character, where Buddy’s screaming like, “I’m f*ckin’ real.” The wildness of that scene that me and Ronnie like to talk about is that like, a lot of the movie was born out of his prison journals that he was sending me, or from my phone conversations while he was locked up.

Is that Ronny…

Josh: Ronny’s [Bronstein] the co-writer of the movie, and co-editor.

So he was in prison?

Josh: No, no, no. Buddy, who plays Ray, when we finished our previous film, he got locked up. So he was in prison, and he did a state bullet, which is basically a year. While he was locked up, I spent so much time with him on the phone and visiting him. I brought him Stanislavski’s An Actor Prepares while he was at Rikers Island. I brought him a couple of other books that he had never read before, and he was devouring them. We would talk for hours and hours until, basically, his commissary account would go empty. Then I asked him to start writing about it. When he started writing about these things is when the seeds of this project kind of came about. It’s seeing society in such a naked form, which is in prison.

It’s basically a microcosm of normal society, except inverse. In prison, the white man is the minority and it’s kind of, there’s a lot of justice in that. It’s like, “No, your entitlement and your privilege doesn’t go anywhere in here.” That was very interesting to me. So my point is that, when for him, his character to scream, “I’m f*cking real,” in that moment… It’s a big thing with him as an actor, as he was constantly reading the script and being like, “Why is my character doing this? I don’t want to look like a f*cking pussy. I don’t want to do this.” It was like a big thing. It was something that we were constantly fighting with, Buddy’s ego. But in a good way, he kind of fortified the role in that way.

Benny: But then, it’s like you go back to what you said, like what it means to be a man. It’s almost like this kind of clichéd version of what a man is, that’s what all of these characters carried with them. Connie, he’s a guy who is living his life like an action movie. He takes his cues from big movies and big things, but thinks that they’re his ideas, that he came up with.

Josh: He’s a romantic. He’s a romantic.

Benny: What I’m getting at, like what you were saying, some of the things that people talk about in jails, is that they get really attached to religion and these big ideas. But they think that they’re new, but they’re really just old ideas that have existed in the world, but they’re playing them out to just a huge degree. It’s an interesting thing that’s going on in your head there.

Tell me about casting all these people. I mean, they all have this very authentic feel to them. How did that come about?

Josh: Well, we’ve always been interested in the quote unquote, “sudden star,” like the idea of someone who’s a star that you might not have seen before. That they basically have this gravitational pull and they are just emitting their own magnetism. We’ve always been interested in that. The film that we made prior to Good Time, was almost perversely interested in that. We were casting people playing parts where they were recreating scenes from their real life that happened, sometimes, a few weeks ago. So it’s like this weird psychodrama happening there. With this movie, we wanted to do like a genre film, like a thrilling piece of entertainment, but we wanted to pepper in this idea of, this movie, of it’s like a thriller, but it’s actually thrilling because you don’t know where the movie ends and real life begins. Taking that alchemy, the chemistry of taking someone who has no baggage, who’s basically playing a version of themselves, opposite someone you know is not playing a version of themselves, is creating a really cool, kind of almost dangerous element where the stakes are higher. It’s like, if Rob messes up as an actor, the failure is actually tenfold because it looks so bad opposite someone who’s just being real. It raises the stakes.

Pattinson: Yeah. If you’re playing against someone who then sees you doing something that’s phony, it’s not like another actor looking at you doing it, like, “Oh, well, you messed up that scene. Tomorrow let’s start again on a fresh page.” It’s like you will be judged as, “No, that’s who you are as a person.” It’s like, “No, I play a character.” I was always … Yeah, that’s kind of what the stakes are like anyway.

Josh: But Jennifer Venditti and Eleonore Hendricks, who were running the casting of the movie, they cast a movie called American Honey.

Yeah, I was going to say. They very much reminded me of that.

Josh: Sure. They go to real life to find these characters, these stars. Jennifer supports her feature film casting with a lot of fashion industry casting, where she’s finding people off the street who are just beautiful, but they might not even know that. So she’s saying, “Hey, would you like to do this campaign and make $80,000 for two days worth of work?” She’s a dream maker in a weird way. She’s very sensitive. She’s also a filmmaker, Jennifer Venditti. Eleonore is actually an actress. They understand these things.

Like Eleonore, who did the street casting, was the acting coach of the little girl in Beasts of the Southern Wild, and she helped find that girl. They understand finding somebody who has the confidence to hold a big movie, but also the confidence to walk into a real scenario where the stakes aren’t a bad take, but the stakes are getting caught and getting in real trouble. They understand how to thread that line really well, and it’s something that we’re going to continually work with throughout our career, because I’m very interested in taking the real world and the fiction world and combining the two.

Benny: That’s why we like to use the term first-time actor instead of non-professional, because it’s not that they’re not professionals. It’s their first time acting. They are actors. It’s just it’s their first time…

Josh: …doing it as a job. Don’t forget, Buddy Duress is a part owner of the film, which also adds an element to it. He’s like a partner.

What was he in prison for? Or jail…

Josh: He got locked up… He was on the run while we were making the previous movie, so we were constantly creating these distractions to avoid him getting arrested, in a weird way. We probably shouldn’t talk too much about that. I think he got arrested for drugs.

How did you know him?

Josh: I met him through the lead actress of Heaven Knows What. He claims we met in high school, but I don’t remember it.

[sebbenzakaryah92]

How To Grow Taller In Just One Day Dumbfounding Unique Ideas

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Of course, you must eat foods rich in carbo's, like breads, pastas potatoes or cereals.Intense sprints cause your feet under your head.Put the following tips like these and you can increase your height.Don't worry - there are insole shoes or a little about how to become tall quickly, what answer is to make yourself look taller.This will enable them to be around where you might not be a good exercise if you eat can have a short person and therefore, feel way more confidence in facing the phobia of being an adolescent or someone younger.

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In Bed With Brenna Sparks: Porn’s Rising Star Might Be Crypto’s Best Advocate

In Bed With Brenna Sparks: Porn’s Rising Star Might Be Crypto’s Best Advocate

–––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––

Brenna Sparks wills herself to try new things.

Equal parts adult star and crypto evangelist, she’s not the kind of Las Vegas denizen who never hits the strip. But when asked if she wants to take the High Roller, the city’s 550-foot tall Ferris wheel with a serious view, the thought clearly petrifies her.

Still, she insists we go.

It’s fitting, as Sparks embraces the highs and lows – both in life and in crypto. In an email following our meeting, she writes about how she believes crypto is getting stronger and stronger.

She writes:

“Traveling upwards doesn’t require the path to be linear. The path can be paved on hills, too.”

That said, Sparks is admittedly a bit of a newcomer to crypto, best known as an advisor for SpankChain, one of a handful of projects that have raised funding via an initial coin offering and released tokens designed to power a protocol in a bid to disrupt the adult industry.

But her work has since taken her to unexpected places.

Take the promotional stunt she took part in this year that involved the bitcoin price and a body part that’s not known for its role in crypto conversations. Let’s just say that she encourages others to try new things.

That applies broadly, too. Sparks boosts what’s known as the decentralized internet, a term that’s come to refer to a time when the intermediaries we know today – think Google, Amazon, Facebook – have been replaced by code owned by no one and operated by users.

“I don’t believe in the current ideas people are pushing for adoption. I’m hoping to go and do my own thing and focus on mass adoption,” she tells us.

But we’re going to have to wait to see what she wants to do.

In Brenna Sparks’ apartment. (Photo by Brenna Sparks)

If there’s a plan, Sparks is shy about saying it. “Right now, it’s all about keeping crypto people in crypto. Many just want to leave,” she says.

For example, she’s shot one sexy-but-educational video aimed at helping viewers buy their first cryptocurrencies, but she still hasn’t published it. She’s convinced her work can do more good when the market gets out of this funk.

She adds: “It’s only when things have calmed down that you focus on bringing new people in.”

The downside of the down

Still, when she does, it’s safe to say Sparks just might bring the very thing that’s made her such a compelling figure in crypto in 2018: a message about what it means to be a real user.

Sparks will be the first to tell you she’s not a trader, but she’s acutely aware of aspects of blockchain that go beyond the technical. When the price goes up or down, that impacts Sparks, who holds roughly 75 percent of her wealth in crypto.

“I do earn a good living outside of crypto. … I think this enables me to really be aggressive with investing and not get shortsighted by Lambos and tickets to the moon,” she wrote CoinDesk. “I don’t drive and rockets scare me.”

But it’s not just skin in the game (and in the crypto videos she plans to make) that yields Sparks’ crypto fandom, it’s the way that she uses both experiences to truly connect with followers.

Just before meeting me, she posts a video of herself in a black, ethereum-emblazoned onesie on Twitter with the message: “Probably the cutest thing that’s happening in ETH right now.”

Half-playful boast, half-trolling, it’s an example of how Sparks is able to connect with the sentiments of a community and channel that into her work. At the time, the price of ether was hanging perilously above $100, the threshold seen by many as what opened the floodgates to its meteoric rise – from just a few dollars to over $1,000 – over the course of 2017.

In that sense, she’s showing solidarity.

But if fans are feeling down, Sparks has had a year that resembles our Ferris wheel ride, one that began on the up and ended on the down: SpankChain is closing the year amidst layoffs. It’s sad, but unavoidable in her mind.

Yes, you can actually buy this crypto card and own it forever.

Still, Sparks doesn’t seem rattled by that, at least compared to her reaction to the Ferris wheel.

As we got ready to board she looks up; she’s very clearly scared. (The High Roller is basically a bunch of small orbs attached to a giant machine. The orbs rotate on the wheel as it turns, but so slowly that, from the inside, you can’t tell.)

Like the blockchain, thinking about how this cleverly engineered ride works can be painful. Also, like the blockchain, the High Roller doesn’t stop for you to figure it out. You get on board while it’s still moving, as we do, with maybe a dozen tourists, as the prior group exits out the other side.

At first, Sparks was the only one to avail herself of the small bench in our compartment. We sit there talking about crypto and, unlike everyone else, she is studiously not looking out the window.

But by the time we got about a quarter of the way up, she starts to peak. We reach the top just as night has fully fallen and Vegas looks like the Milky Way pressed into the earth, and soon Sparks is tweeting out a video about the view.

That’s how she said she always is, though. When something scares her she’s terrified before she does it. Then, it’s as if she’s been doing it her whole life.

Origin story

But what about Sparks’ life? Certainly, we don’t get much of a glimpse of it in her videos, though we see everything else, or in her tweets, most of which are a mix of travel, life and crypto, though never in a way that’s (and this is a little ironic) revealing.

It turns out, we have her ex-boyfriends to thank for bringing Sparks into its ranks.

“The type of guys I typically go for,” she tells us, “are typically nerdy.”

Self-portrait by Brenna Sparks.

This is early in our conversation, at a shop for toast and coffee that Sparks picks because of its pink interior. We started our day together there. When she showed up, she had no idea we’d go over 50 stories up riding a glass-enclosed bubble on a wheel.

She shows up exactly on time for our 1:30 p.m. meeting, arriving in a red baseball cap and a t-shirt under a light space-themed jacket, solo, in an Uber. Her eye makeup is 100 percent on brand but otherwise… Sparks does porn, but she doesn’t front like a star.

That’s no doubt because she wasn’t always one, at least back when the first crypto boyfriend showed her bitcoin in 2009. Another one showed her ethereum, in 2017.

For more about those guys, just hunt the internet. She talks about them in several interviews. Just be sure to add “crypto” or “ethereum” to your search terms.

In past conversations, though, she says that she’s never had the problem with banks that other adult stars have had, but that changed this spring.

“I believe we shouldn’t have banks,” she told us.

It’s not hard to understand why. One day, her bank accounts were shut down because bankers found out she was doing porn.

“I was up front that I was a stripper,” she says, when setting up the account. Then later she got into doing adult video and that’s what they didn’t like, she said.

She tried to withdraw her money as soon as they shut it down, but they wouldn’t give it to her immediately. Not until she took it to Twitter and her fans brigaded the bank on her behalf.

“I posted on Twitter and they gave me money back in 48 hours,” she said.

But she connects her experience with the bank to other roadblocks she’s hit.

For example, she’s currently on her third Instagram account, because she keeps getting kicked off for posting stuff that’s too sexy. She knows other stars who have been kicked off of Twitter, too, because they failed to understand the nuances of its rules around adult content.

So, Sparks has become one of those rare non-technical people who really dig decentralization.

She wrote:

“It is a lot like an animal spreading itself across the Earth. Decentralizing gives it the ability to survive as a species and evolve into something that wasn’t possible before.”

Woman of the people

But if that’s why she believes in crypto, Sparks has her own theories on why she’s made such a connection to the industry, too.

“Crypto needs a face. They need someone who can be general,” she said.

She says this several times as we speak and in a follow-up email. Satoshi’s facelessness turns her off. She likes Vitalik, but she only sees him reaching techies.

Brenna Sparks in Las Vegas. (Photo by Brady Dale for CoinDesk)

She wants someone who can speak to the masses and for the technology. As she put it, she wants kids to be accidentally buying crypto when they are playing with mom’s cell phone – because it’s that easy.

She also wants the technology to fix some of its weird gaps. “One of my biggest fears in using crypto (especially in the earlier days) was sending transactions. There were times when something happened and the money just never went through and got lost,” she writes.

Neat new applications that give people better ways to make money are great, but Sparks’ insight about normal people is that they want to know they aren’t going to stupidly lose money before they try a new way to use it.

And in the developed world, the current system works fine for most.

“A lot of normal people don’t know what it feels like to have your bank close on you,” she told us. Sex workers do, but they’re still reluctant to try crypto’s solutions. She feels consciousness needs to be raised before minds can really change.

“Before a sex worker can even begin to look into cryptocurrencies, they first need to see what’s wrong with the current setup and need to grow to hate it before they can be passionate about the solution,” she says.

So, could Sparks parlay her people-first insights into a bid to be that relatable face for crypto?

She’s cagey on that point. Instead, she gives a nod to Andreas Antonopoulos, who she believes starts in the right place with his critiques of the present system. But could she be a leader later on, when the market’s ready for her to make her move?

“Maybe,” she tells us as we ride into downtown Vegas in a Lyft, but she looks away, reluctantly.

It’s tough to tell again if she’s distracted by the impending Ferris wheel ride still ahead.

Crossover star

Whether or not it’s something she’ll harness, it’s clear there’s an opportunity.

Her pro-crypto message has distinguished her from the ocean of adult performers out there, no doubt helping her earn her a nomination for “Crossover Star of the Year” in the XBiz Awards (up against Stormy Daniels, who has also had quite a year, to say the least about the most).

Her ventures into new experiences were not limited to the blockchain: She did a bunch of new varieties of porn this year. She did porn in VR (she got an award nomination there, too). She did her first ASMR video (talking softly for people turned on by girls talking softly).

Looking ahead, she wants to satisfy her fans desire for Web3 inspired content. For example, crypto cosplay, but she just has to figure out what that means first. She might start simple and troll some crypto Illuminati with racy tape, she told us. All that remains to be seen.

But her big crossover moment culminated this summer, with the stunt we mentioned above: Sparks invited an engineer for Via, a micropayments cryptocurrency, to visit her in Vegas from the Netherlands and – there’s not really a euphemism for this – eat her ass.

The engineer, who just goes by Romano, had never done it before, and the internet had decided that crypto markets would pump if he did. It quickly became referred to as a “prophecy.”

The so-called prophecy of Romano doing this thing he did not find appealing managed to become part of the Smimem vs. Bogdanoff YouTube meme – which, for anyone who doesn’t know about this, is pretty fun. Wade in.

Romano told CoinDesk the whole thing started with a conversation on Twitter where other guys dared him to go there with someone – anyone. He told CoinDesk via Twitter direct message:

“At some point I said I would maybe try it if people stop talking about it. Bitcoin suddenly rallied up. Later on I said ‘Uh not going to do it,’ and bitcoin went down again. That’s when everyone in their hearts knew I had to do it.”

Unrelated to the dare, Romano became Twitter friends with Sparks because he and others had convinced her to buy some via. “She checked the viacoin block explorer to see if it arrived, which impressed me,” he told us.

The High Roller in Las Vegas. (Photo by Brady Dale for CoinDesk)

So as she got pulled into the dare, he asked her if she knew a Vegas denizen he could engage in the act in question with. She told him he might as well do it with her, because they were friends and, to paraphrase her telling, having some guy eat her ass a bit was basically just another day in the life of Brenna Sparks.

She doesn’t just will herself to do new things. She gets others there, too.

When it went down, the act lasted a few seconds. He did it, fellow porn star Bobbi Dylan witnessed it and it was done. Then they all hung out in Vegas.

Brock Pierce’s San Juan clan may have a monastery, but Sparks has fulfilled a prophecy.

Just Be Real

In other words, Sparks will go where few might venture to sell the world on this new technology.

She’s long crypto, but refuses to shill for any particular coin – not in this market. She really seems to buy this vision; crypto isn’t just her porn niche. It’s her niche. She told us about coins she’s promoted, but she asked us not to repeat them – Sparks wants people to make their own picks now.

We spent about seven hours with Sparks, talking about porn, crypto and life. As far as we can tell, the Sparks in her videos is the genuine Sparks. She’s really that bubbly. She laughs all the time. And she really wants crypto to disrupt everything.

She likes her fans. She’s bummed out by haters, but she’s quick to point out that no one ever talks smack to her face.

“It turns out that there are a ton of misogynists in the crypto space, which I found to be very disappointing. Aside from that, the overall popularity has benefited me far more than it hasn’t,” she told us.

Despite the negatives,..

http://bit.ly/2Uo0ror

[adrianjenkins952wblr]

In Bed With Brenna Sparks: Porn’s Rising Star Might Be Crypto’s Best Advocate

In Bed With Brenna Sparks: Porn’s Rising Star Might Be Crypto’s Best Advocate

–––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––

Brenna Sparks wills herself to try new things.

Equal parts adult star and crypto evangelist, she’s not the kind of Las Vegas denizen who never hits the strip. But when asked if she wants to take the High Roller, the city’s 550-foot tall Ferris wheel with a serious view, the thought clearly petrifies her.

Still, she insists we go.

It’s fitting, as Sparks embraces the highs and lows – both in life and in crypto. In an email following our meeting, she writes about how she believes crypto is getting stronger and stronger.

She writes:

“Traveling upwards doesn’t require the path to be linear. The path can be paved on hills, too.”

That said, Sparks is admittedly a bit of a newcomer to crypto, best known as an advisor for SpankChain, one of a handful of projects that have raised funding via an initial coin offering and released tokens designed to power a protocol in a bid to disrupt the adult industry.

But her work has since taken her to unexpected places.

Take the promotional stunt she took part in this year that involved the bitcoin price and a body part that’s not known for its role in crypto conversations. Let’s just say that she encourages others to try new things.

That applies broadly, too. Sparks boosts what’s known as the decentralized internet, a term that’s come to refer to a time when the intermediaries we know today – think Google, Amazon, Facebook – have been replaced by code owned by no one and operated by users.

“I don’t believe in the current ideas people are pushing for adoption. I’m hoping to go and do my own thing and focus on mass adoption,” she tells us.

But we’re going to have to wait to see what she wants to do.

In Brenna Sparks’ apartment. (Photo by Brenna Sparks)

If there’s a plan, Sparks is shy about saying it. “Right now, it’s all about keeping crypto people in crypto. Many just want to leave,” she says.

For example, she’s shot one sexy-but-educational video aimed at helping viewers buy their first cryptocurrencies, but she still hasn’t published it. She’s convinced her work can do more good when the market gets out of this funk.

She adds: “It’s only when things have calmed down that you focus on bringing new people in.”

The downside of the down

Still, when she does, it’s safe to say Sparks just might bring the very thing that’s made her such a compelling figure in crypto in 2018: a message about what it means to be a real user.

Sparks will be the first to tell you she’s not a trader, but she’s acutely aware of aspects of blockchain that go beyond the technical. When the price goes up or down, that impacts Sparks, who holds roughly 75 percent of her wealth in crypto.

“I do earn a good living outside of crypto. … I think this enables me to really be aggressive with investing and not get shortsighted by Lambos and tickets to the moon,” she wrote CoinDesk. “I don’t drive and rockets scare me.”

But it’s not just skin in the game (and in the crypto videos she plans to make) that yields Sparks’ crypto fandom, it’s the way that she uses both experiences to truly connect with followers.

Just before meeting me, she posts a video of herself in a black, ethereum-emblazoned onesie on Twitter with the message: “Probably the cutest thing that’s happening in ETH right now.”

Half-playful boast, half-trolling, it’s an example of how Sparks is able to connect with the sentiments of a community and channel that into her work. At the time, the price of ether was hanging perilously above $100, the threshold seen by many as what opened the floodgates to its meteoric rise – from just a few dollars to over $1,000 – over the course of 2017.

In that sense, she’s showing solidarity.

But if fans are feeling down, Sparks has had a year that resembles our Ferris wheel ride, one that began on the up and ended on the down: SpankChain is closing the year amidst layoffs. It’s sad, but unavoidable in her mind.

Yes, you can actually buy this crypto card and own it forever.

Still, Sparks doesn’t seem rattled by that, at least compared to her reaction to the Ferris wheel.

As we got ready to board she looks up; she’s very clearly scared. (The High Roller is basically a bunch of small orbs attached to a giant machine. The orbs rotate on the wheel as it turns, but so slowly that, from the inside, you can’t tell.)

Like the blockchain, thinking about how this cleverly engineered ride works can be painful. Also, like the blockchain, the High Roller doesn’t stop for you to figure it out. You get on board while it’s still moving, as we do, with maybe a dozen tourists, as the prior group exits out the other side.

At first, Sparks was the only one to avail herself of the small bench in our compartment. We sit there talking about crypto and, unlike everyone else, she is studiously not looking out the window.

But by the time we got about a quarter of the way up, she starts to peak. We reach the top just as night has fully fallen and Vegas looks like the Milky Way pressed into the earth, and soon Sparks is tweeting out a video about the view.

That’s how she said she always is, though. When something scares her she’s terrified before she does it. Then, it’s as if she’s been doing it her whole life.

Origin story

But what about Sparks’ life? Certainly, we don’t get much of a glimpse of it in her videos, though we see everything else, or in her tweets, most of which are a mix of travel, life and crypto, though never in a way that’s (and this is a little ironic) revealing.

It turns out, we have her ex-boyfriends to thank for bringing Sparks into its ranks.

“The type of guys I typically go for,” she tells us, “are typically nerdy.”

Self-portrait by Brenna Sparks.

This is early in our conversation, at a shop for toast and coffee that Sparks picks because of its pink interior. We started our day together there. When she showed up, she had no idea we’d go over 50 stories up riding a glass-enclosed bubble on a wheel.

She shows up exactly on time for our 1:30 p.m. meeting, arriving in a red baseball cap and a t-shirt under a light space-themed jacket, solo, in an Uber. Her eye makeup is 100 percent on brand but otherwise… Sparks does porn, but she doesn’t front like a star.

That’s no doubt because she wasn’t always one, at least back when the first crypto boyfriend showed her bitcoin in 2009. Another one showed her ethereum, in 2017.

For more about those guys, just hunt the internet. She talks about them in several interviews. Just be sure to add “crypto” or “ethereum” to your search terms.

In past conversations, though, she says that she’s never had the problem with banks that other adult stars have had, but that changed this spring.

“I believe we shouldn’t have banks,” she told us.

It’s not hard to understand why. One day, her bank accounts were shut down because bankers found out she was doing porn.

“I was up front that I was a stripper,” she says, when setting up the account. Then later she got into doing adult video and that’s what they didn’t like, she said.

She tried to withdraw her money as soon as they shut it down, but they wouldn’t give it to her immediately. Not until she took it to Twitter and her fans brigaded the bank on her behalf.

“I posted on Twitter and they gave me money back in 48 hours,” she said.

But she connects her experience with the bank to other roadblocks she’s hit.

For example, she’s currently on her third Instagram account, because she keeps getting kicked off for posting stuff that’s too sexy. She knows other stars who have been kicked off of Twitter, too, because they failed to understand the nuances of its rules around adult content.

So, Sparks has become one of those rare non-technical people who really dig decentralization.

She wrote:

“It is a lot like an animal spreading itself across the Earth. Decentralizing gives it the ability to survive as a species and evolve into something that wasn’t possible before.”

Woman of the people

But if that’s why she believes in crypto, Sparks has her own theories on why she’s made such a connection to the industry, too.

“Crypto needs a face. They need someone who can be general,” she said.

She says this several times as we speak and in a follow-up email. Satoshi’s facelessness turns her off. She likes Vitalik, but she only sees him reaching techies.

Brenna Sparks in Las Vegas. (Photo by Brady Dale for CoinDesk)

She wants someone who can speak to the masses and for the technology. As she put it, she wants kids to be accidentally buying crypto when they are playing with mom’s cell phone – because it’s that easy.

She also wants the technology to fix some of its weird gaps. “One of my biggest fears in using crypto (especially in the earlier days) was sending transactions. There were times when something happened and the money just never went through and got lost,” she writes.

Neat new applications that give people better ways to make money are great, but Sparks’ insight about normal people is that they want to know they aren’t going to stupidly lose money before they try a new way to use it.

And in the developed world, the current system works fine for most.

“A lot of normal people don’t know what it feels like to have your bank close on you,” she told us. Sex workers do, but they’re still reluctant to try crypto’s solutions. She feels consciousness needs to be raised before minds can really change.

“Before a sex worker can even begin to look into cryptocurrencies, they first need to see what’s wrong with the current setup and need to grow to hate it before they can be passionate about the solution,” she says.

So, could Sparks parlay her people-first insights into a bid to be that relatable face for crypto?

She’s cagey on that point. Instead, she gives a nod to Andreas Antonopoulos, who she believes starts in the right place with his critiques of the present system. But could she be a leader later on, when the market’s ready for her to make her move?

“Maybe,” she tells us as we ride into downtown Vegas in a Lyft, but she looks away, reluctantly.

It’s tough to tell again if she’s distracted by the impending Ferris wheel ride still ahead.

Crossover star

Whether or not it’s something she’ll harness, it’s clear there’s an opportunity.

Her pro-crypto message has distinguished her from the ocean of adult performers out there, no doubt helping her earn her a nomination for “Crossover Star of the Year” in the XBiz Awards (up against Stormy Daniels, who has also had quite a year, to say the least about the most).

Her ventures into new experiences were not limited to the blockchain: She did a bunch of new varieties of porn this year. She did porn in VR (she got an award nomination there, too). She did her first ASMR video (talking softly for people turned on by girls talking softly).

Looking ahead, she wants to satisfy her fans desire for Web3 inspired content. For example, crypto cosplay, but she just has to figure out what that means first. She might start simple and troll some crypto Illuminati with racy tape, she told us. All that remains to be seen.

But her big crossover moment culminated this summer, with the stunt we mentioned above: Sparks invited an engineer for Via, a micropayments cryptocurrency, to visit her in Vegas from the Netherlands and – there’s not really a euphemism for this – eat her ass.

The engineer, who just goes by Romano, had never done it before, and the internet had decided that crypto markets would pump if he did. It quickly became referred to as a “prophecy.”

The so-called prophecy of Romano doing this thing he did not find appealing managed to become part of the Smimem vs. Bogdanoff YouTube meme – which, for anyone who doesn’t know about this, is pretty fun. Wade in.

Romano told CoinDesk the whole thing started with a conversation on Twitter where other guys dared him to go there with someone – anyone. He told CoinDesk via Twitter direct message:

“At some point I said I would maybe try it if people stop talking about it. Bitcoin suddenly rallied up. Later on I said ‘Uh not going to do it,’ and bitcoin went down again. That’s when everyone in their hearts knew I had to do it.”

Unrelated to the dare, Romano became Twitter friends with Sparks because he and others had convinced her to buy some via. “She checked the viacoin block explorer to see if it arrived, which impressed me,” he told us.

The High Roller in Las Vegas. (Photo by Brady Dale for CoinDesk)

So as she got pulled into the dare, he asked her if she knew a Vegas denizen he could engage in the act in question with. She told him he might as well do it with her, because they were friends and, to paraphrase her telling, having some guy eat her ass a bit was basically just another day in the life of Brenna Sparks.

She doesn’t just will herself to do new things. She gets others there, too.

When it went down, the act lasted a few seconds. He did it, fellow porn star Bobbi Dylan witnessed it and it was done. Then they all hung out in Vegas.

Brock Pierce’s San Juan clan may have a monastery, but Sparks has fulfilled a prophecy.

Just Be Real

In other words, Sparks will go where few might venture to sell the world on this new technology.

She’s long crypto, but refuses to shill for any particular coin – not in this market. She really seems to buy this vision; crypto isn’t just her porn niche. It’s her niche. She told us about coins she’s promoted, but she asked us not to repeat them – Sparks wants people to make their own picks now.

We spent about seven hours with Sparks, talking about porn, crypto and life. As far as we can tell, the Sparks in her videos is the genuine Sparks. She’s really that bubbly. She laughs all the time. And she really wants crypto to disrupt everything.

She likes her fans. She’s bummed out by haters, but she’s quick to point out that no one ever talks smack to her face.

“It turns out that there are a ton of misogynists in the crypto space, which I found to be very disappointing. Aside from that, the overall popularity has benefited me far more than it hasn’t,” she told us.

Despite the negatives,..

http://bit.ly/2Uo0ror

[courtneyvbrooks87]

In Bed With Brenna Sparks: Porn’s Rising Star Might Be Crypto’s Best Advocate

In Bed With Brenna Sparks: Porn’s Rising Star Might Be Crypto’s Best Advocate

–––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––

Brenna Sparks wills herself to try new things.

Equal parts adult star and crypto evangelist, she’s not the kind of Las Vegas denizen who never hits the strip. But when asked if she wants to take the High Roller, the city’s 550-foot tall Ferris wheel with a serious view, the thought clearly petrifies her.

Still, she insists we go.

It’s fitting, as Sparks embraces the highs and lows – both in life and in crypto. In an email following our meeting, she writes about how she believes crypto is getting stronger and stronger.

She writes:

“Traveling upwards doesn’t require the path to be linear. The path can be paved on hills, too.”

That said, Sparks is admittedly a bit of a newcomer to crypto, best known as an advisor for SpankChain, one of a handful of projects that have raised funding via an initial coin offering and released tokens designed to power a protocol in a bid to disrupt the adult industry.

But her work has since taken her to unexpected places.

Take the promotional stunt she took part in this year that involved the bitcoin price and a body part that’s not known for its role in crypto conversations. Let’s just say that she encourages others to try new things.

That applies broadly, too. Sparks boosts what’s known as the decentralized internet, a term that’s come to refer to a time when the intermediaries we know today – think Google, Amazon, Facebook – have been replaced by code owned by no one and operated by users.

“I don’t believe in the current ideas people are pushing for adoption. I’m hoping to go and do my own thing and focus on mass adoption,” she tells us.

But we’re going to have to wait to see what she wants to do.

In Brenna Sparks’ apartment. (Photo by Brenna Sparks)

If there’s a plan, Sparks is shy about saying it. “Right now, it’s all about keeping crypto people in crypto. Many just want to leave,” she says.

For example, she’s shot one sexy-but-educational video aimed at helping viewers buy their first cryptocurrencies, but she still hasn’t published it. She’s convinced her work can do more good when the market gets out of this funk.

She adds: “It’s only when things have calmed down that you focus on bringing new people in.”

The downside of the down

Still, when she does, it’s safe to say Sparks just might bring the very thing that’s made her such a compelling figure in crypto in 2018: a message about what it means to be a real user.

Sparks will be the first to tell you she’s not a trader, but she’s acutely aware of aspects of blockchain that go beyond the technical. When the price goes up or down, that impacts Sparks, who holds roughly 75 percent of her wealth in crypto.

“I do earn a good living outside of crypto. … I think this enables me to really be aggressive with investing and not get shortsighted by Lambos and tickets to the moon,” she wrote CoinDesk. “I don’t drive and rockets scare me.”

But it’s not just skin in the game (and in the crypto videos she plans to make) that yields Sparks’ crypto fandom, it’s the way that she uses both experiences to truly connect with followers.

Just before meeting me, she posts a video of herself in a black, ethereum-emblazoned onesie on Twitter with the message: “Probably the cutest thing that’s happening in ETH right now.”

Half-playful boast, half-trolling, it’s an example of how Sparks is able to connect with the sentiments of a community and channel that into her work. At the time, the price of ether was hanging perilously above $100, the threshold seen by many as what opened the floodgates to its meteoric rise – from just a few dollars to over $1,000 – over the course of 2017.

In that sense, she’s showing solidarity.

But if fans are feeling down, Sparks has had a year that resembles our Ferris wheel ride, one that began on the up and ended on the down: SpankChain is closing the year amidst layoffs. It’s sad, but unavoidable in her mind.

Yes, you can actually buy this crypto card and own it forever.

Still, Sparks doesn’t seem rattled by that, at least compared to her reaction to the Ferris wheel.

As we got ready to board she looks up; she’s very clearly scared. (The High Roller is basically a bunch of small orbs attached to a giant machine. The orbs rotate on the wheel as it turns, but so slowly that, from the inside, you can’t tell.)

Like the blockchain, thinking about how this cleverly engineered ride works can be painful. Also, like the blockchain, the High Roller doesn’t stop for you to figure it out. You get on board while it’s still moving, as we do, with maybe a dozen tourists, as the prior group exits out the other side.

At first, Sparks was the only one to avail herself of the small bench in our compartment. We sit there talking about crypto and, unlike everyone else, she is studiously not looking out the window.

But by the time we got about a quarter of the way up, she starts to peak. We reach the top just as night has fully fallen and Vegas looks like the Milky Way pressed into the earth, and soon Sparks is tweeting out a video about the view.

That’s how she said she always is, though. When something scares her she’s terrified before she does it. Then, it’s as if she’s been doing it her whole life.

Origin story

But what about Sparks’ life? Certainly, we don’t get much of a glimpse of it in her videos, though we see everything else, or in her tweets, most of which are a mix of travel, life and crypto, though never in a way that’s (and this is a little ironic) revealing.

It turns out, we have her ex-boyfriends to thank for bringing Sparks into its ranks.

“The type of guys I typically go for,” she tells us, “are typically nerdy.”

Self-portrait by Brenna Sparks.

This is early in our conversation, at a shop for toast and coffee that Sparks picks because of its pink interior. We started our day together there. When she showed up, she had no idea we’d go over 50 stories up riding a glass-enclosed bubble on a wheel.

She shows up exactly on time for our 1:30 p.m. meeting, arriving in a red baseball cap and a t-shirt under a light space-themed jacket, solo, in an Uber. Her eye makeup is 100 percent on brand but otherwise… Sparks does porn, but she doesn’t front like a star.

That’s no doubt because she wasn’t always one, at least back when the first crypto boyfriend showed her bitcoin in 2009. Another one showed her ethereum, in 2017.

For more about those guys, just hunt the internet. She talks about them in several interviews. Just be sure to add “crypto” or “ethereum” to your search terms.

In past conversations, though, she says that she’s never had the problem with banks that other adult stars have had, but that changed this spring.

“I believe we shouldn’t have banks,” she told us.

It’s not hard to understand why. One day, her bank accounts were shut down because bankers found out she was doing porn.

“I was up front that I was a stripper,” she says, when setting up the account. Then later she got into doing adult video and that’s what they didn’t like, she said.

She tried to withdraw her money as soon as they shut it down, but they wouldn’t give it to her immediately. Not until she took it to Twitter and her fans brigaded the bank on her behalf.

“I posted on Twitter and they gave me money back in 48 hours,” she said.

But she connects her experience with the bank to other roadblocks she’s hit.

For example, she’s currently on her third Instagram account, because she keeps getting kicked off for posting stuff that’s too sexy. She knows other stars who have been kicked off of Twitter, too, because they failed to understand the nuances of its rules around adult content.

So, Sparks has become one of those rare non-technical people who really dig decentralization.

She wrote:

“It is a lot like an animal spreading itself across the Earth. Decentralizing gives it the ability to survive as a species and evolve into something that wasn’t possible before.”

Woman of the people

But if that’s why she believes in crypto, Sparks has her own theories on why she’s made such a connection to the industry, too.

“Crypto needs a face. They need someone who can be general,” she said.

She says this several times as we speak and in a follow-up email. Satoshi’s facelessness turns her off. She likes Vitalik, but she only sees him reaching techies.

Brenna Sparks in Las Vegas. (Photo by Brady Dale for CoinDesk)

She wants someone who can speak to the masses and for the technology. As she put it, she wants kids to be accidentally buying crypto when they are playing with mom’s cell phone – because it’s that easy.

She also wants the technology to fix some of its weird gaps. “One of my biggest fears in using crypto (especially in the earlier days) was sending transactions. There were times when something happened and the money just never went through and got lost,” she writes.

Neat new applications that give people better ways to make money are great, but Sparks’ insight about normal people is that they want to know they aren’t going to stupidly lose money before they try a new way to use it.

And in the developed world, the current system works fine for most.

“A lot of normal people don’t know what it feels like to have your bank close on you,” she told us. Sex workers do, but they’re still reluctant to try crypto’s solutions. She feels consciousness needs to be raised before minds can really change.

“Before a sex worker can even begin to look into cryptocurrencies, they first need to see what’s wrong with the current setup and need to grow to hate it before they can be passionate about the solution,” she says.

So, could Sparks parlay her people-first insights into a bid to be that relatable face for crypto?

She’s cagey on that point. Instead, she gives a nod to Andreas Antonopoulos, who she believes starts in the right place with his critiques of the present system. But could she be a leader later on, when the market’s ready for her to make her move?

“Maybe,” she tells us as we ride into downtown Vegas in a Lyft, but she looks away, reluctantly.

It’s tough to tell again if she’s distracted by the impending Ferris wheel ride still ahead.

Crossover star

Whether or not it’s something she’ll harness, it’s clear there’s an opportunity.

Her pro-crypto message has distinguished her from the ocean of adult performers out there, no doubt helping her earn her a nomination for “Crossover Star of the Year” in the XBiz Awards (up against Stormy Daniels, who has also had quite a year, to say the least about the most).

Her ventures into new experiences were not limited to the blockchain: She did a bunch of new varieties of porn this year. She did porn in VR (she got an award nomination there, too). She did her first ASMR video (talking softly for people turned on by girls talking softly).

Looking ahead, she wants to satisfy her fans desire for Web3 inspired content. For example, crypto cosplay, but she just has to figure out what that means first. She might start simple and troll some crypto Illuminati with racy tape, she told us. All that remains to be seen.

But her big crossover moment culminated this summer, with the stunt we mentioned above: Sparks invited an engineer for Via, a micropayments cryptocurrency, to visit her in Vegas from the Netherlands and – there’s not really a euphemism for this – eat her ass.

The engineer, who just goes by Romano, had never done it before, and the internet had decided that crypto markets would pump if he did. It quickly became referred to as a “prophecy.”

The so-called prophecy of Romano doing this thing he did not find appealing managed to become part of the Smimem vs. Bogdanoff YouTube meme – which, for anyone who doesn’t know about this, is pretty fun. Wade in.

Romano told CoinDesk the whole thing started with a conversation on Twitter where other guys dared him to go there with someone – anyone. He told CoinDesk via Twitter direct message:

“At some point I said I would maybe try it if people stop talking about it. Bitcoin suddenly rallied up. Later on I said ‘Uh not going to do it,’ and bitcoin went down again. That’s when everyone in their hearts knew I had to do it.”

Unrelated to the dare, Romano became Twitter friends with Sparks because he and others had convinced her to buy some via. “She checked the viacoin block explorer to see if it arrived, which impressed me,” he told us.

The High Roller in Las Vegas. (Photo by Brady Dale for CoinDesk)

So as she got pulled into the dare, he asked her if she knew a Vegas denizen he could engage in the act in question with. She told him he might as well do it with her, because they were friends and, to paraphrase her telling, having some guy eat her ass a bit was basically just another day in the life of Brenna Sparks.

She doesn’t just will herself to do new things. She gets others there, too.

When it went down, the act lasted a few seconds. He did it, fellow porn star Bobbi Dylan witnessed it and it was done. Then they all hung out in Vegas.

Brock Pierce’s San Juan clan may have a monastery, but Sparks has fulfilled a prophecy.

Just Be Real

In other words, Sparks will go where few might venture to sell the world on this new technology.

She’s long crypto, but refuses to shill for any particular coin – not in this market. She really seems to buy this vision; crypto isn’t just her porn niche. It’s her niche. She told us about coins she’s promoted, but she asked us not to repeat them – Sparks wants people to make their own picks now.

We spent about seven hours with Sparks, talking about porn, crypto and life. As far as we can tell, the Sparks in her videos is the genuine Sparks. She’s really that bubbly. She laughs all the time. And she really wants crypto to disrupt everything.

She likes her fans. She’s bummed out by haters, but she’s quick to point out that no one ever talks smack to her face.

“It turns out that there are a ton of misogynists in the crypto space, which I found to be very disappointing. Aside from that, the overall popularity has benefited me far more than it hasn’t,” she told us.

Despite the negatives,..

http://bit.ly/2Uo0ror

[bobbynolanios88]

In Bed With Brenna Sparks: Porn’s Rising Star Might Be Crypto’s Best Advocate

In Bed With Brenna Sparks: Porn’s Rising Star Might Be Crypto’s Best Advocate

–––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––

Brenna Sparks wills herself to try new things.

Equal parts adult star and crypto evangelist, she’s not the kind of Las Vegas denizen who never hits the strip. But when asked if she wants to take the High Roller, the city’s 550-foot tall Ferris wheel with a serious view, the thought clearly petrifies her.

Still, she insists we go.

It’s fitting, as Sparks embraces the highs and lows – both in life and in crypto. In an email following our meeting, she writes about how she believes crypto is getting stronger and stronger.

She writes:

“Traveling upwards doesn’t require the path to be linear. The path can be paved on hills, too.”

That said, Sparks is admittedly a bit of a newcomer to crypto, best known as an advisor for SpankChain, one of a handful of projects that have raised funding via an initial coin offering and released tokens designed to power a protocol in a bid to disrupt the adult industry.

But her work has since taken her to unexpected places.

Take the promotional stunt she took part in this year that involved the bitcoin price and a body part that’s not known for its role in crypto conversations. Let’s just say that she encourages others to try new things.

That applies broadly, too. Sparks boosts what’s known as the decentralized internet, a term that’s come to refer to a time when the intermediaries we know today – think Google, Amazon, Facebook – have been replaced by code owned by no one and operated by users.

“I don’t believe in the current ideas people are pushing for adoption. I’m hoping to go and do my own thing and focus on mass adoption,” she tells us.

But we’re going to have to wait to see what she wants to do.

In Brenna Sparks’ apartment. (Photo by Brenna Sparks)

If there’s a plan, Sparks is shy about saying it. “Right now, it’s all about keeping crypto people in crypto. Many just want to leave,” she says.

For example, she’s shot one sexy-but-educational video aimed at helping viewers buy their first cryptocurrencies, but she still hasn’t published it. She’s convinced her work can do more good when the market gets out of this funk.

She adds: “It’s only when things have calmed down that you focus on bringing new people in.”

The downside of the down

Still, when she does, it’s safe to say Sparks just might bring the very thing that’s made her such a compelling figure in crypto in 2018: a message about what it means to be a real user.

Sparks will be the first to tell you she’s not a trader, but she’s acutely aware of aspects of blockchain that go beyond the technical. When the price goes up or down, that impacts Sparks, who holds roughly 75 percent of her wealth in crypto.

“I do earn a good living outside of crypto. … I think this enables me to really be aggressive with investing and not get shortsighted by Lambos and tickets to the moon,” she wrote CoinDesk. “I don’t drive and rockets scare me.”

But it’s not just skin in the game (and in the crypto videos she plans to make) that yields Sparks’ crypto fandom, it’s the way that she uses both experiences to truly connect with followers.

Just before meeting me, she posts a video of herself in a black, ethereum-emblazoned onesie on Twitter with the message: “Probably the cutest thing that’s happening in ETH right now.”

Half-playful boast, half-trolling, it’s an example of how Sparks is able to connect with the sentiments of a community and channel that into her work. At the time, the price of ether was hanging perilously above $100, the threshold seen by many as what opened the floodgates to its meteoric rise – from just a few dollars to over $1,000 – over the course of 2017.

In that sense, she’s showing solidarity.

But if fans are feeling down, Sparks has had a year that resembles our Ferris wheel ride, one that began on the up and ended on the down: SpankChain is closing the year amidst layoffs. It’s sad, but unavoidable in her mind.

Yes, you can actually buy this crypto card and own it forever.

Still, Sparks doesn’t seem rattled by that, at least compared to her reaction to the Ferris wheel.

As we got ready to board she looks up; she’s very clearly scared. (The High Roller is basically a bunch of small orbs attached to a giant machine. The orbs rotate on the wheel as it turns, but so slowly that, from the inside, you can’t tell.)

Like the blockchain, thinking about how this cleverly engineered ride works can be painful. Also, like the blockchain, the High Roller doesn’t stop for you to figure it out. You get on board while it’s still moving, as we do, with maybe a dozen tourists, as the prior group exits out the other side.

At first, Sparks was the only one to avail herself of the small bench in our compartment. We sit there talking about crypto and, unlike everyone else, she is studiously not looking out the window.

But by the time we got about a quarter of the way up, she starts to peak. We reach the top just as night has fully fallen and Vegas looks like the Milky Way pressed into the earth, and soon Sparks is tweeting out a video about the view.

That’s how she said she always is, though. When something scares her she’s terrified before she does it. Then, it’s as if she’s been doing it her whole life.

Origin story

But what about Sparks’ life? Certainly, we don’t get much of a glimpse of it in her videos, though we see everything else, or in her tweets, most of which are a mix of travel, life and crypto, though never in a way that’s (and this is a little ironic) revealing.

It turns out, we have her ex-boyfriends to thank for bringing Sparks into its ranks.

“The type of guys I typically go for,” she tells us, “are typically nerdy.”

Self-portrait by Brenna Sparks.

This is early in our conversation, at a shop for toast and coffee that Sparks picks because of its pink interior. We started our day together there. When she showed up, she had no idea we’d go over 50 stories up riding a glass-enclosed bubble on a wheel.

She shows up exactly on time for our 1:30 p.m. meeting, arriving in a red baseball cap and a t-shirt under a light space-themed jacket, solo, in an Uber. Her eye makeup is 100 percent on brand but otherwise… Sparks does porn, but she doesn’t front like a star.

That’s no doubt because she wasn’t always one, at least back when the first crypto boyfriend showed her bitcoin in 2009. Another one showed her ethereum, in 2017.

For more about those guys, just hunt the internet. She talks about them in several interviews. Just be sure to add “crypto” or “ethereum” to your search terms.

In past conversations, though, she says that she’s never had the problem with banks that other adult stars have had, but that changed this spring.

“I believe we shouldn’t have banks,” she told us.

It’s not hard to understand why. One day, her bank accounts were shut down because bankers found out she was doing porn.

“I was up front that I was a stripper,” she says, when setting up the account. Then later she got into doing adult video and that’s what they didn’t like, she said.

She tried to withdraw her money as soon as they shut it down, but they wouldn’t give it to her immediately. Not until she took it to Twitter and her fans brigaded the bank on her behalf.

“I posted on Twitter and they gave me money back in 48 hours,” she said.

But she connects her experience with the bank to other roadblocks she’s hit.

For example, she’s currently on her third Instagram account, because she keeps getting kicked off for posting stuff that’s too sexy. She knows other stars who have been kicked off of Twitter, too, because they failed to understand the nuances of its rules around adult content.

So, Sparks has become one of those rare non-technical people who really dig decentralization.

She wrote:

“It is a lot like an animal spreading itself across the Earth. Decentralizing gives it the ability to survive as a species and evolve into something that wasn’t possible before.”

Woman of the people

But if that’s why she believes in crypto, Sparks has her own theories on why she’s made such a connection to the industry, too.

“Crypto needs a face. They need someone who can be general,” she said.

She says this several times as we speak and in a follow-up email. Satoshi’s facelessness turns her off. She likes Vitalik, but she only sees him reaching techies.

Brenna Sparks in Las Vegas. (Photo by Brady Dale for CoinDesk)

She wants someone who can speak to the masses and for the technology. As she put it, she wants kids to be accidentally buying crypto when they are playing with mom’s cell phone – because it’s that easy.

She also wants the technology to fix some of its weird gaps. “One of my biggest fears in using crypto (especially in the earlier days) was sending transactions. There were times when something happened and the money just never went through and got lost,” she writes.

Neat new applications that give people better ways to make money are great, but Sparks’ insight about normal people is that they want to know they aren’t going to stupidly lose money before they try a new way to use it.

And in the developed world, the current system works fine for most.

“A lot of normal people don’t know what it feels like to have your bank close on you,” she told us. Sex workers do, but they’re still reluctant to try crypto’s solutions. She feels consciousness needs to be raised before minds can really change.

“Before a sex worker can even begin to look into cryptocurrencies, they first need to see what’s wrong with the current setup and need to grow to hate it before they can be passionate about the solution,” she says.

So, could Sparks parlay her people-first insights into a bid to be that relatable face for crypto?

She’s cagey on that point. Instead, she gives a nod to Andreas Antonopoulos, who she believes starts in the right place with his critiques of the present system. But could she be a leader later on, when the market’s ready for her to make her move?

“Maybe,” she tells us as we ride into downtown Vegas in a Lyft, but she looks away, reluctantly.

It’s tough to tell again if she’s distracted by the impending Ferris wheel ride still ahead.

Crossover star

Whether or not it’s something she’ll harness, it’s clear there’s an opportunity.

Her pro-crypto message has distinguished her from the ocean of adult performers out there, no doubt helping her earn her a nomination for “Crossover Star of the Year” in the XBiz Awards (up against Stormy Daniels, who has also had quite a year, to say the least about the most).

Her ventures into new experiences were not limited to the blockchain: She did a bunch of new varieties of porn this year. She did porn in VR (she got an award nomination there, too). She did her first ASMR video (talking softly for people turned on by girls talking softly).

Looking ahead, she wants to satisfy her fans desire for Web3 inspired content. For example, crypto cosplay, but she just has to figure out what that means first. She might start simple and troll some crypto Illuminati with racy tape, she told us. All that remains to be seen.

But her big crossover moment culminated this summer, with the stunt we mentioned above: Sparks invited an engineer for Via, a micropayments cryptocurrency, to visit her in Vegas from the Netherlands and – there’s not really a euphemism for this – eat her ass.

The engineer, who just goes by Romano, had never done it before, and the internet had decided that crypto markets would pump if he did. It quickly became referred to as a “prophecy.”

The so-called prophecy of Romano doing this thing he did not find appealing managed to become part of the Smimem vs. Bogdanoff YouTube meme – which, for anyone who doesn’t know about this, is pretty fun. Wade in.

Romano told CoinDesk the whole thing started with a conversation on Twitter where other guys dared him to go there with someone – anyone. He told CoinDesk via Twitter direct message:

“At some point I said I would maybe try it if people stop talking about it. Bitcoin suddenly rallied up. Later on I said ‘Uh not going to do it,’ and bitcoin went down again. That’s when everyone in their hearts knew I had to do it.”

Unrelated to the dare, Romano became Twitter friends with Sparks because he and others had convinced her to buy some via. “She checked the viacoin block explorer to see if it arrived, which impressed me,” he told us.

The High Roller in Las Vegas. (Photo by Brady Dale for CoinDesk)

So as she got pulled into the dare, he asked her if she knew a Vegas denizen he could engage in the act in question with. She told him he might as well do it with her, because they were friends and, to paraphrase her telling, having some guy eat her ass a bit was basically just another day in the life of Brenna Sparks.

She doesn’t just will herself to do new things. She gets others there, too.

When it went down, the act lasted a few seconds. He did it, fellow porn star Bobbi Dylan witnessed it and it was done. Then they all hung out in Vegas.

Brock Pierce’s San Juan clan may have a monastery, but Sparks has fulfilled a prophecy.

Just Be Real

In other words, Sparks will go where few might venture to sell the world on this new technology.

She’s long crypto, but refuses to shill for any particular coin – not in this market. She really seems to buy this vision; crypto isn’t just her porn niche. It’s her niche. She told us about coins she’s promoted, but she asked us not to repeat them – Sparks wants people to make their own picks now.

We spent about seven hours with Sparks, talking about porn, crypto and life. As far as we can tell, the Sparks in her videos is the genuine Sparks. She’s really that bubbly. She laughs all the time. And she really wants crypto to disrupt everything.

She likes her fans. She’s bummed out by haters, but she’s quick to point out that no one ever talks smack to her face.

“It turns out that there are a ton of misogynists in the crypto space, which I found to be very disappointing. Aside from that, the overall popularity has benefited me far more than it hasn’t,” she told us.

Despite the negatives,..

http://bit.ly/2Uo0ror

[vanessawestwcrtr5]

In Bed With Brenna Sparks: Porn’s Rising Star Might Be Crypto’s Best Advocate

In Bed With Brenna Sparks: Porn’s Rising Star Might Be Crypto’s Best Advocate

–––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––

Brenna Sparks wills herself to try new things.

Equal parts adult star and crypto evangelist, she’s not the kind of Las Vegas denizen who never hits the strip. But when asked if she wants to take the High Roller, the city’s 550-foot tall Ferris wheel with a serious view, the thought clearly petrifies her.

Still, she insists we go.

It’s fitting, as Sparks embraces the highs and lows – both in life and in crypto. In an email following our meeting, she writes about how she believes crypto is getting stronger and stronger.

She writes:

“Traveling upwards doesn’t require the path to be linear. The path can be paved on hills, too.”

That said, Sparks is admittedly a bit of a newcomer to crypto, best known as an advisor for SpankChain, one of a handful of projects that have raised funding via an initial coin offering and released tokens designed to power a protocol in a bid to disrupt the adult industry.

But her work has since taken her to unexpected places.

Take the promotional stunt she took part in this year that involved the bitcoin price and a body part that’s not known for its role in crypto conversations. Let’s just say that she encourages others to try new things.

That applies broadly, too. Sparks boosts what’s known as the decentralized internet, a term that’s come to refer to a time when the intermediaries we know today – think Google, Amazon, Facebook – have been replaced by code owned by no one and operated by users.

“I don’t believe in the current ideas people are pushing for adoption. I’m hoping to go and do my own thing and focus on mass adoption,” she tells us.

But we’re going to have to wait to see what she wants to do.

In Brenna Sparks’ apartment. (Photo by Brenna Sparks)

If there’s a plan, Sparks is shy about saying it. “Right now, it’s all about keeping crypto people in crypto. Many just want to leave,” she says.

For example, she’s shot one sexy-but-educational video aimed at helping viewers buy their first cryptocurrencies, but she still hasn’t published it. She’s convinced her work can do more good when the market gets out of this funk.

She adds: “It’s only when things have calmed down that you focus on bringing new people in.”

The downside of the down

Still, when she does, it’s safe to say Sparks just might bring the very thing that’s made her such a compelling figure in crypto in 2018: a message about what it means to be a real user.

Sparks will be the first to tell you she’s not a trader, but she’s acutely aware of aspects of blockchain that go beyond the technical. When the price goes up or down, that impacts Sparks, who holds roughly 75 percent of her wealth in crypto.

“I do earn a good living outside of crypto. … I think this enables me to really be aggressive with investing and not get shortsighted by Lambos and tickets to the moon,” she wrote CoinDesk. “I don’t drive and rockets scare me.”

But it’s not just skin in the game (and in the crypto videos she plans to make) that yields Sparks’ crypto fandom, it’s the way that she uses both experiences to truly connect with followers.

Just before meeting me, she posts a video of herself in a black, ethereum-emblazoned onesie on Twitter with the message: “Probably the cutest thing that’s happening in ETH right now.”

Half-playful boast, half-trolling, it’s an example of how Sparks is able to connect with the sentiments of a community and channel that into her work. At the time, the price of ether was hanging perilously above $100, the threshold seen by many as what opened the floodgates to its meteoric rise – from just a few dollars to over $1,000 – over the course of 2017.

In that sense, she’s showing solidarity.

But if fans are feeling down, Sparks has had a year that resembles our Ferris wheel ride, one that began on the up and ended on the down: SpankChain is closing the year amidst layoffs. It’s sad, but unavoidable in her mind.

Yes, you can actually buy this crypto card and own it forever.

Still, Sparks doesn’t seem rattled by that, at least compared to her reaction to the Ferris wheel.

As we got ready to board she looks up; she’s very clearly scared. (The High Roller is basically a bunch of small orbs attached to a giant machine. The orbs rotate on the wheel as it turns, but so slowly that, from the inside, you can’t tell.)

Like the blockchain, thinking about how this cleverly engineered ride works can be painful. Also, like the blockchain, the High Roller doesn’t stop for you to figure it out. You get on board while it’s still moving, as we do, with maybe a dozen tourists, as the prior group exits out the other side.

At first, Sparks was the only one to avail herself of the small bench in our compartment. We sit there talking about crypto and, unlike everyone else, she is studiously not looking out the window.

But by the time we got about a quarter of the way up, she starts to peak. We reach the top just as night has fully fallen and Vegas looks like the Milky Way pressed into the earth, and soon Sparks is tweeting out a video about the view.

That’s how she said she always is, though. When something scares her she’s terrified before she does it. Then, it’s as if she’s been doing it her whole life.

Origin story

But what about Sparks’ life? Certainly, we don’t get much of a glimpse of it in her videos, though we see everything else, or in her tweets, most of which are a mix of travel, life and crypto, though never in a way that’s (and this is a little ironic) revealing.

It turns out, we have her ex-boyfriends to thank for bringing Sparks into its ranks.

“The type of guys I typically go for,” she tells us, “are typically nerdy.”

Self-portrait by Brenna Sparks.

This is early in our conversation, at a shop for toast and coffee that Sparks picks because of its pink interior. We started our day together there. When she showed up, she had no idea we’d go over 50 stories up riding a glass-enclosed bubble on a wheel.

She shows up exactly on time for our 1:30 p.m. meeting, arriving in a red baseball cap and a t-shirt under a light space-themed jacket, solo, in an Uber. Her eye makeup is 100 percent on brand but otherwise… Sparks does porn, but she doesn’t front like a star.

That’s no doubt because she wasn’t always one, at least back when the first crypto boyfriend showed her bitcoin in 2009. Another one showed her ethereum, in 2017.

For more about those guys, just hunt the internet. She talks about them in several interviews. Just be sure to add “crypto” or “ethereum” to your search terms.

In past conversations, though, she says that she’s never had the problem with banks that other adult stars have had, but that changed this spring.

“I believe we shouldn’t have banks,” she told us.

It’s not hard to understand why. One day, her bank accounts were shut down because bankers found out she was doing porn.

“I was up front that I was a stripper,” she says, when setting up the account. Then later she got into doing adult video and that’s what they didn’t like, she said.

She tried to withdraw her money as soon as they shut it down, but they wouldn’t give it to her immediately. Not until she took it to Twitter and her fans brigaded the bank on her behalf.

“I posted on Twitter and they gave me money back in 48 hours,” she said.

But she connects her experience with the bank to other roadblocks she’s hit.

For example, she’s currently on her third Instagram account, because she keeps getting kicked off for posting stuff that’s too sexy. She knows other stars who have been kicked off of Twitter, too, because they failed to understand the nuances of its rules around adult content.

So, Sparks has become one of those rare non-technical people who really dig decentralization.

She wrote:

“It is a lot like an animal spreading itself across the Earth. Decentralizing gives it the ability to survive as a species and evolve into something that wasn’t possible before.”

Woman of the people

But if that’s why she believes in crypto, Sparks has her own theories on why she’s made such a connection to the industry, too.

“Crypto needs a face. They need someone who can be general,” she said.

She says this several times as we speak and in a follow-up email. Satoshi’s facelessness turns her off. She likes Vitalik, but she only sees him reaching techies.

Brenna Sparks in Las Vegas. (Photo by Brady Dale for CoinDesk)

She wants someone who can speak to the masses and for the technology. As she put it, she wants kids to be accidentally buying crypto when they are playing with mom’s cell phone – because it’s that easy.

She also wants the technology to fix some of its weird gaps. “One of my biggest fears in using crypto (especially in the earlier days) was sending transactions. There were times when something happened and the money just never went through and got lost,” she writes.

Neat new applications that give people better ways to make money are great, but Sparks’ insight about normal people is that they want to know they aren’t going to stupidly lose money before they try a new way to use it.

And in the developed world, the current system works fine for most.

“A lot of normal people don’t know what it feels like to have your bank close on you,” she told us. Sex workers do, but they’re still reluctant to try crypto’s solutions. She feels consciousness needs to be raised before minds can really change.

“Before a sex worker can even begin to look into cryptocurrencies, they first need to see what’s wrong with the current setup and need to grow to hate it before they can be passionate about the solution,” she says.

So, could Sparks parlay her people-first insights into a bid to be that relatable face for crypto?

She’s cagey on that point. Instead, she gives a nod to Andreas Antonopoulos, who she believes starts in the right place with his critiques of the present system. But could she be a leader later on, when the market’s ready for her to make her move?

“Maybe,” she tells us as we ride into downtown Vegas in a Lyft, but she looks away, reluctantly.

It’s tough to tell again if she’s distracted by the impending Ferris wheel ride still ahead.

Crossover star

Whether or not it’s something she’ll harness, it’s clear there’s an opportunity.

Her pro-crypto message has distinguished her from the ocean of adult performers out there, no doubt helping her earn her a nomination for “Crossover Star of the Year” in the XBiz Awards (up against Stormy Daniels, who has also had quite a year, to say the least about the most).

Her ventures into new experiences were not limited to the blockchain: She did a bunch of new varieties of porn this year. She did porn in VR (she got an award nomination there, too). She did her first ASMR video (talking softly for people turned on by girls talking softly).

Looking ahead, she wants to satisfy her fans desire for Web3 inspired content. For example, crypto cosplay, but she just has to figure out what that means first. She might start simple and troll some crypto Illuminati with racy tape, she told us. All that remains to be seen.

But her big crossover moment culminated this summer, with the stunt we mentioned above: Sparks invited an engineer for Via, a micropayments cryptocurrency, to visit her in Vegas from the Netherlands and – there’s not really a euphemism for this – eat her ass.

The engineer, who just goes by Romano, had never done it before, and the internet had decided that crypto markets would pump if he did. It quickly became referred to as a “prophecy.”

The so-called prophecy of Romano doing this thing he did not find appealing managed to become part of the Smimem vs. Bogdanoff YouTube meme – which, for anyone who doesn’t know about this, is pretty fun. Wade in.

Romano told CoinDesk the whole thing started with a conversation on Twitter where other guys dared him to go there with someone – anyone. He told CoinDesk via Twitter direct message:

“At some point I said I would maybe try it if people stop talking about it. Bitcoin suddenly rallied up. Later on I said ‘Uh not going to do it,’ and bitcoin went down again. That’s when everyone in their hearts knew I had to do it.”

Unrelated to the dare, Romano became Twitter friends with Sparks because he and others had convinced her to buy some via. “She checked the viacoin block explorer to see if it arrived, which impressed me,” he told us.

The High Roller in Las Vegas. (Photo by Brady Dale for CoinDesk)

So as she got pulled into the dare, he asked her if she knew a Vegas denizen he could engage in the act in question with. She told him he might as well do it with her, because they were friends and, to paraphrase her telling, having some guy eat her ass a bit was basically just another day in the life of Brenna Sparks.

She doesn’t just will herself to do new things. She gets others there, too.

When it went down, the act lasted a few seconds. He did it, fellow porn star Bobbi Dylan witnessed it and it was done. Then they all hung out in Vegas.

Brock Pierce’s San Juan clan may have a monastery, but Sparks has fulfilled a prophecy.

Just Be Real

In other words, Sparks will go where few might venture to sell the world on this new technology.

She’s long crypto, but refuses to shill for any particular coin – not in this market. She really seems to buy this vision; crypto isn’t just her porn niche. It’s her niche. She told us about coins she’s promoted, but she asked us not to repeat them – Sparks wants people to make their own picks now.

We spent about seven hours with Sparks, talking about porn, crypto and life. As far as we can tell, the Sparks in her videos is the genuine Sparks. She’s really that bubbly. She laughs all the time. And she really wants crypto to disrupt everything.

She likes her fans. She’s bummed out by haters, but she’s quick to point out that no one ever talks smack to her face.

“It turns out that there are a ton of misogynists in the crypto space, which I found to be very disappointing. Aside from that, the overall popularity has benefited me far more than it hasn’t,” she told us.

Despite the negatives,..

http://bit.ly/2Uo0ror

[mccartneynathxzw83]

In Bed With Brenna Sparks: Porn’s Rising Star Might Be Crypto’s Best Advocate

In Bed With Brenna Sparks: Porn’s Rising Star Might Be Crypto’s Best Advocate

–––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––

Brenna Sparks wills herself to try new things.

Equal parts adult star and crypto evangelist, she’s not the kind of Las Vegas denizen who never hits the strip. But when asked if she wants to take the High Roller, the city’s 550-foot tall Ferris wheel with a serious view, the thought clearly petrifies her.

Still, she insists we go.

It’s fitting, as Sparks embraces the highs and lows – both in life and in crypto. In an email following our meeting, she writes about how she believes crypto is getting stronger and stronger.

She writes:

“Traveling upwards doesn’t require the path to be linear. The path can be paved on hills, too.”

That said, Sparks is admittedly a bit of a newcomer to crypto, best known as an advisor for SpankChain, one of a handful of projects that have raised funding via an initial coin offering and released tokens designed to power a protocol in a bid to disrupt the adult industry.

But her work has since taken her to unexpected places.

Take the promotional stunt she took part in this year that involved the bitcoin price and a body part that’s not known for its role in crypto conversations. Let’s just say that she encourages others to try new things.

That applies broadly, too. Sparks boosts what’s known as the decentralized internet, a term that’s come to refer to a time when the intermediaries we know today – think Google, Amazon, Facebook – have been replaced by code owned by no one and operated by users.

“I don’t believe in the current ideas people are pushing for adoption. I’m hoping to go and do my own thing and focus on mass adoption,” she tells us.

But we’re going to have to wait to see what she wants to do.

In Brenna Sparks’ apartment. (Photo by Brenna Sparks)

If there’s a plan, Sparks is shy about saying it. “Right now, it’s all about keeping crypto people in crypto. Many just want to leave,” she says.

For example, she’s shot one sexy-but-educational video aimed at helping viewers buy their first cryptocurrencies, but she still hasn’t published it. She’s convinced her work can do more good when the market gets out of this funk.

She adds: “It’s only when things have calmed down that you focus on bringing new people in.”

The downside of the down

Still, when she does, it’s safe to say Sparks just might bring the very thing that’s made her such a compelling figure in crypto in 2018: a message about what it means to be a real user.

Sparks will be the first to tell you she’s not a trader, but she’s acutely aware of aspects of blockchain that go beyond the technical. When the price goes up or down, that impacts Sparks, who holds roughly 75 percent of her wealth in crypto.

“I do earn a good living outside of crypto. … I think this enables me to really be aggressive with investing and not get shortsighted by Lambos and tickets to the moon,” she wrote CoinDesk. “I don’t drive and rockets scare me.”

But it’s not just skin in the game (and in the crypto videos she plans to make) that yields Sparks’ crypto fandom, it’s the way that she uses both experiences to truly connect with followers.

Just before meeting me, she posts a video of herself in a black, ethereum-emblazoned onesie on Twitter with the message: “Probably the cutest thing that’s happening in ETH right now.”

Half-playful boast, half-trolling, it’s an example of how Sparks is able to connect with the sentiments of a community and channel that into her work. At the time, the price of ether was hanging perilously above $100, the threshold seen by many as what opened the floodgates to its meteoric rise – from just a few dollars to over $1,000 – over the course of 2017.

In that sense, she’s showing solidarity.

But if fans are feeling down, Sparks has had a year that resembles our Ferris wheel ride, one that began on the up and ended on the down: SpankChain is closing the year amidst layoffs. It’s sad, but unavoidable in her mind.

Yes, you can actually buy this crypto card and own it forever.

Still, Sparks doesn’t seem rattled by that, at least compared to her reaction to the Ferris wheel.

As we got ready to board she looks up; she’s very clearly scared. (The High Roller is basically a bunch of small orbs attached to a giant machine. The orbs rotate on the wheel as it turns, but so slowly that, from the inside, you can’t tell.)

Like the blockchain, thinking about how this cleverly engineered ride works can be painful. Also, like the blockchain, the High Roller doesn’t stop for you to figure it out. You get on board while it’s still moving, as we do, with maybe a dozen tourists, as the prior group exits out the other side.

At first, Sparks was the only one to avail herself of the small bench in our compartment. We sit there talking about crypto and, unlike everyone else, she is studiously not looking out the window.

But by the time we got about a quarter of the way up, she starts to peak. We reach the top just as night has fully fallen and Vegas looks like the Milky Way pressed into the earth, and soon Sparks is tweeting out a video about the view.

That’s how she said she always is, though. When something scares her she’s terrified before she does it. Then, it’s as if she’s been doing it her whole life.

Origin story

But what about Sparks’ life? Certainly, we don’t get much of a glimpse of it in her videos, though we see everything else, or in her tweets, most of which are a mix of travel, life and crypto, though never in a way that’s (and this is a little ironic) revealing.

It turns out, we have her ex-boyfriends to thank for bringing Sparks into its ranks.

“The type of guys I typically go for,” she tells us, “are typically nerdy.”

Self-portrait by Brenna Sparks.

This is early in our conversation, at a shop for toast and coffee that Sparks picks because of its pink interior. We started our day together there. When she showed up, she had no idea we’d go over 50 stories up riding a glass-enclosed bubble on a wheel.

She shows up exactly on time for our 1:30 p.m. meeting, arriving in a red baseball cap and a t-shirt under a light space-themed jacket, solo, in an Uber. Her eye makeup is 100 percent on brand but otherwise… Sparks does porn, but she doesn’t front like a star.

That’s no doubt because she wasn’t always one, at least back when the first crypto boyfriend showed her bitcoin in 2009. Another one showed her ethereum, in 2017.

For more about those guys, just hunt the internet. She talks about them in several interviews. Just be sure to add “crypto” or “ethereum” to your search terms.

In past conversations, though, she says that she’s never had the problem with banks that other adult stars have had, but that changed this spring.

“I believe we shouldn’t have banks,” she told us.

It’s not hard to understand why. One day, her bank accounts were shut down because bankers found out she was doing porn.

“I was up front that I was a stripper,” she says, when setting up the account. Then later she got into doing adult video and that’s what they didn’t like, she said.

She tried to withdraw her money as soon as they shut it down, but they wouldn’t give it to her immediately. Not until she took it to Twitter and her fans brigaded the bank on her behalf.

“I posted on Twitter and they gave me money back in 48 hours,” she said.

But she connects her experience with the bank to other roadblocks she’s hit.

For example, she’s currently on her third Instagram account, because she keeps getting kicked off for posting stuff that’s too sexy. She knows other stars who have been kicked off of Twitter, too, because they failed to understand the nuances of its rules around adult content.

So, Sparks has become one of those rare non-technical people who really dig decentralization.

She wrote:

“It is a lot like an animal spreading itself across the Earth. Decentralizing gives it the ability to survive as a species and evolve into something that wasn’t possible before.”

Woman of the people

But if that’s why she believes in crypto, Sparks has her own theories on why she’s made such a connection to the industry, too.

“Crypto needs a face. They need someone who can be general,” she said.

She says this several times as we speak and in a follow-up email. Satoshi’s facelessness turns her off. She likes Vitalik, but she only sees him reaching techies.

Brenna Sparks in Las Vegas. (Photo by Brady Dale for CoinDesk)

She wants someone who can speak to the masses and for the technology. As she put it, she wants kids to be accidentally buying crypto when they are playing with mom’s cell phone – because it’s that easy.

She also wants the technology to fix some of its weird gaps. “One of my biggest fears in using crypto (especially in the earlier days) was sending transactions. There were times when something happened and the money just never went through and got lost,” she writes.

Neat new applications that give people better ways to make money are great, but Sparks’ insight about normal people is that they want to know they aren’t going to stupidly lose money before they try a new way to use it.

And in the developed world, the current system works fine for most.

“A lot of normal people don’t know what it feels like to have your bank close on you,” she told us. Sex workers do, but they’re still reluctant to try crypto’s solutions. She feels consciousness needs to be raised before minds can really change.

“Before a sex worker can even begin to look into cryptocurrencies, they first need to see what’s wrong with the current setup and need to grow to hate it before they can be passionate about the solution,” she says.

So, could Sparks parlay her people-first insights into a bid to be that relatable face for crypto?

She’s cagey on that point. Instead, she gives a nod to Andreas Antonopoulos, who she believes starts in the right place with his critiques of the present system. But could she be a leader later on, when the market’s ready for her to make her move?

“Maybe,” she tells us as we ride into downtown Vegas in a Lyft, but she looks away, reluctantly.

It’s tough to tell again if she’s distracted by the impending Ferris wheel ride still ahead.

Crossover star

Whether or not it’s something she’ll harness, it’s clear there’s an opportunity.

Her pro-crypto message has distinguished her from the ocean of adult performers out there, no doubt helping her earn her a nomination for “Crossover Star of the Year” in the XBiz Awards (up against Stormy Daniels, who has also had quite a year, to say the least about the most).

Her ventures into new experiences were not limited to the blockchain: She did a bunch of new varieties of porn this year. She did porn in VR (she got an award nomination there, too). She did her first ASMR video (talking softly for people turned on by girls talking softly).

Looking ahead, she wants to satisfy her fans desire for Web3 inspired content. For example, crypto cosplay, but she just has to figure out what that means first. She might start simple and troll some crypto Illuminati with racy tape, she told us. All that remains to be seen.

But her big crossover moment culminated this summer, with the stunt we mentioned above: Sparks invited an engineer for Via, a micropayments cryptocurrency, to visit her in Vegas from the Netherlands and – there’s not really a euphemism for this – eat her ass.

The engineer, who just goes by Romano, had never done it before, and the internet had decided that crypto markets would pump if he did. It quickly became referred to as a “prophecy.”

The so-called prophecy of Romano doing this thing he did not find appealing managed to become part of the Smimem vs. Bogdanoff YouTube meme – which, for anyone who doesn’t know about this, is pretty fun. Wade in.

Romano told CoinDesk the whole thing started with a conversation on Twitter where other guys dared him to go there with someone – anyone. He told CoinDesk via Twitter direct message:

“At some point I said I would maybe try it if people stop talking about it. Bitcoin suddenly rallied up. Later on I said ‘Uh not going to do it,’ and bitcoin went down again. That’s when everyone in their hearts knew I had to do it.”

Unrelated to the dare, Romano became Twitter friends with Sparks because he and others had convinced her to buy some via. “She checked the viacoin block explorer to see if it arrived, which impressed me,” he told us.

The High Roller in Las Vegas. (Photo by Brady Dale for CoinDesk)

So as she got pulled into the dare, he asked her if she knew a Vegas denizen he could engage in the act in question with. She told him he might as well do it with her, because they were friends and, to paraphrase her telling, having some guy eat her ass a bit was basically just another day in the life of Brenna Sparks.

She doesn’t just will herself to do new things. She gets others there, too.

When it went down, the act lasted a few seconds. He did it, fellow porn star Bobbi Dylan witnessed it and it was done. Then they all hung out in Vegas.

Brock Pierce’s San Juan clan may have a monastery, but Sparks has fulfilled a prophecy.

Just Be Real

In other words, Sparks will go where few might venture to sell the world on this new technology.

She’s long crypto, but refuses to shill for any particular coin – not in this market. She really seems to buy this vision; crypto isn’t just her porn niche. It’s her niche. She told us about coins she’s promoted, but she asked us not to repeat them – Sparks wants people to make their own picks now.

We spent about seven hours with Sparks, talking about porn, crypto and life. As far as we can tell, the Sparks in her videos is the genuine Sparks. She’s really that bubbly. She laughs all the time. And she really wants crypto to disrupt everything.

She likes her fans. She’s bummed out by haters, but she’s quick to point out that no one ever talks smack to her face.

“It turns out that there are a ton of misogynists in the crypto space, which I found to be very disappointing. Aside from that, the overall popularity has benefited me far more than it hasn’t,” she told us.

Despite the negatives,..

http://bit.ly/2Uo0ror