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gerbiloftriumph · 5 years ago

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So you wanna be a king (pt4)

orrrr mayyyybe juuust cosplay one since that’s way less responsibilities

(incidentally, the fabbo shirt’s from redbubble, https://www.redbubble.com/people/midorilied/works/29739636-do-it-for-him-white-text, if @midorilied doesn’t mind me showing it off)

If you’ve followed along thus far then you should have a cloak, jerkin, pants and boots. A fully wearable Graham perfect for romping around the countryside. But it feels incomplete without the accessories, so let’s give those a try.

Part 4: Pouches n Bracers

(Again, these are all just suggestions and a How I Did It from a very novice cosplayer. Disregard all points, or take the ones you like. improvise adapt overcome)

Perhaps the best part about adventure games is the stuff. The bottomless inventory, a random assortment of strange things that all Do A Thing. Graham carries everything from money to badgers to literal humans in his pockets (presumably his mother is a seamstress trained by the gods).

This...won’t be you. Sorry.

Now, to be fair, I saw a Graham cosplay on tumblr (I’m so sorry, I don’t remember who--does anyone know?) who sewed pockets into their cloak, which is delightful and a very sweet idea!

However, I prefer the swoosh and snap of my cloak, and heavy things like cell phones in your cloak will alter the weight. Something to keep in mind as you decide how to manage your outfit.

(forgive the blur--I haven’t been able to get a still of what it looks like when swooshing. Perhaps now I’ve got real boots I’ll do another gifset of it)

Thus, all my phone, money, keys, and backup freckles (e.g., liquid eyeliner) must live in Graham’s belt pouches instead of cloak pockets. Lord knows what Graham actually keeps in his pouches, game-wise. Squirrel snacks, maybe, to avoid repeating the fiasco from Tourney Day?

This time I followed a pattern. I know, weird, right?

I wanted functionality, but I wanted them to be slim and simple, too. I found a guy on YouTube, and he comes with a .pdf template pattern in his video description! It’s super detailed, easy to follow, and better than me rambling. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tPhQlaI_UX4

Three years later, they’re starting to look a touch tired. I used a plain dark brown fabric (was it broadcloth?). Half a yard is plenty. If it’s semi-close in color your your belt, ideal. I made two sizes, two large for phone and makeup for touchups, and one small for keys and money. The large ones are 3″ wide and 5.5″ tall, and the small one is 2.5″ by 4.5″, but size them to whatever important things must be on your body at all time.

I added snap clasps to keep them shut (never know when you’ll be pounced by goblins, or trip over a crack in the sidewalk), and I found some plain silver buttons to sew over where the snaps sit--added bonus, hides my sloppy stitchwork. I took some of the leftover suede rope from the jerkin for the front--my ugliest secret is that it’s really horrible looking super glue dribbled everywhere. Hasn’t moved in 3 years, tho. /victory fist bump

I turned the corners of the front flaps so I wouldn’t have square tops. I didn’t trim off the excess fabric since I thought keeping extra weight in the corners would help keep the flaps down. You could always sew in another layer of something sturdier if you didn’t want the flaps to curl over time--it’s probably worth it. It does make a difference.

So, in doing this half-tutorial, I’ve just realized that Graham’s actual model has three pouches of various sizes on his left side only which means I’ve been wearing and drawing him wrong since day one. So. That’s cool. themoreyouknow.gif

(still not changing anything tho; I like keeping my phone on my right side)

Bracers!

Graham’s an archer. So, he’s got bracers on his forearms to protect himself. (presumably his rippling muscles are protection enough since he stops wearing them between his 30s and 70s.)

We have the same problem here as with the jerkin: the bracers seem practically sewn onto his arm. And that’s maybe doable, but I’m mortal, not digital, and I want this to be comfortable and also easy to remove. Now, unfortunately, my method loses the black bands he has on his bracer underbellies--they don’t seem to fit. If you have a nice solution, let me know.

Get yourself a ruler, paper, a scrap of elastic band, a sheet or two of stiff felt (probably like this stuff: https://www.amazon.com/Darice-Stiff-inches-5-Pack-FLT-0331/dp/B00KNAKJH6), and all the leftovers from your jerkin.

Measure around your wrist--mine’s 6″, so we’ll use that. Draw a 6″ line on a piece of paper, find the center of the line, mark it. Measure how long down your arm you want the bracer to go. I like 8 and a quarter inches myself (make it as long as you can without the bracer edge rubbing your inner elbow because that gets real old real fast). From the center mark of your wrist line, make a straight line down (a grid is helpful here to keep it straight). At the point where your bracer stops, measure around your arm: I got 9″. Find the halfway mark of your base arm line, add that to the paper. Connect the corners. It should look approximately something like this:

Cut out and test your design to make sure it’s comfortable (you want to forget you’re wearing these. keep them away from your elbow. f’reals). Cut the shape out of your stiff felt, and cut out your brown fabric leftover from your jerkin, with a margin all around so you can fold it over and sew (I did an inch I think, because I’m a coward). For the hand guard, I did half my wrist (3″), then measured my hand to see how high it had to be to just scrape the knuckle. For my hand, that’s about 3″, give or take. Curve it, test it, cut it out of felt and brown alike, and cut out some extra brown to cover the inside of the hand guard too, as you don’t want to see any white against your hand.

Fold the loose edges over the felt and sew it down along the marked places:

Make little snips in the hem of the hand guard hem as you go to achieve that tight curve.

I was nervous about combining the two pieces as I needed easy wrist flexibility. The two lines that aren’t hemmed I left “raw” and sewed the brown edges together as was, so that there’s no stiff felt against the wrist at all.

Another secret: my bracer grommets aren’t the same as my jerkin grommets--they’re much smaller, like 7mm, because I’d planned on making my jerkin with this smaller size earlier to replicate Graham’s tighter lacing but it didn’t work out--the larger ones from your jerkin work fine.

It’s the same process as the jerkin, too. Every inch from the wrist to the elbow gets a grommet, plus its corresponding partner. A-likea so:

The next part might be optional. I cut another piece of brown about the same size as the bracer body again, and sewed the edges along the inside, just past the grommets, so that when you wear the bracer, you don’t see the shirt beneath your laces. It also gives you a place to hide the loose ends of your suede rope once it’s tied into place. Probably optional.

Graham’s bracers have definition near the elbow, and I was annoyed that I couldn’t find a way to fit in the large black bands without messing up the simplicity of my pull on/pull off system, so to reference it I found thin black trim and sewed it along the bottom hem, just below the last grommet.

Okay, lace it with the suede rope and try it for fit. You may notice the hand guard is a bit unwilling to stay attached. Get the super glue, and--

no wait please don’t do that

let’s just make an elastic ring instead

My elastic was white: I colored it with a brown marker so it wasn’t as jarring if anyone caught sight of it. Sew it into your existing hemline, wherever it feels natural to wear it as a ring on your middle finger. A strip of fabric or trim might work as well, but the elastic makes it easy to pull on.

I desperately need to update my gray wristbands with real rope. This is trim, and I do not like it. But it was free, at the bottom of my cosplay bin, and I’m so tired of spending money on this costume.........anyway, loop the rope of choice three times around your wrist, sew it into a closed loop to avoid dealing with knots and bows, and tug the whole thing on and off over your hand. pls do not make it too tight.

And that’s looking like a proper cosplay. Just a few more accessories and also the hat. I assume everyone just wants the adventuring hat, but if there’s any interest in the crown, I could toss that in too, maaaayyyybbeeee?

#kings quest #King Graham #King's Quest #cosplay #midorilied #hey midorilied if you don't want your shirt in here lemme know i'll swap for a different picture #just two more to go~!#tutorial

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complicatedandstained · 6 years ago

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358 Nights: Stasis

It occurs to more than one of them that this is the most people that have ever sat around the Organization’s kitchen table at one time since the day the Dusks dragged it in from wherever it is the Dusks get anything.

Only four of them at a table meant to seat six, but the Organization members tend to give each other a wide berth—at least three yards of personal space a piece. This in order to avoid petty arguments, any one of which could spiral into maiming and dismemberment as easily as it could deescalate into a fit of giggles or a quick shag.

No emotions meant anything could happen at any given time.

So: three yards minimum. Unless you were fuck buddies. And sometimes even then.

Everyone’s waiting for Xigbar to break the silence and he doesn’t disappoint. Setting his palms on the table, he leans across it toward Saïx with singular, menacing intent. “It’s quarter to three. This had better be really fucking interesting. I, for one, had other plans.”

Saïx nods, unperturbed, like getting the objections over with is one of the bullet points in his meeting agenda.

“Yes, why are we meeting in the middle of the fucking night, in the middle of the fucking kitchen, Saïx?” Axel’s light, mocking tone eases some of the tension in the air as Xigbar chuckles. “Was the Round Room on reserve? You just have a craving for good food and good company?”

“He’s not likely to find either here,” Vexen quips, smirking, though, as usual, there’s no one around to laugh with him.

“Good company, eh?” Xigbar raises his brows, then elbows and grins at Axel. “This is getting kinkier than expected.”

Axel’s face remains impassive, but Vexen chokes.

Saïx stands up, thumbs pressing into the table, “Enough. We are here to discuss number XIII. Once we have done so, you may return to your precious regularly scheduled nocturnal activities, whatever, or whoever, they may be.”

“We couldn’t discuss number XIII, oh, say, in the daytime?” Axel continues blearily, rubbing the back of his hand across his eyes. “With number XIII?”

Saïx does not deem this worthy of a response. “You three are the only ones aware of number XIII’s entire, unique history.”

“Cute little Ventus and his cute little murder weapon,” Xigbar offers, watching his companions for any signs of surprise and almost disappointed to find none. “Well, what of it? He back in a coma or some shit?”

Saïx and Vexen nod.

Xigbar smiles. “No shit. Again?”

“Fuck,” Axel blurts, and at the raised brows Saïx directs at him, amends, more neutrally. “Doubles our work load, doesn’t it?” He crosses his ankles and leans back in his chair, arms folding behind his head. “The slacker.”

“Double workload.” Xigbar rolls his eyes. “Must be Tuesday. So, I repeat, what of it?”

“What of it?” Vexen scoffs in exasperation. “Haven’t you fools noticed?”

Xigbar and Axel blink back at him with blank expressions.

Vexen sighs, tapping the pen in his hand against the clipboard he’s set on the table. He circles a bar graph and the pair lean in to get a better look at the finely printed labels.

“As you know, Ventus was presumed dead for approximately ten years. Since Roxas’ appearance, we have theorized that Ventus’ body entered into a kind of stasis, hidden somewhere in Castle Oblivion, while his mind—heart—what have you—found refuge in Sora’s. Thus, in Sora’s death, Ventus, managed to manifest again in the Nobody, Roxas.”

They have discussed as much before in more private meetings between pairs of them. So now they nod as though they get it, though even Vexen doesn’t fully comprehend the logistics of it all.

Magic, they figure, the easiest, if not the only, explanation.

“Roxas’ recent lab results show highly irregular activity,” Vexen continues, “which we hypothesize is the result of this stasis.

“Unlike other Nobodies, Roxas’ body is growing and changing. We are seeing seemingly impossible, dramatic spikes in hormonal activity as his body attempts to fast-forward through the growth he should have experienced, making up for lost time, as it were. As his body struggles to adapt he goes into long periods of hibernation, which thus far, seem relatively harmless, perhaps even beneficial.”

Vexen pauses here, though his fellow Nobodies keep their poker faces intact with a skill that would make Luxord tear up a little.

The silence carries on for a little too long. Axel coughs.

“So… what?” Xigbar tugs at the strap of his eye patch and leans to level his glare toward Vexen, voice dropping into a disgruntled growl, “We’re having a meeting so you can tell us Roxas is about to get really tall and really horny?”

Vexen glares back, a colder, more calculated thing, and straightens the edges of his stack of papers.

“We can expect to see accelerated growth and physical maturation, yes, in addition to the rapid strides in intelligence and abstract reasoning we have already noted in mission reports. He should then reach the level of maturity of a typical twenty-year-old male within a matter of months. And, to answer Xigbar’s question, at the time of stasis, he had likely already passed through much of the growth process known as puberty, so, it is likely the height difference will be marginal at best.”

Axel offers an exaggerated stretch and yawn. “Well, thank the Lord we met to discuss this.”

“As if it weren’t keeping you up at night,” Xigbar snickers back. “I can’t tell, are you disappointed or relieved?”

Twists of flame rise up from Axel’s knuckles, and Xigbar’s grin widens.

Saïx rolls his eyes and grabs Axel’s wrist, the blaze dying out. “Gentlemen, please.”

Saïx nods to Vexen to continue and with a disapproving scowl, he does.

“Roxas may also exhibit traits often characteristic of the quote-unquote teenager or young adolescent. While he will be spared the typical crushing emotional turmoil, he could still exhibit impulsiveness, poor decision making, identity crises, questioning of authority, and perhaps outright rebellion.

“And, of course, as Xigbar so crudely put it, perhaps an increase in sexual impulses, to boot.”

Xigbar reaches out a glove to prod at his neighbor’s cheek. “Close your mouth, Axel.”

Axel’s jaw snaps shut and his eyes narrow at Xigbar in warning, hand lighting up again.

“Axel has taken it upon himself to supervise number XIII,” Saïx directs at Xigbar, “nothing more.”

“Supervise, huh?” Xigbar shrugs, withdrawing his hand, settling back in his seat. “My mistake. No one in their right mind would hook up with their supervisor.” This remark is blatantly directed at Saïx, who spends suspicious amounts of time with Xemnas, and who blatantly ignores it.

The flames fan up Axel’s wrist, but, at a disapproving glance from Saïx, die down.

“It’s… just a lot to take in,” Axel mumbles for Vexen’s benefit.

Now Xigbar’s eyes roll. “As if. We’ve been noticing these changes for months now. I don’t need a lab coat to tell you the kid’s getting taller, smarter, and mouthier. I been watching it happen. I know you like to have show-and-tell for all your little experiments, Vex, but next time, send us, like, a bullet pointed memo, and give us all some extra shut eye, would ya?”

Ice crystals spread across the table top where Vexen’s hand rests, though he looks otherwise disengaged. “As usual, you seem to be failing to grasp the gravity of the situation. Chances are, he’ll be near Axel and Saïx’s age when the process is complete and his body reaches equilibrium. Roxas’ behavior will be highly erratic and the changes will be rapid and painful. Regardless of his age, with the keyblade, he is a force to be reckoned with. This will affect us all.”

Xigbar groans. “As usual, you seem to be failing to grasp that I couldn’t give fewer fucks.”

“I agree.” Saïx nods, and three mouths dip open. “All the more reason Roxas should continue to carry his weight. This will in no way serve as a pathetic excuse to shirk his duties when he can be bothered to stay awake. Roxas has a job to do, as have we all. I expect the three of you to see to it that he keeps his toes in line—impulses or no.”

Xigbar sits back, wondering if all this talk is really necessary, wondering why Saïx feels the relentless need to be so harsh toward Roxas, of all people, his single model employee. Roxas who completes every mission and then some. Roxas who never says no. Sure, the kid has a curious streak. Yeah, he’s a little more kind-hearted than the rest. But questioning authority? Rebellion? As if.

But then, he knows why Saïx is really getting pissy with XIII, and it has more to do with Axel’s hormones than Roxas’.

“Have I made myself clear?” Saïx demands, arms crossing.

“Yes, sir,” Vexen and Xigbar chorus solemnly.

Axel salutes, two fingers to his temple, voice saucy, taunting, “Yes, sir.”

“It goes without saying that this conversation is to be kept between the four of us. You are dismissed.” Saïx waves them off with a flick of his hand.

“They grow up so fast,” Xigbar croons, head shaking, as he and the scientist rise to head out and leave the children to their scheming. “Seems like just yesterday Lea and Isa were tykes, eh, Vexen?”

Axel and Saïx freeze entirely, and Vexen’s laughter drags cold air down each of their backs like fingernail scratches.

“How quickly they forget. It’s harder for us, I think. Different playground: same boys—bossing around adults, fighting over their toys, knocking each other down into the dirt.”

A flaming chakram slams into the wall between the pair of them, and they both veer to the sides.

“One more word,” Axel growls when they turn his way, “and I’ll set you on fire.”

Saïx says nothing, of course, merely glares, but the lack of a reprimand to Axel is support in its own way.

“Apologies, Saïx, Axel.” Vexen nods at each but smirks as he walks out. “I meant no offense.”

Xigbar stays, attention fixed solely on the red-head. “Careful who you threaten, hot shot.” Xigbar pries the weapon out of the wall and tosses it carelessly back as if it doesn’t singe his fingertips. “I can take a little heat. And if you’re not careful, I might bust your favorite toy.”

It’s Saïx who stands and catches the chakram, sets it down on the table, with a loud clink, unscathed. “I think you’ll find that like all of Axel’s toys, Roxas is well-kept and not so easily shattered.”

Xigbar’s mouth opens for a second before settling into a challenging smirk.

Axel whirls on Saïx, hand resting lightly on his forearm, as the man pulls out his chair and steps away. “C’mon, Saïx… it’s not like that…”

Saïx yanks his sleeve through Axel’s fingers and steps away, glaring at him with those unfamiliar gold eyes. “Isn’t it?”

Saïx walks out, and Xigbar and Axel can only watch him go.

“Well, that coulda gone better,” Xigbar mutters, still bemused.

Axel takes a step forward, the way Saïx departed, but this time, gloved, callused hands clutch his shoulders.

Xigbar’s voice settles into something quieter, “C’mon, Ax, let it go.”

Axel nods and turns to the other kitchen exit. Xigbar’s arm sweeps around Axel’s back and leads him out into the hall in the direction of their rooms.

Xigbar gestures down the dark, yawning path before them. “You heading to Roxas, then?”

Axel sighs, shrugs. “Might as well.”

A flame flickers in Axel’s palm, illuminating their path where the silvery glow of Kingdom Hearts can’t quite stretch from the window panes.

“So,” Xigbar begins conversationally. “You gonna tell the kid when he wakes up?”

Axel’s laugh is short and empty. “They’d murder me.”

“Eh, yeah,” Xigbar nods thoughtfully, “probably so.”

“He’s smart.” Axel’s arms cross, he glances down the hall for prying eyes. “He’ll figure it out on his own.”

“You better hope not.” They swing around a bend, automatically weaving left and right, avoiding one of the large divots Larxene put in the ground in a spat with Demyx. “Then they’ll murder him.”

“I won’t let it come to that.” Axel’s words sound light enough, but the genuine intent behind them makes Xigbar pause in his steps. Thoughtlessly, Axel lights the candles in their sconces on the walls around them and they watch each other, warily, their skin ghostly white in the flickering.

“You won’t be able to stop it,” Xigbar challenges and then pauses to glance around. “Ah, here’s where I ran into our little miscreant the other night on his way to see you of all people.”

“Why haven’t you turned us in?” Axel challenges in a low voice. “What do you want?”

“I’ll think of something.” Xigbar’s smile, his mocking tone, are inscrutable as ever. He sets his glove over the light in Axel’s hand and smoke passes between the pieces of leather as it goes out. “A ‘thank you’ might be a nice start.” Xigbar flicks his wrist and the torches extinguish, plunging them into solid darkness.

“…Thank you,” Axel murmurs. He can feel leather against his cheek, heat as Xigbar’s hand draws his face down, level with his, moisture and the rough scrape of stubble as unfamiliar lips press his cheek.

“You’re welcome, sweetheart.”

Axel feels a playful tug at the silver chain around his neck, and then nothing. Without another word, the pair of them split off.

Axel finds Roxas snoring in his bed. No sheets cover him; Roxas hates to be confined. He’s still wearing his coat and boots, but somebody would notice any efforts to make him more comfortable, and people are talking enough as it is.

Axel musses Roxas’ hair, and watches him breathe. He waits for his own breaths to slow to the same pace as Roxas’, and then, giving his hand a final squeeze, Axel slinks back out into the night, leaving no trace that he’s been around in the first place.

#kingdom hearts #axel #xigbar #saix #roxas #vexen #organization xiii #akuroku #akusai #xemsai #xigbar x axel #358 nights #my writing

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lubdubsworld · 7 years ago

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Taehyung x Reader, Jk x Reader

Rating 19 +

Angst

Warnings: age difference? Y/N is a little older. love triangles.

It may help if you like both tae and jk because the reader gets with both of them ...

Part 1

"Cue."

He watched you pose for still after still, your smile becoming steadily harder to hold, your gait becoming just a little bit less surefooted and your eyes growing steadily weary. He wanted to clear the whole place out, order them all to just leave you alone but instead all he could do was bow lower when another coordi noona passed by, burrowing his face in his oversized hoodie, hoping no one would recognize him.

He hadn't seen you in twenty three days. It was a long time even by your standards. Every few weeks , he tried to at least spend a couple of days with you, exclusively but lately, with your drama and photo shoots and variety recordings , it was damn near impossible to get time together. Now that his drama was wrapped up, he wanted to make things up to you. Maybe if you agreed you could take a vacation. For as long as you wanted.

He'd always wanted to take you to Venice.

It was another hour and a half before the shoot wrapped up, Taehyung went further into the shadows, although it was technically unnecessary. This was presumably the most hectic part of the entire thing, sometimes even more than the part where they set up the shoot. Unlike other models who always insisted on leaving at once, you hung back, helping people out and taking care of your own wardrobe changes.

when you finally stepped out of your dressing room, dressed in a simple sleeveless white T-shirt and blue jeans, your hair neatly wrapped in a high pony and your face bare of all make up, he felt the familiar ache start inside his center.

You were the only real thing in a life of delusional fame and surreal popularity. Back when he'd been a struggling novice actor to the time when he'd become a household name , you had always treated him the same. You caught sight of him and stopped, eyes widening.

"Taehyung-ah..." you mouthed looking around in obvious panic. He grinned and went closer. If it were up to him, he would announce to the world that they were dating. But Ji Hyo was so violently against the whole thing that he had given up asking your about it. And deep down he knew you was right. Theirs wasn't a forgiving society and the same fans who worshipped them one second could end their careers with ease.

"Let's go. " He looped his hand with hers and quickly moved to one of the service exits. You shifted your bag from one shoulder to the other, squeezing his fingers and leaning against him with a sigh.

"Should I carry you?" He teased, half serious.

"you look worse than me. Just don't collapse and make me carry you." You retorted in your usual fashion and he grinned. Your candid, tomboyish way of talking was one of the things he adored about you. Impulsively, he reached out and lightly stroked your cheek. Jumping, you stepped away from him, shooting furtive glances around. He tried not to role his eyes at that.

"You should stop being so scared. What's the worse that could happen?" He smiled. You gave him a ' Really? you're going to ask that ? ' kind of look.

"Anyway, why are you here? " You said, once you'd climbed into his luxury sedan and buckled yourself in.

"I wanted to get laid." He winked, giving you a sleazy grin and lightly tapping your knee. You rolled your eyes but a smile played in the corner of your lips. Instead of responding , you pulled out the hair-tie holding your hair up and he watched the way your short , straight hair fell in careless waves around your face.

He admired that about you , among other things. Despite being an actress , you never paid much attention to yourself and you didn't really need to, either. You looked pretty , wholesome.

Real.

And you belonged to him. Every pale, beautiful rebellious bit of you was his to touch and love and kiss and hold.

He brought his foot down hard on the accelerator, eager to get you home.

Making love to Taehyung was like a serene waltz, you thought in distracted pleasure, enjoying the way he spent so much time, just kissing every little bit of you. You always felt like a some pagan goddess being reverently worshiped and it amazed your that he seemed to genuinely think you were still the most attractive woman of his acquaintance.

He crawled back up , lightly nipping your nose and dropping a kiss on the corner of your mouth.

"What are you thinking? " He stroked your brow lightly.

"I'm thinking you should be out with a younger, prettier woman." You said.

"Can I invite her in here, instead?" He winked, earning himself a sharp jab in his side.

Smiling, he drew you close, fingers moving down your back to cup your bottom, making you throw your leg over his as he yanked your panties off. You smiled, kissing him softly as he stroked you, fingers slipping in without any resistance as he pulled you closer still.

You held on to his shoulders, fingers digging into the pale skin on his back as he worked slowly and patiently, bringing you to release with just his fingers. It didn't take long because you hadn't been touched in such a long time and your body had been hotwired from the moment you'd seen him that day.

You shut your eyes as climax hit you, not with the explosive bang that you usually had but in a sort of gentle, mind numbing softness. Like waves lapping at your feet. You shuddered against him and he kissed you, soft little kisses till you stopped trembling.

You wanted to return the favor, kiss him in places that would have him begging but he wasn't in the mood, gently flipping you over , slipping out of his clothes and pushing into you before you could catch your breath.

The first thrust literally stole your breath away. You hadn't had sex in nearly a month and your body reminded you that you still were essentially a lot smaller than him. It was a tight fit and you had to grit your teeth just to keep breathing, the pleasure incredibly intense. Sighing you held on as he thrust inside you, each stroke marked by his labored breathing, sweat gathering on his forehead as he lightly kissed your nipples and licked them.

It didn't last long and you were grateful when he didn't immediately pull out of you, his weight heavy and hard against your even as you stroked his back , the back of his head, threading your fingers through his hair. You kissed the side of his head, his ears and the softness of his cheek, rubbing yourself against the slight stubble there.

When he did pull out, your body protested meekly and you swallowed the urge to grab him and keep him inside yourself. Instead, you crawled a bit upwards, turning around and gathering him close until his face rested on the swell of your breasts, his arm draped over you as you kissed the top of his head.

"This is what I need, every night." He said, voice muffled . You grinned and glanced down at him, the way his face rested on your breasts and the look of contentment on his face.

You had wanted to talk to him about something important, but looking at him like this you couldn't bring yourself to say it out loud. As he fell asleep against you, your mind began to rewind the last weeks.

Or rather years.

When you had met five years ago, Taehyung had been twenty five and ...there really was no other word for it, adorable. You had been flattered by his tenacious pursuit of you, his puppy dog eyes and his fervent oath to never let your go. You'd laughed at his enthusiasm back then and almost as a joke, you'd agreed to date him.

You had been so certain that he would get over his noona-crush , that he would outgrow his silly fascination with your, once he realized how incredibly talented and handsome and manly he really was. Once he saw the other , more gorgeous feminine and successful actresses throw themselves at him.

A few weeks, you told herself. A few weeks and he would change his minds.

But the weeks turned into months and the months turned into years.

And here you guys were.

Not exactly just friends, not exactly crazy in love lovers and not exactly two fully committed adults. You didn't know what you were.

He would never agree but deep down you knew you were holding him back. The past few weeks had only reaffirmed your belief that you weren't doing him any favors by staying in his life, not when this was the most crucial point of his acting career. He had refused several movie roles and you knew that some part of him had backed away because he hadn't wanted to spend a lot of time away from you. You couldn't face yourself, if your presence began to hinder his career.

And now, the constant media attention on him would mean even fewer chances to meet each other. Taehyung never realized the risk he was taking every time he tried to pull stunts like the one he did today. Or maybe he did, and just didn't care. Either way , he was treading dangerous waters for you and you felt guilty just thinking about it.

Tomorrow, you would tell him.

Tell him that they ought to take a break from each other.

and this time, no matter how much he tried to convince you otherwise, you would walk out of his life.

Even if he hated you for it.

~~~~~~~~~~

"You're late." Yoongi grinned catching sight of your panda-eyes and groggy gaze and giving your a slight nudge. You shifted the ridiculously large bouquet of wildflowers from one hand to another. The card read, ' To the song of my life from the song in yours.'

Clever.

"I suppose you were the one who told Taehyung, I was shooting at SBS?" You rolled your eyes and tied your shoelaces. The day’s work was done and most of the members had already gone. One of your co workers had offered you a ride home and you had refused, too tired to put up with even the harmless flirtation he tossed your way.

No, today you wanted to relax and listen to wise counsel. Ergo, Min Yoongi.

"I'm going to break up with him." you said firmly. Yoongi rolled his eyes and paid for the bowl of patbingsu.

"If I had a 1000 Won for every time you said this." He teased, lightly grabbing your elbow and leading you to a private booth in the cafeteria.

You walked distractedly, your mind running in circles. You had left a sleeping Taehyung on the bed, with a note to meet up for some dessert at eleven that night. It was still a little past nine and you wanted to get your head straight before you spoke to him.

Yoongi had a way of always bringing out the logical part of you and you were rather desperately in need of some logical reasoning. . Especially because Taehyung was the most unreasonable person on the planet.

"Is it because of Bo Gum?" Yoongi said quietly, all seriousness and you physically withdrew in surprise. Blinking you let out a shocked laugh.

"No. why would you... No. I don't feel that way about him...anymore." you whispered, familiar unwanted feelings rising up and choking your throat. Although you were being honest when you said you didn't feel anything for Bo Gum, you couldn't blame Yoongi for asking. And though it was a long time ago, you still felt embarrassed and hot when you thought of how you had rather gracelessly pursued the quiet man. But that had been so many years back and you were a different girl now. Woman.

"That's good. It won't do you any good to.."

"I know." You said, rather sharply . You had no wish to be reminded of Bo Gum’s disinterest in you. It had hurt badly enough the first time.

"So?"

"I think I'm too old for him. " You said blithely and Yoongi grinned easily.

"We both know he doesn't give a damn about your age." He said shaking his head in denial. You rolled your eyes.

"I mean that I want to get out of the entertainment business." You said softly. That made Yoongi stop and stare, spoon suspended in midair as he looked at you in evident shock.

when he didn't say anything else, you sighed and dropped your head to the table.

"I want to get married. I want a family. Babies." You said listlessly, staring off into the far wall. " I've been thinking about it, oppa. I'm almost thirty years old. I should be settling down and all this fame and glitz...it just doesn't make me happy at the end of the day, when I go to an empty house and an empty bed. "

"Did you tell Tae that you were thinking of quitting?" He said quietly. You smiled bleakly.

"He would never believe me. Worse, he'll try to propose and pretend he wants to marry me."

"You think he doesn't want to marry you, eventually? You know that's not true Y/N.... I think the boy made up his mind when he was seventeen , that he was going to marry you." He said seriously and you felt a thrum of pleasure despite your misgivings.

It was flattering and enchanting, the knowledge of how much Taehyung actually liked you

"I know oppa. And I want to do the right thing. He has a wonderful life ahead of him and..."

You stopped when familiar fingers closed around your shoulders, effectively robbing you of breath.

"Tae.." You whispered in abject horror, too stunned to think straight. Yoongi was already getting up and moving away, looking horribly surprised.

"You guys should talk it out..." He said in embarrassment and you went cold as Taehyung pulled up a chair next to you. His face was impassive and he looked frighteningly calm.

"Were you going to break up with me, now?" He said cheerfully, with a wide smile that didn't reach his eyes. You hesitated, glancing at the exit.

"Try it... Try leaving and I'll throw you on the nearest table and kiss you right here, in front of everyone. Then you won't have to worry about our reputations, would you?" He said, with the same cheerful tone.

"You're being irrational." You began but he was already reaching for your wrists.

"I'm being me. And you should act like yourself instead of like a noble heroine in a tragic play."

"Let's go home... We'll talk this out in private." you said calmly and he yanked you closer. You followed him, almost happy at the prospect of finally getting a chance to talk things out with him. But you had barely reached his car before his phone rang.

You watched the way his face darkened in annoyance and you realized that it was happening again. Another script reading or meeting with a director and as always you would be left behind.

"Tell them I won’t be coming anywhere this week. I'm taking a few days off." He barked into the phone and you glared at him.

"What are you doing? You can't just refuse to..." you began but his grip on your arm tightened.

"Let's do it."

"What?"

"Let's register our marriage. Right now."

Your heart literally stopped.

"You're crazy."

"It was you. It's always been you. And it will always be you, till the day I die. " He said softly, his gaze going warm and fingers slipping into yours. You shook your head in confusion. Your heart was misleading you again. Telling you this would work out and it was time you stopped fooling yourself. He must've seen your face change because for the first time, something close to fear entered his tone.

"Don't say it...." He whispered.

"please Tae...."

"I'm begging you don't say it...!!" He said desperately, grabbing your wrist. You pulled your hand away with a choked sob.

"I'm so sorry...... I'm so sorry..." You said, already moving a few steps away.

"This isn't right. Does this feel right to you??" He said urgently, reaching for your again but you shut your eyes and shook your head.

"Let's not see each other again." You said quietly, watching the light fade out of his eyes.

And as the words left you , you knew that this time, they were real.

~~~~~~~

"You shouldn't be starving yourself ." Jung Kook said casually as he placed a small foil wrapped package in front of your desk in your apartment. You glanced at the gift and smiled. Your latest project had required you to lose more than 5 kilos and you'd been eating a lot less than usual.

It was sweet of Jung Kook to indulge you once in a while, you supposed, but the thought of how long you would have to work out to burn off those calories made you wary of opening the thing.

"You're a doll but please don't make me eat that." You grimaced and Kook rolled his eyes.

Easy for him, he was just one of those people who managed to look fit and sexy with minimum effort.

Like Taehyung

You sighed and glanced at your watch. It was seven forty five in the morning and you had already failed your daily resolution to not think about him. Never before had you given a thought to how much you thought about Taehyung on an average day. But now that you weren't supposed to...

It was already two months since you guys had broken up and you felt like you weremissing a limb.

And you were feeling increasingly foolish as well. You had never realized how much you had loved Taehyung, how much you had craved him.

even the little doses that you had been able to get over these years.

God, what a mistake this whole breakup thing had been.

But then, no point in trying to go back on it.

Because technically your reason for the breakup was still valid. It was your own reaction to the breakup that you had underestimated vastly. You had thought it would somehow be easy to get over him, seeing as you guys hadn't been seeing a lot of each other anyway but now you realized that just knowing he was there for you, knowing that he belonged to you had kept you centered for such a long time.

"Will you have dinner with me tonight?" Jung Kook asked quietly , a look of hopeful interest in his face and you felt like a heel.

"That's alright , I was planning on taking an early day off." The moment you said it, you realized it was true. You had been excessively tired lately and you wanted to catch up on a few winks. Not that you could sleep these days. You missed falling asleep to Taehyung’s voice. Sometimes he had sung soft little lullabies in his deep manly voice and you wished you had recorded a few of them at least.

Sighing you got up and stretched.

It was going to be a long day.

~~~~~~~~~~`

"Are you alright? " Someone was asking you and you realized that you were suddenly flat on your back, faces looming over with mute concern and you struggled to sit up straighter.

What had happened? One minute you had been posing for another photo and the next minute darkness had clouded your senses like a black curtain and here you were.

"We need to get you to a hospital. " Yoongi’s voice came floating and you blinked.

"Oppa?" You asked surprised. Familiar fingers touched your cheek and you smiled as Yoongi’s face came into view. He helped your sit up and you momentarily swayed, leaning heavily on him.

Yoongi sighed.

"I'm taking you the doctor and then home." He whispered.

An hour later you lay on the private VIP room while Yoongi spoke with someone behind the curtain, presumably the doctor.

"I'll tell her." His voice came floating and you felt a bit of foreboding rise inside you.

A few seconds later he came in , looking concerned.

"Are you alright?" He asked, looking upset. You nodded and sat up wincing when the movement pulled on IV line in your wrist.

"What's wrong?" You asked , heart thrumming in fear and he gave you a slightly worrying glance.

"I told the doctor I'll tell this to you but only because I wanted to say something else first."

"Oppa , stop scaring me..."

"Just know that we're going to get through this together, alright? Whatever happens we're going to be there for you. All of us."

I'm going to die, you thought in one rush of breath. I have some untreatable form of cancer that's going to kill me.

"And you don't have to do anything you don't want to. This can stay just between us if you want. "

I'm going to die in less than a month, Oh God, Taehyung...I need you....

"You're pregnant."

Suddenly the cancer didn't seem so bad.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

You poured yourself a glass of milk and lightly peeled the paper off your dinner , a large plate of black bean noodles and Kimchi Fried Rice. No point dieting when you were going to blow up anyway.

Sighing you sat down in front of the French Windows gazing out into Seoul skyline. Rain was lashing the city and rivulets crept down the one way mirror. You watched each one making its way down, its path already decided for it by gravity.

Just as your life was now decided.

Your public life was over, you acknowledged blithely as you stared at the window. Instead of any sort of regret or disappointment you felt an odd sort of relief. You didn't have to formulate an excuse to get out of the whole entertainment industry right now. You could do it without any sort of hassle.

You laughed at that naive notion. Of course there would be hassles. There would be an explosion of epic proportions when this got out. You could imagine all the speculations that would occur regarding the baby's parentage and you could also imagine the colorful epithets which would be hung over your head, as a single mother.

Not just you, your child as well.

Oh, God what had you done.

More importantly, what to tell Taehyung?

You could just imagine what he would say. He would want to marry you at once and you wanted to sob at the unfairness of it. He would toss your child's future in your face and just like every other woman on the planet you would be forced to bend to your man's whim, because the other option would be disgrace in the eyes of society.

Tears slipped and fell and you glanced at herself in the mirror that hung on the nearest wall. You looked tired and haggard. Every bit of your 27 years, your eyes red from unshed tears and your t shirt stained with a bit of the noodle. You lifted the t shirt lightly, glancing at your flat tummy.

You were a little over eight weeks pregnant and you looked no different. You wouldn't be showing for another month at least and you supposed you would have to get your things in order and....

Sighing you tried to switch the thoughts in your head off. You needed to think straight before you contacted Taehyung. Like come up with an iron clad argument regarding why you could have this baby and not have it affect him or his career in any way. An iron clad argument that would convince him that you guys could maybe raise this baby, together , without making any sort of hasty decisions.

The phone rang , shattering your thoughts and you reached for it. It was Yoongi.

"Don't turn on the news." He said, sounding tense. You went ice cold.

Someone found out about the pregnancy , you thought in a panic. My life is over.

You fumbled for the TV Remote.

"Baby, do you hear me... I'm on the way to your place, don't turn the news on before I get there..."

But you already had.

The phone dropped out of your hands as you stared numbly at the television screen.

ACTOR KIM TAEHYUNG ANNOUNCES RELATIONSHIP WITH DRAMA COSTAR , LALISA MANOBAN.

" Oh , well. There's my ironclad argument." You said bleakly, staring at his happy, smiling face as he stood there with his gorgeous, successful new girlfriend.

Author’s Note : This is finished. I’ll update the whole thing today. adsfdgh. this is actually a fic I’d written earlier but I thought it suited tae and jk.... so I re wrote it... :-)

#TAEHYUNG SMUT #taehyung angst #taehyung #bts v #bts smut #bts fics #bts scenarios #jungkook smut #jungkook angst #love triangles

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onlinemarketinghelp · 6 years ago

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Quotacy Review: Get Quick Quotes for Life Insurance https://ift.tt/2H9ojbU

Quotacy is an online marketplace that lets you answer a few very simple questions, without providing your contact information, and quickly get quotes for life insurance and disability insurance from multiple companies.

Life insurance is one of those things a lot of people don’t think about until it’s much too late. If you’re traditionally employed, you might get basic life insurance for free as a standard benefit, but it’s rarely more than $10,000 or $20,000 — maybe enough to pay for a funeral and settling an estate, which isn’t nothing, but won’t do what many people need life insurance to do.

If you were to die in mid-career without adequate life insurance, it could leave your partner, children, pets, or other people you support in a really tough place. Houses might have to be sold and new jobs might have to be found to try to cover the loss of your income. That’s what life insurance is intended for.

Because unlike health insurance, the vast, vast majority of life insurance customers will not die young — life insurance is also surprisingly affordable. If you’re traditionally employed but want supplemental insurance to whatever your benefits package offers, or if you’re a freelancer and need comprehensive insurance, an online marketplace like Quotacy is a great way to compare some of your options.

You can compare Quotacy to Policygenius, an online insurance brokerage which offers a wider variety of insurance products and less customer service.

You can also compare what you find on Quotacy to Haven Life and Ethos, which we’ve also reviewed. Both of those companies offer life insurance directly rather than aggregating quotes, but because they’re fully online they might end up offering even lower prices. (This is an important decision, so take the time to compare everything — both costs and benefits!)

Quick Navigation

Getting a Term Life Insurance Quote — or Actually, a Lot of Quotes

Contact Options and Help

Other Products Quotacy Offers

Who Is Behind Quotacy and Are They a Trustworthy Company?

Final Word

Getting a Term Life Insurance Quote — or Actually, a Lot of Quotes

As a general rule, if you’re a major contributor to your family’s income, you’ll want enough life insurance to replace about 10 years of your salary. In other words, a person making $100,000 a year should insure themselves for $1 million. You might also want to consider enough life insurance to pay off a mortgage or student loans, if relevant. (If you die young, your loans might be forgiven, but enough life insurance to cover your partner’s loans might be a good idea.)

What Quotacy does is to get initial quotes for term life insurance from a variety of carriers and then they allow you to complete your initial application through their app.

Term life insurance is generally the best choice for adults who are concerned about replacing their income for their families during their working years — you can read more about why here. It lets you pick what “term” (span of years) you want to be covered for. So if you expect to work another 20 years, you get life insurance just for that term or period of time, and your family will only get a payout if you die within that period.

When you go to Quotacy, you begin by answering four very basic questions about: age, gender, location, and smoking status. (If that’s one of the four basics . . . if you smoke, you might want to quit, by any means necessary!)

This takes about 10 seconds, so then you move to a second screen which gives you a range of initial quotes. You can play around with sliders here to see how your quotes might change if you want more years covered, a bigger or smaller payout, etc.

Following this, you spend about 60 seconds answering questions about your height and weight, whether you’ve used tobacco or had cholesterol issues, and whether an immediate family member has had heart disease, diabetes, or cancer.

Then you get a list of preliminary quotes from a variety of insurance companies:

At this point, you can play with the sliders again to see how your quotes change as you request more or less coverage:

When you’re ready, you can choose a company and do the preliminary application in about five minutes. This asks more detailed questions about your health history and about other risks (like whether or not you drink or use drugs, and whether or not you fly private planes).

At this point, your application flies off into the ether, or anyway, to Quotacy’s central office. An agent will get in touch with you to get you to sign off on the initial application.

Then you’ll start dealing with the insurance company directly for a phone screen, and you might have to take a medical exam or provide more information like driving records. However, the Quotacy agent will facilitate all of this contact with the insurance company. (They’ll also work with a financial advisor or estate planner if you have one.)

After any of this extra information is provided, you’ll get a final offer from the insurance company. If the final offer is different from the initial quote, you can go back and start a new Quotacy process with another company, or ask your Quotacy agent if you can contest the insurance agency’s offer.

Contact Options and Help

Quotacy is pretty full-service. You can call them, text them, or email them, even if you’re not a customer. The team works on salary, not commission, which means they shouldn’t be pressuring you into buying something that’s not right for your needs.

If they need to contact you, they ask for your preference (call/text/email) and try to accommodate that, unless it’s not possible for technical reasons (can’t attach a document to a phone call!).

If you’re not in great health, Quotacy has an interesting option; they have an in-house underwriter who will look at your health history and help you find an insurance company that might be best for your specific issues. If you have a chronic condition or some other risk factor, some companies might be more willing to work with you at a reasonable price than others, and the in-house underwriter can help with that.

It’s worth mentioning that a number of people who reviewed them on Trustpilot mentioned having previously been denied life insurance because of a chronic condition. Quotacy’s agents, by working with many companies, may really be able to help guide people with issues towards a company that will work with them.

Quotacy seems pretty dedicated to being in touch as much as you want. Unlike some companies that bury their contact info, you can hardly spend time on the Quotacy website without seeing a phone number or email form that offers to put you in touch with a real person quickly.

Other Products Quotacy Offers

Quotacy also offers other products besides their main product of term life insurance.

They do provide quotes for whole life insurance, which we don’t recommend.

Maybe of more interest, they offer quotes for disability insurance. Like term life insurance, this could be incredibly useful if you become disabled and are unable to make the salary you otherwise would. It could also provide for your care, depending on what type of disability you develop.

You can’t get an instant quote for disability insurance. Instead, you answer brief questions about your age, health, occupation/job duties, and salary, and Quotacy employees research options and get back to you in a couple of days.

“Final expense” insurance is a form of whole life targeted at elderly people. It’s cheaper than typical whole life policies because it just aims to provide a small benefit of around $15,000 that covers end-of-life expenses like medical bills and a funeral.

A free account with something called “LegacyShield” is basically an online version of the filing cabinet in your parents’ basement that may or may not have the information on their insurance policies, wills, finances, etc., etc.

Who Is Behind Quotacy and Are They a Trustworthy Company?

Quotacy is a subsidiary of Hallett Financial Group (two of the founders are Halletts), and they’ve been around since 1990, though presumably their website was a lot less slick back then! They’ve really transitioned well to the Internet age. They work with most of the big health insurance companies, as you’ll see if you call up a preliminary quote from them.

They’re not a huge company; you can see photos and capsule bios of all the people you might deal with, including application assistants and insurance agents, on their site.

They have great reviews on Trustpilot which seem in general to especially focus on their customer service. Maybe they’re so nice because they’re based in Minneapolis? Anyway, if you want to deal with real people, they seem like a good option for that.

The best thing about Quotacy, in my opinion, is that their employees work on salary, not commission. I really dislike commission-based models for anything because they give such a big motive to sell the most expensive thing, not the best thing for the customer.

I also like that Quotacy promises not to sell your contact info. When I was buying car insurance a few years ago, I had to give my contact info to a site like this and spent weeks inundated with messages!

Final Word

To be honest, I didn’t start this review with great expectations. I’d never heard of Quotacy and after my car-insurance experience a few years ago I was suspicious about putting my info into another online insurance system.

But the time I spent exploring Quotacy while I wrote this review made me pretty enthusiastic. They don’t give you a hard sell, but rather present you with a lot of options and offer significant customer service focused on answering the questions real people have. As a freelancer, I want to buy life and disability insurance for myself pretty soon and this site has shot to the top of my list of places to search.

The post Quotacy Review: Get Quick Quotes for Life Insurance appeared first on The College Investor.

from The College Investor

You can compare Quotacy to Policygenius, an online insurance brokerage which offers a wider variety of insurance products and less customer service.

Quick Navigation

Getting a Term Life Insurance Quote — or Actually, a Lot of Quotes

Contact Options and Help

Other Products Quotacy Offers

Who Is Behind Quotacy and Are They a Trustworthy Company?

Final Word

Getting a Term Life Insurance Quote — or Actually, a Lot of Quotes

What Quotacy does is to get initial quotes for term life insurance from a variety of carriers and then they allow you to complete your initial application through their app.

Then you get a list of preliminary quotes from a variety of insurance companies:

At this point, you can play with the sliders again to see how your quotes change as you request more or less coverage:

At this point, your application flies off into the ether, or anyway, to Quotacy’s central office. An agent will get in touch with you to get you to sign off on the initial application.

Contact Options and Help

If they need to contact you, they ask for your preference (call/text/email) and try to accommodate that, unless it’s not possible for technical reasons (can’t attach a document to a phone call!).

Other Products Quotacy Offers

Quotacy also offers other products besides their main product of term life insurance.

They do provide quotes for whole life insurance, which we don’t recommend.

Who Is Behind Quotacy and Are They a Trustworthy Company?

They’re not a huge company; you can see photos and capsule bios of all the people you might deal with, including application assistants and insurance agents, on their site.

Final Word

The post Quotacy Review: Get Quick Quotes for Life Insurance appeared first on The College Investor.

https://ift.tt/2IQZUdM March 03, 2019 at 11:15AM https://ift.tt/2TtSj95

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arcticdementor · 4 years ago

Link

Raymond Cattell was one of the early 1900s eminent psychologists. Like Meehl, he had a philosophical bent with some odd ideas in ethics. That ended up getting him into trouble (like yours truly). So I found one of his older books, from 1937, so before World War 2, and decided to give it a shot. Actually, I came across these pro-eugenics books due to tracing to trace the origin of the word dysgenics. Unlike eugenics, it was not coined by the master himself, but came about later.

…

The main research content of the book is actually about a study of children and counting their number of siblings and so on. This stuff is not so interesting and produced the normal dysgenic findings. The main part of the book are the historical and philosophical discussions.

…

On IQ shredders, as we now call them following Spandrell 2013:

Note on Difference of Urban and Rural Intelligence—What is perhaps the most thorough of American surveys (Jones, H. E., et al., 1932, “Environmental Handicap in Mental Test Performance,” Univ. Calif. Public.) shews ten points of I.Q. superiority in the town and concludes “about half of the average difference of ten points I.Q. is attributable to factors other than those derived from the social and educational environment.” With the more recent tests used here the effect of environment would not be so great, indeed it would be generous to allot two points to it, and that because of the accidental circumstance that the town group was already familiar with intelligence tests.For it is a naive supposition that the town environment is more favourable to the development of intelligence. This allowance for town familiarity with tests would give a difference of town and country of five points, which is in agreement with the eventual conclusion on the American results.As is well known, town children are also superior in general physique, stature, etc. This aligns itself with the fact that positive correlation (of a low order) exists between good intelligence and good physique and points to the conclusion that the town’s advantages attract a superior biological sample of the population, though (as I have pointed out in Psychology and Social Progress) the city tends to sterilise and kill the very qualities which it attracts. The country continually supplies the cities with its better men, but the cities do not maintain them. (In this survey, for instance, the average birth rate in the country was 3-62, in the city 3-36—an indication dysgenic in itself.) Consequently, the cities will move towards the present intelligence level of the country.

This is 1937, I remind you.

…

So, averages, and distributions, and tails. This foreshadows later work on the cognitive elite/cognitive capitalism model that Heiner Rindermann has been pushing for some time, and before that smart fraction theory (La Griffe du Lion). It also foreshadows my own work on the S factor the last 7 year or so.

…

Encouragement is given to such critics, by the circumstance that, since the facts are open to everyone’s observation, everyone is a psychologist. The layman is, in any case, inclined to think from unsystematic observation that intelligence varies widely with environmental influences, but he is unable, through lack of training, to separate mental capacity from acquired information and skills. A large book could be filled with popular notions concerning psychology which experiments have shewn to be hopelessly perverse. biologists and philosophers, hopelessly perverse.

Sociologists, economists, biologists and philosophers, moreover, blithely make holiday in the field of psycho—logy, presumably when the confusion of their own subjects becomes too Oppressive, and after arranging statistics concerning psychological facts with which they have no firsthand acquaintance proceed to make “authoritative” statements about mental testing or any other matter which must be fitted into their favourite theories. It is obvious that in psychology, as in medicine, there is a sense which comes from first—hand experience and immersion in the facts. The psychologist studies the parts not from the angle of a political or social theory but as everyday matters of his science, and no psychologist engaged day after day in testing and watching intimately the progress of children and the reactions of adults, doubts that there are two distinct entities—the veneer of education and the inextensible innate capacity. Usually if a tool is faulty the person who has to use it most is the first to complain. It is a striking fact that in this field the people who have least practical experience are the most loudly critical.

So, suppression of such topics did not come first from the fallout of World War 2. This stuff was there before. Indeed, if one reads history, there’s a lot of social psychologists from about 1900 pushing this angle that we still see today.

…

Civilisation, then, is not a thing in itself which can be transported hither and thither and which can live in virtueof its own vigour. It may linger in a preserved state in the dusty pages of books, but it lives again only in relation to living flesh and blood. The noblest thoughts of Greece went begging for a home when the germ plasm carried by Homer, Plato and Pheidippides had died. Similarly, the sweetness and light of the best ideas of today will remain but a haunting reproach if the brain of the race takes on mean proportions. Civilisation must be thought of as a melody played on the living brains of men. However magnificent may be the music which past andpresent geniuses have composed it can never be rendered fully on instruments which have lost the original complement of strings.

…

The national suicide club:

The Haslams live in an atmosphere of assertive over-compensation, trained to social climbing. Their bridge game, product of intensive training, is the terror of the neighbourhood, whilst their dominance on the committee of the suburban tennis club is unquestioned. In clothes and cars they go from strength to strength; in fact, they and their like are so successful that in two or three generations they will be as extinct as the Dodo. Their title should be the National Suicide Club and they spread, wherever they go, the false values, the sounding rules and strangling regulations of their set. As the carriers of a fatal and contagious moral disease the members of our Suicide Clubs should be isolated.

The problem of national survival is that of on meeting the one flank the blindly driven hordes of Civilisation Wreckers, Unlimited, and on the other, the insidious contagion of the National Suicide Club.

…

On modern decadence:

This is not to advocate the solution that when culture presses too heavily upon its bearers the repression must be removed in a wholesale fashion. Through the comparatively high standard of suppression characteristic of this country we do at least keep our fools silenced, inactive and without followers, when some other countries are noisy with foolhardy new schemes and sentiments.

Yet it is obvious that the modern world needs a discriminating provision of new loyalties and sentiments if it is to have a healthy and vigorous emotional life, if it is to adjust to new conditions and if it is to avoid suicide. Without them culture is stagnant and the individuals composing a society suffering from social melancholia become miserable and lifeless under the sheer weight of repression. Deprived of satisfying purpose they turn at best to overloading their esthetic satisfactions, at worst to the opium of sheer sensuality. Then there spring up in society devices catering for such substitute satisfactions, at first in the few, but later, through the contagion of habit and fashion, in the majority. Thus the false psychological habits and values, begun as a pisaller, end by having a positive life of their own as agents whereby the instinctive energies of society may be deflected from useful biological ends.

When society becomes shot through with these false, substitute values the young acquire them with their frustrations, before marriage, and find themselves after marriage already possessed of the compensatory values, the satisfying investments and fixations of emotional energy which leave no room for interest in children. Both through these psychological habits themselves and through the economic burden which they occasion there is neither will nor material facility for having children. They must have cinemas, excessive social engagements and motor-cars rivalling those of their neighbours; but children “get on their nerves,” as do all things which impinge on a person’s life without evoking an adequate positive emotional response.

#emil o w kirkegaard #book review #raymond cattell

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droneseco · 6 years ago

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Pimax 5K Plus Ultrawide VR Headset Offers a Glimpse Into the Future

Our verdict of the Pimax 5K Plus: With highest field of view you can currently buy and one of the highest resolutions, this is a premium headset and priced accordingly. You'll need to be upgrading from a Vive, or buy separate basestations and controllers though; and if you wear glasses, wait until they've fixed the comfort issues. 710

One of the biggest criticisms of VR today is that it feels like putting on a pair of ski goggles: you end up with unnatural black circle around the periphery of your vision. The Pimax 5K Plus is a new breed of “ultrawide” field of view headsets, which take up almost your entire vision, rendering a scene much more as you’d see in real life. It’s a tantalising glimpse into the future of VR, but is it ready for the present? Read on to find out exactly what we thought of the Pimax 5K Plus, available to buy now for $700.

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Just the Headset

Before we look at hardware specifics, it’s worth pointing out that right now you can only purchase the headset itself. For a working VR experience, you’ll also need at least one Steam VR Lighthouse Basestation (v1 or 2), and motion controllers.

So if you own an or purchase new an original HTC Vive full kit, you can upgrade the headset to the Pimax 5K Plus; it is fully compatible with the older Lighthouse 1.0 Basestations and Vive Wands. Or you can purchase a new set of Index Controllers and Index Basestations (v2.0) directly from Valve. Either way, this is going to add around $600 to the total purchase price.

If you’re planning on using the Pimax exclusively for racing or flight sims, you cough get away with a single Basestation at the front of your rig and skip the controllers entirely. A second hand Basestation could be purchased for less than $100.

Pimax plans to release their own Basestations and controllers at a later date, and we can expect those to be available separately or in a package. However, no further details on availability or timing of these are yet available.

Pimax 5K Plus Specifications

Resolution: 2560 x 1440 per panel

Horizontal FOV: 120-170 degrees

Screens: Custom Dual LCDs, 90Hz refresh rate.

Lens: Custom Fresnel with physical IPD adjustment. Eye relief distance is fixed.

Tracking: SteamVR Lighthouse (Basestations not included, but required)

Audio: 3.5mm stereo port

Price: $699 direct from Pimax, headset only ($799 on Amazon US)

Headstrap: Fabric, no built-in headphones

Weight: 514g total (including strap)

Connections: USB2.0+ and DP1.4

If you’re not a fan of the black levels and colors offered by LCD screens, a 5K XR model is also available with OLED screens for $200 more. The resolution offered by the Pimax 5K Plus is bested only by the HP Reverb (at 2560 x 2560 per eye). But to drive that display at full resolution, you’ll need an incredibly powerful GPU, like a 2080Ti. Testing on a mid-range 1080, I needed to downsample to 0.75 for acceptable performance.

The lenses, and canted panels are absolutely massive. There’s a large sweet spot, and the displays are crisp. Though the so-called “screen-door-effect” has never really bothered me, I couldn’t find any on the headset even when looking specifically for it. The only downsides to these displays are the slightly washed-out colors and greyer blacks. For those who love playing horror games or Elite Dangerous, the murky blacks will be more of an issue. For general VR usage, I felt that the field of view more than made up for it.

This zoomed-in photograph taken through the lenses should give some idea of the clarity found with such a high-resolution headset.

You Really Can’t Wear Glasses

Out of the box, you won’t be able to wear glasses of any kind with the Pimax, as the lenses simply sit too close to your eyes. In fact, even some users who don’t wear glasses have complained that it touches their eye-lashes uncomfortably. For testing, I grabbed a spare VR cover to use as additional padding, thereby pushing the lenses further away from my eyes. It worked but was very awkward to adjust every time, and added at least a minute or two onto setup time for each VR session.

My solution to use the Pimax 5K Plus with glasses was just another layer of padding, but it took time to adjust each session.

The fabric head strap is similar to that on the original Vive, and includes no built-in audio solution at all. You’ll need to provide your own pair of headphones or earbuds. The headset itself weighs 514g, which is relatively lightweight considering the massive screens on the front, and I had no issues once it was on my head. Pimax has promised to make both a rigid strap with integrated headphones and thicker facial interfaces for glasses wearers at some point, but these are not yet available at the time of writing, nor do we have a timeline on their production. We’ll update this review when we know more.

If you own the original Deluxe Audio Strap for your HTC Vive, and have access to a 3D printer, you can print some adaptors.

The Field of View is Incredible

Total immersion is hard to achieve, but visually at least, even the normal (roughly 150-degree) FOV setting of the Pimax is simply breathtaking. There is a small amount of distortion at the periphery, but nothing noticeable. On the largest FOV setting, the distortion is significant enough to be slightly distracting, but I suspect continued use would minimize this.

Most of my time was spent in No Man’s Sky, where the added field of view makes for even more impressive vistas of imagined worlds.

Field of view is not an exact science though. It’ll depend very much on your face shape, IPD, and how far the lenses are from your eyes. Those who don’t wear glasses and have a normal IPD will find the greatest benefits. Still, even with the extra padding for my glasses, I was blown away by the difference.

Experiencing an ultrawide FOV is truly a moment of “oh, wow – this is how VR really should be”.

PiTool and SteamVR

Despite using the StreamVR Lighthouse tracking, the Pimax 5K Plus is a sort of hybrid SteamVR headset. It requires the installation of a third party software and driver tool: PiTool.

The PiTool software is best described as functional for the most part, and even integrates the Revive drivers to offer direct access to Oculus Store games. It also replicates some core functions of SteamVR, like pairing controllers and defining a boundary. More importantly, it allows you to configure aspects of the screen such as contrast, brightness, and FOV.

Presumably, the software and additional drivers are needed in order to run a display with such a high field of view, which no other SteamVR headsets are as yet capable of. However, requiring third-party drivers does present some issues. For instance, when I initially tested the PiTool software, it wasn’t compatible with the new Valve Index controllers. It seems the PiTool software is not passing through the controller definitions natively, so SteamVR couldn’t actually recognize Valve’s own controllers when paired with the Pimax headset. Running the beta version of the PiTool software fixed this and a number of other graphical glitches I was experiencing.

For some games, a little extra configuration is required in the PiTool software, such as enabling compatibility mode. Even then, I experienced some slight popup distance glitches for objects in No Man’s Sky, which weren’t present when testing on the Valve Index. There weren’t game-breaking by any means, but do show that there’s entirely separate render pipeline here.

The PiTool is functional then, but a bit of a kludge. It would be nice if it wasn’t needed, and perhaps in future SteamVR will offer native support for high-FOV headsets.

This is The Future – But Maybe Not The Present

If I haven’t already conveyed this enough: the increased field of view is absolutely breathtaking. Other headsets pale in comparison. If you have a powerful enough gaming PC, if money is no object, and if you don’t wear glasses – this could well be the headset you’re looking for. Existing Vive owners can easily upgrade to the Pimax 5K Plus.

At around $700 though, it’s not the best value for money. For those not upgrading, you need to add on the cost of Basestations and controllers. To purchase new Valve Index Controllers and matching Basestations, you’d be looking at a combined total cost of closer to $1300. That’s beyond the limit of most VR enthusiasts, and you still get a subpar experience thanks to the poor quality head strap and lack of integrated headphones.

I’d be lying though if I didn’t say that overall I’ve had a somewhat frustrating experience with the Pimax 5K Plus. You may have a better time, and I’d love to hear from you in the comments. But for me, the added faff of trying to get comfortable with extra facial padding and putting on my own pair of headphones just doesn’t justify the increased field-of-view. The extra few minutes of setup time – or more, if you need to tweak settings for a new game that perhaps isn’t displaying properly – is too much. SteamVR isn’t exactly a robust system at the best of times; adding in a third-party software tool increases the odds that you’re gonna have a bad time. For every day VR, this won’t be my go-to headset.

The Pimax 5K Plus offers a breathtakingly immersive experience; that much is true. But it’s not quite there yet on aspects other than the display. By the time it is ready, there may be other options. Still, at least you have time to save up for that inevitable graphics card upgrade you’re going to also need.

Enter the Competition!

Pimax 5K Plus VR Headset Giveaway

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Pimax 5K Plus Ultrawide VR Headset Offers a Glimpse Into the Future published first on http://droneseco.tumblr.com/

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humilhe-blog · 7 years ago

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topmixtrends · 7 years ago

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IN HIS CELEBRATED 2005 book-length essay, Graphs, Maps, Trees: Abstract Models for Literary History, Franco Moretti drew attention to the relevance of diagrams and graphs for understanding the larger forces that shape literature. Such models, Moretti argued, can provide us with quantitatively supported insights into the emergence (and fall) of literary genres across vast expanses of time and space. Consider the rise of the novel — not just Ian Watt’s 18th-century British tradition but the narrative genre in late-18th-century Japan, in mid-19th-century Spain, or in mid-20th-century Nigeria. What might computer-generated models teach us about the historical behavior of a corpus so enormous and diverse that it exceeds the ability of a single reader to navigate it?

As it turns out, quite a lot. For the “rise of the novel” follows a pattern that is at once stunningly predictable and revelatory of the broader market forces shaping literary history. A rapid growth in the number of book publications produces a reorientation of the reading public toward contemporary titles, which in turn gives rise to a balkanization of literature into genre niches (detective novels, sporting novels, school stories, et cetera). That pattern, however, only becomes visible from the panoramic vantage point of computer-generated graphs. Hence the need for “distant reading” — and, with it, the return to structure and form as central preoccupations of literary criticism.

Increasingly, literary fiction and nonfiction have made explicit use of graphs, maps, and diagrams. Jennifer Egan’s 2010 novel A Visit from the Goon Squad includes a chapter in PowerPoint; Paul Beatty’s The Sellout (2016) features a zoning map drawn up by the novel’s main protagonist; Richard Powers’s The Overstory (2018) charts tree rings, nature’s own way of diagramming time. There is, of course, nothing new about this literary interest in maps and diagrams. Authors such as Borges, Joyce, and Faulkner first made maps a central thematic for modern literature, as in the well-known Borges fable of an emperor ordering a map so detailed and precise that it ends up covering the very terrain that it charts. Yet, whereas these modernist writers still presumed a more or less stable reality underpinning their representations of it, the diagrams haunting contemporary writing are, more often than not, born simultaneously with the text.

Such is the case with the diagrams and images in Dustin Parsons’s Exploded View, a volume of essays loosely structured around the theme of fatherhood. If Moretti’s graphs afford an insight into the vast and global, then the diagrams featured in Exploded View constitute something of a dialectical opposite: here, the humdrum reality of domestic life is revealed to be filled with unexpected complexities and life lessons.

The “exploded view” alluded to in the title refers to the diagrams in machinery manuals, where all the parts of a to-be-assembled object are “blown up” into a single image. Parsons’s father, a Kansas oilfield worker, had many such manuals in his shop, and several of the essays in Exploded View are devoted to childhood reminiscences of the author assisting him on the job. As with Seamus Heaney’s father poem “Digging,” Exploded View is driven, in part, by a homology between the manual labor of the father and the writing labor of the son. Throughout the volume, one gets the sense of being inside the author’s shop, complete with rhetorical tools and other such machinery lying about, all as magical as the paternal equipment he describes.

Moreover, by opening each of these essays with “exploded view” diagrams of machinery, Parsons renders visible the fact that so much of our childhood experience exists for us as images. Our personal narratives emerge from the stimulus of a single snapshot, a single scene, a particular visual image, lodged in our brains and just waiting to be seized and (re)assembled. The author’s father, a taciturn man, speaks to him in such images, more so than he does in words. The son, meanwhile, seems to have inherited at least some of that quietude — for, although a man of words, he, too, is taciturn (“[s]ome of my greatest regrets are my ill-advised silences”).

The book features other diagrams as well. A childhood reminiscence of a tornado touchdown in Western Kansas is juxtaposed with an image of a Fujita scale, the metric used to measure tornadoes. This scale, Parsons observes, registers the “force” that a tornado has, not its size or velocity: “The funnel size or speed of the storm does not matter. We measure a tornado by its damage.” One is inclined to use this method to evaluate the author’s own writing: most of these essays owe their appeal not to their breadth or flow but rather to the “damage” they do — that is to say, to their uncanny ability to move readers, leaving us with a lingering impression of a figure, a landscape, an object. None of these essays are very long, and most explore thematic material that is quite ordinary, even mundane in character. Yet by the time you are finished with them, something about that ordinariness has been revealed in a novel way, the components fully laid out, as if in an exploded view.

Take the essay “Harvest,” which describes the planting season in an unnamed rural town. Not until the end does the narrator truly reveal his personal involvement, as he watches in awe, from atop a grain elevator, the field hands’ celebration of the Fourth of July. “It was a first job, and I thought they’d all be like that,” Parsons writes. “Thought they’d all end in such billows.” The point, for the adult writer looking back, seems to be that work, in the present, is all too often a daily grind devoid of such spectacle and show. But to adopt such a nostalgic reading is to miss the fact that this first job, too, is already mired in routine. This, at least, is what the hum of anaphoras steering the essay seems to suggest: “The grain is planted by tractor, tucked in with a prow and a drop and a grating for cover. There is nitrogen. There is water. More than once there are prayers.”

Neither, for that matter, does the Fourth of July spectacle, upon a second reading, carry all that much hallowing weight. Or, better put, the glimmer of the festivities is partially obscured. Along the way, the essay introduces us to two unnamed characters who are briefly lifted above the undifferentiated crowd of field hands: there is “the classmate who is a fuckup” and the “older kid,” who “graduated a few years ago but will never leave town.” When Parsons returns to these two figures later in the essay, it is in the midst of his description of the fireworks finale. “Later,” Parsons writes with a sudden leap in time that gives so many of these essays their volume and depth, “the older kid is convicted of rape, the fuckup is killed on his motorcycle, and there is a realization that their fate wasn’t so clear.”

Exploded View registers, throughout, an awareness of the relative insufficiency — even futility — of words. The proliferation of diagrams seems to suggest that words will somehow always fall short of the image, that — to evoke Keats’s urn — the “unheard melodies” of the image or art object will forever be “sweeter” than what words can articulate. Time and again in these essays, as if to capture that point, the image precedes the text. Before we begin reading the essay “Pumpjack,” for example, we are given the exploded view of an actual pumpjack, with the text skirting the image in numbered sentences as if listing various assembly parts:

This is the doghouse, this is the pipe rack, so on and so forth, and we walked through the field naming things that sounded like the things they were. […] Why suddenly did every signifier sound and look like its signified?

The pumpjack becomes a symbol for childhood itself, a time when there is as yet no dislocation between signifier and signified, when life can still be experienced with an image-like holism, as in the exploded-view diagram that precedes the essay. The very act of naming, the emergence of language, is already what puts us at a remove from things. Such is the burden shouldered by every writer: like Adam naming the animals in Eden, he understands that there is no writing without loss — indeed, that writing itself is the agent of loss.

It is no surprise, then, that death, both symbolic and real, hovers like a shadow over these essays. A coyote is beheaded by the pumpjack’s counterweights (“The enduring image I will always have of the pumpjack is how it takes life”); a street dog appears one day and then disappears for good; the neighbor across the street dies in sweltering India. And, finally, the son faces the mortality of the parent: “My greatest fear for my father is that he never reaches that age where he is able to retire. My greatest fear is that my time to turn over his shop will be postmortem.”

Time and again in these essays, the simultaneity of text and diagram generates a rhetorical and emotional weight. But it is not until the closing essay that we witness the full effect. As the author comments on his relative inability to “see” color, the silhouette of a cardinal is drawn on the opposite page. “Your sons have known their colors for as long as they could talk,” Parsons writes. “Your wife shares their names with the boys: periwinkle, magenta, coral, café au lait.” At first, the reader is unsure what “color” in this context means. Surely, the choice of a bird on the opposite page would suggest something without ties to racial identity and/or politics. There is no “color line” in the natural world, only color. But, as the essay takes you deeper into its subject, and as the cardinal silhouette assumes greater shape, the political and racial stakes become clearer. “Your entire family has an eye for color that you simply don’t have,” Parsons observes. “Obviously it is because it never has had to.” By the time the reader reaches the end of the essay, he understands that the hand-drawn silhouette of the cardinal is not meant to be an illustration at all. Indeed, as a silhouette, it does not even have color. Instead, what Parsons seems to be asking readers — and, indeed, himself — is something like this: Have you ever pictured what it means to be of color? Are you able to draw the fault lines of racism and bigotry? Can you imagine what this does to others?

Such are the explosive questions with which Exploded View ends. It is difficult, upon closing this book, not to feel a sense of sadness when seeing how far the contemporary political climate has drifted away from the kind of empathy Parsons elicits and displays. That he does so with unwavering minimalist precision and a keen sense for the rhythms of everyday life puts him in the tradition of lyrical poets such as Emily Dickinson and William Carlos Williams. As the latter knew, so much depends upon a red wheelbarrow, or a red cardinal for that matter — that is, on our ability to imagine the strain (and pain) of others.

Birger Vanwesenbeeck, a father, will be teaching at Bosporus University in Istanbul in the fall.

The post Charts of Childhood, Maps of Family appeared first on Los Angeles Review of Books.

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inexcon · 8 years ago

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RSI Comm-Link: Collision Course - Part II

Radu Ghazi settled into the bunk, letting the mattress conform underneath him. He was impressed by the support. Most ship designers couldn’t care less about mattress strength. They seemed to spend all their time pouring credits and attention into the sexier aspects of the ships; the hull, the guns, the engines. The marketing points, he’d once heard them called. That was back on Prime, in some high class bar that he had no business being in. The thing these companies didn’t seem to grasp was that when you spend months on the drift, a comfortable mattress could save your life just as well as an armored hull.

The airlock lift hissed and opened. A short man in an expensive but ill-fitted flightsuit rose into view on the lift near the bunks. The man turned towards Radu.

Radu snapped off a shot with his pistol. The energy round punched through the small man’s faceplate and popped into his head. He dropped in a heap and was still. A thin strand of smoke rose from the wound.

Radu climbed out of the bunk, dragged the body off the lift and took an appraising look around the interior of the Constellation. He might have to buy one of these when he gets the credits.

He hit the descend button on the lift. The platform shook gently and began to descend.

Outside, the sun was just beginning to rise on Daymar. Swirls of dust danced in the predawn light. Radu crossed the landing platform, keeping an eye on the dark buildings dotted around the edge of the outpost complex.

Based on his recon, the target (learning their names just muddled his thinking) was always the first one up, so he wasn’t expecting any witnesses, but you had to be ready for anything. That type of flexibility had seen him through some pretty dicey situations.

Radu trudged towards the jagged peak behind which he’d parked his ship. Gravel crunched underneath his boots as he glanced back at the closest building. A faded logo for Rayari Inc. was barely visible under the weathered dirt. He’d heard the company mentioned on the spectrum from time to time, but had no idea what it really did, even less of what it would be doing all the way out here.

What do you gotta do to get sent out here? Radu wondered as he climbed the hill. Trying to figure out the stories that led people to where they were was one of his favorite hobbies. Six years in the Bremen militia watching people come and go provided a lot of opportunities for people watching. That was a long time ago, however.

He reached the top and did a thorough scan around the outpost to make sure no one had stirred. The light from Stanton’s star had now crept across the horizon. The moon was peaceful and quiet.

Radu glanced back at the Constellation waiting on the pad, wondered briefly about how long it would be before anyone discovered the body he left inside, then turned and walked down to his own ship. The old Gladius had been his father’s, the same model as the one his old man had flown back in the service. Radu and his dad had picked it up at a reclamation sale and spent two years fixing it up. When Radu joined the militia, his dad passed the ship onto him.

Moments later, after the flare of his thrusters had merged with the canopy of stars, the outpost was still again.

The credits hit his account by the time Radu entered the main sprawl of Grim HEX. The central hub of the dilapidated station was bathed in the flickering light of the massive community screen that loomed above. What had once been used by the station administration to post updates, job opportunities, ads, local events, et cetera, was now a wash of digital noise, fractured imagery and the occasional Nine Tails symbol.

He didn’t understand why the outlaw pack felt the need to take over the signs. It’s not like there was any confusion that they were running this place now. Looking around, he counted eight armored thugs bearing Nine Tails tags, fully loaded and looking for trouble.

A junkie raced out of a nearby abandoned storefront with that feverish excitement that comes right after scoring a hit. Radu weaved out of his way and watched him disappear down one of the winding back halls. Turns out Radu wasn’t the only one watching. He met the gaze of a pair of squatters dressed in ragged oil-stained clothes. Their hands twitched sporadically. They seemed to be waiting to see if Radu was going to move on the junkie. When Radu turned away, they skulked down the hall after their prey.

Ol’ 38 was pretty empty, so Radu could grab a seat by the end of the bar. The bitter old man wasn’t working the bar today, it was that kid, the one who looked like one bad day away from the junkie Radu just saw.

“Get you somethin’?” he asked as he polished up a dirty glass.

“Gin and Pips,” Radu responded.

The kid nodded and slowly started to make the drink. Radu couldn’t help but watch him check each and every bottle in the speed rail until he found whatever cheap gin they had. Then he checked three freezers before he could find a can of Pips. The mixture was even more baffling to him.

Finally, the kid put the glass of mostly gin in front of Radu.

“Let me know if that’s okay,” he said with a tinge of hope.

Radu took a sip and winced. It was a lot of gin.

“Yeah, sure. It’ll do.”

The kid bartender grinned, gave a thumbs up, then went back to “clean” more glasses.

Radu brought up his mobi and skimmed through the headlines on the spectrum, but it was just more of the same: fear and money — the two engines that seemed to drive all of Humanity.

“Hey there, chief.”

Radu looked up from his mobi. There was no mistaking that voice. Madrigal was a two-bit thug for the NovaRiders. Rumor was that Madrigal used to be CCS, the civilian division of Hurston’s corporate security, but was let go for being too violent. Collections were his specialty, which unfortunately put Radu on his radar. Two of his enforcers were waiting by the door, presumably there to keep Radu from making a break for it.

“Hey, Ayrs,” Madrigal said as he settled onto the seat next to Radu. “Lemme get a Rust.”

The kid behind the bar smiled and spent another protracted amount of time trying to identify the right bottle.

In the meantime, Madrigal let out a theatrical sigh and turned to face Radu, who simply stared ahead this whole time.

“I hear you might have something for me.”

“Yeah?” Radu replied and took a sip of his drink. The ice had cut down the potency of the gin. Or maybe it was the growing anger …

“I heard from a person who heard from a person that you just pulled off a ghost job.” Madrigal stared at Radu, a smug grin on his face. “I mean, you know what a social guy I am. All the friends I got.”

Radu didn’t say anything. Madrigal watched him.

“I’m waiting,” he finally said.

“The credits just transferred. I was gonna send ’em.” Radu brought up his mobi and sent the pay to whatever dummy account the NovaRiders had set up for collections. He watched his own account drop down to double-digits.

“Good, real good.” Ayrs delivered a glass of Rust. Madrigal immediately downed it and checked his mobi. He did not look impressed. “Looking a little short.”

“That’s what they were paying.” Radu took another sip. “You don’t like the rate, take it up with them.”

Madrigal grabbed Radu by the back of the neck and slammed his head to the bar. Everyone in the bar jumped at the sound, but nobody did anything. The kid bartender turned away to look for more glasses to clean.

“Let’s pause a sec and recap. You owe us, so we own you. You stop paying? You die. You try to run? You die. Don’t like it? Maybe you shouldn’t have done what you done. So mind the goddamn tone with me. You’re alive because you’re useful and believe me, that can change real quick.” Suddenly, the smug grin was back. “Alright. Good talk. You got two days left to pay us for this month. I’m sure you’ll work it out.”

Madrigal grabbed Radu’s glass and downed that too.

“Thanks for the drink.”

Madrigal left. No one looked at him as he strode out of the bar. The two lunks of muscle by the door followed him out.

Radu sat up. After a few moments, the kid bartender wandered over like nothing had happened.

“Another?”

Radu shook his head and hit the job board on his mobi instead. As he scanned through the random and anonymous jobs that populated the local servers, one headline jumped out at him.

“I messed up.”

The job seemed simple enough: retrieve a NavDrive from a wreck and drop it off to get wiped. The money was right too, but it was something more. The offer was written with a desperation Radu could relate to.

He took the job. Moments later, all the relevant data flooded to his mobi.

Radu stopped by his hab to pull his flight suit and guns. Speed grind music hammered through the walls on one side. The heavy distortion and propulsive beat almost covered the screaming argument that was raging on the other.

He pulled on the chestpiece of his armor and strapped it into place, when he suddenly stopped. Radu slumped down on the edge of the bed and looked at the tiny room around him that had become ‘home.’ He picked out all the tiny details; the days-old foodstuff bags piling up in the corner, the old blood stains on the walls, all of it, and looked at them like he was seeing them for the first time.

The weight of the past six months came pressing down on him. He barely recognized himself anymore. How could he have strayed so far from who he used to be?

All the guilt, frustration and anger swirled around his head until finally, a single thought pushed to the surface: it’s time to change.

He’d do this job. Whatever it took to get him a little breathing room until his next payment was due, but he’d use that time to escape, to find a way out of the noose that was slowly strangling him.

One way or another, Radu decided, he would be free.

Radu weaved his way through the halls of Grim HEX, past the squatters and Nine Tails killers, the broken doors with leaking atmo, and headed towards his ship.

Outside the airlock to his pad, Madrigal was shaking down some other poor sap for whatever creds she had kicking around. Radu hit the button for the airlock and waited. Madrigal finally noticed him.

“Safe flying,” Madrigal yelled with a smirk.

The airlock finished cycling and the door hissed open. Radu stepped inside and punched the button. The outer door finally opened, revealing his ship.

He stocked the rifles and climbed into the pilot’s seat. The canopy struggled to close while he powered on the various ship systems. The multi-displays flickered to life while the engines started to hum. He struck the thrusters and felt the first lurch of movement as the skids lifted off the deck. He checked for an open flight path. The space around Grim HEX was notorious for lazy outlaws trying to score easy kills from pilots who thought they were ‘safe.’

Lift fast, clear fast was the mantra. Radu spotted an empty route out of the asteroid cluster and flashed the engines. The G’s hit his chest as the ship punched out away from the station.

The light fighter effortlessly weaved through the massive asteroids, dancing slowly through the void. The scans were clear, but Radu did visual sweeps to see if any would-be ambushers were pulling low-sigs to get close. Satisfied he was alone, he input the coordinates for the retrieval job. It was still in the asteroids around Yela, but on the far side, so he’d need to quantum around the moon before he could get a straight shot.

The first orbital marker selected, the quantum drive spun up and kicked him into a blur. The surrounding Stanton system turned into a smear of light until the drive automatically dropped him out. He repositioned the ship to the next marker and quantumed again.

Minutes later, he descended into the asteroid belt towards his coordinates. The scans were clear, but Radu slowed anyway. No sense wandering into a trap in case the job had been shopped to other pilots. Sure enough, he started to see scattered pieces of debris, leading him to the decimated wreck of a Connie.

He began to a wide sweep around the wreckage to make sure he was truly alone.

That’s when he saw the ragged Buccaneer parked up outside with its power on, lights shining into the wreck, and no pilot to be seen.

Damn, he thought. I really didn’t want to have to kill anyone today.

TO BE CONTINUED …

SURVEY

It seems that our two main characters, Radu and Clara, are about to cross paths and we want your help in deciding what happens next. Take the survey below and let us know how you think the action should unfold. (If you need a refresher on what happened in Part One of Collision Course you can read it here.) The poll will close Friday, August 18th at 6:00pm PST.

#RSI.CommLink.Repost

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louisdwilliams · 8 years ago

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5 Best Small & Portable Electric Skateboards

Believe it or not, small skateboards are actually quite a rare occurrence on the market. That is probably due to small (read hardware-inferior) models not being cost effective for their manufacturers so they took the easier road and just specialized in making big ones. While that’s true for most of todays’ electric skateboard manufacturers, there are still a few companies that specialize in making miniature, lightweight ones. With more and more people aiming to get their hands on a lightweight model that’s easy to carry around by hand when it runs out of juice, I’m pretty sure the big-board trend will vanish. Until that happens, here’s a short list of top 5 best small electric skateboards available on the market!

5. Dynacraft Surge

Surge is pretty much an old-school skateboard with simplistic deck very similar to those popular models from the 90’s. You could find those in virtually every basement across the USA since late 90’s and early 2000’s are considered as the pinnacle of skating. Nowadays, the skating community is slowly (but surely) moving away from the classical models with new, superior designs, so we could consider Dynacraft’s Surge a modern-day dinosaur. With that being said, let’s see what is this dyno all about!

Other than its old-school design, Dynacraft Surge doesn’t really have that much good things going on… other than its dirt-cheap price tag. With that in mind, it comes as no surprise that this little guy can go only 6mph which is extremely slow, and that’s even an understatement. In addition to that, the supported payload capacity hovers around 150 pounds (don’t use it if you are over 145lbs to stay on the safe side) which isn’t that miraculous either… but still better than Alouette (more on that later on). Actually, come to think of it, Surge’s main selling points are apparently the minimalistic old school design and the dirt-cheap price. I don’t see any other virtues but that. Unfortunately, due to the lack of small models on the market, Surge managed to get on the list at the number 5 spot.

4. Blitzart Mini Flash

This 28-inch model features a sleek design and high quality Polyurethane wheels (76-inch is the size), making sure its buyers realize what a stylish option it is. It is similarly priced as the Surge, with just a couple of dollars between the two. Still, Blitzart Mini Flash offers much better hardware allowing it to perform superior in comparison to Dynacraft’s “masterpiece”.

This stylish electric skateboard’s specification sheet claims it can reach up to 12 miles of range on a single charge. I’ve personally tested this model and can assure you that the only way this number is accurate is if it’s been measured by having no one on top of it. Things aren’t that much worse in reality. Blitzart Mini Flash can still go up to 10 miles if you’re not that heavy, but don’t even think about reaching 12. Top speed is actually pretty good and beats Surge by a mile (it’s just a figure of speech, Blitzart actually beats Surge by way more than just a mile). More precisely, this electric skateboard can go as fast as 10 mph, even though the spec sheet claims it can reach roughly 12mph. Combine that with a solid quality grip tape (with a hi-def printed logo of Blitzart on it) and a genuinely intuitive remotee controller and you’ll get yourself a proper small electric skateboard for dirt cheap.

3. Alouette

Let’s start off by saying that Alouette is a weird model. A really weird model actually. I’ve already mentioned this somewhere above but I have to mention It again, just to make sure you do not repeat the same mistake I did a couple of months ago. You see, while I was carefully reading through the specs and features of this little fella, I did not notice it says it can support ONLY 120 POUNDS. Without that information, I hurried up and ordered it. When I got it, I jumped on it and I heard an immediate clack sound coming from the deck. I quickly jumped down from it, went to my home office and realized it had a ridiculous weight limit and is meant only for children. With that out of the way, let’s see can Alouette improve its initial bad impression.

The deck is made out of 5 maple wood layers but it is not nearly as durable and flexible as it might seem at first. While it is incredibly lightweight (just 7.7 pounds), the fact that it sports just a 350W motor should have been a deal breaker for me… but no, I went ahead and bought it despite that. Moving forward, Alouette features a solid 2200mAh battery with fast charging technology that lasts up to 6 miles. Additionally, it also sports 80A Polyurethane wheels which are sturdy enough but won’t offer anything special to be honest. All in all, if you’re looking to buy a cheap, small electric skateboard for your kids, Alouette is a solid choice. On the contrary, if you’re looking for a model to suit yourself, steer away from this one!

2. Acton Blink Lite

Finally, we have a skateboard that works well across all departments, unlike all of the previously featured ones. This just proves my point about the lack of (good) mini electric skateboard models on the market, but as I’ve already said in the introductory chapter, I really think that will change in the near future. With that hope still desperately blooming through the entirety of this list, I would like to tell you more about Blink Lite by Acton, an interesting electric skateboard with plenty of good things under the deck!

Moving onward to the actual Blink Lite, I’m proud to say that it’s the worlds lightest (good) electric skateboard, weighing in at only 7.5 pounds. In addition to its amazing weight (or the lack of it haha), Blink Lite also sports some damn fine specifications as well. Believe it or not, this little fella can reach a top speed of up to 10mph. What’s a little less surprising is its maximum range of roughly 5 miles. I mean, it’s not that short, but not that breathtakingly long either. Golden middle, some would say. Another golden thing is its excellent Canadian maple deck which is surprisingly flexible and durable. It is topped off by a firm layer of grip tape with beautifully simple graphics that make sure Blink becomes a well-known brand in the industry. With all of that in mind, I’m pretty sure you realize that this little fella is, by far, the best model we had on this list up to this point.

1. Maxfind

And finally, we have come to the ultimate small electric skateboard that aims to provide you with superior performance that you could not even think was possible from a medium sized (roughly 30-inches) skateboard. True, it’s not your typical miniature skateboard if you include its tail and nose in the numbers. If you do, it turns out to roughly 38 inches. For the sake of this article, let’s cut the length story here and focus on what really matters and that’s the actual skateboard and its respective performance.

Coming in at just 12 pounds, Maxfind is a pretty lightweight model that’s going to suit people looking for easy-to-carry options. Moving onto its specifications, I’m proud to say that this thing can go as fast as 17mph in ideal conditions (realistically 15mph which is still not half bad). Moreover, it sports the well-known Samsung 18650 Lithium-ion battery that’s able to supply power for roughly 10 miles on a single charge (it features the quick charge technology of course and takes only an hour to fully charge). This will greatly depend on the user’s weight. Considering Maxfind can take up to 220 pounds, the max range and top speed will significantly vary from person to person. With that being said, there’s just one more thing that I’d like to add to this one and that’s the IP65 waterproof certificate which means you can use this bad boy under mild rain without worrying about breaking it.

Conclusion

As I have already mentioned above, there are not that many small electric skateboards available on the market. For what reason? I don’t know… Apparently, people feel more comfortable skating on bigger boards which, presumably, provide them with superior stability and generally better overall performance. With those words, I would like to cut the article here and end it, wishing you all the best on skateparks all around the globe.

The post 5 Best Small & Portable Electric Skateboards appeared first on ELSkateboards.

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elskateboards · 8 years ago

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5 Best Small & Portable Electric Skateboards

5. Dynacraft Surge

4. Blitzart Mini Flash

3. Alouette

2. Acton Blink Lite

1. Maxfind

Conclusion

The post 5 Best Small & Portable Electric Skateboards appeared first on ELSkateboards.

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topsolarpanels · 8 years ago

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Inside the Online School That Could Radically Change How Kids Learn Everywhere

Emily Duggan, 16, expends most afternoons at a dance studio tucked behind a shopping plaza near her home in Exeter, New Hampshire. Blond and doe-eyed, Duggan has been dancing since she was two, everything from tap to ballet. She puts in about 12 hours a week at the studio, including class and rehearsals with the dance team for weekend competitors. Duggan also prides herself on get good grades in school. But two years ago, the stress of managing both dance and academics overwhelmed her.

She was depleted and losing weight. Some nights, Duggan faced four hours of homework after a day of school and dancing that stretched into the evening, I would just break down crying and telling, I cant do this anymore! she recalled.

Her mothers concurred. In January 2015, Duggan enrolled in New Hampshires self-paced Virtual Learning Academy Charter School, joining about 200 full-time middle and high school students and about 10,000 part-timers from brick-and-mortar schools statewide who take online VLACS courses a la carte. There is no entrance exam, screening or application required to attend VLACS, which is free for any New Hampshire student.

A week afterward, theres a follow-up bellow. Thats when I ask students why theyre taking my course, and what their goals are, told Kent. Some students simply need the course credit, of course, but others have a fitness target, struggle with obesity or are athletes who want to increase their strength or overcome an injury.

Students do the bulk of their learning independently. They make their own route through online lessons, digital texts and multimedia, and follow links to extra, explanatory resources. They upload all their work. Yet the students and mothers interviewed for this story said that they have more one-on-one interactions with teachers than they did in traditional schools.

Kent opened her laptop to show the dashboard that tracks her students. She can sort them by grade or by the last time they logged into class, submitted work or checked in with her. If a student has been inactive for more than a week, Kent will reach out to see if everythings OK.

That level of educator communication was the biggest change A. J. Rando noticed when his daughter, Olivia, a secondary school student and a black belt in karate, are participating in VLACS to accommodate training and competition.

Theyre proactive about it. If youre not attaining contact every couple weeks, the emails start, telling, hey, we should talk, told Rando. His daughter added that having teachers reach out, makes it less intimidating to talk to them. That helps a lot if you need to ask a question.

VLACS middle school student Olivia Rando, 11, stands beside some of the trophies shes won as a black belt in karate.Chris Berdik

Students are also matched with a guidance counselor and an academic adviser who help them create and follow a C3( short for college, career and citizenship) readiness scheme. The guidance counselors also spot red flag that a student is struggling and offer support during the usual teenage drama. Finally, tutoring is available through four abilities coaches.

Like all VLACS teachers, Kent has office hours most days, when students can log in to her online classroom, a Skype-like interface, for one-on-one chats about assignments or feedback on a recent test.

If students genuinely need to reach Kent outside of office hours, including evenings and weekends, shell oblige. She also responds to student emails instantly, even if her teenaged students arent always so prompt.

Being ever present is paramount to building that working relationship, she told. Students need to know youre there, insuring what they do, and that you care about and support them.

VLACS physical education and wellness teacher Lisa Kent at home in Amherst, NH, appearing over an online dashboard of her current students.Chris Berdik

Competencies

On a bright, chilly March afternoon, VLACS English teacher Bette( pronounced Betty) Bramante settled into a black leather recliner for an interview at her home overlooking Great Bay on New Hampshires seacoast.

Over the years, Ive come to appreciate the capacity of every learner to excel when you let them approach a topic through their interests at a pace and style that suits them, told Bramante, who began her career in the 1970 s as a secondary school English teacher. After all, I live with a perfect example.

She was referring to her husband, Fred, who was a poor student and graduated 206 th out of 212 in his high school class. After clawing his route through college, however, he had a distinguished career in education first as a secondary school science educator( where he and Bette gratified ), then as a long-time member and chair of New Hampshires country board of education, and now as president of the nonprofit National Center for Competency-Based Learning.

‘ When you think about virtual education, its often more about efficiency and getting more students through than it is about relationships.’VLACS founder and CEO Steve Kossakoski

In 2008, during Freds tenure with the board of trustees of the education, New Hampshire became the first country to necessitate high schools to issue course credit for mastering competencies, rather than for fulfilling the requisite number of hours, days or weeks of instruction( aka seat time ). That same year, VLACS welcomed its first students.

Competencies are learning deconstructed. A single course, such as algebra, contains several competencies, which blend some core knowledge, such as understanding linear equations, with broader abilities like applied analysis or problem-solving. Instead of a C+ in algebra, for example, a competency-based report card could show that a student has mastered four algebra competencies but hasnt yet figured out quadratic functions or basic statistical analysis.

In a competency-based school, especially a virtual one, semesters “losing ones” shape. While VLACS has guidelines for course completion time and students use an online chart to track their progression, theres no bonus for mastering competencies faster than your peers or penalty for taking extra time.

During the interview, Bramante sat beside her laptop, awaiting an upcoming discussion-based appraisal with one of her students. Shorthanded as DBAs, these discussions are held for each competency. Regurgitating facts wont cut it in a DBA, during which teachers ask follow-up questions to probe students understanding and the reasoning behind their answers and decisions. Educators also ask students how they can apply that knowledge. If a student falterings, the educator will recommend that she go back and review certain course material before taking the written exam. At VLACS, the bar for mastery is a test score of 85 percentage or better.

English teacher Bette Bramante at home in Durham, NH.Chris Berdik

Performance Pays

Another big difference with VLACS is its funding source. Most virtual schools get country funding based on enrollment numbers. More students entail more revenue, and virtually three-quarters of full-time virtual students are in schools run by for-profit education management organizations.

By contrast, VLACS, a nonprofit, earns its funding based on the number of competencies mastered by its students. Heres how that breaks down, according to Kossakoski: New Hampshire allocates charter schools about $5,600 dollars a year for each full-time student, presuming the student completes six full credits. A one-credit course is one-sixth of that total, or about $933 dollars. If a student masters just half of the competencies that make up a course, for example, then VLACS earns half of the $933.

That calculation also applies to students at brick-and-mortar schools who enroll in a VLACS course to obtain competencies they are missing due to a previous incomplete or failed course, or to access advanced courses not offered at their home school. VLACSs courses are accepted for credit by every high school and many secondary school in New Hampshire.

Some outside experts question that pay-for-performance model due to the risk that teachers may thumb the scale to speed student progression.

Not merely does VLACS funding depend on competencies, so do teacher salaries, to a degree. They are based on an expectation of how many competencies their students will master over the course of a year. However, teachers can accrue bonuses by surpassing those expectations.

Some outside experts question that pay-for-performance model, either due to the risk that teachers may thumb the scale to speed student progression, or because such a system may not fully account for differences in students and subject matter.

When youre teaching high-ability students, a lot of these free market principles will bring you success, told Michael Barbour, an education professor at Sacred Heart University in Fairfield, Connecticut, who examines online learning. But if Im teaching algebra to at-risk students, the majority of whom have already failed it two or three times, then Im going to have big problems with pay-for-performance. What kind of educator will you get to teach those children?

But Larry Miller, dean of the school of education at Florida SouthWestern state college and a co-author of the 2015 Center for Reinventing Public Education study, pointed out that VLACS teachers get their base pay whether they reached their targets or not, and most bonuses are a marginal incentive, in the single digits as a percentage of total salary.

Nevertheless, Miller did find a different cause for concern over VLACSs funding model. Specifically, when students at traditional schools take a VLACS course, the country pays VLACS without subtracting any funding from the brick-and-mortar schools.

The double funding has minimise rivalry and greased the wheels of partnership between VLACS and the states other school systems. Eventually, however, it could be a budget buster. Thats something theyll have to wrestle with as their impact grows, Miller told.

Virtual Gets Real

Two years ago, the John-Zensky family crisscrossed the eastern United States for two weeks in their minivan, hitting up cities and sites.

It was epic, told Danielle John-Zensky, standing in the kitchen of her Pittsfield, New Hampshire, home, flanked by two of her children, DJ, 14, and Delaney, 16.

Before DJ and Delaney became full-time VLACS students last year, they were home-schooled. We do a lot of road journeys, Danielle told. We like to travel when the rest of the kids are in school.

During a typical weekday morning, Delaney spreads out on the living room lounge with her laptop and DJ uses the desktop computer in the kitchen. They check out the online chart that shows how theyre progressing in each course.