#this literally crashed my app the first time i tried to upload it

[seakicker]

starting a T-shirt business dm for inquiries

[izpira-se-zlato]

JO Paris, 22.03.24

Gig report! Compiled this morning in the car to Antwerp with help form @zadig-fate and @yoda-bor 💛 I recorded everything except Katrina (bc my camera app crashed in the middle), so I'll upload this once I'm at a place with stable wifi again :D

all my buses were delayed so I power walked to the train station. Then that train was delayed so I almost missed my Eurostar. Then my Eurostar was also delayed. "That's what I call a Deutsche Bahn special, actually." – Kris ("when your first train is late but then it's okay because the second train is also delayed")

so many people I knew in the queue. From Helsinki. From London last year. From Utrecht. 😊💛

when I grabbed my number, Jan and Nace returned to the venue (and they were so pretty in daylight and in person)

Nace said hi as they walked past 😊

their postures??? Nace has definitely worked on his posture, meanwhile Jan appears so slim and small. It's wild.

Jan and Jure returned to the venue together, looking… Pissed is too harsh a word, but frowning? So we first kinda thought they were actually pissed off. But then Nace showed up a minute later, his usual sunny self, and was immediately accosted by fans. So. I assume it was less "pissed off" and more "do not approach" (and it worked)

soundcheck was Gola and Vem da greš, which we could hear every time they opened the doors (this was my last general access gig. It's EA from here on out, baby!)

Kris and I had decided to go on the balcony and got spots right next to the sound booth, where we were joined by @thisismyobsessionnow 🫶

it was warm but the sound was really good (duh)

also we had nice cushy seats like the old people we are 😂

first opener was a duo of brothers made up of discount Jure and Käärijä if he was French. Discount!Jure had a nice chest (Jure at home)

their music was eh, the lyrics cringe

Kris says they spoke french but I spent most of their set on tumblr/discord so I wasn't listening, but it was a Choice since pretty much none from the EA crowd spoke French

speaking of EA, there were allegedly 60 EA tickets though I saw numbers up to 62 (500 people venue)

JC Stewart was fun

he was told he looked French prime minister. He got confused by president vs prime minister but he also got kinda flustered. He was shown a pic and was "oh yeah, I see it"

we got Katrina opener

Nace. Jfc.

the venue was super hot so I tried to appreciate the fit while he had it on in full – white buttoned shirt with a sweater vest over it and a proper tie and glasses, going for the full teacher look except hot???

I still spent a good chunk of the gig looking at Jure though. The elevated balcony spot gave ussuch a nice view of him

Bojan was smiley and sounded way less congested than in Utrecht (maybe he's on the mend?)

Kris on the other hand was sipping tea on stage. In particular very sassily during Demoni

Kris had guitar problems at the beginning of Šta bih ja and went to Kiki to get it fixed but Bojan didn't see and so was actually worried for a moment that Kris had gotten sick off-stage. Kris was adorable in reassuring him that he was fine

they were all so mobile again

og demoni scream. In the middle. Might have been Bojan letting out his anxiety over Kris having disappeared from stage

"Kris, honey" and then that moment. What in the BoKris was that. I just turned to Kris and said that out loud bc what the fuck

There was a sizeable crowd of Slovenians in the audience and Bojan was delighted

fairly even split in the crowd for French vs foreigners, though the French were louder in yelling

the most hilarious to me moment: Bojan did his spiel about "who here experiences panic attacks?" And the crowd cheered, and he was like "yay! Panic attacks! It's me!" And Kris next to me went "I'm the problem, it's me," and literally on the last syllable, Bojan started saying the exact same thing. One brain cell. Or maybe he has the stream on his in-ears

Barve oceana 🫶🫶💛💛

according to Astrid, I looked ridiculously happy (I was ridiculously happy)

best galaxy of me version tonight. I still don't like it though 😂 it's gonna be my metulji 😂

Bojan went into the crowd for Umazane misli

it's so fun to watch from above

Vita was his trusty shadow and also a beacon of light to spot Bojan with

this time I don't think they forgot her in the crowd

Bojan made the balcony sing while he was still in the crowd. But it was mostly just Kris, Madeleine, and me, at least on the bleachers/seated part. We still gave our best 😂

Carpe Diem was not part of their "encore" but came before

no Tokio :( might be the first show without it?

fucking Novi val

the way Jure jumped up and sprinted to trade a drumstick for a baguette, it was so hilarious

he was so happy, and he first made fun of Nace for being unable to eat it

he shared it with Jan

Jan got chocolate and they put it into the baguette and then shared it.

Jure let everyone else also take a bite, including Bojan who was ostensibly singing

Nace bottle feeding Kris. What the fuck. Can someone make sure they still don't know about AO3?

no Umazane shenanigans even though Jan and Nace had talked right before it so I'd been hopeful

so many um versions in other langauges. It wasn't the longest rendition, but we also

when Bojan said we'd get the original Slovene version, I thought it would be the one he made up on the spot when they went on stage to play it all the way back? When they were babies. So it was a small disappointment when it was just the regular Slovene version 😂

Bojan asked the Slovenians if they were able to tell that they weren't playing at home and they said no and Bojan was so so delighted

he's also given the mic to people in the audience outside of Umazane misli (ne bi smel and plastika, I want to say)

he sang galaxy of me with a guy from the front row (Josh?)

not a lot of Jance, possibly because they were looking after Kris?

still a lot of eye contact

or maybe it was the fact that they apparently were out in Paris together in the afternoon 😏

my phone was so hot by the end (and I have 4gb left of memory)

after the gig I couldn't find my hat so I was worried I'd left it, so I went back in. Which was how I got JC and Vita to sign my gig memory book

I had forgotten about wanting to grab Vita's signature so if Astrid hadn't reminded me, I would have missed out

the boys got JC Stewart sick, he said his voice was going

It was raining so the boys ran out of the venue towards a van while we cheered. Bojan took a group selfie

Jan and Jure left first with the crew in that van so we assume that the others took a second car

[blazehedgehog]

A Eulogy for my Playstation 4 Pro

So since I was a brain genius who decided to transfer all my fundraiser money to my bank account on a weekend, let's have a little eulogy for my poor Playstation 4 Pro.

I bought it in 2017 after a hellish move from Colorado to Nevada. We'd lived in Colorado for 26 years, and rented the same house for 24 of those years. I literally grew up in that house. Then our landlords got greedy (as all landlords eventually do), almost tripled our rent, and we had to move.

One of the last things I did before I packed up my computer was release The Definitive Way to Play Sonic Adventure on Youtube. That video was a modest success, but it had a secondary effect where a no-commentary gameplay video I'd uploaded for the fangame Sonic Utopia got picked up by the algorithm as a result, and that video suddenly took off like wildfire. I found myself sitting on a pair of videos that were about to pull in close to a combined 3 million views. It was the most I'd had a video blow up in a very long time.

I was now flush with a few thousand dollars of cash that I could do whatever I wanted with. That was great, as I got to help cover some moving expenses. I gave my Mom some money, I paid one of the deposits on our new apartment, paid to fix some stuff that got broken in the move, I bought myself a new desk, new computer chair, some storage shelves, a new bed frame, and still had about $700 left to spare. So I bought a PS4 Pro and a small handful of games (The Nathan Drake Collection, Yakuza Kiwami, The Last of Us Remastered, and Parappa the Rapper Remastered, I think). It was the first true next-generation console I'd bought in 11 years -- I'd had a Wii U, but that doesn't count.

Within that first year, I'd already run into my first problem with that Playstation 4. Back in the Xbox 360 era, I had a moment in my life where I was a psychopath that was running a media server off my PC. Every morning I'd wake up, download everything my Youtube subs had posted the day before, along with whatever GiantBomb had uploaded that day, and threw it up on the media server. The 360 could see the server, and those downloads would basically become my background noise for the day. I watched the entire GiantBomb Persona 4 Endurance Run that way: on the 360, through my media server. For context, these were the days before there was any way to watch Youtube on a television. There was no app. Youtube was just a website. So the Media Server was what I had to do to see Youtube on another screen.

In the move out to Nevada, I'd bought a cheap 32GB USB thumbdrive from the back-to-school section at Wal-mart and filled it full of movies and videos and stuff. With the PS4 set up, I plugged that thumbdrive in and tried out the PS4's media player capabilities, hoping it worked like the Xbox 360.

It did... for about 45 minutes. In the middle of watching Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: The Movie the media player suddenly crashed and refused to see the USB thumbdrive anymore. I reached down to pull it out only to find it was almost too hot to touch. I might have actually dropped the thumbdrive because it shocked me just how hot it was. I have never felt a piece of electronics be that hot before.

For the rest of that day, that USB port was dead. Nothing you plugged into it would be recognized. Eventually, it finally started working with controllers, but it never accepted any other thumbdrives, ever.

After about three years, I started to notice recordings were starting to get a little weird. Clips I'd record of my Fortnite matches would have huge 2-3 second chunks go missing, or the encoding would corrupt and smear. But then it went away, so I figured maybe it was just a problem with the game and not the console. It'd come back every now and then, maybe once a year, but it only ever happened with Fortnite, and only occasionally.

About a year and a half ago, I started to notice something else weird. Unless there was a specific game I needed to play for work stuff (like Sonic Frontiers or whatever), my PS4 was mostly just a Fortnite machine, and mainly because the PC version of Fortnite is a disaster.

But for months I'd left a disc in my PS4's disc drive. I think it was probably Balan Wonderworld or something, and as I booted up Fortnite for my daily founder's mission rewards, I noticed a sound. I'd been hearing it on and off for a while, but now I was finally paying attention to it. I realized: the console was sitting there scanning the disc, over and over and over, like it couldn't read it. I'd hear the disc motor spin up, the soft click-click-click as the read head scanned for data. It'd spin down, spin up, click-click-click, whirrrrrr, click-click, spin down, spin up, etc. Over and over. It'd do this for a good 30-45 seconds, then finally settle down and identify the disc.

The first time I noticed this, I ejected the Balan disc and put in something else; I think it was Dreams. PS4 read the disc instantly. I shrugged, figured maybe the Balan disc was just cursed and didn't think anything of it.

About a week later, I caught it doing it with the disc for Dreams. And then Sonic Frontiers. Then Sonic Superstars. Pretty much any disc I'd put in there. As the months wore on, it started taking multiple minutes for it to identify the disc.

A few weeks before it died, I ended up taking the disc out and basically resigning myself to only putting a disc in if I was going to play it, and removing that disc the moment I was done, because that scanning process seemed like it was making the problem worse.

A few months before it died, I got a full hardware crash on the console. The error code it gave me pointed to a hardware failure, but a google revealed that it was a generic error code that could mean literally anything. Right around this time, the video corruption in my Fortnite recordings came back around. I had a feeling it was the HDD.

Thus began the saga of trying to replace my PS4's HDD. I knew it could take SSDs, so I did some research, saved up $100, and bought a 2TB SSD that was compatible with the console. Followed Sony's official instructions on replacing the HDD, and...

It didn't work.

I vowed to get my money back and order a different HDD, but prices went up and realizing the other mounting problems with this machine (including the fried USB port), and my general mood overall, I just kept the money and figured I'd ride or die until the machine breathed its last.

8 months later... it refused to boot up at all.

Rest in piece, king. The only other console I've ever had straight up die on me like this was my Xbox 360, and if I'm being honest, I kind of smothered that poor boy a little bit hoping to get a sturdier console back from the repair center.

(I did not, but that's a story for another day.)

[mosylufanfic]

On a Wednesday, in a Cafe

<sidles in> ahem so.

I meant to have this done for Valentine’s Day. I really, really did. But then I didn’t. I don’t know what to tell you. But hey, it’s still February, I haven’t finished eating my giant heart-shaped box of chocolates, and I ship these two dum-dums the whole year round so I’m going to slap it up here anyway.

Title from “Begin Again” by Taylor Swift

On a Wednesday, in a Cafe

"Hi, welcome to Jitters," the barista said when she walked up to the counter. "Decaf chai latte from the app, right?"

"Right. Thanks." Caitlin forced a pleasant smile onto her tired face and reached out for her drink.

But instead of handing it over, the girl said, "Look who's here!"

Caitlin blinked at her. It had been a long day and she really just wanted to sit quietly in a corner  and unwind before going home and to bed.

But the barista waved a hand. "Look!" she said insistently.

Caitlin turned her head and saw a man sitting at her usual table. She started to be annoyed, but something throttled the emotion before it could fully form. She knew those shoulders. She knew the sheen of that dark hair, even if it was caught back in a ponytail at the nape of his neck. She knew that broad-palmed hand that lifted to tuck a stray lock behind his ear. She even knew that huge hockey bag down by his feet.

"That's your friend, right? You guys always used to be in here together."

"Right," Caitlin said faintly. She took her drink and walked over to the table. "Cisco?"

His head whipped around, and she knew that smile too, even if it was buried in a thick, dark beard. "Caitlin! Hey!"

He leapt up and hugged her. She hugged him back, the solid feel of his body against hers feeding some hunger inside her.

He let her go first, and she made herself release him. "I literally just texted you," he said. 

She pulled her phone out and saw his message glowing on the screen. Just got into the CC, it said. Can I crash with you for the night?

She looked up. "Of course you can. You don't even need to ask."

He grinned. "Thought maybe I should check. Just in case you had a, uh, a guest already."

She felt her cheeks heat. "No guests," she said. "Not for awhile." Nobody but you, she almost said, and felt herself blush hotter. 

He looked at her for a moment, and then said, "Well. Good."

She popped the lid off her drink and stirred it absently. "So," she said. "How long are you in town this time?"

He'd been gone for months, on the road checking out what had changed after Crisis. He would upload his findings to the Star Labs database and stop into Central City for a day or two when his path took him there. The last time, he'd stayed with Caitlin.

"I think," he said slowly, "that I'm back for good."

She looked up. "For good? Really?"

"Yeah, I've hit all the major cities with a meta presence. Think I got a handle on what's changed now. We'll probably still get the occasional shock here and there, but the project's done as far as I'm concerned. And - " He met her eyes. "It's time, you know? I took my break."

She put her hand over his. "You know there's a high chance you'll run into Kamilla. She still works with Iris."

"Yeah. I know."

"How are you doing?" she asked.

The night it had happened, he'd texted her. It's over. We broke up. I can't stay here. Can I crash on your couch?

She'd texted back of course immediately. 

He'd come over with a bottle of vodka and no information other than that long distance had been too hard on their relationship. He'd asked to watch Star Wars ("original trilogy, obvs"), and had only cried a little, when Princess Leia told Han Solo she loved him and he'd said he knew. 

He'd been gone by the time she'd woken up the next morning, her sofa bed folded up and the blankets and pillows stacked neatly on the cushions. 

They usually texted when he was on the road, and when he video-called, it was to the cortex because he'd learned something everyone needed to know. So it had been hard to gauge how he was handling the breakup, and when she asked, he just texted back that he was handling it okay.

He did look okay. Not nearly as wrecked as he had been after Cynthia. Of course, it had been two months.

He met her eyes. "I'm doing okay," he said. "I won't lie, being out of Central City really helped."

"Your stuff is all in storage," she said. "Kamilla packed it all up for you."

"I know. She sent me the address of the storage place. And the bill, which is fair." He toyed with his phone. "I did a lot of thinking. A little drinking. And, uh, for future reference, 'I'm in town for a week and I'm newly single' is apparently, like, Tinder catnip."

It hit her like a thump in the chest, and she pretended to take a sip of her latte to cover her baffling reaction. 

They'd talked about their sex lives before. Not in graphic detail or anything, but she'd always known when he was dating or had an FWB or having a dry spell, just like he had with her.

Of course he would have had a few hookups. She should have known he would. That was one of his breakup go-tos, along with drinking more than he should and watching the angstiest, most dramatic telenovelas so he would have an excuse to cry. 

"Hey," he said, and she looked up. "I know what you're thinking."

She felt her cheeks heat. "What's that?"

"Yes, I was safe, and yes, they were nice."

That hadn't been even close to what she'd been thinking, but she went with it. "Well, good. That's all I ask."

His smile faded. "How's, uh, how's she doing?"

"I haven't seen her much," she said tactfully. "It would be awkward, you know."

"Right."

"But Iris says she's doing okay."

Iris had also added that if she never heard that one Lizzo song again, it would be too soon, but Caitlin didn't share that.

She bunched up her napkin and made herself drop it, smoothing it on the table. “Are you going to let her know you’re home?”

“I should,” he said, scratching at the edge of his beard. “Just as a heads up. Maybe we’ll get coffee or something, just for closure. But that’s her call.”

She was quiet a moment more, but he didn't seem to be up for talking about it. She thought closure and realized again that they really had broken up. Somehow it had been hard to believe it.

"So, how are things around here? You mentioned Frost and Sue were getting into it a little.”

“Oh, adjustment pains,” she assured him. “You know how Frost doesn't like new people in the group, and Sue is kind of like a cat, in that if someone doesn't like her, she makes it her mission in life to annoy them. It’s much better now. They've worked it out."

"Yeah? Really? What happened?"

"I don't have all the details, but judging by the hangover the next morning, tequila shots were involved."

"Just tequila shots?"

"Sue pleaded the Fifth and so far there's not a warrant out for Frost, so I thought it best to leave it there."

He laughed. "So otherwise, how is the famous Sue?"

She started filling him in on all the ways that Sue was tying Ralph in knots, and how much he was enjoying it, while acting like he wasn't. As usual with them, they found more and more things to talk about, until their drinks were stone-cold and they were the only people in the cafe.

She looked across the table at him as he was telling some story about his time in Gotham, and thought I missed you. 

They'd had long stretches of separation before, like after Ronnie had died the second time or after Savitar. But this was the first time it hadn't been due to some trauma, and the first time they'd kept in touch. She'd started to live for the buzz of her phone, and more than once Barry had called her out for sneaking a look at her texts when they were trying to brainstorm about the enemy-of-the-week.

The night he'd broken up with Kamilla, she'd stared at the ceiling for close to an hour before she was able to make herself go to sleep, wondering why she had butterflies in her stomach, and why she kept thinking about him asleep in the next room, and why the door between them seemed so thin and the distance between the sofabed and her own bed seemed so short.

It would have been a bad idea, she knew that. Bad timing. But somehow she couldn't come up with any reasons not to do it besides that.

The barista started wiping down the tables near them, and she checked her phone. “Oh, they closed half an hour ago.”

“It’s fine!” the girl chirped in the tones of someone who’d been instructed by corporate not to ever kick someone out. “You stay as long as you like."

"No, we should go." Caitlin got up and tossed her cup into the trash. Cisco followed suit and hoisted his bag over his shoulder. She tried not to stare too openly at the flex of muscle in his arm as he did so.

The night was warm. He'd left in early February, hat crammed firmly on his head and mittens enveloping his hands as they said goodbye at the train station. She'd looked away from him kissing Kamilla and wrapped her arms around herself against the snowy morning, wishing as she always did that Frost could share some of her temperature imperviousness. 

Now, they strolled down the street, just the two of them, in the balmy evening. The steam-heat of summer lurked on the horizon. 

After nixing the idea of a taxi - "I've been traveling all day. Be good to stretch my legs. Unless you want one?" - Cisco was quiet. They'd turned down her street when he said, "So there's something I didn't tell you earlier about my Tinder dates."

"They weren't nice?"

"They were. But I made it sound like I had a bunch and actually I only had one."

She looked at the sidewalk, pretending she had to pick her way across perfectly flat and clear concrete. "You can have as many or as few Tinder dates as you want," she said. "It's really none of my business."

"They were nice," he persisted. "And I had fun. But I also felt kind of . . . empty afterwards. I'd gotten used to sleeping with someone that I loved, and just sex was like whipped cream without the hot chocolate. Still a good time," he added. "But not really satisfying, you know?"

She took that in, staring at the sidewalk. "Are - are you thinking of getting back together with Kamilla?"

He shook his head at once. "No. We were good together for awhile, but we had good reasons to break up."

"But you thought she was the one."

He was quiet for so long that she looked up, half-dreading his expression. But he just looked sad and pensive.

"You know, I think I wanted her to be the one," he said. "I wanted it so hard that I stuck with us way past our natural expiration date. And it wasn't good for either of us." He looked away, brushing his hair back. "But about a month into my trip, I started to realize that I missed - " He shot her a look. " - other people more than I missed her. And after that it was like things just started unraveling."

She felt her face heat and her heart thump, but he was talking again. 

"So, no, I'm not getting back together with her, and I'm pretty sure she'd feel the same if I asked her."

"So you're going to start looking again?" she asked.

He was quiet for a moment. "Being on the road, you know, it gave me a lot of time to think. Time to look at my life from the outside. Figure out what was making me happy and what wasn't. I worked some things out."

"Good," she said. "I think you needed that." It was why she'd made the suggestion in the first place, no matter how much she'd missed him.

"And I got to see a lot of people who'd had different lives before Crisis."

Her mouth fell open. "Did you vibe?"

He shook his head. "Mostly my powers are still gone. But every so often something did happen where I'd look at someone, and I'd see their other lives, and I'd see where the path - " He waved his hands. "Where they sort of branched. Where one version made one choice and another version made a different one.”

"Wow," she said, because she couldn't think of any other response.

"Like, it was all chance which version won out, you know? Sometimes they were living their best life and sometimes their worst one and - god, this was a mindfuck - sometimes they were living one that was just as good. It wasn't the same, but it was just as good."

"That's pretty wild."

"And you know, a lot of times it was down to the stupidest little things like whether they braked for a yellow or not. But sometimes it was something big, like deciding to marry someone or move or take a job."

She frowned at him. He was rambling, and she couldn't completely follow his train of thought. "Well, yes."

"I know, I know, life's like that sometimes. We all know that. But seeing it like that really made me think, you know, about all the big and little choices I've ever made in my life and how just changing one of them could have changed everything and, you know?"

"Y . . . es," she said slowly. She wasn't sure she did, but it seemed important to him.

"And then I started thinking how I've still got time. We've all got time, right? We've got all the time in the world until we're dead."

"That's a little morbid."

"I know! I know. But, like, we have all this time, right? But we just spend it doing all the things we always do, in this rut, complaining about our lives and not actually doing anything that might change them. And then we keep saying, what if, what if."

If she hadn't been with him for the past two hours, she would have suspected him of being a little drunk. Instead, she cocked her head. "Cisco, how long have you been awake today?”

"I slept on the train," he said. "But do you get what I'm saying?"

"I don't think I do." Her heart was thumping heavily in her chest, dark and slow with dread.

What if he wanted to leave Central City? Or even just Star Labs? He’d said he was home for good, but what if he’d just meant he was done with his tour? What if he wanted to take off all over the world? 

He rubbed his hand over his hair and muttered, "Okay, I - okay. Look. I'm saying I missed you."

Well. That wasn't what she'd expected.

She tucked her hands in her pockets. "I missed you, too."

"You did?” 

“Of course I did. You’re one of my best friends.”

“Friend,” he echoed. “Yeah. Yeah, yeah. Long time now.”

“What’s it been, eight years?”

“Something like that.”

“So of course I missed you.” She unlocked the front door of her building and held it open for him. “I’m glad you’re back.”

He put his hand on her arm, stopping them in front of the mailboxes. "Do you ever think about that? About how our lives would change if something was different?"

"Who doesn't?" She searched his face. "Cisco, what are you getting at, exactly?"

His mouth opened and closed for a moment, and then he let out a soft groan. Before Caitlin could do anything else, he'd taken her face in his hands and kissed her.

For some reason, the only thought in her head was that kissing a man with a beard was surprisingly nice. Or maybe it was kissing Cisco that was nice. More than nice.

Oh. 

Oh.

Cisco was kissing her.

He let go before she could get her jumbled thoughts in order and retreated a step or two. "Shit," he said. "Shit, I'm sorry, I didn't mean to just - like that - I - "

She grabbed his jacket and hauled, and he stumbled back towards her until she could kiss him back. He was much faster on the uptake than she was, and it was only a moment before his arms wrapped around her. 

Sometime later, his forehead rested against hers. "So," he said, eyes closed, "that's okay then."

"Very much okay," she said.

His hands skimmed up her sides and then down. "Every time my phone buzzed I grabbed it. Hoping it was you.”

“So did I,” she whispered.

He smiled at her, eyes bright. “I know the timing is weird and bad. But it’s always been weird, bad timing with us. That’s why I never did this before.”

She found herself smiling goofily. “You wanted to do this before?”

“More than once. A lot of times.”

“So we have some catching up to do.” She kissed him again. 

Someone cleared their throat, and Caitlin pulled away from Cisco to see one of her neighbors looking judgemental at her for making out with a strange man in the middle of the lobby. "I need to get my mail," she said.

“Sorry,” she lied to Mrs. Trainor, not sorry at all, and scooted a few steps down.

“Hey Mrs. T,” Cisco said. 

She squinted at him. “Cisco? Is that you?" She'd seen him reasonably often, and Cisco was the kind of person who could chat amiably to neighbors that Caitlin had never said two words to. 

“Yep. The beard threw you off, right? I’ve been traveling and it was easier than shaving every day.”

She looked a little mollified. “Well, welcome back.” She looked between them. “Nice to see the two of you finally got it together. Only maybe not in front of the mailboxes.”

Cisco snickered, and Caitlin elbowed him. “Sorry about that. We’ll get out of your way. Have a good night.” She grabbed Cisco's hand and tugged him toward the elevators.

He gave her a delighted look. “I think your neighbor’s been shipping us!” he whispered. 

Caitlin hit the button. “And to think all this time I thought she just had the hots for you, asking about you so much.”

He snickered again. “No reason it can’t be both.” He turned serious. “So, I’m still staying?”

She blinked at him. “I said you could.”

“Yeah, but that was before,” he said. “I don’t want you to feel pressured or anything. I can crash at Barry and Iris's place. Or get a hotel.”

She took that in and smiled. He knew as well as she did that inviting a man you’d just kissed into your home was a different thing than letting your friend stay for the night. “It’s fine,” she said as the elevator doors slid open. “I don’t feel pressured at all.”

He took her hand, smiling back. “Good. We can talk this out. Figure out how this is going to work. And then kiss some more.”

“That sounds like a good plan,” she said, hitting the button for her floor and sending him a coy look. “And if we both feel like it, maybe we can have some hot chocolate.”

FINIS

[twracehorse]

Cringing at my own videos

Training Videos Edition!

I got bored, needed motivation to start editing, went back to take a look at my older videos, and now I judge and cringe at them because that’s a given at this stage

Under the cut to keep your dash shorter :3

Determined Horse Training, the title I came up with to be a little unique. I obviously couldn’t use something akin to Northena’s “Training Is Fun...Right?” and I wanted to give it a proper title knowing this would be a series of videos. I thought, and thought, and came up with the title after thinking of Undertale and how you are filled with determination in the game. “I am filled with determination to train these horses!” is what I thought and so the title of the series became that!

I use // as a way to separate different topics I’m talking about

Brave Rebel- First off...the thumbnail. He was originally themed sort of after Nathan Drake from Uncharted, since I was into that series at the time. So the map was, you know, for the treasure hunting. But I didn’t want to stretch the map to fit and somehow decided that a brown background was a good idea?? // AH THE CLOTHES! THE NECK!! AHHH GATORADE OCEAN BLEHH. // Oh yeah I have a spelling error in the video “Let’s go defeat this traning day!”. // Been training with Sage from the start of the series. I wonder how many fails of their’s I’ve caught XD // Ah the rocks, the rocks that I caught Sage stumbling out of in a later training video. // Let’s not forget the double mouse thing going on that makes its appearance in many videos before I figured out to click off of the web pages (which had a music playlist going while training). // Omg there’s someone with the club name The Babies standing nearby when I turn in the final race. // Low-key still love this horse. He was my first true Soul Steed before we were designated to our starter. I don’t take him out much, the difference in horse animations from new to old is getting bigger and for dynamic photos, it just doesn’t look good ( @~@)

Cool Hero- The horse based off of Markiplier back when he had red hair. I also uploaded the video on his birthday! // The song choice....I mean it fits the theme, otherwise I’d pick a better song. // The mini references I’m still low-key proud of. // There’s quite the amount of gliding pons in this video and some horror texture pons. // I obviously had to max Markimoo at the observatory! // I also mimicked Mark’s outros where an image is boomeranging. It took a couple tries with my friend in the background, but it was worth it!

Violet Mystery- I hope when I introduced her as “The winner of the Jorvik Wild horse competition” I mean, she was the first coat to be picked. Back when it was only one horse coat is being made. They added the top two coats afterwards. // Oh yeah the character’s whole head would move to the side to keep eye contact with the camera. // It’s so weird to think that I caught a bit of footage of Swifty just before meeting her. Then again I remember NOT editing this training video until months later and uploaded it in September. Mind you that I got Cool Hero and Violet Mystery at the same time and Cool Hero’s video was out in June...oops. // Ironic that I have the pandoric cracks around when the horse is based off them. // People running up from the riding arena, ah the fog glitch that would happen when you left your horse in the riding area, ran all the way to the dino valley elevator, took it, and there was no fog in the valley! 

Megalove- Ah the first Undertale horse! I mean technically still the only Undertale themed horse I have, but I do have others planned. Haven’t gotten them yet and some plans changed. // The thumbnail....why did I make the stickers super tiny?? // Finally changed Elsa’s hairstyle to the ponytail I still wear to this day. We need updated ponytails with side bangs! I know we have the awesome braided ponytail in Mistfall, but there’s too much forehead! // Also the first training footage with the meet up....was 4 hours long. This was back when I recorded all stages of training and went through the footage in real time....I’m glad I changed strategy. // Can’t remember if crashing into a jump and the jump of the music timed at the same point was on purpose or if it was editing magic. // Oof cringing that I put comic sans as Sans “talking” in the video nnngghhhhh! // Ah my old club name Royal Ambassadors. I gave that club over to my side account Chiara Monsterhope for obvious reasons. // Annoying Dog in the credits, I still love that

Lucky Hero- I’m still proud that I came up with his nickname Vien short of Vienna where the famous riding school is. He, along with Brave Rebel, are my top horses. Please get an update eventually boys! // Finally Mac users had clear water! I was so happy over this you do not understand XD // Warriors by Imagine Dragons fits this horse, but quite a pain when I got Dark Warrior and didn’t want repeating songs. // Oh yeah early on, the Lipizzaners had a weird reflective tail glitch going on. // Vien was the first horse of mine that I got the day of release, bright and early in the morning! // I love how in the face of danger, an approaching bull dozer, I just stare at it. It wasn’t even a “oh no I should get out of the way” and instead was “huh that’s a thing”. // ALLY CHUM! I forgot that was a nickname to good friend!

Grey Ghost- OH BOY HERE WE GO!! Honestly my favorite training video. It was so much fun to edit with the music and the Halloween stickers hidden around the screen! Despite waking up at 5am to train for that aesthetic™. // Okay but that mushroom with the dark green sign did legit give me a spook. My body froze for a second and then I remembered that Slenderman doesn’t exist in Star Stable XD. // Ngl two of the stickers are hard to see cause of their surroundings. // GALLOPER THOMPSON MY MAN! Honestly I waited till midnight for him to be in Goldenleaf forest, just to see what would happen if you were racing and he caught you. By the gods of editing magic, the song was at a good point that fits perfectly with that scene. // For the scarecrow race I did actually take two different takes. I failed the first one and when I was editing I noticed that the two runs looked similar. So I put the first part of run 1 and cut before I failed and then put the remaining of the race with run 2. Looks almost seamless! 

Silent Promise- My favorite mare in my stable! She ends up being my AoT cosplay photo horse...until I get the actual themed horse XP. // Shadows were a little glitchy at first. // Why am I using Rud instead of Rude. Like I know why cause that’s how we got around the filter, but I didn’t need to put it like that in the video. It’s like back in my WolfQuest days where I learned to use Cuz as a short version of Cause and it bled into my text vocab. // The witch bombs...I wanted to make it dramatic, but in hindsight it’s just tasteless really. Also to note that the sound which was fine before uploading, got more rough once it was on YouTube

Small Potential- Real cringe theme here, Hetalia. It was fun while watching and all that, but since then I’ve seen some well done anime! Growth! // I love the nickname Finny. Not too sure if I want to keep this pony or not, sadly. // The Christmas remix song is because I had no other ideas XD

Brave Eagle- Oh this is another slight cringe theme. Even more cringe is the fact that I had to re-upload this training video since it got blocked all over the world! due to the Hamilton musical songs. So I....had to layer over the songs with other songs....it’s a whole mess and was a whole pain since I had to re-edit the sound effects. // I’m proud of the thumbnail though....that’s it

Winter Dust- Why did I make the “there’s a new app with these foals you can train” with the dramatic music? // I think because I had less levels to train, I tried filling that space with “cool looking shots”. // Ah, yes, my How To Get Over A Jump wikipedia step by step

Hollow Phantom- Had to bring a creepy vibe even though it was February. So he’s like a Halloween not Halloween horse. // Can you believe that I found the main song from a Haikyuu!! crack video? XD. // That zoom on the pony surrounded by magic shires was weird. We’re saying “SO TINY” but the clip was so short it was done and over without much sense. // Mmm that slight irritation that the music and clip didn’t match with the drop. // Tried to blend the music together with itself....it’s obvious. // Of course had to max the Galloper horse where I first met the phantom himself

North Guardian- I wanna talk about the thumbnail....that background...is literally just the horse’s hindquarters. I wanted something mossy since the horse is sort of based off of Pelagia from Shadow of the Colossus. I couldn’t find good enough backgrounds, so I used the horse itself. // Again that urge to want to make the clip and music match but ahhh

Lucky Lucky- Still wish I could name this horse Gold Luck or something. // I think one of the camera turns during a race was just to show off the rainbow nearby. // Ahh! back when we could say “demon” in the chat. // Hmm instead of letting the clip run, I could’ve just cut to Reed calling the askew fence “a disgrace”. // Text was onscreen for just too long. // Trying to do the riding arena jumps with a good camera angle. But at that point, the camera kept moving and wouldn’t hold still. I’m glad it’s better now. Maybe I’ll try it again with a future horse. // Huh, forgot to add sound effects when I hit something on the last race

Silent Surprise- Cause I had to let the people know that I bought the horse after watching the Belmont. // AH STILL THE NECK! // 2 minutes in and we haven’t even gotten to the actual training yet. // Another day, another SSO glitch, this time it’s shadow rocks. // Oop missed a sound effect

Hot Spot- THE MUSTACHE! // I forgot I put a filter over the video to give it an old timey look. I should do more like that if it’s in theme. // Of course I had to have The Wanted be playing with this song since it’s old west sounding. // What was the purpose of editing the scarecrow race like that? XD. // Random running clip. // Walking the whole bobcat race would be nice if I didn’t keep moving the camera

Pumpkin Candy- As much as I love my Halloween horses, this training video isn’t up to the standards that the first Halloween training video set up. It’s still got Halloween themed music, it’s still got stickers hidden in the video, but it doesn’t feel the same. // Having text be their default instead of making them the same agh. // The spooky filter I overlayed the clips with changes at times. Would be nice if it stayed consistent

Dragon Dawn- Hmm now that I have more songs to choose from (getting into another artist as much as I did with The Wanted), I would have another song playing to fit the horse better. Maybe Euphoria or Mikrokosmos. Oh well those will be for future horses eventually! // Didn’t drop with the music...disappointed

Thunder Spirit- The horse that trains through three months. You can easily tell by the Valentine race, the rainbows of March, and April Fools. // Man I really need to work on making the text not be so BIG. // The first rainbow race had lots of sound effects. After that one I was just like “yeah not doing that again”

Sun Chaser- Eh the slowed down music is not the best idea. But I think it was also an intro to a remix of the song. So it was only so long and I had a bit to say for the intro of the horse. // The second clip of the mysterious Icelandic cryptid you can’t see them once it zooms in....annoying. // Too much of a slow build up with another cryptid spotting. // Also using the same sound but slower after just using it...smooth (not). // You know the very last clip of the horse as he’s turning around on the beach? Yeah that’s the exact moment I did the intro for the horse XD

Dragon Warrior- The contrast between me and Sage’s bantering vs the sadder song (I found the song because of a Zeno AMV) well it’s kinda weird having laughs and then sad melody. // YouTube again ruins the quality of the mic as it sounds fuzzier than it was pre-uploaded. // Low-key recording voices was fun aside from having to make sure the clips matched the voices and clicking of the mouse. // I’m still annoyed I couldn’t find the perfect snoring sound effect when Sage’s Connemara is sleeping and starts gliding away

Smoke Mirror- A little too much of a pause between text in the intro. // I love how I’m wearing a Halloween shirt because no other shirt matched with the blue of the hat except for the dress it came with THAT I GOT RID OF! 

Obsidian Mystery- I love the thumbnail for her training video. It’s so spooky and cool! Favorite thumbnail of the entire series right there. // Ironic that with the three Halloween horses I’ve had. The two with the upbeat music are the ones where Galloper was present that year. The one where Galloper was missing that October, the music was softer, generic Halloween music. Not intentional, but it works. Though the first Halloween training video still gets the trick-or-treats because it has nostalgic music. // Some text isn’t easily visible

Dark Warrior- The horse I wish I could name Secret Warrior cause that would make SO MUCH MORE SENSE than Dark Warrior, but here we are. // Since Warriors by Imagine Dragons was in a previous training video, I had to search for another song to fit the horse. I literally went through those anime character theme song videos to find one! That was a terrible jump cut of the song

Ember Flame- Coming Soon

[chaptersofprogress]

Chapter 1

So today the most basic build of a most basic app is coming out. Literally have nothing but I tried to make sure to lay out all the things I have to do and how to do them and they are a lot time consuming since I have to learn everything from scratch but it's fun and better then nothing. Slow but steady. First thing I did was to create a simple UI plan from now I'll be creating a UI in figma and uploading it to dribbble. For now since it was just 1 page I only did a rough sketch on paper. Then comes content writing I have no idea how to write so just went ahead and did it any way I could, just wrote what came in my head and I always wanted to write "created with love by" at the bottom of the app. So I went ahead a little easter egg like that. The Font i used was Comfortaa.

This time it was really important to chose colors that match and here discord helped me and also a post from dribbble: For heading I used: #5DFFA2

For content inside: #43B581

For bottom message: #FF73FA

For background: #18191c

Then came the logo instead of designing the went ahead with a logo generator that I heard about from a few people that is adobe logo generator. Now I don't know why but without logging in adobe site when I downloaded the logo it downloaded an executable, when I ran it terminal popped up and something happened. This pissed me off a little. If you don't want people to download it without logging in don't give a download button. Don't give me sketchy executable. But once logged in it downloaded PNG. This made me more sure that I want to design my own logos in the future.

Then I started working on the code and realized either the documentation is not very good or I m an idiot. But somehow completed it and also added google analytics just to see how the app does and also the crash reports. Few things I didn't think I would learn were. DO not name package as com.example. Now since this was too basic so not a lot of work has been done. Now I was looking at TMDB and they have an API but no good android app. So in chapter 2 we are developing that. Minimal and efficient.

While uploading to app store I realized I need banner and everything which I obviously didn't prepare.

Need app icon: 512x512

Need Feature Graphic: 1024x512

Need 2 phone screenshots.

so a lot of designing.

Links:

dribbble: https://dribbble.com/som253

github: https://github.com/som-cs/Most_useless_app

logo: https://imgur.com/gallery/QOsOkgp

play store link: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.techaagama.mostuselessapp

to support me: buymeacoffee.com/som253

discord: som#0003

[howsareeasy]

it isn’t failure; it’s data

Equipment: mac pro 2014 with inbuilt mic. Moto G3 (and then Moto G6) for reading via the Adobe Acrobat PDF reader. For hosting purposes, Dropbox and Mediafire. Software: both GarageBand and Audacity.

There’s 1600 words under the cut. Or you can read here over at Dreamwidth if it’s easier

Chose: GaragageBand or Audacity:  For the sheer scope of the information gathered alone, Audacity. I held out on using Audacity until I got my head around GarageBand, because GB was Apple. I did five of my first podfics in GarageBand (and the last six in Audacity). I'm glad that I did GarageBand before I got into Audacity, because Audacity didn't feel that difficult when I got my head around it, because I already had my wars with GarageBand. Although I do like GarageBand for the ease of rerecording (you literally just record over the offending area), and insertion of silences, it has a lot of drawbacks. For instance,  when it comes to longer files (about 180mins) it will start to eat your files. In addition, because not many people use GarageBand, information on troubleshooting is pretty rare, and Apple insists on upgrading and changing the interface ever so often. As a result, a lot of people I know are working from their legacy interface from 2014. It doesn't help me with what I have now. I only know one person (other than myself) who worked in GarageBand, and got tired of bugging her (she's busy and took ages to respond to my questions, because she's BUSY). whereas with Audacity, there are enough people to have a wiki. There are guides everywhere in terms of how to use Audacity, especially podfic specific guides. Overall, Audacity is a bit more straightforward, once you know what to look for. The wiki is relatively comprehensive and easy to follow. For instance, once I got my head around recording edits and putting them in the spaces where they needed to be, the process of recording patches then patching them for reedits is fairly straight forward. Audacity has the advantage of doing more pin point edits when it comes to mouth noises, and general cleaning up of fic background noises with noise plates. Audacity's envelope application is a lot better and smoother than GarageBand's fades (in terms of say, if you want to have music fading in or out of your narrative). Now, I don't think I'm going to be the sort of person to use music in a podfic unless the writer is pretty much waving semaphore flags and going - this piece of music here!- but it's a neat effect. Hardest thing about podficcing: For me, it was getting the reading down pat, to be honest. When I listen to my first five podfics, I'm surprised at how fast I'm reading, so every reading it's been me telling myself to slow down. It's one of the reasons why I started to edit as I go, because it forced me to refocus, and check my speed when rabbiting along. Then because my reading got slower, I could engage in the process of the fic more. However, as I grew more confident with the reading flow, I'd allow myself to read through a chapter or so, and then go back and edit. I didn't really get the concept of what a read/performance was until podfic 7, I guess (AO3 is down now, so I can't remember what it is. I want to say Cloud City). The whole concept of pauses in podfic and how that's a part of hitting the ear didn't really strike me until about podfic 10 (Stay In My Eyeline to the point where I took it down and recut for silences). But I think podfic 9 (Good Timing), made me happy enough with my narrative and voice bits. As much as podfic 11 KICKED MY ARSE, I'm more or less happy with the pauses and spaces in the fic. I mean, I could have done more, let the quiet spill out, especially towards the ending, but you can only learn by doing. I'm not going to beat up myself with the first podfics, tbh, because no one is born a master. Now, that last podfic. I don't think I had any hubris with the first ten podfics. I tried to improve on every one as I went on, and I think they got better quality wise when I jumped over to Audacity, because again, because of noise plates and edits made for a cleaner product (I could get rid of the 'clunk' sound when I'd stop the recording), but that last podfic (Now That I'm In Madrid) almost made me rage quit many a time. Between the file deletions, Audacity freezing, my files crashing, having to borrow someone else's PC to get my three hour files on as well as the edits, the installation of my mpegg plug in refusing to deal on my macbook (until I had to manually install it, after overriding Apple’s admin permissions to accept the plug in), only to export the chapters and not being able to bundle them into a book. Plus my voice turning to gravelly mush in the last third of the reading, it's been a hard knock on my confidence, to be honest. To the point where, I'm like, "Yeah, I liked podficcing, I guess? But erm... I don't think it likes me much." That being said, I really like the last story, and I'm sorry that I didn't do my best by it, but it was beyond my ken. To the point where, if I had to redo the podfic (lol, no), I couldn't do it any better right now, and that's fine. Reading source: A lot of people read their fic on screen while the recording is going on in the background. I tend to read directly from my smartphone, using the Adobe PDF app. I do like the app because you can highlight bits, and insert comments on the document, it's also smooth scrolling experience reading wise. My Moto G6 has more power and a better screen so it's an easier read. File hosting: Dropbox and MediaFire are relatively straightforward. They are fine. Most annoying bit of podficcing: Podfic covers. As much as I know that they didn't have to be made, I pretty much did it, because people do expect them (before Itsadrizzit started the push to overturn the practice). I wouldn't do anything beyond a text box now, but podfic covers came at the worst time for me. After recording, edits, and listen throughs and before uploading for hosting. I forever whinged around that. Most surprising bit of podficcing: The edits, I guess? I didn't mind them at all. I can do edits while being sociable, whereas for preprepping and doing the reading itself, I had to lock myself away and put my phone on 'do not disturb' mode. Would I podfic again? I don't have the resources, nor will I be in a position to get a new laptop for the while so, no, I don't know. More no than yes. It depends? As it is, I can't risk anything more than a 60 min run time (no more than 9.5k word count) and even then, I do wonder if I should review that to 30 mins (about 3-4k word count) because I can't trust my equipment. It makes no sense to set your stall up for anything less than a 2k word count. It's too much hassle for me to find an empty space and record for anything under 1.8k at least.  Not to mention the edits, listen through (ugh) and hosting. I can't do anything chaptered in terms of podbooks (because I don't know how to bundle the chapters to export without having ppl downloading 24 separate files and I don't have the bandwidth to deal with that right now. I'd just do a basic .m4b file, although I hear that people aren't fans and NEED. CHAPTERED .m4b podfic, but these madams will have to deal). My computer cannot be trusted to splice various files together (for instance, if I wanted to do a fic with a run time of 180mins, I'd have to do three 60min files, then splice them together. My computer crashed twice doing that feat, so no). This is tragic, because it's knee capped what I wanted to do. Liiiiike that 25k fic to pod in my bookmarks is now deleted (170 mins run time, three files of 57 mins give or take). Overall, yay or nay?  Yay! I'd like to think that I have shown respect for podficcers before, but after doing it for three weeks (11 podfics in three weeks, but I spent two weeks before doing the research) my respect is tenfold. It's not just reading what's on the page, but reacting to it with a mixture of control with the air of surprise. There's an art to it, as well as the technical bits, be it just having a fluid and enjoyable listening experience. Hell, just reading aloud alone is its own feat of stamina. There's the weighing up of file hostings, and this on top of the lack of Blanket Permissions, so if you find a fic that you want to do but there's no BP, you're out of luck, and there are far too many writers who are really arsey toward the whole medium. Conclusion: So, yeah, my experiment ends here! It wasn't a total failure, but it hasn't been an activity brimming with triumphant successes either. Thanks for the weigh ins and the advice from the podficcers who've been doing this for a minute. If you're a writer and are reading this, please think about including a BP in your profiles, even if it's a yes, maybe so (please ask) or hell no (so you won't be bothered).

[cryptocoinguides]

Safemoon Has a New Project.

Hello and welcome back to the daily Safemoon news and updates review. In this content, I will talk about Safemoon and bridges with a full explanation as if you are five years old and at the end of the video you will understand why you should start packing your bags for a trip to the moon. So yeah, this video is super interesting so make sure to watch it until the very end. Disclaimer. Also if you are interested in getting price predictions and crypto news literally every hour, then join my telegram channel, we already have more than 2000 people.

If you want to invest in Safemoon, I would recommend you to use BitMart exchanger, also following the link in my description will give you extra discounts on trading fees. By the way, be careful of scammers pretending to be me on social media. I would never ask your 12 secret words. Links to my official Social Media accounts are in the description. Alright, so I want to start this video with a question. Have you watched the last AMA 2 days ago? Comment down below.

So if you haven’t watched it, then let me tell you something. Safemoon and its upcoming bridges are the only things being discussed on the Safemoon Reddit group and Twitter. But why do we need these bridges? What do crypto bridges even mean? And how will they affect Safemoon price and when these bridges will be implemented? Watch this video to find out. So recently Safemoon CEO John Karony posted the following message. “I’m sure you’ve seen today’s UK regulatory news regarding Binance, it’s important to not limit your projects to one chain. ” Well, big Binance vs Safemoon video you can find on my channel in my previous uploads.

In case you don’t know what recently happened to Binance in the UK, give me like 30 seconds to explain. LONDON Cryptocurrency exchange Binance has been banned from operating in the U.K. by the country’s markets regulator, in the latest sign of a growing crackdown on the crypto market around the world. Britains Financial Conduct Authority said Saturday that Binance Markets Limited, the U.K.

Division of Binance is not permitted to undertake any regulated activity in the U.K. From June 30, the company which already offers Brits crypto trading through its website must add a notice in a prominent place in its website and apps showing U.

K. users the following text: Binance, the world’s largest crypto exchange by trading volumes, was set to launch its own digital asset marketplace in Britain. However, it was one of several crypto firms that withdrew applications to register with the FCA due to not meeting anti-money laundering requirements.

The FCA spokesperson clarified that the scope of the ban was limited. Though Binance Markets Limited is banned from offering regulated services in Britain, non-registered firms can still interact with U.K. consumers. That means Binance could still offer Brits crypto trading through its website. “We are aware of recent reports about an FCA UK notice in relation to Binance Markets Limited (BML). BML is a separate legal entity and does not offer any products or services via the Binance.com website.” Alright, so now let’s get to the Bridges announcement by the Safemoon team.

In the last AMA they said that bridges will be available from Tuesday, which is today. If you still don’t understand what the bridges are, then let me show you a quick and easy-to-understand explanation. ” Today safemoon announced something massive after only a few months of existence. BRIDGES which opens sfm to Etherum, EOS, Wax etc. Released TUESDAY USA time. Bridges are making a huge stir because thanks to our dev papa bridges change the crypto space and our beloved Safemoon is now CROSS CHAIN.

Bridges mean more access to Safemoon from different angles and other ways to acquire such as through Etherum and that corresponds to a huge increase in – volume + the ability to take advantage of what those chains offer. Think of Safemoon as New York City an island cut off but these bridges are now being built out to other cities so the traffic there can come in, each time they pay a toll on the bridge which = reflections to the citizens of NYC aka us #safemoon army! We aren’t so alone and it’s easier to buy.

Who remembers many months ago at our peak ATH we crashed the Binance smart chain – meaning no one could buy, our momentum was shot, had we had bridges this would not have been an issue because, for example, we could have used Etherum to buy safemoon. Guys this project is months old. John and the team have and are barely sleeping but still looking, working excited and fresh flying to Africa locking in deals, showing us actual video footage of meetings with the government, they are fully transparent and upfront, this is the ground floor to something incredible in 5 years this will be world-changing with what they have in motion.

Hold on guys, we’re going to the moon. ” Let me know if you still have questions about bridges down in the comments section. But I think this reddit post made it pretty clear. So as was mentioned above, Tuesday brings us bridges to EOS, Wax, and Ethereum. But why Safemoon team choose them, and what’s so unique in them? Well, let’s find out.

First, let’s take a look at the EOS project. What Is EOS? EOS is a platform that’s designed to allow developers to build decentralized apps (otherwise known as DApps for short.) The project’s goal is relatively simple: to make it as straightforward as possible for programmers to embrace blockchain technology and ensure that the network is easier to use than rivals. As a result, tools and a range of educational resources are provided to support developers who want to build functional apps quickly. Other priorities include delivering greater levels of scalability than other blockchains, some of which can only handle less than a dozen transactions per second.

EOS also aims to improve the experience for users and businesses. While the project tries to deliver greater security and less friction for consumers, it also vies to unlock flexibility and compliance for enterprises. The blockchain launched back in June 2018. Who Are the Founders of EOS? The EOS platform was developed by the company Block.one, and its white paper was authored by Daniel Larimer and Brendan Blumer. Both men continue to be members of Block.one’s executive team, with Blumer serving as CEO and Daniel Larimer as CTO.

Blumer is a serial entrepreneur, and one of his earliest ventures involved selling virtual assets for video games.

He went on to co-found Okay.com, a digitally focused real estate agency in Hong Kong. Larimer is a software programmer who has also started a series of crypto ventures. They include the crypto trading platform BitShares and the Steem blockchain. The pair met in 2016 and formed Block.one the following year. Alright, now let’s move to the second bridge which is the bridge to Wax. What Is WAX? WAX is a purpose-built blockchain, released in 2017, that is designed to make e-commerce transactions faster, simpler and safer for every party involved.

The WAX blockchain uses delegated proof-of-stake (DPoS) as its consensus mechanism. It is fully compatible with EOS. Wait, did I say delegated proof-of-stake? What does it even mean? Delegated Proof-of-Stake is the same as Proof-of-Stake, except people vote for who can validate transactions. In Delegated Proof-of-Stake, users have the power to give their voting power to others if they choose so. Delegated proof of stake is what is known as a consensus mechanism. Consensus mechanisms are ways that transactions are added to the blockchain. So when we have blockchains, we have a series of blocks, and blocks are just units of storage for cryptocurrency transactions.

For example, if you send a bitcoin to a friend, and a bunch of other people sends Bitcoins to their friends, these are all transactions. All these transactions become a block and certain people are responsible for adding these blocks to the blockchain. The people who are responsible for writing these blocks to the blockchain are known as nodes. Nodes are people who own computers with software that connect to the blockchain network. What determines who handles these transactions to blockchain? That’s where the consensus mechanisms come in.

Delegated proof of stake is all based on how many people voted for you to do so. So with the delegated proof of stake, we have a bunch of people who vote for the node that’s allowed to add blocks to the blockchain. The node who wins is known as the witness. Witnesses can validate the transactions faster. The winner is the witness, then the block gets added to the blockchain. Users can also vote for what is known as delegates. Delegates are people who can affect the rules of the blockchain network directly. So let’s say users vote for a particular delegate. The delegated person who was voted in is able to change the rules of the blockchain.

For example, change how many transactions are on the block. So with all of this, delegated proof of stake is aiming to solve some of the issues with how blockchains disperse the power, and how decentralized they are. Alright, if your brain didn’t explode, let’s get back to Wax.

The custom features and the incentive mechanisms developed by WAX are intended to optimize the utility of the blockchain specifically for use in e-commerce, with the goal of encouraging voting on proposals. To make this possible, WAX created a suite of blockchain-based tools upon which decentralized application (DApp) marketplaces and non-fungible tokens can be built upon.

Who Are the Founders of WAX? WAX was co-founded by William Quigley and Jonathan Yantis. William Quigley studied at the University of Southern California and then worked at Disney. After leaving Disney in the early 1990s, he got an MBA at Harvard and became a venture capitalist. Over time, he became the managing director at Idealab. Alongside creating WAX, he is also the managing director at Magnetic. Jonathan Yantis works as the chief operating officer at WAX and as the chief operating officer at OPSkins.

Well, the third bridge is a bridge to Ethereum.

I think 99% of you know what Ethereum is, but let me give you a brief explanation, maybe you will learn something new. What Is Ethereum? Ethereum is a decentralized open-source blockchain system that features its own cryptocurrency, Ether. ETH works as a platform for numerous other cryptocurrencies, as well as for the execution of decentralized smart contracts.

Ethereum was first described in a 2013 whitepaper by Vitalik Buterin.

Buterin, along with other co-founders, secured funding for the project in an online public crowd sale in the summer of 2014 and officially launched the blockchain on July 30, 2015. Ethereums own purported goal is to become a global platform for decentralized applications, allowing users from all over the world to write and run software that is resistant to censorship, downtime, and fraud.

What Makes Ethereum Unique? Ethereum has pioneered the concept of a blockchain smart contract platform.

Smart contracts are computer programs that automatically execute the actions necessary to fulfill an agreement between several parties on the internet. They were designed to reduce the need for trusted intermediates between contractors, thus reducing transaction costs while also increasing transaction reliability. Ethereums principal innovation was designing a platform that allowed it to execute smart contracts using the blockchain, which further reinforces the already existing benefits of smart contract technology.

Ethereums blockchain was designed, according to co-founder Gavin Wood, as a sort of one computer for the entire planet, theoretically able to make any program more robust, censorship-resistant, and less prone to fraud by running it on a globally distributed network of public nodes. Alright, so now when you completely understand what we are dealing with, comment down below your thoughts. Or if something is left unclear for you, feel free to ask it in the comment section. Just like Safemoon CEO John Karony said, “Bridges are an incredible asset and will continue to play a key role in the expansion and adoption for years to come.” If you enjoyed this video, then please like this video and comment something, this would really help me out to reach the youtube algorithm.

If you want to invest in Safemoon, I would recommend you to use BitMart exchanger, also following the link in my description will give you extra discounts on trading fees. But, note that I’m not forcing you to invest in this project. It’s 100% your personal decision.

Also if you are interested in getting price predictions and crypto news literally every hour, then join my telegram channel, we already have more than 2000 people. Don’t forget to check out other videos on this channel. Thanks for watching!.

Read More: Dogecoin outperforms Ethereum, BNB, Cardano, and XRP

via Safemoon Has a New Project.

[theblankestofstares]

Save haven {Kim Seokjin}

Title: Save Haven

Genre: Fluff

Summary: You get strange text messages from your ex-boyfriend and decide to crash at your best friend’s place for a while

Words: 1700

His texts usually didn't bother you.

Your ex-boyfriend had been sending them for months. Ever since you had ended things with him, you'd get one or two messages a week.

The reason behind this was that the two of you hadn't broken up on good terms. After nine months of dating, he had become crazily possessive over you. He didn't let you go to parties, and when he did, he'd be next to you the entire time. He was aggressive towards boys approaching you, even if it was only about stuff like homework.  He went through your phone without your consent, he even had an app to track your iPhone when you were out of the house.

Needless to say, he wasn't very happy to hear that you'd be moving out of your shared apartment, and with that his life.

The texts were mostly about how he knew that you still missed him every day; you didn't, and how he knew you had asked his friends about him; you hadn't.

You never responded to any of his bull shit-messages, and it looked like he was starting to notice, as the texts started to come less frequently.

You were deep in thought, biting your lip as you moved your eyes over the computer screen on the desk in your own private office. You liked your job because it allowed you to make use of your smartness, but it could get very complicated and hard to keep up with.

When you were finally done with your tasks for the day, you stood up from the uncomfortable chair you had been sitting in and stretched. As you walked out of your office and into the main room, you noticed that everyone else had gone home already. You looked at the huge clock on the wall and cursed when you realized exactly how late it was.

You were rushing out of the building when a red bouquet of flowers caught your eye. Frowning, you picked it up. Why had no one taken this home with them?

As you lifted the flowers, a tiny paper fell out. You picked it up to see who this bouquet belonged to.

I'm waiting for you S.

Gasping, you stumbled around a bit. This was obviously meant for you. The S. said it all.

Was he waiting for you? Where? You were suddenly scared out of your mind. He had shown up at your work, what kept him from actually going to your house? You couldn't go back there now.

After a few minutes, you decided to call you friend Jin. He didn't live too far, maybe he could pick you up.

The phone ringed a couple of times until, eventually, it went to his voicemail.

You cursed out loud and stepped out of the office. Locking the door behind you, you began your walk to his house.

Your heels were clicking on the empty streets as you walked them. The darkness was everywhere, only the streetlights provided some light, just enough to make the whole scene a lot eerier.  

The walk to his house was about ten minutes. It started raining after five. Not raining, storming. The water came down from the dark sky in buckets, drenching you in seconds. You pulled your jacket up as much as possible, but it didn't have a hood so even your hair turned into a wet mess.

After a few more minutes, you finally arrived at Jin's house. The light was burning in his living room. This small fact made you very happy, as it meant he was home. You walked over to his door, still in the rain, and rang his doorbell.

A few seconds passed until the door opened. A tall figure appearing in its place. You looked up at him and were met with his beautiful brown eyes. You had to admit, your friend was attractive. And kind, too.

He didn't even say anything as he pulled you inside to get you out of the rain. The sudden pull on your arm surprised you, and you yelped as you smacked into him. A loud groan erupted from the male and you had to stifle your laugh.

"Y/N, look what you've done." He whined and you giggled.

"Nice to see you, too Jin."

He stepped back from you. "So, why did you decide to bless me with your presence at this time of the day," He looked at the clock on the other side of the room, "or I mean night?"

You were just about to explain when a stream of raindrops went from your hair, down your shirt, leaving your entire body in shivers.

Of course, Jin noticed. "Here, I'll get you something warm and dry to put in first. You can make hot chocolate if you want."And he disappeared into his bedroom.

Even though he couldn't see it, you nodded but opted to stay in your spot by the front door in fear of leaving a wet trail in his house. Hugging your chest, you looked around a bit. His house had a huge living room and small bedrooms. His living room was nicely decorated. You were proud to say you helped the boy with that because he wasn't the best at it, to be honest. There were a couch and a small table across from a nice tv. The tv was up against a wall with dozens of pictures; that had been your idea. The pictures were mostly from Jin with his family, friends and you. You had known each other for a very long time. Your parents always used to say that the two of you would end up together, and you were suspicious of a few bets going around in both families.

There as an obvious bond between the two of you, but neither of you ever bothered to see if a romantic relationship would ever work. With that, you thought, he also probably didn't like you in that way.

Your thoughts were interrupted by a pile of clothes being pushed into your arms. Jin smiled at the little yelp of surprise that escaped your mouth.

"You're adorable." He cooed as he petted your head. "You can get dressed in my bathroom, I'll prepare the hot chocolate."

When you walked out of the bathroom, Jin was already sitting on the couch with his back facing you. You decided to scare him and started creeping up behind him.

The moment you had your arms up and were inhaling to shout, he turned around in a millisecond. You screamed loudly as he grabbed you by the arm and literally pulled you over the couch and onto his lap. He held you by your waist as you were trashing to get out of his grip, unsuccessfully of course.

You were struggling for a few minutes until eventually, you relaxed in his arms. By the adrenaline and the craziness of the situation, you hadn't noticed how close you actually were to this boy. And with the realization, came the uneasiness.

You tried to move again, but Jin's muscular arms held you in your place. "Y/N, stop moving," He muttered, "I like sitting like this."

As much as you tried to ignore the feeling of butterflies in your stomach, his words certainly did something to you, even though maybe they didn't to him. You rested your head in the crook of his shoulder. Both your eyes looking at the ceiling.

It felt like hours later that Jin finally spoke again. "I don't get how you haven't done anything about this situation."

You knew exactly what he meant. He had told you countless times before that you should look for help with the texts, but you never actually deemed it necessary.

"I will." You promised. "But can I just stay here for the night please?"

Jin hummed from underneath you. "Of course, Y/N. You could stay here any day of the week."

You smiled and tilted your head slightly, turning to look at him to find him already staring at you.

"Why do you always date the douchebags?" His voice was a mere whisper. You truly didn't know how to answer this question. You could barely think straight. Here you were lying on top of your best friend whom you apparently had a bigger crush on than you had thought. Your faces were only a couple of inches apart. Could it be..?

"You do realize that there are a lot of nice guys, right?" He whispered. With that, your heart broke a little. Of course, he wasn't into you. The fact that he was suggesting the option of dating other guys threw your entire fantasy right out of the window.

"I.. I gue-" Your voice was cut off by Jin's lips smashing against your own. In your confusion, you didn't react for a moment, but then you slowly relaxed into the kiss. His plump lips were moving softly against yours, and you turned your body to face him, as you were still sitting on his lap. He noticed your discomfort, and without removing his lips for even a second, he grabbed the hem of your back and laid you down on the couch as he hovered over you.

Your lips were still moving against each other when your hand found his hair, a small groan erupted from the beautiful boy above you. The sound made you both chuckle a bit.

"Sorry," Jin whispered against your lips, "I've just been waiting for this moment for a long time."

You nodded as the boy started to plant kisses on your jaw and neck, gasping.

"Me too, Jin. Me too."

dude this took forever to upload because the program I write this on deleted like 75% of this imagine and I couldn't be bothered to write it again

But I did work really hard on this and it would mean the world if you could give this a like or whatever. I’d love you more than Hoseok loves dancing.

[slrlounge1]

Narrative Blogging App | A “Hands-On” Review

One of the more painstaking parts of being a successful photographer is blogging consistently and doing it well. The challenges are legion: properly sizing images, creating collages, image optimization, uploading, organizing, seo, etc. Often those technical challenges can distract from writing and creating compelling content. Personally, my biggest block to blogging was getting the images how I wanted them in WordPress. It felt like an impossible task to add 50-100 images to a blog and arrange them exactly how I wanted them. So the first time I heard about Narrative, during their initial beta phase, I was intrigued. Narrative is an app-based blogging platform that promises to simplify blogging and to make creating beautiful blogs easy. In this post I’ll break down Narrative’s features and give you my thoughts on ways that it’s awesome, and areas where it could improve.

Interface

Narrative is an elegant, well-designed, and fairly easy to use blogging app for Mac OS that works with WordPress of Squarespace. It loads quickly and once you’re in the app, you simply click “create new blog” to get started. Once you’ve selected the file where your images are stored, you’re ready to begin dragging and dropping your images into the post. Yes, it’s literally that easy. You can actually drag and drop your images in almost any arrangement you can imagine. You can also resize images in the app to create just about any arrangement you can dream up.

One area where I’ve had trouble even after many updates is in writing text. It’s not a major issue, but almost every time I add a text box and begin typing, the text line will move randomly to a different line and I have to go and click back where I was originally typing to continue. It’s a nuisance, but not a deal breaker. Overall, the app is intuitive and works as you’d hope it would.

SEO

Once you’ve built your blog, you’re going to want to optimize it for SEO. This is one area where Narrative really shines. You can quickly and easily add keywords to images and add meta descriptions to the post and it will automatically give you feedback on your SEO. To add keywords you simply click on an image and type in the keywords you want to add. You can even select multiple images at one time to add a keyword to multiple photos.

Post Submission

Narrative will publish your blog directly from its app onto its server, and then directly onto your WordPress or Squarespace webpage. They even have plugins for themes like Flothemes, Pro Photo, and Showit to ensure the sync works properly. Once you’re all setup and after you’ve written your blog and optimized it for SEO, you click “Publish” and Narrative does the rest of the work for you.

Speed

When you build a blog, you’re adding lots of images to your post that have a tendency to slow down loading speeds unless you size the image perfectly and use an image optimizer to reduce the overall size of your file. Narrative does the optimizing for you. All you have to do is link Narrative with you’re images and build your blog.

The blog post is also hosted on Narrative’s servers, so when it’s working well, it’s very fast and it’s going to save you some storage space on your own server. This of course presents an area of concern. Namely, what happens if Narrative’s servers crash, or if they close up shop? For example, last week they launched a new update which increased their server use substantially and caused widespread outages for a few hours. My blog posts were unavailable as were many other photographers’ I know who use Narrative. Again, this was frustrating, but not a deal breaker. Sometimes servers go down. The folks at Narrative worked immediately to fix the problem and wrote an e-mail to every user who was affected, describing the problem and the solution. I haven’t had any problems since and everything is working great. That brings me to the next thing I like about Narrative, their people.

Customer Support

I appreciate the transparency of the people at Narrative and their willingness to recieve feedback and impliment changes that make their app better. When I first tried Narrative as a beta, it was admittedly extremely buggy and I wrote many e-mails outlining the challenges and things I needed to have improved if I was going to pay for the app. In the past few months, they’ve fixed most of the bugs and implemented many of the things I (and many others) suggested. It’s important to remember that this is still a fairly new piece of software, so there are going to be bugs, but it’s clear to me that the people at Narrative really care about their customers and the product they’re putting out. They are quick to fix bugs when they’re reported and they release frequent updates adding new features and improved functionality.

Pricing

Narrative offers three different monthly tiers, $9/month (Lite) for 10 published blogs, $12/month (Basic) for 50 published blogs, and $20/month (Pro) for unlimited blog posts and the ability to export your blog post as a JPEG. This is a useful feature in the event that you ever leave Narrative but don’t want to pay to have them continue to host your blogs. Or in the extremely unlikely event that Narrative closes shop, you’ll have all of your blogs backed up. They also offer a discount on their packages if you pay annually. I think these prices are fairly reasonable, considering all that Narrative does and the fact that they’re actually hosting your blog posts.

Conclusion

Narrative has been revolutionary for me in terms of blogging. Gone are the feelings of dread when I sit down to write a blog post. I’m not worried about creating duos in one app and then importing them into WordPress and hoping that I added them in the right order, lest I have to go back and forth cutting and pasting into the correct order. Narrative just works. It’s easy to use, efficient, and allows me to focus on creating great content instead instead of being bogged down by technical dead ends when designing a blog. Narrative has made blogging a more joyful experience.

Narrative has room for improvement though, though. It needs to become more reliable (see the server outage above). It really should allow all users to download the JPEGS of their blogs or provide another method of backup to ensure that users won’t lose their posts entirely if a catastrophe happens. It should also import the images directly into the app. Currently, if you move or delete the folder you used to import images into Narrative, the images go blank in the app and you have to relink them to make any adjustments. Given my experience with the app and their team thus far though, I have no doubt that they’ll continue to improve the app. They have done that so far and I see no reason to think they won’t do so going forward.

In the end, I highly recommend Narrative for any photographer looking to optimize their workflow, enhance their SEO, and fall in love with creating beautiful blog posts again.

      from SLR Lounge http://bit.ly/2XoQSHr via IFTTT

[slrlounge1]

Narrative Blogging App | A “Hands-On” Review

One of the more painstaking parts of being a successful photographer is blogging consistently and doing it well. The challenges are legion: properly sizing images, creating collages, image optimization, uploading, organizing, seo, etc. Often those technical challenges can distract from writing and creating compelling content. Personally, my biggest block to blogging was getting the images how I wanted them in WordPress. It felt like an impossible task to add 50-100 images to a blog and arrange them exactly how I wanted them. So the first time I heard about Narrative, during their initial beta phase, I was intrigued. Narrative is an app-based blogging platform that promises to simplify blogging and to make creating beautiful blogs easy. In this post I’ll break down Narrative’s features and give you my thoughts on ways that it’s awesome, and areas where it could improve.

Interface

Narrative is an elegant, well-designed, and fairly easy to use blogging app for Mac OS that works with WordPress of Squarespace. It loads quickly and once you’re in the app, you simply click “create new blog” to get started. Once you’ve selected the file where your images are stored, you’re ready to begin dragging and dropping your images into the post. Yes, it’s literally that easy. You can actually drag and drop your images in almost any arrangement you can imagine. You can also resize images in the app to create just about any arrangement you can dream up.

One area where I’ve had trouble even after many updates is in writing text. It’s not a major issue, but almost every time I add a text box and begin typing, the text line will move randomly to a different line and I have to go and click back where I was originally typing to continue. It’s a nuisance, but not a deal breaker. Overall, the app is intuitive and works as you’d hope it would.

SEO

Once you’ve built your blog, you’re going to want to optimize it for SEO. This is one area where Narrative really shines. You can quickly and easily add keywords to images and add meta descriptions to the post and it will automatically give you feedback on your SEO. To add keywords you simply click on an image and type in the keywords you want to add. You can even select multiple images at one time to add a keyword to multiple photos.

Post Submission

Narrative will publish your blog directly from its app onto its server, and then directly onto your WordPress or Squarespace webpage. They even have plugins for themes like Flothemes, Pro Photo, and Showit to ensure the sync works properly. Once you’re all setup and after you’ve written your blog and optimized it for SEO, you click “Publish” and Narrative does the rest of the work for you.

Speed

When you build a blog, you’re adding lots of images to your post that have a tendency to slow down loading speeds unless you size the image perfectly and use an image optimizer to reduce the overall size of your file. Narrative does the optimizing for you. All you have to do is link Narrative with you’re images and build your blog.

The blog post is also hosted on Narrative’s servers, so when it’s working well, it’s very fast and it’s going to save you some storage space on your own server. This of course presents an area of concern. Namely, what happens if Narrative’s servers crash, or if they close up shop? For example, last week they launched a new update which increased their server use substantially and caused widespread outages for a few hours. My blog posts were unavailable as were many other photographers’ I know who use Narrative. Again, this was frustrating, but not a deal breaker. Sometimes servers go down. The folks at Narrative worked immediately to fix the problem and wrote an e-mail to every user who was affected, describing the problem and the solution. I haven’t had any problems since and everything is working great. That brings me to the next thing I like about Narrative, their people.

Customer Support

I appreciate the transparency of the people at Narrative and their willingness to recieve feedback and impliment changes that make their app better. When I first tried Narrative as a beta, it was admittedly extremely buggy and I wrote many e-mails outlining the challenges and things I needed to have improved if I was going to pay for the app. In the past few months, they’ve fixed most of the bugs and implemented many of the things I (and many others) suggested. It’s important to remember that this is still a fairly new piece of software, so there are going to be bugs, but it’s clear to me that the people at Narrative really care about their customers and the product they’re putting out. They are quick to fix bugs when they’re reported and they release frequent updates adding new features and improved functionality.

Pricing

Narrative offers three different monthly tiers, $9/month (Lite) for 10 published blogs, $12/month (Basic) for 50 published blogs, and $20/month (Pro) for unlimited blog posts and the ability to export your blog post as a JPEG. This is a useful feature in the event that you ever leave Narrative but don’t want to pay to have them continue to host your blogs. Or in the extremely unlikely event that Narrative closes shop, you’ll have all of your blogs backed up. They also offer a discount on their packages if you pay annually. I think these prices are fairly reasonable, considering all that Narrative does and the fact that they’re actually hosting your blog posts.

Conclusion

Narrative has been revolutionary for me in terms of blogging. Gone are the feelings of dread when I sit down to write a blog post. I’m not worried about creating duos in one app and then importing them into WordPress and hoping that I added them in the right order, lest I have to go back and forth cutting and pasting into the correct order. Narrative just works. It’s easy to use, efficient, and allows me to focus on creating great content instead instead of being bogged down by technical dead ends when designing a blog. Narrative has made blogging a more joyful experience.

Narrative has room for improvement though, though. It needs to become more reliable (see the server outage above). It really should allow all users to download the JPEGS of their blogs or provide another method of backup to ensure that users won’t lose their posts entirely if a catastrophe happens. It should also import the images directly into the app. Currently, if you move or delete the folder you used to import images into Narrative, the images go blank in the app and you have to relink them to make any adjustments. Given my experience with the app and their team thus far though, I have no doubt that they’ll continue to improve the app. They have done that so far and I see no reason to think they won’t do so going forward.

In the end, I highly recommend Narrative for any photographer looking to optimize their workflow, enhance their SEO, and fall in love with creating beautiful blog posts again.

      from SLR Lounge https://www.slrlounge.com/narrative-blogging-app-a-hands-on-review/ via IFTTT