#this post brought to you by the fact that the poll results kind of look like a HP bar

[adobe-outdesign]

do you knock out the Chansey or make it into a god among its kind? the choice is yours to make

[bllsbailey]

This Is About to Get Ugly

Do you think the DNC went well? I'm not sure the Democrats did. Reading between the lines of what was said and done between all that "joy," I think the Democrats are panicking, and for good reason. They aren't selling themselves well. 

If you think this is good, I've got sour news for you. This is the kind of thing that spurs Democrats into action. They live by the mantra "by any means necessary," and if the Democrats are the cornered animal they're hinting they are, then they're about to resort to some really brutal tactics to hold onto power. 

The signs are all there. Bizarre time change-ups, internal discord, Democrats avoiding each other, sudden and out-of-place displays of patriotism, speech disruptions, and a presidential candidate that they had to force into the position of nominee by abandoning the Democracy they claim to defend. Even as CNN contributor Scott Jennings noted, noticeably absent from all the speeches and talks was an explanation as to why the country is in the state it is after Democrats have been in control for 12 of the past 16 years. 

Moreover, as the DNC went on, a lot of claims were made that were disproven in real-time. Social media denizens and news sites alike watched the proceedings like hawks, calling out Democrats when they pushed lie after lie. 

It had a very interesting effect, and while it will take days for polls to catch up, you could see just how much damage people telling the truth and exposing the facts were doing to the Democrat Party and Harris in particular by looking at websites like Polymarket. The website, which allows for betting on everything from sports to politics, prominently displays the 2024 presidential election. Harris led Trump in terms of favorability for a while, but now Trump is on top. 

Interestingly, that switch happened during the DNC. 

The Democrats see all this info and more and aren't going to take this lightly. As they feel the wall at their back, they're going to start lashing out, but don't think they're lashing out alone. They will have their allies in the corporate media and Silicon Valley pulling out all the stops to make sure that the party and Harris look as good as possible in order to fool people into believing she's not the communist she actually is. 

As I've covered before, Harris and her VP pick Tim Walz are big fans of censorship and coming down on free speech. Both are on record proclaiming that they will come down on what they call "misinformation" and "hate speech," and they will make themselves the arbiter of what defines those terms. 

(READ: The Anti-Free Speech Candidate)

You and I know how far they're willing to go because we witnessed it in real-time. The Hunter Biden laptop story, Tulsi Gabbard's Google results, and even various attempts to discredit and silence RedState have all come at the hands of the Democrat Party allies who are bent on seeing to it that the Democrats have every advantage. Google even tried to suppress information about the attempted assassination of Trump.

I can't stress this enough. This isn't an accident. This is very, very intentional and as we get closer to election day, this is only going to get worse. I have no idea what surprise the Democrat Party has waiting for us in October, but I can guarantee that in order to pull it off, it will require so much media cooperation and internet censorship that they'll be digging through it for years.  

Don't think for one second that you won't be affected by it. This will be a massive rollout of coordination between Democrats and their allies. You will be blacklisted, your posts hidden, and your information feeds choked. You will see all sorts of attacks on networks like X and Rumble, which allow free speech, be they lawfare or DDOS. 

We know all this because we've brought you proof before, including very recently. 

(READ: Surfaced Recording of Biden/Harris Team Reveals How They Targeted and Manipulated Voters and Information)

You're not without your weapons. RedState strives to be one of them, which is why we're attacked so often. On more than one occasion, we've been the thorn in the shoes of the powerful, and that's why we're constantly the subject of censorship attempts. This is, of course, why we have the VIP program. The point of these attacks is to limit our reach so severely that it tanks our traffic, and we slip quietly into oblivion. 

If you can, we'd love for you to join our VIP Program and become a member for very, very cheap. Today is the last day of our 60% off sale, making all the videos, articles, and podcasts our members receive very inexpensive. Just enter promo code "FIGHT" on sign-up, and you'll be part of their headache. 

Remember, the left is desperate to hold onto power, and they might lose it to the guy they've been telling you they hate and fear most. Don't think they won't pull out all the stops, and this includes coming after us both. Because the less information you gather and distribute, the better off the Democrat Party is. 

Let's fight together. You join us, and we'll keep being an oasis of truth amid the desert of lies they try to create online. 

[aijamisespava]

My Eurovision Winners Ranked

Up next on my list of super fun content to put out while waiting for more Eurovision 2024 Content is the 2nd place poll decision: My personal winners ranked.

This is a super exciting challenge for me because I will be looking at my personal favorites (from 2009 onward) and then ranking them (which may also be the hardest thing I will do this semester), so consider this my All-Star Fan Contest.

DISCLAIMER: This was put together rather quickly and on a day that wasn't the day I put this post out. So this ranking may be different over time. It's so sporadic that my top 5 changes almost every time I hear the respective songs. HERE WE GO!

15. "You Are The Only One" by Sergey Lazarev/"Sound Of Silence" by Dami Im (🇷🇺 and 🇦🇺 2016) Technically, this is more "UNRANKED" because I have 2 2016 winners that change depending on my mood. That's how this list is kicking off.

14. "Running Scared" by Ell/Nikki (🇦🇿 2011) A divisive entry when it comes to if it deserved to win. I think it did (obviously lol), but I just liked others from other years a little more. But it doesn't take away from the fact that I find this song really beautiful.

13. "Fairytale" by Alexander Rybak (🇳🇴 2009) Wow. I ranked an icon so low, but that just means that Eurovision, for me, improved so much over the past years since I started ranking them. Plus, the iconic level that this song holds alone is astounding.

12. "Undo" by Sanna Nielsen (🇸🇪 2014) Staging wise, the staging really catapulted the song to great heights. But the song is amazing and I always enjoy hearing it. It has kind of a music box opening, which is always something I can get behind. I feel bad for ranking this one so low!

11. "Beautiful Mess" by Kristian Kostov (🇧🇬 2017) This song is so mellow, but great because it's NOT boring! It's really calming and was a really popular song at the time and even personally (was 81st on my Wrapped in 2022 and my mom has this on her playlist).

10. "Arcade" by Duncan Laurence (🇳🇱 2019) Of the actual winners at the contest, this one has to be my favorite of the bunch. It deserves all the accolades, and is the perfect song to be the first Eurovision song to reach 1 billion streams. I respect Duncan so much as a musician and think he deserves all great things with this song.

9. "O Mie" by Aliona Moon (🇲🇩 2013) A beautiful, rather underrated ballad from Moldova took the top spot for me in 2013, and I don't regret putting it up there. The song is so amazing. It's one of the songs where the performance didn't need to do anything for the song as the song is great in and of itself.

8. "Répondez-moi" by Gjon's Tears (🇨🇭 2020) I feel so bad for putting this down in the middle of the pack because I really do like this song! It just shows how much I like these personal winners. And thing is, I think this song would have done well had the contest gone on. Probably not a win, but I could see it getting a similar result as "Tout l'univers" had one year later.

7. "Forever" by Alekseev (Belarus 2018) This is only 1 of 2 NQs I had of all my personal winners. But this is one of my favorites because the ambiance is unique and eerie, but so entrancing. It's something I would love to write something for it, but also love the personal feelings I have when listening to it (if that makes sense?)

6. "Die Together" by Amanda Tenfjord (🇬🇷 2022) My first run through of Eurovision (catching up with all the songs as they came out) brought me an amazing winner to kick it off. I was hooked from the concept of the song and was not disappointed with what we were given!

5. "Crno I Belo" by Kaliopi (🇲🇰 2012) Kaliopi is a total queen for bringing this iconic song to the contest. I love it so much, was so happy when it got put on Spotify in the US that I actually wrote something about it. But from beginning to end it amazes. The pacing is magnificent and everything about it (HIGH NOTE) was absolutely stunning!

4. "We Could Be The Same" by maNga (🇹🇷 2010) I know I know I know. I'm team Turkiyë in the debate. But as someone who loves rock music, this song was perfect for me. In fact, it was one of the first Eurovision songs I had heard that hadn't won!

3. "Aijā" by Sudden Lights (🇱🇻 2023) What haven't I already said about this song? It's such a magical piece from beginning to end. It's so relaxing (and I actually tried listening to it while falling asleep once like an actual lullaby and I was OUT before the song was done!). When I first heard it, it quite literally shot to the top of the rankings and stayed there (despite my runner up's efforts). I also must note that I also listened to the rest of Sudden Lights' discography and was impressed with what I heard!

2. "Rhythm Inside" by Loïc Nottet (🇧🇪 2015) Taking runner up is my personal favorite from one of the most stacked years of Eurovision. This song, while varies away from songs I typically listen to is just so catchy. It also bears an emotional attachment because since hearing this song (and watching the performance), I have become a huge fan of Loïc's post-Eurovision discography, which is also vastly different from his entry.

1. "Tout l'univers" by Gjon's Tears (🇨🇭 2021) I know from when I mentioned my favorites from each country that I pointed out my favorite entry of all time being Switzerland's 2021 entry. A lot of what makes it my all time favorite is the emotional attachment I have towards it. If this song didn't exist, I doubt I would be writing this today.

[awake-my-oceans]

so sorry for the dumb question but i recently started the cased closed manga after i saw ur posts and was confused where kaito kid came in?? are they in the same universe? i searched it up and i found some results saying that he's from another manga by the same mangaka but some that say that he's in case closed too. tysm!!

Dear anon, that’s not a dumb question; this is a weird topic with a weird fan base. Detective Conan (the English dub is called Case Closed) has been running since 1994, and it’s has a relatively small fan base outside Japan (where it’s HUGE). Aka, most people talking about Detective Conan will assume that you’ve been following the ins and outs of it for years, and will therefore fail to explain things like how Kaitou Kid is kind-of-and-kind-of-not a crossover. Bear with me.

I’m putting the rest under a cut since I got excited and this got long.

To be clear, I’m not one of those longtime fans, I got into it like……..8 months ago shgjwngjwnjfms. I guess I just followed the fandom convention of not explaining stuff. Until now!

Let’s start with the author, Gosho Aoyama. Early in his career, he starts a fairly lighthearted manga about the mishaps of a teenage magician who goes the not-at-all convoluted path of trying to hunt down his father’s murderers by being an international jewel thief. He also starts a child-aimed manga called Yaiba about a boy who’s competent at being a samurai and incompetent at pretty much everything else; when he learns he has to defeat a great evil, he goes on adventures via The Power Of Friendship.

At this point, Gosho says “ok but I want to launch a more successful manga.” Fair enough! So he starts Detective Conan, which turns out to be a whopping success. He’s having fun quietly referencing Yaiba in the background—it’s the show the Detective Boys/Junior Detective Club (depending on sub/dub) are obsessed with.

Gosho decides to have even more fun by bringing in Kaitou Kid for a one-off crossover. Except he made the (excellent) mistake of making Kaitou Kid so incredibly fascinating and have such great interactions with Conan that Kid keeps coming back out of sheer demand. Seriously. He keeps ranking second in popularity polls and it’s not even his manga. The fandom took one look at him and said “yeah, we’re keeping this one.”

(Then again, how could we NOT? Look at him. LOOK AT HIM.)

A lot of the groundwork for Detective Conan was lifted straight from Magic Kaito. Like. Shinichi (Jimmy in the dub) looks identical to civilian Kaitou Kid. In the non-canon movies, Kid keeps using his real face to disguise as Shinichi, to Conan’s great displeasure, and it’s hilarious. Plus, aside from the fact that Magic Kaito has one character who uses magic and Detective Conan is author-confirmed to not have magic, they live in the EXACT same world in the EXACT same city and the two mangas will in fact occasionally reference each other.

Most people gave up at this point, threw their hands in the air, and decided that for fandom purposes, Detective Conan and Magic Kaito were functionally the same universe narrated from two different perspectives. Hence, pretty much everyone referring to this as DCMK—aka Detective Conan-Magic Kaito.

Tldr—technically Magic Kaito is a different manga, but 1) they’re almost identical worlds and 2) Kaitou Kid appeared once in Detective Conan, making him so popular that he’s been brought pretty fully into the Detective Conan universe. He’ll pop up every fifty to a hundred episodes or so. Which I know sounds like a long time, and it is, but also the anime just celebrated its thousandth episode, so, uh, yeah.

If you want to speed run all the Detective Conan appearances of Kaitou Kid, you totally can—you don’t need canon context. I do recommend going in release order, because Conan and Kid’s relationship has fascinating development. The one Detective Conan plot-heavy episode featuring Kid is the Mystery Train episodes (701-704), so you might want to skip that for strong Detective Conan spoilers. Note that Kid works out that Conan is Shinichi early on in the timeline of the non-canon movies, but we have no confirmation that he knows this in canon, although there is plenty of speculation.

If you want a full-on dose of Kaitou Kid, you can also jump over to the Magic Kaito manga and anime! Featuring this mysterious, elegant, and highly competent gentleman thief being a very sweet teenager who is an absolute disaster at everyday life. I think that’s only in sub, not dub, but I could be wrong. Either way, it’s absolutely worth your while.

If you want more DCMK content, you can also hang around this blog, follow @redrobin-detective who has excellent DCMK stuff and actually dragged me into DCMK herself, and go check out the ao3 tag. Trust me, fully half of the DCMK tag is Conan or Shinichi interacting with Kaitou Kid.

Once I finish my vast DCMK wip, you can read that, too! It’s postcanon fallout of everything, with Kid and Shinichi/Jimmy as the main (platonic) relationship.

[lightns881]

DreamNotFound Shipper Demographics and the Question on Whether Encouraging the Shippers is Unhealthy

So a couple of days ago I ran a poll on DreamNotFound shippers to capture demographics because a Reddit post (I will link it below) discussing the potential harm of Dream’s fanservice tactics (I’ve talked about it on a previous post) made me very curious as to the kind of audience he was attracting. 

Here are the results.

The survey consisted of four simple questions asking for gender, age, sexuality, and what kind of behavior they engage in when it comes to DreamNotFound.

Out of the 174 DreamNotFound shippers who responded, here are the overarching demographics for them.

Statistics 

Overall (174 Responses)

- 85.6% of total respondents identified as non-heterosexual

- All heterosexual respondents were female

- There were 8 times more female respondents than male respondents

- 37.9% of respondents were under the age of 16

Male (14 Responses)

- 50% of male respondents were under the age of 16, 1 respondent was 12 or under

- All male respondents identified as non-heterosexual with 42.9% identifying as homosexual, 42.9% identifying as bisexual/pansexual, 7.1% identifying as Asexual, and 7.1% identifying as Other

Female (116 Responses)

- 36.1% of female respondents were under the age of 16, 21% were over the age of 18

- 21% of female respondents identified as heterosexual, the majority (47.1%) identified as Bisexual/Pansexual

Non-Binary/Other (41 Responses)

- Non-Binary/Other respondents had the largest under 16 population at 39% and lowest 18 and over population at 19.5%

- 73.2% of non-binary respondents identified as bisexual/pansexual, 7.3% as homosexual, 14.6% as asexual, and 4.9% as other

(I will post a link to download the google spreadsheet in the comments below if anyone would like to take a look at the data for themselves.)

Fanfiction/Fanart/Reader Statistics

- DreamNotFound creators (fanfiction and/or fanart) were most likely to be bisexual/pansexual females between the ages of 16-17

- 35.3% of DreamNotFound creators were 15 or under, 41.2% were 16-17, and 23.5% were 18 or over

- 65.2% of DreamNotFound fanfiction readers were over the age of 16 (34.9% were 15 and below, 42.8% were 16-17, and 22.4% were 18 and over)

Possible Shortcomings in the Data

Though this survey was conducted for DreamNotFound shippers, not everyone marked the option of Shipping DnF in the last question. Though it might seem as some stray non-DreamNotFound shippers could have potentially taken the survey as well, this is likely not true considering the individuals who chose not to mark the Shipping DnF option all marked either one or both of the other two options. A likely hypothesis could be that some people thought Shipping DnF meant shipping them seriously/for real.*

*A way I’ve heard the difference between shipping them seriously and not seriously be described is shipping Dream and GeorgeNotFound (not serious) vs shipping Clay and George (serious). While all DnF shippers engage in the first, not everyone engages in the second because it is more of an invasion of privacy. It’s sort of like the way some people might ship two characters in a show but not ship the actors that play them. In this case, Dream and GeorgeNotFound function as sort of personas, while Clay and George are the actual individuals behind them.

Discussion on Potential Harm of DreamNotFound

So onto the million-dollar question: Is Dream’s fanservice and encouragement for the DreamNotFound shippers harmful solely because of the fact so many of them are minors? Is it harmful for minors to sexualize creators by writing, reading, and creating fanfiction/fanart (that might or might not be NSFW)?

*Chuckles*

Look, since the age of the internet, fandoms, and fangirls/fanboys, minors have been sexualizing their favorite characters, ships, personas, actors, singers and creators. “Teenage girls,” specifically, have been obsessing over them for a lifetime now. Just take a look at the One Direction and K-Pop fandoms. Is it harmful? I’m sure dozens of people, articles, and researchers have tackled this question in the past.

But, of course, we are talking about Dream’s deliberate encouragement of this ship (because it sure does get him a heck of a ton of fan content, does it not?) Obsession to the point where it affects a part of your life is obviously harmful, but is Dream encouraging this sort of behavior? Besides the passing jokes and fanservice, there is not indication that he’s deliberately encouraging obsessive shipping. Wouldn’t he try a little harder if he were?

And sure, Dream should not take pleasure from a bunch of thirteen year old girls calling him sexy and/or writing smut about him, but even if they were to stop the fanservice now, I HIGHLY doubt these behaviors would stop. It never did stop with One Direction, did it? Or K-Pop Groups. And I bet you right now someone is out there currently reading Septiplier fanfiction and/or engaging in the fandom that’s left for them even after they’ve explicitly told the fans they’re uncomfortable with it.

I don’t think Dream telling fangirls to stop shipping DnF will prevent this obsessive fangirl behavior from those who have it. This issue is much bigger than just Dream and George and the Minecraft community. The only thing it would do is stop the respectful and more mature DreamNotFound shippers, and that isn’t really going to make a difference, is it?

Now, in terms of accusations of grooming, I think this is a vastly different scenario that shouldn’t be brought into the discussion of DreamNotFound shippers. As long as the Dream Team doesn’t actively engage on a personal level with minors, there shouldn’t be a fear of sexual allegations. And again, even if he were to come forth and tell the fans to stop shipping DreamNotFound, it does not make this kind of situation any more unlikely to happen.

Concluding Thoughts

Now, I’m not saying I don’t entirely agree with the whole of the post. I think it brings forth some valid concerns that should be addressed, but I also think not everything mentioned is under Dream’s control. And specifically dealing with encouraging DreamNotFound shippers, in my opinion, I don’t think it’s going to make a difference in the toxicity and obsessive behaviors behind some of their stans. Most toxic and/or obsessive stans/shippers will continue to be toxic and/or obsessive, and the others who aren’t are just going to be discouraged from engaging in a ship and fandom they might really enjoy.

A Note on the Second Survey Conducted on the writing/reading of NSFW content from DreamNotFound shippers

I know some of you know I also conducted a second survey that was a little more personal and contained questions pertaining to the engagement of shippers in NSFW DreamNotFound content.

The reason I didn’t include the results for that survey here are because there have only been 20 responses to the survey as of now, and I don’t believe it’s enough to offer a valid data analysis for it.

However, if you guys would like to participate in it, I will link the form in the comments as well. I apologize for all the links down there, I do not want Tumblr to delete my post from tag pages.

Thank you everyone who participated on the survey! I would also like to thank the dream team writers discord server who helped in spreading the survey and evaluating the second unreleased survey. I hope, at the very least, this data evokes some discussion about this topic.

Check out my Tumblr page for DreamNotFound Fanfiction reviews, my twitch link (I stream MC every Sunday 7PM CT with my best friend), and other crack content! Toodles! :)

[queenmylovely]

Learning Curve

Summary: Ben hardy x fem!reader. It can be so hard to find the words to ask a significant other for something new. 

Word Count: 3.8k

Warnings: cussing, fluff, smut (protected sex [what’s that?], oral sex, fingering, daddy kink, etc.) (18+!! marked with ***)

A/N: It’s finally time for my 500 follower celebration to kick off! According to the polls, this comes in third place, making it the first I’m posting. Thank you so much again to everyone who follows me, including the people that have since I hit 500, cause it’s been a minute, whoops. I’m excited for this one and thank you to Brigid (@illfoandillfie​) for reading this over and instilling confidence in me 💖 The other two will hopefully be coming out in as many weeks, so keep an eye out! Any feedback is super appreciated but especially replies, messages, and asks are super helpful for my writing ‘cause I get to hear what you think! 

Masterlist

(hhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh)

💖💖💖

About six months into your relationship with Ben, you were feeling… fidgety. It wasn’t anything to do with Ben or your feelings for him, those were going strong. And it wasn’t the sex, or at least wasn’t that the sex was bad. In fact, it was amazing and Ben was really good at it and making you feel good, but sometimes it felt like you needed more. And you were pretty sure that you had put your finger on what exactly that more was, but didn't know how to broach it with Ben.

It was something that you had experienced with a couple other boyfriends, though it had happened naturally and in the instances where it hadn’t you had never brought it up. It was in no way the reason any of those relationships failed, you just thought that it’d be best to at least talk about it with Ben because you felt like you were going to be with him for a long time and it seemed right to be honest with him about this and your needs.

The resolution to be honest did not make what you wanted to say any less awkward. You had absolutely no idea how to bring up to your boyfriend, who was seemingly pretty vanilla, that you wanted to call him daddy. When you were in the moment, the word turned you on too much for you to be embarrassed, but in the cold light of day, it always brought some heat to your cheeks because you had a hard time believing that you found it so hot. You weren’t into ageplay and didn’t want to dress up (that’d just require too much effort anyway), but the comforting, cared for feeling you got whenever you were in that particular subspace with a partner was something unreplicatable in any other situation.

You had had to explain some things to Ben in the past. Stuff like the purpose of safewords and how they’re used for instance. He knew all about consent and always made sure the both of you wanted to do what you were doing and were having a good time, but safewords had never come up with previous partners. You had decided on yours together: cactus. Something short and easy to say that would never come up in during sex out of context. Plus cacti were cute. Now, every time either of you would see one in real life, you’d point it out to the other and giggle together at your shared secret.

There were other things that you had taught Ben about like bondage (so far just handcuffs around the headboard), spanking (he still wouldn’t slap your ass very hard, but that was okay), and even some toys (both of you really liked vibrators). But for some reason, this was the time that you were the most apprehensive. Maybe because this was the first time that it was something that was about you, it was one of your kinks, and it wasn’t shared by everyone. In fact, some people couldn’t handle it at all and didn’t understand why anyone would like it. If Ben was one of those people, you didn’t want to make him uncomfortable by bringing it up. And, you didn’t want Ben to see you differently or judge you because you couldn’t imagine breaking up at this point. So you were nervous about letting something as relatively trivial as this get in the way of your budding relationship.

You decided to take a couple of days to figure out what you wanted to say and to hype yourself up. It also wasn’t really fair to assume that Ben would judge you. He had been so understanding and empathetic towards you with all things (not just sex stuff), so there was no reason to think he’d be any different with this, even if he didn’t think he’d enjoy it.

For the time being, you decided to keep your plans with Ben and try to stay in the moment without obsessing over what you were going to say. That kind of obsessing was best left for when you were trying to fall asleep.

This afternoon, you were going over to Ben’s apartment and planning on spending the night. His project at the moment was shooting in London, so you were seeing a lot of each other, which was good because you couldn’t seem to get enough of each other. After spending practically every other night at each other’s place for about two weeks straight, you had exchanged keys so it would be easier to see each other whenever. That was about a week and a half ago, and it had been so nice since.

So around 4:00pm when you let yourself into his apartment and called out for Ben and heard nothing back, you weren’t surprised. He had told you that he would be done sometime between 3:30-4:30pm, so you weren’t bothered. You slipped off your shoes and socks then went to set your little overnight bag in his bedroom. Then you headed to the kitchen, washed your hands, and grabbed a glass of water, scrolling on your phone for a minute.

Before you did anything else, you heard the front door open and started heading to it. As you were walking through the doorway, you heard Ben call out, “Babe?”

You smiled at him as he noticed you and his entire face brightened when he saw you. As you walked closer he reached his arms out to you and you giggled then ran into them. He pulled you tight to him, so tight you were lifted onto your tiptoes and you laughed. Ben joined in your laughter before pulling back to press a kiss to your lips. The kiss was short because you were both still laughing a bit, just so happy to see each other. You imagined that to anyone else you might be insufferable, but you didn’t really care.

“How are you?” you asked Ben, dropping your hands to rest on his chest.

His were still strong around your waist, “Good, happy to see you. You?”

“Same, so happy to see you,” you replied, rubbing your thumbs back and forth on his chest.

“You’re too fucking cute,” Ben muttered, leaning back in for another kiss. This one was longer and had some heat behind it that made you sigh happily into it. Ben swiped his tongue along your lower lip and you gave him access, getting a bit lost in the kiss as his tongue teased along your own. His hands slid down to your ass, just feeling at first. But then his grip strengthened and you knew what he wanted. Ben was a big fan of carrying you into whichever bedroom you were going to have sex in, feeling you up and making out on the way. But right now, there were other things to do.

“Ben,” you said against his lips because he wasn’t letting you break the kiss.

“Hmm?” was his only reply, so you pushed gently on his chest.

“We have to go start dinner, remember?” you asked, tilting your head towards the kitchen.

Ben frowned and threw his head back, groaning, “Do we?”

“Yeah, we do. We have to start this part and then we wait an hour and a half and then we can do the rest. So we have one and a half hours of time to fill after these fifteen minutes of work. Does that seem doable?” you said, giving Ben a look.

He finally realized what you were saying and smirked back at you, nodding. The two of you headed into the kitchen and Ben washed his hands and you both started on the meal prep. You were making homemade pizza, something that you were pretty used to doing but that Ben was still learning. For the best results the recipe said to make the initial dough and then let it rise for an hour and a half before rolling it out and making the pizza. It was a small pre-planning sacrifice to make for some of the best pizza you had ever had.

It was quick work, just combining the ingredients and kneading the dough for a couple minutes. You did a sort of reverse-Ghost move wherein you were Patrick Swayze teaching Ben’s Demi Moore how to work the dough. He was a quick learner and wanted to switch positions right away, but you knew that’d just distract both of you.

Once the dough was rising and both of your hands were cleaned of flour and sticky dough, Ben pulled you to him and kissed you. His hands came to your waist as his tongue swept along your lower lip. Then he lifted you to the counter and you made a sound of surprise, feeling his chuckle vibrate on your lips. Your legs spread wide to accommodate him and he got close to you, roaming your body with his hands. Resting your hands on his chest again, you lightly scratched down his torso causing him to groan deeply and rock his hips into yours. The feeling made you want him closer so you wrapped your legs around his waist to keep him that way, but before you even got settled again, he used that opportunity to pick you up.

You broke the kiss for a moment to laugh but went right back to it, loving his soft lips against yours. Ben carried you down the hallway, using one hand to hold you up and the other to feel you up. Once you got in his bedroom, you glanced towards the mirror as you usually did (because it was fucking hot to see Ben all over you) and let out a laugh when you saw that your ass was covered with flour.

“What’s so funny?” Ben asked you, already laughing due to your infectious smile.

“Look what you did to me,” you gestured to the mirror and Ben looked, breaking fully into laughter as well.

“Sorry, babe,” Ben replied insincerely and then you felt his free hand spanking your ass repeatedly, hard enough to make you moan.

“d--Ben!” you exclaimed, surprised by the change of pace.

“Just getting the flour off. What did you think I was doing?” he asked you with a smirk.

“I- um, nothing,” you replied quickly, but Ben knew exactly what you were thinking and exactly what he was doing. You tried to divert the subject, “Can we get on the bed now?”

“Of course, babe. We can do anything you want,” Ben replied, making strong eye contact that made you swallow thickly.

***

Ben sat down on the bed so that you were straddling his legs and pulled you right up against him. The two of you started working your hips against each other, your clothed pussy rubbing along Ben’s hardening cock and creating that sweet friction that made your mind fuzzy. Ben kept his hands on your waist to help guide you and yours moved up to his shoulders to anchor yourself. The kiss was also driving you into the moment, the feeling of his lips against yours, the movement of his tongue with yours, and his hot breath on your face whenever you broke apart to breathe made you want more.

Soon you broke apart to take off your shirt and Ben did the same. Then you took off your bra and Ben switched his attention to your breasts, lavishing them with kisses and licks, intermittently sucking on your nipples and nipping them just enough to drive you crazy. When you started moving your hands to Ben’s waistband, he flipped the two of you over instead so that you were laying in the middle of his bed and he was on top of you. Then he started to take off his pants and underwear, you rushing to do the same.

Ben kissed you again deeply, taking your breath away. He pulled away and started kissing your neck, making you moan. Then he said into your ear, “What do you want?”

“Fingers, your fingers, Ben,” you replied breathily, already desperate for him.

Placing another kiss to your neck, Ben ran his hand down your body lightly, raising goosebumps along your skin and making you shiver in anticipation. His hand reached your pussy and he just placed his hand there for a second, making your breath deepen. Then he put a finger at your entrance, getting it wet with your arousal and sliding it along to your clit. He rubbed little circles, making you hum in pleasure. Continuing to kiss and suck at your neck, Ben switched so that his thumb was rubbing at your clit and slowly pressed a finger into you. Your breath hitched and you felt Ben smile against your skin.

The combined feelings of his fingers and lips were making you a little hazy in the best way, the good feeling taking away anything unimportant and leaving only you, Ben, and how he was making you feel. But you wanted to make him feel good too, so you reached a hand down and wrapped it around his cock, smiling slowly when you felt his moan on your neck. You pumped him in time with his finger’s thrusts into your cunt, and that only made you want him inside of you more.

Ben added another finger and you gasped at the stretch, the feeling making your pussy clench and your hand speed up around Ben. Between the pleasure Ben was giving you, his reactions from what you were giving him, and how desperate you were for more, your mind was reeling.

Then Ben’s fingers found your g-spot and you cried out, unable to help yourself, “Oh--oh, daddy!”  

You hardly knew what you said but felt Ben’s hips thrust into your hand a couple times and his fingers press harder for a second before his mind caught up with… the rest of him and everything stopped. Ben slowly removed his hands from you and moved your hand from him, propping himself up on his side to look at you.

“Um, we-- I think we should talk--”

“Oh, Ben, I’m so sorry,” you cut him off, covering your face in your hands. “I wanted to talk to you about this, I was going to soon. I didn’t mean to just spring this on you, or make you uncomfortable…”

There was a pause where Ben looked thoughtful. Then he spoke up, “You don’t have to be sorry. I’m not upset, I was just… surprised. This is something you’ve thought about?”

You felt your cheeks heat up but dropped your hands and nodded, explaining, “Yeah, it’s something that I’ve experienced before and I’d like to with you, if you’re okay with it, I know it’s not everybody’s bag.”

“Why do you like it?” Ben asked, it wasn’t accusatory, just curious.

Laughing a bit nervously, you stumbled as you tried to tell him, “W-well… I just-- I just get this really comforted feeling from it. And it’s also a power-control thing I guess, which you know I find really hot. The… giving up of control but with a whole undercurrent of trust and care is what it is, for me. And maybe because it’s so dirty.”

With the last sentence you covered your face again and breathed out quickly. Then you rushed out, “Not that it has anything to do with father issues or anything. I do not call my dad ‘daddy’ and it’s not about age for me either. Just so we’re clear about that.”

Ben nodded slowly and because you were so nervous, his face was unreadable. Then it was his turn to surprise you when he asked, “How does it work?”

That’s what he had asked you with all of the other things you had taught him about, and while you knew it wasn’t an absolute yes, it was closer to that than the no that you were expecting. You put your hands down again and turned to look at him better.

“Um, okay. Basically, I would, um, call you ‘daddy,’ and would answer you with ‘yes daddy’ or ‘no daddy’--”

“What would I call you?” Ben asked like he couldn’t help himself.

“Oh, you could call me whatever you want, but usually stuff like sweetheart, angel, baby girl, princess,” you told him and he nodded so you continued. “And you’d, um, be in control. Like, you’d tell me what to do and would be in charge of me.”

“Could you give me an example?” Ben asked, grabbing one of your hands and starting to play with it. Not so much to distract himself but to calm you.

“Mhmm, so orgasm control’s a common one. Like--”

“Like it’s up to me whether you can come or not?” he interjected, and it was hard to tell whether or not his voice was deeper than usual.

“Y-yeah, because--”

“Because daddy owns your pussy, doesn’t he, angel?” Ben asked and your head spun at how quickly the energy changed between you, and you got wetter at the same time.

“Yes,” you replied.

“Yes who?” Ben asked with an edge in his voice.

“Yes, daddy,” you corrected quickly.

“Good girl, angel. Now what to do with you?” he mused, bringing your hand up to his mouth and kissing each pad of your fingertips. The contemplative way he looked at you had you squirming in place, anticipating everything that he could do. “Why don’t you sit up against the headboard, angel? I want to taste that sweet cunt.”

“Yes, daddy,” you replied, moving quickly to where he said to go.

As soon as you were sat there, Ben laid down in front of you, using his hands to push your legs wide apart. Immediately Ben bent his head down and licked at your entrance, sliding his tongue all the way up to your clit and circling.

“So fucking wet for daddy, huh angel?” he said, looking up to see your reaction. Your eyes were practically rolling back into your head at just that and you reached down to thread your fingers through Ben’s hair.

“Please, please, daddy, keep going,” you replied, not quite able to look down at him still, but sighing in relief when his mouth went back to your pussy.

Ben sucked your clit, then used his tongue to press on it, constantly switching to keep you on edge. You couldn’t help your hips bucking up to his mouth as you got closer, but his hands on your thighs kept you from being able to do it too much. Ben could tell that you were getting close by the loud moans leaving your mouth and the way he had to hold you down tighter to stop your writhing.

“Now since this is my pussy, I don’t want it to come yet,” Ben said, pausing his movements to look up at you sternly and you whined in frustration. He continued, his voice dripping with condescension, “Oh is that hard, angel? Don’t worry, I do want this cunt to come, I just wanna feel it on my cock.”

“Oh, yes, yes, please, daddy,” you babbled, so relieved and excited that he was going to fuck you.

Moving up your body, Ben placed kisses to each of your hips, in between your breasts, and along your collarbone before reaching over to his bedside table. He grabbed a condom and put it on, swiping his dick through your wet folds.

Easing inside of you, you both let out a shaky sigh once he bottomed out. You moved to wrap your legs around him, but he stopped you, pressing your legs to either side with his hands like before.

“daddy wants you like this, angel,” Ben murmured against your lips and you nodded, breath quickening at his words.

Then he started a punishing pace into you, making you cry out again, “daddy, oh-- oh yes!”

Ben’s hips snapped into yours when you said that, eliciting another bout of moans from you. Your hands clung one on Ben’s shoulder, the other reaching up to his hair again. More because you knew Ben liked it than because you wanted dominance or anything, you tugged on the short hair at the nape of his neck and Ben groaned at the feeling.

Everything that was happening was pushing you swiftly to the edge again and you tried to let Ben know, “I’m-- I’m-- close, so so--”

Ben slipped one of his hands from your thigh to your clit, rubbing quick circles, “That’s it, angel, come for daddy. Wanna feel you clenching around my cock.”

You did, shakily crying out “d-daddy!” as the pleasure grew and broke out across your entire body, both hands holding tighter to where they were. And it was the pull on his hair, your pussy pulsing around his cock, and your uneven cry that set Ben off.

He came with a high, strained moan, thrusting twice before burying himself in your heat and holding there. As you both came down, he kissed from the tops of your breasts, up your neck, finally finding your mouth. His soft lips comforted you as you came down from your high that had honestly worn you out quite a bit.

You smiled sleepily at him when he pulled away and pulled out, lying on his side next to you after taking off the condom, tying it off, and tossing it on the floor. Turning on your side to face him, you tangled your legs together, cuddling into his warm chest and tucked your head in the crook of his neck.

Leaning your head up, you pressed a soft kiss to the side of his neck and whispered, “Thank you.”

“You’re welcome angel,” he said in his rumbly after sex voice and you shivered.

“That needs to stay reserved for this. If you say that in general conversation I’ll be a mess,” you told him.

He chuckled and nodded, “Okay, but same goes for ‘daddy.’ Unless you wanna be fucked hard in the next empty room we find, we gotta save it for private.”

You nodded your assent as well, but both of you tucked that information away in your heads for future use.

***

Ready to pass out in his arms, you settled into them, sighing contentedly as you did. Ben’s hand rubbed soothingly along your back and he hummed softly under his breath.

He could feel your breathing evening out, so he said, “We can nap for a bit, but remember that in about forty-five minutes, our dough will be ready and we gotta make pizza.”

You buried your head further into his neck and groaned, “Do we?”

Ben laughed and replied, “Yes, you made me make food before sex, and now I’m gonna make you eat before sleep. Or at least show me how to finish it so I can eat. You know I can’t go to sleep on an empty stomach.”

“Okay, okay. Forty-five minute nap it is,” you replied, tapping his arm so he would continue his movements before. He did with a light laugh, starting to hum again because he knew how much it comforted you. You pressed one last kiss to his skin before sleep claimed you and your body relaxed into his.

💖💖💖

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PLEASE READ !!!

Taking Page From Authoritarians, Trump Turns Power of State Against Political RivalsDavid E. Sanger,The New York Times•October 11, 2020The  south side of the White House in Washington, on Saturday, Oct. 10,  2020, as viewed from the Ellipse. (Stefani Reynolds/The New York Times)President  Donald Trump’s order to his secretary of state to declassify thousands  of Hillary Clinton’s emails, along with his insistence that his attorney  general issue indictments against Barack Obama and Joe Biden, takes his  presidency into new territory — until now, occupied by leaders with  names like Putin, Xi and Erdogan.Trump has long demanded — quite  publicly, often on Twitter — that his most senior cabinet members use  the power of their office to pursue political enemies. But his appeals  this week, as he trailed badly in the polls and was desperate to turn  the national conversation away from the coronavirus, were so blatant  that one had to look to authoritarian nations to make comparisons.He  took a step even Richard Nixon avoided in his most desperate days:  openly ordering direct immediate government action against specific  opponents, timed to serve his reelection campaign.“There is  essentially no precedent,” said Jack Goldsmith, who led the Justice  Department’s Office of Legal Counsel under President George W. Bush and  has written extensively on presidential powers. “We have a norm that  developed after Watergate that presidents don’t talk about ongoing  investigations, much less interfere with them.”“It  is crazy and it is unprecedented,” said Goldsmith, now a professor at  Harvard Law School, “but it’s no different from what he has been saying  since the beginning of his presidency. The only thing new is that he has  moved from talking about it to seeming to order it.”Trump’s  vision of the presidency has always leaned to exercising the absolute  powers of the chief executive, a writ-large version of the family  business he presided over. “I have an Article II,” he told young adults  last year at a Turning Point USA summit, referring to the section of the  Constitution that deals with the president’s powers, “where I have the  right to do whatever I want as president, but I don’t even talk about  that.”Now he is talking about it, almost daily. He is making it  clear that prosecutions, like vaccines for the coronavirus, are useless  to him if they come after Nov. 3. He has declared, without evidence,  that there is already plenty of proof that Obama, Biden and Clinton,  among others, were fueling the charges that his campaign had links to  Russia — what he calls “the Russia hoax.” And he has pressured his  secretary of state to agree to release more of Clinton’s emails before  the election, reprising a yearslong fixation despite having defeated her  four years ago.Presidential historians say there is no case in  modern times where the president has so plainly used his powers to take  political opponents off the field — or has been so eager to replicate  the behavior of strongmen. “In America, our presidents have generally  avoided strongman balcony scenes — that’s for other countries with  authoritarian systems,” Michael Beschloss, the presidential historian,  wrote on Twitter after Trump returned from the hospital where he  received COVID-19 treatment and removed his mask, while still considered  contagious, as he saluted from the White House balcony.Long ago,  White House officials learned how to avoid questions about whether the  president views his powers as fundamentally more constrained than those  of the authoritarians he so often casts in admiring terms, including  Vladimir Putin of Russia, Xi Jinping of China and Recep Tayyip Erdogan  of Turkey. They have something in common: Trump’s State Department has  criticized all three for corrupting the justice systems in their  countries to pursue political enemies.Pompeo has always bristled  when reporters have asked him to explain what the world should believe  when it reads Trump’s most authoritarian-sounding tweets. He answers  that what distinguishes the United States is that it is a “rule of law”  nation, and then often turns the tables on his questioners, charging  that even raising the issue reveals that the reporters are partisans,  not journalists, intent on embarrassing Trump and the United States.But  his anger is often wielded as a shield, one that keeps him from  publicly grappling with the underlying question: How can Washington take  on other authoritarians around the world — especially China, Pompeo’s  nemesis — for abusing state power when the president of the United  States calls for political prosecutions and politically motivated  declassifications?“We’ve never seen anything like this in an  American election campaign,” said R. Nicholas Burns, a former  undersecretary of state who is now an informal adviser to Biden. “It  reduces our credibility — we look like the countries we condemn for  nondemocratic practices before an election.”“I have worked for  nine secretaries of state,” Burns said. “I cannot imagine any of them  intervening in an election as blatantly as what we are seeing now. Our  tradition is that secretaries of state stay out of elections. If they  wanted to release Hillary Clinton’s emails, they could have done it in  2017, 2018 or 2019. It is an abuse of power by Donald Trump and Mike  Pompeo.”Another career diplomat who served as both ambassador to  Russia and deputy secretary of state, William J. Burns, said that what  Trump had ordered is “exactly the kind of behavior I saw so often in  authoritarian regimes in many years as an American diplomat.”“In  dealing with Putin’s Russia or Erdogan’s Turkey, we would have protested  and condemned such actions,” he said. “Now it’s our own government  that’s engaging in them.“The result,” said Burns, now the  president of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, “is the  hollowing out of our institutions at home and deep corrosion of our  image and influence abroad.”In the current cases, it is unclear  whether Trump will get his wish — or whether his loyal appointees will  slow-walk his requests. There is some evidence they are already looking  for escape hatches.Pompeo, the administration’s most conspicuous  ideologue, Trump’s most vocal loyalist and a lawyer, was clearly taken  aback when the president expressed displeasure, saying he was “not  happy” that the State Department had not released emails sent through  Clinton’s home server.“You’re running the State Department, you  get them out,” the president told Fox Business in an interview this  week. “Forget about the fact that they were classified. Let’s go. Maybe  Mike Pompeo finally finds them.”Pompeo, one of his aides said  Saturday, was in a box: The complaint about Clinton’s home server was  that she was risking exposing classified emails by not using the State  Department email system — a system Russia had already infiltrated — yet  Trump was demanding that they be released in full. Just days before, he  had announced, over Twitter, that he was using his executive power to  declassify all of them, without redactions.“We’ve got the  emails,” Pompeo responded on Fox News. “We’re getting them out. We’re  going to get all this information out so the American people can see  it.”But he also hinted that many of Clinton’s emails, mostly  those that were stored on the State Department’s own system, have  already been posted on the agency’s website, after an unusually diligent  effort by the department to respond to Freedom of Information Act  requests from Trump’s supporters. (They are often heavily redacted — to  the point of containing no content — despite the president’s order to  the contrary.)“We’re doing it as fast as we can,” Pompeo told  Dana Perino, a Fox News anchor who once served as President Bush’s press  secretary. “I certainly think there’ll be more to see before the  election.”Pompeo clearly understands the problem: Even if he  makes all of them public, they are unlikely to satisfy the president.  Last year, the State Department’s own inspector general found that while  Clinton had risked compromising classified information, she did not  systematically or deliberately mishandle her emails.William Barr  may face an even greater challenge in satisfying the president. No  attorney general since John Mitchell, who served Nixon and brought  conspiracy charges against critics of the Vietnam War, bent the Justice  Department more in a president’s direction. And Nixon himself, while  urging the IRS to audit political opponents, stopped short of publicly  calling for individual prosecutions. Yet in February, Barr told ABC News  that Trump “has never asked me to do anything in a criminal case.” At  the same time, he complained that the president’s tweets about the  Justice Department “make it impossible for me to do my job.”Now,  clearly, the president has asked Barr to act in a criminal case — and  not in a quiet phone call. Instead, he did it on Twitter and Fox News,  expressing his deep disappointment with his second attorney general, for  essentially the same reason he fired his first one, Jeff Sessions:  insufficient blind loyalty.His complaint appears to have been  driven by Barr’s warning to the White House and other officials that  there are likely to be no indictments before the election from the  investigation being run by John Durham, the U.S. attorney in  Connecticut. Durham is searching for evidence that the inquiry into  Russia was a politically motivated effort to undercut his presidency.Trump  says the case is clear-cut. He told Rush Limbaugh, the conservative  radio host to whom he gave the Presidential Medal of Freedom during the  last State of the Union address, that Durham has had “plenty of time to  do it.”“Unless Bill Barr indicts these people for crimes — the  greatest political crime in the history of our country — then we’ll get  little satisfaction, unless I win,” Trump said on Fox Business.“If we don’t win,” he said, “that whole thing is going to be dismissed.”This article originally appeared in The New York Times.© 2020 The New York Times Companynytimes.comTaking Page From Authoritarians, Trump Turns Power of State Against Political RivalsPresident Trump took a step even Richard M. Nixon avoided in his most desperate days: openly ordering direct, immediate government action against specific opponents, timed to serve his re-election campaign.

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via Politics – FiveThirtyEight

After Democrats’ great midterm election, the 2020 election could be a second consecutive Democratic wave. According to FiveThirtyEight’s forecasts, Joe Biden has an 84 in 100 chance of winning the presidential election, Democrats have a 68 in 100 chance of flipping the Senate and the party has a 94 in 100 chance of keeping the House.1 Altogether, there’s a 65 in 100 chance that Democrats will have full control of the federal government next year.

Democrats’ hopes — and Republicans’ fears — for another blue wave grew this week with the release of several polls that were among Biden’s best of the entire year. It’s hard to tell exactly why this is happening given all the news of the past couple weeks, but no matter how you slice it, it’s not good for President Trump. For instance, a national poll from CNN/SSRS gave Biden an eye-popping 16-point lead among likely voters. Monmouth University also gave Biden an 11-point lead in Pennsylvania in a high-turnout scenario and an 8-point lead in a low-turnout scenario. Quinnipiac University backed that up with its own Pennsylvania poll showing Biden up by 13 points, and added a Biden+11 Florida poll and a Biden+5 Iowa poll for good measure.

At the same time, some other high-quality pollsters produced more subdued results in a few key swing states, although they hardly qualify as good news for Trump. Siena College/New York Times Upshot put Biden at 45 percent and Trump at 44 percent in Ohio and gave Biden a 6-point edge in Nevada. And Marquette Law School, polling its home state of Wisconsin, returned a result of Biden 47 percent, Trump 42 percent. Those results in Ohio and Wisconsin are especially significant given Trump probably needs to win them in order to secure a second term.

What to make of all these polls? Throw them in an average, of course. And FiveThirtyEight’s polling averages do suggest that Biden is widening his lead, although the degree varies depending on which state you look at. (Nationally, though, Biden has gone from a 7.3-point polling edge two weeks ago to a 9.4-point lead today.)

Biden is gaining in a number of battleground states

How FiveThirtyEight’s polling average changed in the last two weeks, nationally and in key swing states

Polling Average on… State Sept. 23 Oct. 7 Change Florida D+1.6 D+4.6 D+3.0 New Hampshire D+6.9 D+9.8 D+2.9 Pennsylvania D+4.6 D+6.9 D+2.3 Georgia R+1.1 D+1.0 D+2.1 Iowa R+1.0 D+0.9 D+1.9 Ohio R+1.0 D+0.7 D+1.7 North Carolina D+1.2 D+2.3 D+1.1 Nevada D+5.8 D+6.6 D+0.8 Arizona D+3.8 D+4.4 D+0.6 Minnesota D+9.2 D+9.5 D+0.3 Michigan D+7.4 D+7.7 D+0.3 Wisconsin D+6.8 D+6.9 D+0.1 Texas R+0.7 R+1.5 R+0.8 National D+7.3 D+9.4 D+2.1

Source: Polls

The topline takeaway from this is that, spurred by the Quinnipiac polls, Biden’s lead has increased the most (from 1.6 points to 4.6 points) in Florida, which was previously one of the few bright spots on the map for Trump.

Biden has also further cemented his lead in Pennsylvania (where it went from 4.6 points to 6.9 points) and in swingy but oft-forgotten New Hampshire (thanks to several polls over the last couple weeks that have consistently given Biden an 8- to 12-point lead there).

However, several states haven’t seen the same kind of shift, including Michigan and Wisconsin, whose demographics are similar to Pennsylvania’s yet whose polling has not seemed to improve for Biden. However, the fact that Michigan and Wisconsin polling has stayed still while Pennsylvania’s has zagged toward Biden has brought its polling average more in line with those two states’ — right around Biden+7 or Biden+8. So the recent movement in Pennsylvania may just be correcting an anomaly from August and September when Pennsylvania polls were oddly weak for Biden.

In tandem with his polling bump, Biden’s odds of winning are up, too. Here is a graph of our national forecast over time:

And here’s how the race has changed in Pennsylvania, the likeliest tipping-point state in the Electoral College:

Before you overreact to these trends, though, remember that momentum doesn’t exist in general elections. This could be the beginning of Biden running away with the election … or it could be a temporary, post-debate sugar high for Biden. To take a high-profile, recent example, Hillary Clinton had an average 6.9-point national polling lead and an 88 in 100 chance to win the election on Oct. 17, 2016 — at the height of the anti-Trump backlash after the Access Hollywood tape — but fell back down to 3.9 points and a 71 in 100 chance by Election Day. Historically, trends are just as likely to revert to the mean as they are to continue.

That said, “reverting to the mean” this year might mean returning to the 7-point or so national lead that Biden held throughout September — and if he maintains that kind of lead on Election Day, he’ll be an overwhelming favorite to win the election, even with Trump’s Electoral College advantage.

In addition, because the pandemic has increased the popularity of mail voting, people are voting earlier than ever this year — at least 5.6 million votes have already been cast nationwide. So that throws yet another wrench into the equation: Even if there’s a sudden tightening in the last week or two before the election, it may not matter as much as it did in 2016 — a large chunk of votes will already have been banked at a time when Biden was flying high.

[zippyreview-blog]

Zippy Review: The Worlds 1st All-In-One Interactive Viral App

Sick of buying products that gets you nowhere? You know the ones where the sales pages are filled with BS? But then you find out there’s incomplete training on how to make it online. That stops today.

I have something cool you need to check out. A brand new app that lets you leverage… First Of It’s Kind Viral Quiz App For Traffic & Sales… Interested? If yes the you need to check this Zippy Review below!

What is Zippy?

Be honest… you’ve brought a product cause the sales pages are flashy – luxury cars, yachts, vacation spots, houses… Then you discover that the products offered are complicated.

I’ve been there. I’ve learned my lesson. So today… Billy Darr offers a refreshing software that makes it possible for newbies to crush it online. This is the easiest way for anyone to start earning passively at home

First of it’s kind viral quiz app for traffic & sales…  With Zippy, you’ll work whenever you want for as long as you like. You’re in complete control. There’s been such a buzz about Billy Darr’s new software.

Others have earned loads from it. Consistent sales every week. And most of them are newbies. If you’re looking for an easy beginner friendly option to earn online. THIS is it.

You’re getting the Worlds 1st AutoPilot Viral Software that leverages viral marketing for hundreds of free viral visitors, you get the step-by-step tutorials, the quick start guide and 5 premium bonuses, worth thousands.

So how do you get ahead of the viral traffic game? Simple. Zippy is the answer. In the details, this is the first of it’s kind ultimate viral marketing software that lets you leverage the power of Quizes, Polls, Quotes and so much more!

The goal of the software is to help turn 1 visitor into 10 and 10 into 100 with power of viral marketing! Zippy is a complete solution & comes with everything you need from the software to the training & everything in between. No list, no website and no hosting is needed.

Zippy is web based which means it works on any device with a web browser. So whether that’s a Tablet, PC, Mac, Android, iPhone literally any device that has a web browser.

With Zippy, you’ll get an all in one suite that can handle just about any traffic generation task you can throw at it. Just take a look at a few of the things Zippy can do in the next parts of this Zippy Review.

Zippy Review Overview

Vendor Billy Darr

Product Zippy

Launch Date 2020-Aug-31

Launch Time 11:00 EST

Front-End Price $17

Bonuses YES, HUGE BONUS

Refund YES, 30 Days Money-Back Guarantee

Product Type Software

Support Effective Response

Official site 👉VISIT OFFICIAL SITE

Recommended Highly Recommended

Skill Level Needed All Levels

Who are the creators?

Billy Darr is a familiar name in the market recently. He is known for his excellent digital products. Some of the products that helped him succeed such as BossFunnels, Surge, Social Profit App, etc.

He always tries his best to create products that serve the needs of the user. They know him by his passion and enthusiasm for digital technology.

Recently, with the help of his colleagues Justin Opay and Dipanjan Goswami, he continued to launch a high-end digital product to serve customers.

Let’s look at the next parts of my Zippy Review to see what he has transformed into it

Features of Zippy

Einstein said: “The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over & over again and expecting different results…”

That’s why the creators have put together something totally different to what you’ve ever seen before… A solution that not only gets you traffic but a solution that converts that traffic into cold hard cash.

Because let’s face it — you can’t deposit traffic into your bank account! Now what we have for you is not just another software, it’s the ultimate package to getting results online but first let me explain why you’re still stuck.

Once you understand what’s holding you back you can break through and move forward.

Everything you need to succeed is included at an affordable 1-time price!

Brand-New Zippy Software: First-Of-It’s-Kind Beginner Friendly Software Gets You Hundreds Of Free Viral Visitors In 60 Seconds In 1-Click.

Step-By-Step Video Tutorials: The included video training teaches you EXACTLY how to convert the viral traffic you get with Zippy and turn it into unstoppable sales.

Quick Start Guide: If you don’t like going through video’s don’t worry, I have you covered with a Quick Start Guide that just shows you how to fire up Zippy to get viral traffic & sales in seconds.

LIVE Chat Support: We want to offer you to have the best experience ever with Zippy. That’s why we have live chat agents waiting to assist you should you need it.

Zippy levels the playing field for the small guy who’s just starting out. It’s designed and built for the beginner to get “viral visitors”. And you can effortlessly get viral visitors without any of the following:

No Tech Skills

No Being On Camera

No Setting Up Funnels

No Previous Experience

No Paid Advertising

No Huge Budget

With this software, you will be able to create…

Quiz: Generate results based on logic and user profile

Trivia: Create a facts list

Quote: Create a customized post to convey in insight

Poll: Create a poll and ask the users what they think

Flip card: Create a flip card, click and revel back of the card

Personality: determine personality trait based on choices made

Story: Create video based story based on facebook (post, video), twitter, flicker, gist and more

News: Create a featured content using image/gif

👉VISIT OFFICIAL SITE

Zippy Review: Is it worth your money?

So… if you know that viral traffic is the bees knees when it comes to marketing, why aren’t you doing more of it? Or even if you are using it in your marketing strategies, why are you working with so many tools to get the results you’re getting?

Did you know you’re only one click away from getting hundreds of free viral visitors in as little as 60 seconds which in turn let you enjoy sales 24/7 and live a life of total freedom?

If that sounds exciting, listen up and here’s why Billy and his team have built an incredible first of its kind software that lets you harness the power of viral marketing without any of the complicated boring tech stuff. It’s literally as easy as one click

That’s where Zippy comes into play. You’ll have a ton of tools at your fingertips that replaces most of the tools you use to get free viral visitors. There’s a ton of things that Zippy can do, (which you can see at the previous parts of this Zippy Review).

Zippy gets you hundreds of free visitors that multiply leveraging the power of viral marketing. In other words, it gets you traffic which continues to increase on autopilot. It’s literally a case of set forget and laugh to the bank. This is truly a breakthrough in the marketplace

No more fiddling about with expensive software that requires a serious learning curve. All joking aside, if you’re serious about taking your traffic to another level this year, then you owe it to yourself to get a copy of Zippy while the price is incredibly low.

From my perspective, there are several reasons why you need to grab Zippy right now.

Initially, Zippy is 100% fueled by FREE traffic. Undoubtedly, traffic is considered as the lifeblood of any online businesses. If you don’t have any traffic on your website, you don’t have anybody to convert.

But with this all-inclusive system, you would absolutely say goodbye to the days of wasting your time & money for traffic. It will help you tap into hoards of free traffic as well as prevent you from spending a lot of money on buying traffic.

Besides, the software is so SIMPLE and powerful so that ANYONE, even if you are NEW to this whole “internet software”, you can use this software and get results.

To make sure you can maximize the ability of Zippy, it offers you the detailed training that helps you discover all of the ins and outs of the system. Especially, you also get atraining that shows you how to make real money.

But that’s not all. You will be shocked when you know its price that I will tell you in the next part. The vendors offer you a gigantic discount in comparison with what it contains. Believe me, this is definitely cost-effective and worth money investment for you.

Right now however, Zippy is available at a serious discount so you’ll want to head over and check it out before the time runs out and the price goes up.

You’re probably thinking that this unique first of its kind viral software is very expensive and you’d be right to think that. Considering most life-changing software not only started around $97 but typically have a monthly fee too, so it would be fair to charge you at least $97 a month for this…

But today you won’t be paying $97/Month. You won’t even be paying $67/month, not even $47/month. When you act during the limited launch period, you won’t be paying monthly at all.

In fact they’re going to give you an amazing bargain which means today you can get in for a one-time price without any monthly fees. It’s literally less than the price of a large pizza.

And it gets better when you act now, you’ll also get five brand new premium bonuses worth thousands absolutely free.

Pricing

For a limited time, you can grab Zippy with early bird discount price in these options below. Let’s pick the best suited options for you before this special offer gone!

Front-end: Zippy ($17)

Brand-New Zippy Software – Worth $197/Month

Step-By-Step Video Tutorials – Worth $297

Quick Start Guide – Worth $197

Live Chat Support – Priceless

Bonus #1: 1K A Day LIVE Invite – Worth $1,997

Bonus #2: $268 Discount Coupon – Worth $268

Bonus #3: Agency Licence – Worth $497

Bonus #4: 25x DFY Campaigns – Worth $497

Bonus #5: $100 A Day Case Study – Worth $297

365-Day Money Back Guarantee

Gets Results Or Get Paid $300!

OTO 1: Unlimited Edition ($29)

The Unlimited Edition Gets You Unlimited Free Viral Traffic & Sales

With The Unlimited Edition You Can Get Viral Traffic From A Total Of 20 Different Sources

You’ll Get Special Access So You Can Create An Account For Your Friends & Family

There Is No Usage Or Others Restrictions When You Get Unlimited

Unlock Additional Tutorials That Let You Easily Achieve 4-Figures A Day

If You Can’t Scale Up With This Special Upgrade Just Let Us Know & They’ll Send You $500 For Wasting Your Time

OTO 2: Done-For-You Edition – $197

They’ll Setup Everything For You There’s Literally Nothing For You To Do

Then They’ll Ensure The Traffic They Drive Actually Turns Into Sales

Once They’ve Setup Everything For You The Next Thing They’ll Do Is Drive Viral Traffic For You

They’ll Tell You Which Products Produce Sales On AutoPilot & Convert Like Ferocious Wildfire

They’ll Also Include Our Private Rolodex Which Is Worth Its Theyight In Gold

And They’re So Confident That If You’re Lucky Enough To Grab This You’ll Get Results And If You Don’t They’ll Personally Send You $1,000 For Wasting Your Time

OTO 3: Automation Edition – $39

Add the “Automated” edition to your order so you can get autopilot traffic with Zippy and can enjoy making money while you sleep.

The “AutoPilot” Edition Lets You Automate Zippy So You Can Enjoy Traffic & Sales While You Sleep

You’ll Unlock The AutoPilot Function So You Can Experience REAL Automated Traffic 24/7/365

With The Automation Edition You Also Unlock Traffic From Even More Sources..

To Ensure You Know What Todo To Automate The Entire Process Step-By-Step Video Tutorials Will Be Included So You Can Make Money Fast

You’ll Also Get The Rights To Sell The Agency Rights To Others So You Can Make Even More Money

OTO 4: Reseller Edition – $39

How would you like to make 100x times more money from Zippy than the average customer who buys it? The ability to make back 100x times what you’ve spent on Zippy so far?

Now imagine sending people to this exact funnel that you’re going through… imagine them buying products through it just like you have done. But… Instead of me getting money, you keeping all of the money for yourself…

That’s what we’re offering you a proven sales system without doing any of the boring, complicated and expensive tech stuff.

Steal Zippy For Yourself – $9,997 Value

100% Commissions On Everything – $2,997 Value

Leverage Our Marketing Material – $9,997 Value

Ready-Made Sales kit – $4,997 Value

Get Results Or Get Paid $500 – $500 Value

Keep 100% Of All The Money – $9,997 Value

Bonus #1: Affiliate Robot Software – $497 Value

Bonus #2: Affiliate Funnel App – $997 Value

OTO 5: ATM Edition – $197

Their Team Of Experts Will Personally Setup The “100 Dollar Daily Method” For You From A To Z… All You Need To Do Is Grab A Copy Of The ATM Edition Right Now..

They’ll Do All Of The Work For You, Just Sit Back, Chill Out And Watch Traffic And Commissions Roll In Every Day…

If You’ve Ever Wanted Hands-Free Sales & Profits Then This Is It. Imagine Not Doing Any Work Whatsoever Then Logging Into Your Commission Account To See Cold Hard Cash How Amazing Would That Feel?

You Can Do What Your Enjoy Most, While Their Experts Ensure They Do All The Setup For You So You Can Sit Back, Relax And Get Paid Big Time…

Fast Action Bonus: You’ll Get Instant Message Access Directly To Billy And His Support Team To Ensure You Make Money With This Program… This Has $20,000 Value

Zippy Review Conclusion

Thank you so much for reading my Zippy Review. I really hope it did help you with your buying decision. This system is coming out with many bonuses for the early bird. Take your action ASAP for the best deal.

REMEMBER! If you purchase through my link, you will be supported 24/7; That means you can contact me ANYTIME when you get trouble in using or can not contact with the authors/ product supporters. I will help you RIGHT AWAY!

Besides, if you buy this product through my link, you can also get these huge bonuses below (Please remember that these bonuses are not for the TRIAL or FREE versions):

👉VISIT OFFICIAL SITE

You can have an opportunity to receive extra bonuses if you finish 3 steps below:

Step 1: Order the product by Clicking here.

Step 2: Choose 1 of my huge Bonus Packages below! Remember that you can pick one more bonuses pack for each Upgrade you purchased!

Step 3: After your purchase goes through, email your receipt & your chosen bonuses pack to me at alexhuynh.1110@gmail.com so I can confirm your purchase and email you information about how to access to your bonus material.

I Will Always Update New Bonus

Now, Check your bonus below!

»»Plugin Bonus Package««

»»Theme Bonus Package««

»»General Bonus Package««

Read more related articles:

LIVIO Review: New App Lets You Start Exploiting 2 Billion Potential Buyers For Limitless FREE Traffic…

Abracadabra Review: New Traffic Siphon Is Like”Magic” & Get Results In Only 5 Steps..

Thank you again for reading my Zippy review & bonus

[kattaloop]

Lexa IS More Than A Symbol

I came to Tumblr for the Clexa GIFs and stayed for the very occasional long-form contribution. So I don’t know what’s being talked about and how, but a few friends asked me to comment on this. A week ago, @rivertalesien offered a lengthy reply to an anonymous question:

“Why is Lexa the one that people want to fight for but seems to be the only one kept dead? Not that ODAAT and WE had dead lesbians but they were cancelled and fan efforts brought them back like why is Lexa the only one who can't? She has to be more than a symbol though?“

I have my own thoughts on this issue, some of which I can’t publicly elaborate on. Let me just say that you’re right, Lexa absolutely is more than a symbol and should be treated as such. But what did River have to say about it all?

“First of all, the situations with ODAAT and WE are completely different: those involve complex negotiations with advertisers in order to cover the costs and where the show will be hosted. I know it’s fun to believe that fan campaigns had anything to do with it, but it is always, ultimately down to negotiations with advertisers and studios. It makes the producers and all look good to praise their audience for the “hard work” trying to save the series, but they all know better.“

It’s right to say that money is a driving force in any decisions the networks make. But you can’t isolate a show from the broader programing strategy, and, as far as I know, advertising deals are  bundled. As with any business, money isn’t the only deciding factor, either. Power and prestige have important roles in this game of film and television, and personal preference absolutely exists. As for fan campaigns, they add a voice, one that may have, and has, in the past, convinced executives to revisit the  issue in the first place. Would they have done the same thing without that little nudge from viewers? Maybe, but probably not.

“And Lexa is “kept dead” because, and this is only inference, but I think it’s a strong one: Jason Rothenberg lost a huge business/development deal as a result of the Lexa/Clexa fan drama.“

You did your research, I’ll give you that. But I’m unsure how well you understand the reality of this business. Considering that failed pilots are more common than green-lit ones. Considering that any pilot is a collaborative process with too many components in play than for an outsider to pinpoint exactly one reason as to why it failed. Considering that this industry, for all its rigid hierarchy and rules books, can also be one of the most unpredictable - one person leaves and the whole house of cards can crumble. Considering that you refuse to entertain the pros that would accompany Lexa’s return, pros that someone with Jason’s disposition might be equally interested in as in the more petty revenge fantasies.

“Jason Rothenberg spent the days, weeks and months after Lexa’s death cutting himself off from those fans who were hurt by his actions and no doubt working behind the scenes to make sure he didn’t lose his job over his unethical, unprofessional behavior. His supporters in the cast were openly derisive of Clexa fans who spoke out and a tone of trying to ignore or undermine the fan fallout was the given order. Showing real empathy and offering to work with the audience in order to heal the divide might have gone a long way for improving his image and the show’s. Rothenberg decided to hide instead.“

Yes to everything but the last sentence. You’re assuming - sorry, inferring. I happen to know that it was not his decision. Once again, isolating one aspect from its context and environment usually leads to wrong or, at least, incomplete conclusions.

“One very clear consequence of his queerbaiting is that Greg Berlanti, the very successful (and openly gay) producer of many DC shows including Supergirl, stepped out of a development deal for a new series tentatively titled The Searchers. The project was likely mostly Rothenberg’s, but without Berlanti’s backing, it was dropped. Story was that it was too “expensive” to produce, yet Berlanti went on to get a huge deal with the CW, producing Riverdale as well as the upcoming Batwoman. Would Berlanti want to be associated with Rothenberg after the Lexa debacle? Probably not and that’s probably closer to the real reason the deal went south.“

Except the queerbaiting isn’t even fully acknowledged, still. That’s a lot to base on “likely” and "probably.” Berlanti was already getting these deals. He also had his own issues to deal with. If the production was deemed too expensive, it doesn’t mean that there’s a conspiracy beyond the normal industry processes.

“Outside of The 100, he has no produced credits to his name and how he got the job of showrunner when he had no previous experience in any capacity in a writer’s room or on a production staff is certainly baffling. He very quickly proved he didn’t have the professionalism for the job and anyone else would have been dismissed.“

But he wasn’t dismissed, and that should tell you enough to not be baffled by the fact that they hired him, even without knowing the industry from within.

“The 100 went from 16 episodes to 13 because the order for renewal had already been given and the WB/CW put out feelers in the form of polls asking the audience directly: will Lexa’s death affect if you watch the show? Who does that unless they are seeking to reassure the advertisers that Lexa’s death wouldn’t be a big issue for long and spoil their investment?”

In conjunction with a noticeable drop in ratings and other measurable factors, this is probably a reasonable conclusion. They were hoping for a surge and were slammed, instead. There were a lot of whispers, but nothing I’d consider to be confirmed. What does this have to do with why they wouldn’t bring Lexa back? If anything, it suggests they know of her value.

“Fans are capable of all sorts of interpretations of a text (oh boy are we), but one thing that I think is generally considered across the board is that with season 4, the tone toward Lexa was more than a little OTT and a tad spiteful.”

I’m glad you acknowledge that much of this is based on interpretation. In summary, the praise Lexa received in S4 felt unauthentic, the Flame and Lexa were used as an emotional device, and Clarke’s actions were problematic. How’s that any different than post-307, when nobody seemed too bothered about losing their beloved Heda, when the Flame and Lexa were used as an emotional device, and when Clarke had sex as a coping mechanism and even questioned Lexa’s humanity? The latter were all written before the backlash. It mostly speaks to the show’s persistent issues with continuity, character development, and representation.

“This is just my interpretation, but with fans crying out for her return, pleading for a spin-off and so on, and generally being the most out-spoken fandom for LGBTQ rights and better representation in media (and a never-ending drag of Rothenberg’s name), is it likely that a production that never did anything to try and make amends ever going to give in to such pleas?”

As likely as any other production, to be honest. Allow me to go back to your earlier assessment. “They don’t care about fans’ pleas.” Would they bring Lexa back for the fans? Doubtful. “They care about their own benefit.” Would they bring Lexa back if it benefited them? Now we’re talking.

But they can’t just do it any odd way. As you also said previously, they know better. They may ignore us, but they watch us. They would’ve assessed the different scenarios. From a business point of view, they’d want to avoid another backlash. Then you have a diva showrunner to consider, and a guest star who is in work and, hopefully, wouldn’t return for a guest stint if it didn’t benefit her and Lexa. It’s a tricky balance, made even more difficult by a fandom that likes to tear itself apart over conflicting opinions every 3 months or so.

Considering all of those circumstances, I can’t think of a reasonable way to bring Lexa back other than at the very end. Which would benefit the production, but more importantly, a large number of fans, the tiny matter of representation, and ADC - if done right, which I give her enough credit to make sure before agreeing to anything. I’m not saying that it will happen or that it won’t happen. I’m saying that there’s a strong case for it happen, to balance out your rather one-dimensional approach.

“There is a cruelty to this because almost any other kind of story of this kind would involve a moment of catharsis, but that moment is constantly suspended, always dangled, but never in touch.”

Personally, I’d agree with that, but I can also think of writers who’d be into it. We’ve already established that Jason and his immediate team are lacking awareness and empathy. It makes little sense, therefore, to expect them to act differently, especially if they’re leading up to another shock twist. My guess is as good as yours on whether that’s something good or bad.

“They know what fans want and it’s arguable too that Rothenberg has twisted what the fans want for his own benefit: a spin-off of The 100, but one entirely about something decidedly unrelated to Lexa. Showing online fan interest might be one way of telling advertisers: see, there’s a demand for his work.”

No offense, but this makes no sense and it’s probably the most contradicting and subjective thing you’ve said thus far. If they know what fans want, then there’s nothing to twist. It’s actually part of the reason why the Lexa spinoff campaign started while the show’s still on air: to get the word out, to make sure they know exactly what and who we want, and what and who we don’t want. Jason started talking about a spinoff before 307, so there’s literally no ground for this argument, which also has no bearing on the question. So why bring it up?

“Unless advertisers demand it, is it likely that this unprofessional queerbaiting producer would do anything except the most spiteful of nods? That’s all he’s done at this point and the story this season looks more and more like they are going to finally close the book on any Lexa mentions ever again.”

Unless advertisers become involved in the creative process, this argument is also invalid. Thankfully, there are regulations in place to avoid that. And unless you know what motivates a person, you can’t speak to what they will or won’t do. Even if you did, you can’t be certain. Once again, this is a collaborative process even under the worst of circumstances. Things could go either way.

“Fight for Lexa, there is nothing wrong with her being a “symbol” of a fight for better representation.”

It feels wrong when you reduce her to a symbol, when you put her in the past, when you tell others to seek out other representation, when you dismiss her implied humanity. Our emotions in relation to Lexa are real, and that makes her real in all the ways that matter. What happened to “she’s more than just a character?” Well, she’s also more than a movement. Let’s not use their excuses when they kill of one LGBT character and put another on their place against ourselves.

“Keep using her light, but never forget where it really comes from, something Rothenberg will never understand: it comes from you.”

Now see, this is a great statement. I, too, believe that Lexa is a part of us. Her light guided me out of the complete darkness I had lost myself in, and it became part of my own light. I’ve never come across a character like that, or person, for that matter. A sentiment that still reverberates through the fandom and beyond. I believe that her light can help so many more people whom she wasn’t able to reach in the short time she was given. And so, part of my fight for better representation, better storytelling, will always be to let Lexa’s light shine again. She deserves to live. She deserves to have her story told!

[quietdaysco]

Primrose Path - Devlog #006

Hey, it’s us again—two indie devs with fresh dirt on our visual novel progress. Ready? 

Behind the Scenes

Playtesting Feedback

Last month we closed the pre-alpha Ink build of Primrose Path’s common route outline. It met its purpose of proving the basic concepts of our game were viable and that it interested players in our target demographic. In fact, playtesters gave us overwhelmingly positive feedback in our post-test form about the characters and story. Here are a few quotes from their responses:

“The number of elements of the MC's [main character’s] life added in to the story in increments helped me not only relate to the MC but also stay interested.”

“There's a good variety of calmer moments and more outlandish/exciting/otherwise more high tension moment [sic], no issues for me.”

“[T]he clients are a rainbow of people with a few that [sic] very much stand out [to me]”

“By the end, I was definitely considering who I was going to chose as my client and was sad the pre-alpha ended even though I knew it was going to.”

“I 100% would dance [in a mini-game similar to] DDR [Dance Dance Revolution]”

As you can see, the beginnings of Primrose Path went over well and players definitely had a lot of interesting things to say about our mischievous clients! We can’t spoil them here, but you may be able to see for yourself when alpha testing comes to our server in the future! 

Now, for all the good we received, it’s not to say the pre-alpha went without its criticisms:

“This might be silly, but I wish there were an option that weren't a dress for her outfit to the party.”

It’s not silly at all, playtester! It had us thinking about the different ways our protagonist, Lynn Austen, could express herself. This concern lead to one outfit redesign and introduced a number of new ones!

“The beginning was a little slow, but I love Priya, so all of her scenes brought my attention back instantly.”

We love co-worker and bestie, Priya, too, but she can’t be an exception for pacing. We’ve since reevaluated and tweaked Part 1: Work Day. Plenty of visual changes and cutting scenes entirely were discussed in order to tighten up the overall pacing.

“Harper seems harsh but has pressure on her to make her harsh, but then you see her and shes [sic] just straight up scary.”

While all playtesters understood Harper’s role as Lynn’s no-slack boss, a few found her consequentially unapproachable. We have a lot in store for her in later routes, but acknowledge she was sparse during the common route. We’ve since taken this concern and made her more available in new scenes, adjusted her tone in some of the older ones, and had other characters—who have a very different relationship with her than Lynn does—reflect more openly on her. We think this humanizes Harper much more.

“Unfortunately [Bellarmino] feels like a snobbier, more irritating Matt. [...] I personally don't find him very likable but I'm looking forward to being proven wrong.”

In our feedback form, we asked about character impressions. We also polled if players didn’t have to play all routes at least once, which clients they’d pick. While character impression responses expressed a willingness to give our model and fashion designer, Bellarmino LaFauci, a chance, he was our least popular choice in the poll. We figured it may have been that his personality wasn’t differentiated enough against the company with whom Lynn encounters him, so we’ve made adjustments to contrast him more against his judgmental cabal.

So as we went through and addressed feedback, we had some ideas of our own to implement, which leads us to...

Updated Revised Outline

Double the wordcount! Yep, we’re just shy of 32,000 words for the revised common route outline. How could this be? Look: don’t mistake Primrose Path for a linear narrative. Your choices affect the world from day one.

Beyond changes from playtester feedback, other new content includes:

New Characters! We work to make sure our side characters leave an impression. We’ve added a few more with the means to salvage or devastate Lynn’s career. Until you yourself can meet them, look out for future Lore snippets on our Twitter!

New Events! Lynn has more opportunities than before, and under different states of mind, to navigate and impact the world around her. Depending on what Lynn did, where, and when can completely change an encounter within that same space and time. 

New Key Items! There are a couple of items Lynn can collect if she meets the right people and takes certain actions. These items can reveal some important information in client routes later on—and some hints for others, too!

New Areas! A few more places have been added to the common route, including whole new scenes. What could possibly lie behind these doors?

So how’s that sound? If you said “Damn, that’s hella rad,” well you just took the words right out of our mouths. But we’re not done yet; we take feedback seriously. When we can’t decide on what our audience may want, we leave no room for speculation. There’s really only one way to settle that.

VN Protagonist Sprite Survey 

We run a survey! We wanted to know how visual novel fans preferred to see a customizable MC represented as a sprite, if at all. It’s tough for us because as much as we want to make Lynn as visually present as her sense of self, we also acknowledge that “immersion” for many players also means different levels of “intrusion” from MC’s sprite—down to none at all, for folks wanting to self-insert despite taking on another character’s existing backstory. While we think we’ve come to a happy medium that serves our purposes and would appeal to a good number of players, we’ll be sharing with you all in a separate post our findings.

Two things are for certain: 

Visual novel players are an incredibly dedicated base, having turned out over 100 responses to our form! Thank you so much for helping us see your side on the matter! 

The communities we frequent overwhelmingly take issue with one specific manner of MC representation—one that seems to plague the industry. If you’re not an avid consumer of visual novels, this begrudged answer may surprise you!

But hey, we haven’t closed it yet: you can contribute your opinion too until August 5th, 11:59 PM EDT. Stay tuned for our detailed write-up on the results, next time. We’ve got another survey in the works too (sounds like we’ve got a few hard decisions, huh?) so keep tabs on our Twitter when we release that form.

Greyson’s Twitter 

Greyson’s been taking a break from Twitter for a minute. Working Saturday, Sunday, and Wednesday overheated him, and in that vulnerable time, he caught a virus! So now he’s on sick leave and we’ve promised him an easier schedule of one day a week when he gets better. His posting schedule will be announced soon. You can still send him some love on his Twitter account. He’ll be sure to respond when he’s feeling up to it. He’s always there for you. Will you return the favor?

Main Game Progress

Common Route:

Rough Outline: 100%  ✔

Revised Outline: 100%  ✔

Draft Script: --%

The Artist: Matthias Barousse

Rough Outline: 100%  ✔

Revised Outline: --%

Progress on the main game has primarily been on the common route outline. Some interesting things to note are that last time we reported our revision to be at 90%. After implementing feedback, our clean outline doubled in word count and we’ve reviewed it entirely since then. So now we’re thoroughly at 100%! 

The breakdown of that is:

We finished up the common route’s Part 3: The Interviews, in which Lynn meets all her clients whom she may or may not have stumbled upon at a legendary bash. 

We elaborated on Part 2: The Party encounters and added more variations which subsequently trickle over into alternate interactions in The Interviews. 

We added an interactive, portent dream sequence the night of The Interviews, right when Lynn hits the bed after evaluating all potential clients at work. 

... and a few other additions. Also among other things, we’ve actually started work on the draft script already, but we’ve not had time to properly calculate the percentage. It’ll be updated accordingly in our next log.

What’s Next For Us

We’re going to finish up our script draft and start focusing our efforts into creating a playable, visual alpha build of Primrose Path. Yes, we want to play our game as much as you do and that’s motivation enough!

We’re focusing on monthly devlogs for our Tumblr, but we have to ask:

Are there other kinds of content and updates you folks would like to see here? We want to know! Shoot us a message in our Ask the Devs inbox here on Tumblr, or hit us up on Twitter, Discord, and Lemma Soft!

Thanks for reading! Keep up and remember to enjoy your Quiet Days. ♥

Socials

- Micro-updates on Twitter!

  ♦ Factoids with Greyson!

- Live art development on Twitch!

- Art logging on Instagram!

- Ask us anything here!

- Continue the discussion on Discord!

- Master thread on Lemma Soft!

[jessefferguson]

My Double Life: 5 Years And Going

It’s been a LONG TIME since I wrote one of these, so I figured now was as good a point as any.

Words, spoken out loud, are funny. They can mean very different things.

Try this one:

I am still here.

and

I am still here.

Both of those are the best summary I can think of for how I feel today since today, May 21, is the 5th anniversary of when I was diagnosed with cancer. Five years ago, I sat in a sweltering doctors office in Washington, D.C. as he told me the results of my first biopsy. Five years later, I still have it.

After 5 years, I have two conflicting emotions: I’m still here (thank God) and I’m still (only) here. Five years later, not much has really changed but, also, everything has.

Over the 5 years, I’ve sort of lived a double life – that of a cancer patient and that of a political operative. Sometimes they overlap but, more often than not, they’re separate worlds.

By my best count, over the 5 years, I’ve had 4 surgeries, 33 days of radiation, upwards of 60 rounds of either chemotherapy or targeted therapy, about 75 blood tests, and 150 doctors’ appointments. And over the same 5 years, I’ve worked on 191 television ads, 311 polls, thousands of press releases and speeches, spent over $100 million (of other people’s money), and sent over 40,000 of my own tweets.

I continue to believe the same thing I did – and wrote about - 5 years ago, there are three keys to getting through this sort of thing: (1) Your family and friends; (2) Doctors who are the best; (3) Doing something with your time that you love to do. Even on the worst days of work, the fact that I was doing the work I wanted to do made it that much more possible to fight a disease I did not want to deal with.

WHAT’S THE LATEST WITH ME

I’m living and working from Brooklyn, still. I decided to stay here after the Clinton campaign ended rather than move back to D.C. for a bunch of reasons – closer to my doctors at Sloan Kettering and further from Trump at the WH. Both sounded like good ideas.

For just under a year, I’ve been on a clinical trail and it’s getting some pretty good results. It’s a targeted therapy drug and I’m one of the first to apply it to my unique disease. It’s unlikely to result in me being “cured” or “cancer free” but it’s definitely shrunk the disease in my skin tissue and throughout my head, neck and chest. It’s also brought down the swelling. The swelling issues are far from gone, but they’re better. The best case is that it continues shrinking things; the next best case is it stops anything from getting worse again. Either way, it’s turned my condition to a chronic one, for now. I’ll take it.

Every three weeks I do the same routine. I book a someone to come clean my house for that morning and I take a car down to Sloan Kettering.  I take a blood test. The doctor and I talk about medical stuff for a few minutes and politics for a few minutes and then he sends me for treatment. He’s not from America and has a healthy interest in all the crazy things in our politics.

It takes them about 2 hours to prepare the drug, so I have found a corner in the hospital that is usually empty for work — open the laptop, put on the head set and get to work. It’s my own cancer-center-based mobile-office. I have edited TV scripts and polls, held conference calls, did a radio interview and even convinced a donor to contribute – all from a table in a hospital waiting room. Last week’s discussion was about the placement of a media buy. It’s amazing what you can pull of when people don’t really know where you are.

The drug I’m on is an easy one – targeted therapy. It’s like a smart bomb of chemo that only goes to the cells that have the disease. The worst part is the IV, which I barely notice anymore and after 30 minutes, I’m out. On the road home to a clean house with the mild side effect of an uneasy stomach for a few days. Compared to the other drugs I’ve been on, this is like a piece of cake took a walk in a park.

How long will I stay on it? No clue. But it has made this condition chronic. If you offered me a deal today — get this treatment every 3 weeks for 30 minutes and the disease stays under control, I’d sign in a minute. I’d sign it for the next 10 years. For now, I’ll stay on it unless or until it stops working – then I’ll try something else.

WHAT HAPPENED SINCE 2016

As you may remember from my last blog post, just before election 2016, I had spent the previous 6 months working while dealing with the return of my disease.

On election night 2016, I did venture out. It wasn’t something I did often but I wanted to be with the team that night at the Javits Center in Manhattan. I could, now, try to pretend that I had doubts about the outcome of that night to try to make myself look extra smart, but that would be bullshit. I didn’t; I thought we’d win.

The beginning of that afternoon and evening were great. We were monitoring voting and doing the work we needed to do and I was also seeing some good friends who I had been away from while I worked the last few months from home.

Then, the results started and the mood changed. My heart started to sink, but I kept hoping. Florida, North Carolina, Ohio and others poured in. We knew we needed to hold Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania to make it work.

While we waited for those results, I got up to go to the bathroom. As I stood at the urinal, a friend who had better sense for numbers and data than I do, approached the stall next to me. We looked at each other with the same forlorn look of despair as if our confidence was waning. He said “I just looked at the latest data from Michigan; it’s gone.”  And with that, I found out we had lost in a way befitting the occasion -- standing at a urinal.  

Whether you believe we lost because of a mission from Russia or a miss in Michigan, or any other reason, one thing was clear: we lost the electoral college. It was over. And while I stared at my peers and colleagues – friends who had hired me and  friends who I had hired – I couldn’t stop thinking, “What’s next?”

Despite what you might see or hear, the group who I worked with on that campaign were some of the smartest, most talented and most committed people I’ve ever had the privilege to work with. As I stared at all of them, I wonder what was next for them. As I thought about it more, I worried what was next for me.  

At one point, I wandered away and ended up sitting in the middle of the massive loading dock in the Javits Center with 4 senior staff from the campaign. There where shipping boxes, fork lifts, and one table with a few plastic chairs in the middle. We all just kind of stared at each other. Someone would say something about what we should do or what we should say and we’d all agree but, for the life of me, I couldn’t tell you today what anyone said.  

As the night ended, I was one of the last ones to leave. I’m not really sure why, I just couldn’t. I kept finding someone else to talk to. I was trying to be a bit of team cheerleader – as best as was possible at that moment.  

At around 4:30am that night, I left the Javits center along side two reporters I had gotten to know. We walked for a bit and then they got into cabs and drove off. I just started walking. And walking. I was thinking about what had happened and what it meant for the country. And, if I’m honest, what it meant for me. I had cancer and had just devoted two years of my life to trying to win the presidency – and had failed. I just kept thinking, maybe even crying a bit, and walking.

When I looked up, it was 6 am and the sun was rising. I had walked from the Javits Center at 36th street down almost to the World Trade Center. Much like I did while wandering around the streets of Washington on May 21, 2013, I had done lots of thinking. But now it was November 9, 2016, and it was time to go back to work. I took a cab home, slept for a few hours, and opened my laptop.

WHAT HAVE I BEEN DOING SINCE

Since the campaign ended in 2016, I’ve been “consulting.” I’m still not sure what “consulting” means but it’s what I’m doing. I’m working on my own for a variety of political projects on a variety of important issues, trying to lend my experience to things where I think I can do something interesting and make a difference in the insane moment we’re in right now.

My work has ranged from the fight over the tax plan and some new digital campaign innovations, to a new polling project and an advertising campaign and others. It’s all kept me busy and kept my mind going – in the fight and doing what I love to do. The work is good cause it’s meaningful, it’s the work I want to be doing, and the variety of projects appeals to my attention-span-of-a-fruit-fly-nature.

It’s also allowed me to speak up a bit more about what I think, which has been quite a change. For the last 15+ years, I’ve always represented someone else – the DCCC Chairman, Secretary Clinton, etc. Now I’m speaking more and writing more in my own voice.

I still feel somewhat like a hermit. I live and work in my Brooklyn apartment. I get out more now than I used to, but, nothing like I did when I was healthy. When you’ve been dealing with this as long as I have, you start to lose track of what looking, feeling and being normal would be like. I get to the deli almost every morning and they know to make my eggs and have my iced coffee ready. Others around know me too. Life is easy and that’s important for me right now. One of these days, I’ll be up for making it harder again – but not yet.

THE HEALTH CARE ISSUE

The first project I took on was to help some friends with the coalition fighting the Obamacare repeal legislation. It’s been a hard-waged battle over the last 16 months to improve health care for people instead of letting it get dismantled.

But it’s also been the first time my double lives overlapped a bit. When the Affordable Care Act passed Congress, I was at my office near capitol hill, celebrating with everyone else. But it didn’t really mean anything to me. It was a good thing, but it wasn’t personal.

Seven years later, when repeal of it failed – repeal that would undercut protections for people with pre-existing conditions like I have – it was a very different moment. In fact, when the first repeal plan was pulled from the House floor, I was actually sitting at Sloan Kettering getting my chemo. I was on the phone talking with someone working with me while in the  hospital room getting treated as a news alert came across my computer screen.

I don’t often invoke my own personal health care situation while working on the issue because it shouldn’t be about me. I’m fortunate and would be able to get the care I needed if I had to. But sitting there at age 37, with an IV bag dripping a toxic chemical designed to keep me alive into my arm, I certainly had a different perspective than I had 8 years earlier as an otherwise-healthy, overweight 29 year old who saw passage of the ACA as a good reason to go to the bar and celebrate.

FIVE YEARS AND COUNTING

Once and a while I think about what I could be doing if I was fully healthy. I get sad. Maybe I get mad. As I approach 38 years old at the end of this year, more and more of my friends are having their first or second child and I’m forced to think if my life would be different if I hadn’t gotten this diagnosis five years ago. For sure, it would be. But, in the end, you play the cards your dealt and make damn well sure it’s a game you enjoy. You could win big or you could lose your shirt, but either outcome has to be worth it.

Five years ago I was diagnosed with a disease that probably should have killed me. Five years later, I’m still here. When I put it that way, it actually brings a smile to my face. I know talking about having cancer isn’t something that normally is joyful but being able to do what I love while living with the disease sure beats the alternative.

[day0one]

Trump’s ‘Most Important’ Speech Was Mostly False

In what he billed as perhaps “the most important speech I’ve ever made,” President Donald Trump continued his attempt to deceive the American public into believing the election was “rigged.”

Trump has presented no evidence for such an explosive charge. Nor have his lawyers, who have admitted as much in some of their many dismissed lawsuits. Instead, the evidence shows Trump is inventing and pushing conspiracy theories and other false and misleading claims in an unrelenting attack on U.S. elections.

We’ve fact-checked his false claims about voter fraud for months, and even years, dating back to the 2016 campaign, long before he lost his reelection bid to President-elect Joe Biden. But on Dec. 2, 49 days before he is set to leave office, Trump once again repeated a slew of assertions in a nearly 46-minute video he posted to social media.

The speech came one day after his own attorney general, William Barr, rebutted his claims, saying the Department of Justice and FBI “have not seen fraud on a scale that could have affected a different outcome in the election.”

Here are 19 false or misleading claims the president made during the speech. It is by no means an exhaustive list.

Not ‘overwhelming’ evidence: The president boasted that his legal team has collected “overwhelming” evidence of fraud. “Everyone is saying, ‘Wow, the evidence is overwhelming,’ when they get to see it,” he said. Judges, however, have found the evidence less than overwhelming.

For example, U.S. District Judge Matthew Brann criticized the Trump campaign for failing to provide evidence to justify blocking Pennsylvania from certifying its election results. In dismissing the case, Brann said: “One might expect that when seeking such a startling outcome, a plaintiff would come formidably armed with compelling legal arguments and factual proof of rampant corruption.” Brann continued, “Instead, this Court has been presented with strained legal arguments without merit and speculative accusations, unpled in the operative complaint and unsupported by evidence.”

The Trump campaign appealed Brann’s decision to the 3rd Circuit Court of Appeals, but the three-judge panel unanimously upheld the lower court ruling. Judge Stephanos Bibas, a Trump appointee, wrote: “Charges of unfairness are serious. But calling an election unfair does not make it so. Charges require specific allegations and then proof. We have neither here.”

In Michigan, the Trump campaign sued to stop the counting of mail-in ballots in Wayne County, which includes Detroit and block the certification of the county’s election results. The lawsuit included an affidavit from a poll watcher who claimed she heard from another poll worker that other poll workers were told to change the dates on late ballots. The state judge who ruled against the campaign called the affidavit “inadmissible hearsay within hearsay.”

There are ‘safeguards’: Trump wrongly claimed there were “no safeguards” used by states to check the identity of voters. “While it has long been understood that the Democrat political machine engages in voter fraud from Detroit to Philadelphia, to Milwaukee, Atlanta, so many other places,” Trump said, “what changed this year was the Democrat Party’s relentless push to print and mail out tens of millions of ballots sent to unknown recipients with virtually no safeguards of any kind.”

Only nine states and the District of Columbia sent mail-in ballots to all registered voters, and the states home to the cities mentioned by Trump — Michigan, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, and Georgia — were not among them. As for safeguards, most states use bar codes on mail-in ballots matched to a specific person in the voter files; ballot envelopes require personal information, such as date of birth or driver’s license numbers; and signatures are required and matched against ones on file.

Dominion Voting Systems: Trump again made the bogus claim that Dominion Voting Systems technology, certified by 28 states, switched votes. “Its name is Dominion, with the turn of a dial or the change of a chip, you could press a button for Trump and the vote goes to Biden,” Trump said. Multiple experts, including Attorney General Barr, have debunked this conspiracy theory.

Barr said the Department of Homeland Security and Justice Department looked into such claims and “we haven’t seen anything to substantiate that.” A group of federal, state, and local officials overseeing the nation’s voting system also refuted such claims.

Trump added that “the only secure system is paper,” but 95% of ballots did have a paper record, said Christopher Krebs, the head of DHS’ Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency whom Trump fired after the election. That’s up from 82% of ballots in 2016 and “one of the keys to success for a secure 2020 election,” Krebs said.

Vote counting: In describing Dominion as a “disaster,” Trump asked, “where are the votes counted?” He answered his own question by repeating a fantastical false claim: “Which we think are counted in foreign countries, not in the United States.”

“I don’t understand this claim,” Krebs said when asked about it in a “60 Minutes” interview that aired Nov. 29. “All votes in the United States of America are counted in the United States of America. Period.” Dominion said in a statement, “Votes are not processed outside the United States. Votes are counted and reported by county and state election officials — not by Dominion, or any other election technology company.”

Human error in Michigan: Trump inaccurately used a case of human error — by a Republican county clerk, no less — to falsely suggest widespread voter fraud. “In one Michigan County, as an example, that used Dominion systems, they found that nearly 6,000 votes had been wrongly switched from Trump to Biden, and this is just the tip of the iceberg,” Trump said. “This is what we caught. How many didn’t we catch?”

The facts: A day after the election, Antrim County in Michigan reported that Biden was ahead of Trump by about 3,000 votes, with 98% of votes counted. Election officials surprised that Biden could win a Republican-leaning county, found it was a case of human error and Trump was actually leading by about 2,500 votes. The county clerk “accidentally did not update the software used to collect voting machine data,” the Michigan Department of State, which oversees the state’s elections, said in a statement.  

Antrim County Clerk Sheryl Guy, a Republican, said the error in unofficial results would have been caught during the county canvass process when certifying votes. “I must emphasize that the human error did not in any way, shape or form affect the official election results of Antrim County,” she said at a state legislative hearing.

Poll observers present: Trump has repeatedly, falsely claimed that votes were counted without Republican poll observers present. His own lawyer admitted in court that observers were there. “In Pennsylvania, large amounts of mail-in and absentee ballots were processed illegally. And in secret, in Philadelphia, in Allegheny counties, without our observers present,” Trump claimed.

Trump campaign lawyer Jerome Marcus admitted under questioning by a Republican-appointed U.S. district judge that there were GOP observers present — saying there were “a nonzero number of people in the room.”

Half of Detroit registered voters voted: Trump falsely claimed that in Detroit, “there were more votes than there were voters. Think of that. You had more votes than you had voters.” Nearly 50% of the city’s 504,714 registered voters cast a ballot, according to the city’s unofficial election results.

Trump appears to be talking about a minor issue with out-of-balance precincts. In Detroit, the number of ballots cast versus the number of voters checked into polling precincts differed by a mere 357, Mayor Mike Duggan said on Nov. 18. Such discrepancies, which aren’t unique to this election, can occur through a scanner error or if a voter decides not to vote or spoils a ballot, meaning they ask to void the ballot and re-do their vote.

Trump lost the state by more than 150,000 votes.

‘Not credible’ allegations: Repeating unsupported allegations from a failed lawsuit, Trump said: “Other witnesses in Detroit also saw our election officials counting batches of the same ballots many times, as well as illegally duplicating ballots.” He also said election workers entered “fake birth dates into the system, in order to illegally count” ballots.

Trump is referring to a lawsuit brought by Republican poll challengers that alleged widespread fraud in the counting of ballots at the TCF Center in Detroit. The suit included seven affidavits that accused Detroit election workers of “counting the same ballot more than once,” using “false information to process ballots, such as using incorrect or false birthdays,” and “improperly duplicating ballots,” among other things.

In ruling against the Republicans, who were seeking to stop certification of the election results in the county, Wayne County Circuit Judge Timothy Kenny said the allegations made in the affidavits were “not credible” and represented a misunderstanding of the ballot tabulation process. Detroit election officials, he wrote, “offered a more accurate and persuasive explanation of activity” within the TCF Center.

Georgia signature checks: Trump wrongly claimed Georgia didn’t properly check signatures from mail-in ballots and misleadingly claimed the signature checks were left out of the recount. “In the recent recount in Georgia, which means nothing because they don’t want to check signatures and if you’re not going to check signatures in Georgia, it doesn’t work,” Trump said. “But we have a secretary of state, and a governor who made it very difficult to check signatures.” As we have written, Georgia election officials check signatures twice: once when a voter requests a mail-in ballot, and then again when the ballot is returned.

Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, a Republican, said Georgia strengthened its signature match for this election and trained election officials on Georgia Bureau of Investigation signature-matching techniques. Trump is correct that signature checks were not part of the hand recount. Once a signature is verified on the ballot’s outer envelope, the ballot itself is separated for counting. This protects voter privacy.

Rejected ballots in Georgia: Trump again falsely claimed that the percentage of ballots rejected in Georgia was suspiciously low. “In swing state after swing state, the number of ballots rejected has been dramatically lower than what would have been expected based on prior experience,” Trump said. “In Georgia, just 0.2%, that’s substantially less than 1%, of mail-in ballots have been rejected. In other words, almost none have been rejected. They took everything. Nothing was rejected, practically, compared to 6.4% in 2016.” As he has in the past, Trump is conflating the ballots rejected just for signature issues in this election with ballots rejected in past elections for all reasons — usually for arriving too late. The percentage of mail-in ballots rejected in Georgia due to signature issues this year was about the same as in the 2016 and 2018 general elections.

‘Cured’ ballots: Trump wrongly claimed that in Pennsylvania, Democrats were allowed to cure their ballots — meaning voters were notified about an error in their mail-in ballot so they could fix it — but Republicans were not. “Tens of thousands of voters across Pennsylvania were treated differently based on whether they were Republicans or Democrats,” Trump said. “Voters who submitted flawed ballots in some Democrat precincts were notified and asked to fix their ballots, while Republican precincts, and in particular Republican voters, were not so notified, which plainly violates the Equal Protection Clause of the United States Constitution.”

As we have written, all counties got the same guidance the night before the election instructing them to notify political parties and update the ballot-tracking online system about ballot errors, thus allowing voters to cast a provisional ballot on Election Day. Some counties notified voters, and some didn’t. But that inconsistency didn’t fall strictly along partisan county lines.

On Nov. 27, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 3rd Circuit rejected a Trump campaign lawsuit on this issue. According to an opinion written by Judge Bibas, who, again, was appointed by Trump, the campaign’s “claims have no merit.” The complaint, “never alleges that anyone treated the Trump campaign or Trump votes worse than it treated the Biden campaign or Biden votes.”

“A violation of the Equal Protection Clause requires more than variation from county to county,” Bibas wrote. “It requires unequal treatment of similarly situated parties. … To be sure, counties vary in implementing that guidance, but that is normal. Reasonable county-to-county variation is not discrimination.”

Vote ‘dumps’: Trump again claimed that in Michigan, early in the morning after Election Day, “a vote dump of 149,772 votes came in unexpectedly. We were winning by a lot. That batch was received in horror. Nobody knows anything about it.”

As we’ve written before, what appeared to be an unusually large uptick of about 140,000 votes for Biden was the result of a typo in unofficial results reported by Michigan’s Shiawassee County. The mistake was quickly corrected, the county’s elections clerk told us in a phone interview.

Wisconsin results: Trump again questioned how he lost Wisconsin even though he was ahead in the vote count on the night of the election.

“In Wisconsin, as an example, where we were way up on election night, they ultimately had us miraculously losing by 20,000 votes,” Trump said. “We’re leading by a lot and then at 3:42 in the morning, there was this, it was a massive dump of votes, mostly Biden, almost all Biden. And to this day, everyone’s trying to figure out, ‘Where did it come from?’”

As we’ve written before, Trump was seemingly ahead in Wisconsin at the end of the day on Nov. 3, but that was before many of the mail-in ballots were counted. State law prevented election officials from counting absentee ballots before polls opened on Election Day.

And no one is trying to determine where those absentee votes came from because the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel has already explained what happened. “Biden overtook Trump in the early morning hours when Milwaukee reported its roughly 170,000 absentee votes, which were overwhelmingly Democratic. Then early morning returns from Green Bay and Kenosha on Wednesday added to his slender lead. Trump had nurtured a lead of more than 100,000 votes before those returns came in,” the newspaper reported.

Missed votes in Georgia: Trump falsely suggested that many votes from Trump supporters in Georgia remain uncounted. “Thousands of uncounted ballots were discovered in Floyd, Fayette, and Walton counties weeks after the election, and these ballots were mostly from Trump voters. They weren’t counted. They were from Trump voters,” he said.

It’s true that almost 6,000 previously uncounted or unreported votes in those counties (and Douglas County) were discovered by officials during Georgia’s hand recount of ballots after the election. But those votes for Trump and Biden have since been included in the overall tallies and didn’t change the outcome.

Gabriel Sterling, the voting systems implementation manager for the Georgia secretary of state’s office, said that after including those additional votes for both candidates, Biden’s lead over Trump narrowed from 14,156 votes to 12,781 votes.

Pennsylvania ballots: Trump suggested some issues with mail-in ballots — addressed by elections officials before Election Day — were evidence of fraud. They’re not.

“Many voters all across Pennsylvania received two ballots in the mail,” he said. In October, some voters in Allegheny and Fayette Counties received incorrectly printed ballots. In both cases, election officials issued corrected ballots and made clear: “Only one ballot will be counted for each voter,” as the statement from Allegheny County said.

The state also contacted in October about 4,300 voters who received two ballots, due to a printing error. Department of State spokesperson Ellen Lyon told reporters any duplicate ballots were “coded for the same voter, so if a voter tried to submit more than one, the system would literally prevent the second ballot from being counted.”

Trump further exaggerated: “In Fayette County, Pennsylvania, multiple voters received ballots that were already filled out.” In late October, the county’s district attorney’s office announced it was investigating two ballots that voters received that were already filled out. The Trump campaign cited that incident in a Nov. 9 lawsuit, which was dismissed by a federal judge and upheld by the unanimous 3rd Circuit.

Arizona: Trump repeated a claim from another dismissed lawsuit that wasn’t about fraud. “In Arizona, in-person voters whose ballots produced error messages from tabulation machines were told to press a button that resulted in their votes not being counted,” he said.

As we’ve written, Trump campaign lawyer Kory Langhofer stated in court that he was “not alleging fraud,” but instead was raising concerns about a “limited number of cases” involving “good faith errors.” There were 191 presidential ballots with “overvotes” — meaning more than one candidate for the same office was selected — in Maricopa County.

No witnesses for the Trump campaign could confirm that their votes had not been recorded, and the judge dismissed the campaign’s claims as moot and with prejudice, meaning the decision cannot be retried.

Trump lost Arizona by more than 10,000 votes.

The president added that Arizona’s “attorney general announced that mail-in ballots had been stolen from mailboxes and hidden under a rock.” The AG did announce that 18 ballots, which weren’t opened or filled out, had been found in a field on Oct. 30. Police hand-delivered them to the voters.

Voter rolls: As he has for years, Trump falsely equated errors on voter rolls with evidence of voter fraud. “This colossal expansion of mail-in voting opened the flood gates to massive fraud,” Trump said. “It’s a widely known fact that the voting rolls are packed with people who are not lawfully eligible to vote, including those who are deceased, have moved out of their state, and even our non-citizens of our country.” It is true that voter rolls contain errors, such as people moving to another state but not being removed from the old state’s voter rolls, or people dying but their names not being removed in a timely fashion. But that’s not fraud, unless or until someone tries to illegally vote in the wrong state, or for a deceased person.

As we have written, voting experts say that while the instances of voter fraud via mail-in ballot are more common than in-person voting fraud, the number of known cases is relatively small.

Wisconsin rolls: Trump claimed — with no evidence — that he “knew” a legal dispute over whether to remove more than 100,000 voters from Wisconsin voter rolls involved “illegal voters.” All those voters did was fail to respond within 30 days to a mailing saying it appeared they had moved and given them the opportunity to continue their registration if they had not. There’s no evidence they voted illegally. The case dates back to 2019 and concerns whether the state elections commission, which found errors in such residency-change lists before, had the authority to deactivate those voters. The state Supreme Court heard arguments in late September and has yet to rule on the case.

Not ‘statistically impossible’: Trump wrongly claimed that it was “statistically impossible” that he lost the presidential race even as Republicans had success in congressional races. “The tremendous success we had in the House of Representatives, and the tremendous success we’ve had so far in the Senate, unexpected success all over the country, and right here in Washington, it is statistically impossible that the person, me, that led the charge lost,” Trump said. It is statistically possible.

As John McCormack wrote in National Review, “the notion that down-ballot Republicans greatly outperformed President Trump is inaccurate.” As he noted, only one Republican won a Senate race in a state lost by Trump, Susan Collins in Maine. Republicans picked up seats — but not the majority — in the House. But while Republicans fared better than polls suggested they would, it is not unusual in recent elections for House GOP candidates to fare better against their Democratic opponents “than the Republican presidential candidate performed against his Democratic opponent,” McCormack wrote.

Election experts also attribute some of the disparity to “ballot roll-off,” which is when voters skip certain races. Barry Burden, director of the Elections Research Center at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, told us it’s not unusual for voters to “choose a candidate at the top of the ballot and then ‘roll off’ as they move down the ballot. There is nothing suspicious about lower participation in lower-level races.”

[auburnfamilynews]

Photo by Hannah White/Collegiate Images/Getty Images

Auburn was off, what about everyone else?

What’d you guys get up to yesterday? Head outside? Enjoy the weather? Same here. Auburn had its lone bye week of the season yesterday before finishing up the final four games of the regular season. The Tigers are up to 4-2 at this point after the huge win over LSU on Halloween, and they’ll certainly be favored over a Mississippi State team that’s done nothing but get worse each week since beating LSU.

There were some very interesting results around the country this weekend, however, so let’s get the highlights of the rankings and a rundown of what happened around the SEC.

POLL ALERT: Alabama reaches No. 1 in AP Top 25 for record 13th consecutive season; Notre Dame jumps to No. 2, Clemson slips to No. 4. Full poll >> https://t.co/7dTTUiSC1j More coverage >> https://t.co/2qlqr09CPm pic.twitter.com/gBe2izVZO2

— AP Top 25 (@AP_Top25) November 8, 2020

Unfortunately, Alabama is back atop the standings after Clemson lost in double overtime to Notre Dame last night, so here’s your new top ten:

Alabama

Notre Dame

Ohio State

Clemson

Texas A&M

Florida

Cincinnati

BYU

Miami

Indiana

That’s... an interesting top ten. Indiana?? After three weeks? BYU? They haven’t played a single Power Five team this season. Texas A&M has only the loss to Alabama, but they might be the most unassuming top five team you could imagine.

Other SEC teams in the rankings include Georgia at #12, and Auburn still at #24 after the off week. Let’s get some thoughts on the conference as a whole.

ALABAMA: Off this week, the Tide are now the top-ranked team in the country, and they’ve already played what many think is the toughest test on their schedule in Georgia, despite the fact that Georgia hasn’t beaten them since Nick Saban’s first season, and definitely not when it matters. Running back Trey Sanders got hurt in a car crash and is probably out for the year, so depth takes a hit, but they’re still the best team in the league.

ARKANSAS: Arkansas fans are torn between saying that Chad Morris is the reason they sucked for the past couple of years, and saying that he brought in the players that are currently performing well. The Hogs put up a 24-0 third quarter yesterday against Tennessee, and that was all they’d need. Arkansas is now 3-3 after a surprisingly efficient day from Feleipe Franks, who threw for 3 touchdowns.

AUBURN: Off this week, but looking good. The win over LSU is super satisfying, and up next it’s the two teams struggling the most in Mississippi State and Tennessee. Win those and you’re 6-2 heading into the Iron Bowl. Not bad.

FLORIDA: Ok, they looked fast. Made Georgia look slow and dull. Kyle Trask made up for Kyles everywhere and threw for more than 300 yards in the first half on the way to 38 Gator points, and they cruised from there. Now, they’re in the East driver’s seat and suddenly have a clear path to the College Football Playoff, unlike...

GEORGIA: These guys no longer have a clear path to the Playoff, let alone the SEC Championship Game. For the proximity to meaningful accomplishments that Kirby has achieved, Georgia has little in the trophy case to show for it. Now, they’re going to likely miss the SEC Championship Game for the first time since 2016, and Kirby’s glaringly poor quarterback management is super apparent now with the way that Justin Fields is playing at the moment at Ohio State. Kirby’s record is worse than Mark Richt’s at this point in their respective careers, and now he’s going to be missing games in Atlanta. That’s how a championship-starved Georgia fanbase turns on you.

KENTUCKY: Off this week, they’ll get a chance to bounce back under the quarterback leadership of Joey Gatewood next Saturday against Vanderbilt, so they’ll likely get a victory. Gatewood clearly wasn’t trusted to let ‘er rip last weekend, so Auburn fans have to feel good about Gus’ quarterback decision at the beginning of 2019.

LSU: Off this week, but oh boy, where do you go from here? LSU currently sits at 2-3, and what’s next? Oh brother, they get Alabama at home. Now, Death Valley is the kind of spot where weird things tend to happen, especially at night, but not with the way this Tiger team is playing. They’re... awful. And right now, this season may completely fall apart. Alabama is a sure loss, then they have to go to Arkansas, who’s getting better by the week. Then it’s at Texas A&M before returning home to take on an Ole Miss team that’s just drooling at the pass defense they’ve seen from LSU. Ah, yes, then you finish at Florida. That’s three top six teams left in the final five games, and it’s not out of the realm of possibility that LSU ends up 2-8 at the end of this one. What an encore from a national championship. Worth it, though.

MISSISSIPPI STATE: This team is terrible. They managed to outlast Vanderbilt and hold on despite a second-half Commodore comeback, but they seemed to somehow get worse in the process. Will Rogers threw for 226 yards on 35 completions. Mississippi State ran for... wait for it, NEGATIVE 22 yards. Vanderbilt’s quarterback Kenny Seals hit the 300-yard mark on them through the air. We’re going to likely be a 20-point favorite, and you’ll need to bet the Tigers with every penny.

MISSOURI: Off this week, but they host Georgia on Saturday at noon. Man, that’s a sneaky spot. With what Georgia has been up to lately, and with the way that Missouri can score, watch out if the Tigers happen to get up by a couple of scores somehow. Yeah, Georgia’s defense is great, but a big play or two could really put Kirby on roller skates. You’d hate to see it.

OLE MISS: Off this week, but they’ll get to play the boring version of themselves next weekend when South Carolina comes to town. It’s a battle of former coordinators now turned head coaches with Kiffin vs Muschamp, but I have to think that Ole Miss blows them out of the water unless Matt Corral has another Hyde performance with a myriad of picks.

SOUTH CAROLINA: When we look back at this season, we’ll chalk up the Auburn loss to South Carolina as a true 2020 moment. Since that time they’ve given up 100 points to LSU and Texas A&M combined. Yesterday was a listless effort that had message boards wondering if Hugh Freeze was en route to Columbia to pull Muschamp’s chair out from under him and start paying Chicago recruits to come play for the Gamecocks. 48-3 to Texas A&M. What a loss. They’re 2-4, and we’re one of the two. Gross.

TENNESSEE: Is Jeremy Pruitt in trouble? Tennessee had the top winning streak in the country early on this year, and now they’ve lost four straight games since leading Georgia at halftime a few weeks ago. Yesterday they got up 13-0 over Arkansas and then died, letting the Hogs roll over them in the third quarter for the win. Pruitt still sticks with Jarrett Guarantano for some reason, but he doesn’t have anyone better. For all of the tricks he learned working with Saban and Jimbo, you’d think that this guy would be able to grab a better quarterback.

TEXAS A&M: I don’t really know what to make of this team. I’ve seen them get absolutely blasted in Tuscaloosa, and I’ve seen them do the same thing to some other teams. They’re somehow in the top five, but that could be a function of people not believing in more than four good teams (Bama, Clemson, Ohio State, Notre Dame) and just sticking the Aggies there for fun. Kellen Mond looks... good? The run game is... decent? The defense... tough? Maybe they are good. They play Tennessee next weekend, so it’s likely another win for Jimbo and another bit of frustration for Pruitt.

VANDERBILT: They play hard and get exercise/fresh air, that’s for sure. Not much more than that. Won’t win a game this year.

from College and Magnolia - All Posts https://www.collegeandmagnolia.com/2020/11/8/21555559/saturday-sec-impressions-rankings-peeking-around-the-bye-week

[peacelovefreedomsblog]

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Former First Lady Michelle Obama Points Finger At Trump For Cause Of Her ‘Low-Grade Depression’

By

 Michael Cantrell

 -

August 6, 2020

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Is there anything under the sun the radical left in this country won’t blame President Trump for? Over the last three years, anything that’s bad, unhealthy, accidental, or completely out of human control, has been twisted into some sort of narrative that finds a way to point the finger back at Trump as the cause.

These folks really do think our president is the root problem of all that is evil and wicked in this world, caring little for how ridiculous such statements make them look.

Former first lady Michelle Obama is now blaming President Trump for her battle against what she calls “low-grade depression.”

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Why not? They’ve blamed him for everything else at this point.

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Via TheBlaze:

Obama started her own podcast in late July, and the first episode featured her husband, Barack Obama. In the second episode of “The Michelle Obama Podcast,” the former first lady admitted that she is currently dealing with “low-grade depression” brought on by the coronavirus pandemic, racial injustice, and the “hypocrisy” of the Trump administration.

“I’m waking up in the middle of the night because I’m worrying about something or there’s a heaviness,” Obama said Wednesday. “These are not, they are not fulfilling times, spiritually. I know that I am dealing with some form of low-grade depression.

“Not just because of the quarantine, but because of the racial strife, and just seeing this administration, watching the hypocrisy of it, day in and day out, is dispiriting,” Obama said during her interview with former Washington Post opinion columnist and NPR host Michele Norris.

“‘I’d be remiss to say that part of this depression is also a result of what we’re seeing in terms of the protests, the continued racial unrest, that has plagued this country since its birth,” the former first lady continued.

“I have to say that waking up to the news, waking up to how this administration has or has not responded, waking up to yet another story of a black man or a black person somehow being dehumanized or hurt or killed or falsely accused of something, it is exhausting,” Obama said. “And it has led to a weight that I haven’t felt in my life in a while.

We get it, Obama. Everything that sucks in the modern world is because of Trump. You are beating a dead horse here. Over and over. I mean, she’s really clobbering that sucker with a big wooden club.

One thing Democrats like Michelle Obama and her husband don’t seem to understand is personal responsibility. People are responsible only for their own actions, not the actions of others. We are all individuals who are capable of making our own decisions.

Even if someone bullies us, goads us, or otherwise seems to push us into a certain kind of action, we still have the ability to choose how to react. You cannot put that on someone else.

The race riots in this country are due to the leftist machine known as the mainstream media, lapdogs for the Democratic Party, who constantly create divisive narratives with only half the facts as a means to turn people against each other and cause havoc and chaos.

Havoc and chaos are effective tools for progressives to use as a means of justifying big government policies and intrusions in the public lives of American citizens.

To summarize, Obama is wrong.