#this took ~three days overall (breaks and stuff) but it actually took around 10-12 hours actually drawing it

[youredreamingofroo]

Roo as Benson from The Passenger (2023)

- - Click Roo's pic for better quality :) - -

( Progression pics under the cut :) )

( Latest -> Oldest )

[writing-with-olive]

Tracking goals with a bulletin board instead of a planner

I don't know how helpful this is going to be to everyone, but switching away from using a planner was an absolute GAME CHANGER, so I'm going to share my system because it's not as intuitive as a planner, but at least for me, it's much more effective.

This got kinda long(ish) so the following is under the cut:

why I switched from using a planner to using a bulleting board

what kind of goals I set with this system

measuring success

how it actually works (how to set it up, and use it to actually track goals)

affordability (spoiler alert: it’s better than most planners)

First of all, why did I switch?

My biggest issue with using a planner was that I wasn't seeing my goals often enough. In the closed pages of a book, they are very nicely hidden, and goals I can't see are goals that don't exist. This took me, oh..... five years to realize (starting when I first tried setting and tracking goals), but once I did, everything suddenly made sense. As far as I can tell, the more often you're interacting with your goals, the more likely you are to complete them. 

What kind of goals do I set?

I track goals quarterly, which means I set new goals at the start of every three months (January, April, July, October). This is pretty effective, as I can set ambitious enough goals that I have to actually work to meet them, but there's enough space for setbacks like "I don't wanna" and "Oh look! Life!" without completly obliterating my chances of being able to finish. Quarterly goals are also pretty standard, at least for corporate America (idk about elsewhere, but it seems fairly likely).

In terms of content, I set several goals for the following catagories:

school/academics (if you don't go to school, work-based goals could go here instead)

social media and writing (most of my social media presence revolves around writing, so I kinda lump them together)

personal/private goals (home-based, tasks that I need to set aside more time to do, family, etc)

self care/habits I want to build (take a walk daily, eat breakfast, screentime limits, read books, etc)

This quarter, I have five for each section, which means twenty goals overall. That's a lot. (I'll get to my metric of success in a sec) The benifit though, is that pretty much all of the most important parts of my life are accounted for, meaning that it's not about making time for my goals, it's about structuring my day so that the bulk of it focuses on one goal or another. Whenever I'm bored, I can see what I have on my goals list, and I'm usually able to find something that's interesting to me in the moment. (This method of spreading out goals to cover multiple facets of my life is heavily inspired by Jenna Moreci's goalsetting method)

How does success work?

(The stuff above was adapted from Jenna Moreci. This part is lifted wholesale from what she does.) I have a lot of goals. Because of that, it's pretty unlikely that I'm going to be able to complete all of them, and setting that expectation is a great way to end up failing, and lacking the motivation to do much of anything. Therefore, a successful quarter is completing at least 50% of the set goals. It's still a challenge - I still have to complete 10 goals in 12 weeks, but it's doable. A success is listed as a win, whereas not completing 50% is a loss. Since I am a competitive person by nature, putting it in a win/lose dichotomy is an excellent motivator. 

This is great and all, but how do you actually set it up?

Okay this is the fun stuff! So it would seem like the board would get pretty crowded pretty quick, but it actually doesnt. 

I do all of my tracking on notecards. Each card holds five goals on them, which I write in pen, and I mark my progress by highlighting a progress bar on top of the row I've written my goal on. This means I can tell at a glance what goals I have the most or least progress on, and approximately how far I have left to go. I don't have to get bogged down by writing out fractions/percentage completion, which would definitely clutter things up. 

To set my board up overall, I used string to block out four columns, each with header labels: Quarter, Week, Day, and Other.

The quarter column is where I list all of my goals I've set without breaking it down into little pieces. I have four notecards in this section, each with five goals apiece. It's the way I track how far I am toward completing the whole goal. Since some goals take most of the quarter to complete, I only update the progress bars once a week. 

The week column also has five notecards, but broken down into pieces I can accomplish in a seven-day period. Usually, I set it up, so that the goals on each card directly correspond to the goals on the quarter goal card to it's direct left. You can mix and match which goals you work on any given week, but it's effective for both keeping everything organized, and also for making sure I'm not neglecting anything. I also make sure to label each of the week goals what it's the week of (for example [W- Mar 4] would indicate that this is a weekly goal card, and also that it's the week of March 4th). This is useful in case I want to go back and see what I was up to at any given time. 

The day column looks a little different in that there are only two notecards. This is to help limit what what volume I'm trying to take on, because one of the biggest demotivaters is seeing a giant pile of work and knowing there's no way to finish it in the time you've got. Usually, I align the first card with the top row established by my quarter/weekly goals, and I write out five things I want to achieve during the day based off what I've written in my top two weekly goal cards. The other card is on the third row, and corresponds to the third and fourth weekly goal cards. As a very strict rule, I don't give myself more than four hours of work each day (this excludes going to class). I've experimented with other timeframes, and I've found going over that number means my chances of doing what I've set out to do plummet if I assign myself more. 

The Other section is where I keep all of my past week/day notecards. On top, I have my weekly goal notecards in one of those triangular paper clamp thingys (I have been informed that these are technically referred to as binder clips), organized in chronological order, with the most recent at the front. Below that, I have my daily goals. This way, I have my progress easily accessible (this comes in useful for proving that yes, I did do the dishes three times last week and yes, it's your turn)

How affordable is it?

Actually really affordable. Yes, it takes up more wall space, but you can get a bulletin board for about $20-$45 depending on where you shop (sometimes they cost more, but usually you can find one in the given range). Notecards cost on average about $3-$4 per 100 card pack (which lasts about two months if you use front and back). Thumbtacks cost about two to three dollars, and a small ball of yarn costs about three to seven dollars. This means tracking for the first quarter costs about $35-$60 dollars, but every quarter following is between $4 and $7. 

For comparison, most quarterly planners, cost about $25-$35 dollars per quarter.

Over a year, that adds up to:

 $50 - $80 for a bulletin board tracker

$100 - $140 for quarterly planners

Over two years, it adds up to

$65 - $100 for a bulletin board tracker

$200 - $280 for quarterly planners

Anyway, that got pretty long, but maybe it'll be helpful to you!

[andsotheuniverseended]

cephas my beloved

so i don't know if what you meant here was "answer all thirty of the dnd meme questions for cephas" but that is how i'm interpreting it so i'mma go ahead and put it under a cut

(also for those not in the know, Cephas (they/she/him/any pronoun you like) is my stone construct witch. yes those are both homebrew things I found online. i use this witch and just recently updated them to the 3.0 version and i'm very excited about it)

1. if one of their friends was jumping on a bed and asked your character to join them, would they?

Yes, absolutely, of course. The bed would then immediately break because Cephas is a couple tons of solid rock, but that's on their friends for not thinking it through. Or maybe that was the plan. Either way, Cephas is on board.

2. would your character carry around a tiny bath and body works hand sanitizer? if yes, would it have a specific scent?

I mean, Ceph does carry around smelling salts enchanted to smell like whatever would make someone feel better in the moment? Which is kind of the same thing? But anyways the real answer is Probably Not unless it was a gift, because Cephas has no sense of smell and has no need to sanitize.

3. does your character paint their nails? do they wait for them to dry fully afterwards?

Technically he doesn't have nails but Cephas will happily allow themselves to be painted over any part of their body, and will stay completely still until it's dry. I know because the party his done this to them before.

4. if you cut open your character’s heart and there was something inside, what would it be? why?

Hm. I mean. Literally speaking, no heart, you just find stone in there. Figuratively speaking... a jade earring. representative of their first steps towards freedom.

5. do/would your character carry lots of hair ties on their wrist?

Nah, not unless one of the other party members asked.

6. what parts of your character’s voice/manner of speaking are distinct, if any?

Hm. Mostly just that their voice is pretty rough and low. Otherwise I think they talk pretty normal??

7. what’s the first thing your character’s eyes are drawn to on a map?

New places. To all the parts of the world they haven't seen yet, and want to.

8. how did your character feel when they left home for the first time?

Okay I'm going to go with the definition of home that means Cephas has to feel like it's home, which would mean the place where they lived with their BFF Effie. And I think the first time they left there, with an intent to go out and adventure, they felt really excited, happy, and like they were finally doing what they were meant to be doing. They'd been feeling very restless up until that point, so it's kind of like scratching an itch. Very satisfying.

9. where does your character look when they’re the only one walking down a road?

All around. She likes to see everything and doesn't get particularly worried about other people or robbers or things like that, so there's a lot of being generally distracted by whatever scenery they're passing through. Sometimes he'll just stop and pretend to be a statue on the side of the road and people watch for a while, if there's time for it.

10. does your character have tattoos? were they alone the first time they got one?

Being made of stone, my darling Cephas can't get tattoos. If they had actual flesh I do think they'd wanna get some.

11. if a button came loose from your character’s shirt, would they make sure the replacement matched?

Cephas doesn't wear clothes, and if they did 'matching' would not be the thing they cared about, so for sure No.

12. how loudly do they cry?

Gods I feel like a lot of these answers are just "Cephas is a stone construct and therefore cannot/does not do the thing" but like Cephas is a stone construct and cannot cry. There have been a lot of times where they wished they could, but their body wasn't built for it. Typically if they're sad, they're quiet about it, reserved.

13. does your character like holding hands? do they do it often?

Yes! But he doesn't do it very often at all. Stone isn't comfortable for other people to hold, and they have to be careful not to hurt people when touching them, so it's generally more dangerous for whoever they're holding hands with than its worth.

14. is your character more likely to wear a necktie, a bowtie, or a bolo tie? (if any at all)

Again, no clothes. But I think Cephas would enjoy a good bolo tie.

15. have you ever said something as your character that stuck with you for a while after? what was it?

Oh lord. Uhhh... hm, well there was this one thing but it is very dependent on the context of the moment. Which is that they were talking with another character who was frustrated about not knowing things, and talking about how in order to be people you have to ask questions even if you don't get answers, you have to keep asking questions. And then they discovered something that was a step in a mystery they'd been trying to deal with and Cephas said "and sometimes you do get answers" and I don't know why but that one did stick with me.

16. what does getting flustered look like for your character?

Stuttering. Awkward hand movements. Maybe reverting to the old "I am but a simple construct with no consciousness" trick if they're really feeling out of sorts.

17. does your character have to glance at their hands to remember left and right?

Ha, no. Cephas knows what they're doing, unlike me.

18. does your character have stuffed animals? would they if they could? what kind?

Hm, no, xe doesn't. But I think they would if they ever settled down and stopped traveling. Even if Cephas can't really feel the softness, they would like it. And they'd be very careful with them too. As for the kind... I'm thinking those, like, huge round ones? Fuck there was a name for them. Squishables?? I think???

19. does your character walk or run down stairs?

Walk, typically. Running could damage things lol

20. if your character saw a turtle stuck on its back, would they flip it over?

Oh yes 100%. And also try and talk to the turtle and see if it needed any further assistance.

21. has your character ever climbed out of a window? would they do it again?

I don't have a moment in mind specifically, but there's no way Cephas hasn't, and they would absolutely do it again.

22. what’s your character’s ideal way to wake up? what usually wakes them up?

Cephas doesn't so much sleep as... go into Obedient Construct mode for four hours, which is to say they will obey any order given to them. Ideal way to wake up from that is in some weird/compromising position because it means his friends were messing with them and they love that. And they can't be woken up unnaturally, so its just that after Four Hours something in their head goes Ding and they're back.

23. what’s the pettiest thing your character’s ever done?

Dyed a nobleman's hair bright pink because he was kind of rude to them when they were pretending to be a normal construct.

24. what made your character the angriest they’ve ever been?

Cephas... doesn't really do anger, generally. But! There was a man who pretended to be a prophet of a god, and collected a small group of true believers. And then he took over a town, and made the townsfolk slaves. And that really got to Cephas, in a very personal way. (They did take care of the man and they still have mixed feelings about doing it.)

25. how does you character smile?

With great effort. Cephas wasn't built to emote, so any facial expressions are subtle and take a lot of concentration and effort to make happen. Over time they've gotten more practiced at this and can do it almost without thought, but it's still the smallest movements for a great amount of toil.

26. does your know the names of their constellations? how did they learn them?

I think, some of them? Cephas lived with her best friend's family for a long time and I think they would've learned some of them there. But then they also definitely made a game out of making up constellations and naming them whatever they wanted, so it's a toss up whether what they know is a real constellation or one they made up and then forgot they made up.

27. do/would your character draw or write on themself?

Oh yeah, for sure.

28. would your character race someone to the top of a tall tree for bragging rights?

Not for bragging rights, but absolutely yes Cephas would race someone. And they would lose because they are big and heavy and not made for climbing, but its more about the fun of it than the winning or the losing for them.

29. is there an artist whose style you associate with your character? (visual or otherwise; poets and musicians, etc. count)

Hmm... not really?? I don't really associate artists with my characters. My friend drew Cephas once, so I think that's the closest I'm gonna get to that. Maybe Delta Rae? I feel like Delta Rae has got those witchy vibes, and that makes me think Cephas.

30. how has your character’s first impressions of their party members changed since they met them? have they stayed the same?

Oh this is delightful because when Ceph first met the party, they were pretending to be a normal construct, so the DM was 'playing' them. Which meant I got to sit there and watch, and so I wrote down what Cephas was thinking. They only met the first three members of the party that day, but I literally have it written down that it was three "good first impressions" because one of them stole a book, another one turned invisible to draw a face on a trash can, and the third called Cephas 'interesting'. Overall impression? A group of messes who just went through something tough and are not dealing with it super well.

Current impression? A surprisingly competent group of messes who are working through some stuff, and very much don't like talking about their feelings. Also, I'm invested.

Seriously though it started out as Cephas thinking they seemed fun and wanting a distraction, and now Cephas is like actually really invested in all of them and their growth and wants to help them as much as they can.

[acciomoondew]

hiya tumblr

i haven’t done this in.. well quite some time but here goes

just to update anyone who is reading this - hi i’m lisa and i am almost done my first year of law school. it’s gone okay, but the exams are murderous they’re so much harder than i could have ever imagined and i’m really struggling. but i just got a job with the prosecution services in a town just about an hour away for the summer. i’ve always wanted to be a prosecutor like genuinely always since i was like 12 years old. it’s hard to articulate why because it’s kind of shifted after going through a whole undergraduate degree where i learned all about people and society and psychology and criminology and stuff. but i still want to be one and i want to make a difference with my career and hope to make at least a small impact on the criminal justice system. but you see the thing is so many people are doubting me on this. just this past week alone two separate colleagues at school have basically told me that my reasons for wanting to be a prosecutors are stupid and i won’t be able to make any changes as a lawyer and you know i get it maybe being a lawmaker or a politician would be able to make more change. but i think it’s important for prosecutors to make changes from within the criminal justice system you know? by not focusing so much on incarceration and targeting of indigenous canadians and use more meaningful consequences that will decrease criminality. i know that’s idealistic and hopeful and probably naive but that’s what i believe and want to do with my life and it’s all i’ve wanted to do for like over 10 years. i’m also so lonely? i have friends at school but we don’t really hang out outside of class and lunch and school-related functions. i mean a couple times i have been invited out and that’s nice. but my friends pre-law school are not communicating with me. i’m always the one starting the conversation and rarely does it last long. so yeah i’m struggling. a couple weeks ago i had my reading week break and told them to let me know when they were free so we could get together and so one suggested the snow maze and then i immediately said yes that sounds great and it took the others (one of which is like the leader of the other two - they won’t go if the one main one doesn’t) until the day before to finally commit. but then when we got there (i drove because i’m the only one with a car) the three fucked off and did their own thing and left my other friend and i alone. and then you know i had to drive them home and they like didn’t talk to me on the drive back. so i feel like i did something wrong but of course i didn’t but my brain doesn’t let me think otherwise and yeah the depression thing is always fun but it’s really messing me up but i’m too scared to go to the doctor and do anything about it because i know just how expensive it is to get help and how long it takes to get help and i don’t know if i go see my gp if she just give me a prescription for antidepressants because i think i need them. the social anxiety is getting bad again too, and i think it might be merging into general anxiety which is super fun. i’m crying all the time now and i don’t like that it’s not fun and it makes me feel like shit and idk i just don’t feel like i have anyone to really talk to. i feel like no one wants to talk to me and i know i’m not the best person i try to be nice but i’m so fucking weird and awkward and i don’t know i’m not a good talker i don’t say the right thing i say dumb things all the time and idk maybe i can’t do this maybe i can’t do law school it’s so stressful and hard and i feel so dumb in class which is new i’ve always understood the things i’m learning before but now it’s like everyone around me is having no trouble but i’m struggling and i just i hate it i hate my self and how i am and i just want to sleep all the time and i do i go to school for like 10 hours and try and do some studying there and then i come home and i’m just so drained that i end up zoning out and not being able to do anything except watch netflix and sleep and it makes it really hard to keep up with courses and i’m really worried that i’m going to fail everything and that will ruin my life i will never be able to become a lawyer let alone a prosecutor and then what do i do with my life because i didn’t do honours psych because i was told i wasn’t good enough for the program so i woudl have to go back and do the 2 year add on just to be considered for the masters program and then i would have to go get a phd and i would still be in school when i’m 30 and i’m spiralling i’m spiralling hard and who knows if i would even be a good clinical psychologist i’m surely not good or smart enough to be a psychiatrist because med school would actually kill me but my peers are so smart like so smart they talk about their undergrad experiences and most of them never got anything less than an A or A+ whereas I got a mix of everything I’m talking like an even split between B+ A and A+ but i still got a bunch of B’s and one C+ and even on the midterms they’re all sad because they all got B’s and i’m sitting there like fuck really i would die for a B because I actually failed one of them, and got a C and a C+ on two others, and that means i’m very at risk of not doing well overall and holy fuck the finals are worth between 70 and 80% of my grade and that’s terrifying and i just know i’m going to fuck it up and i’m just so scared and worried and in addition to the crying you know when you can actually feel a strain in your heart like you heart is trying to leave your chest because you are just so sad and oh heart yeah still single still a 23 year old virgin who has been on 3 dates and is continually rejected on dating apps and i’ve never even been kissed and how pathetic is that i mean how do you get to be twenty fucking three without having any physical intimacy like i don’t even get hugs because i don’t see my friends because they don’t talk to me anymore and my immediate family are not huggers and i’m worried that i’ll never be able to find a partner because who wants someone so old who has no experience whatsoever and is emotionally and physically stunted in the romance department and oh yeah and questioning sexuality is fun too like that’s just one more thing to be worried about and i’ve been going between over eating and not eating and i’ve gained so much weight i’m so disgusting my body is repulsive to me so i can’t imagine ever showing it to another person and i really yeah i really wish i could just start over like die and start over or at least maybe go back to grade 4 and start over because that’s where it all started to go downhill my dad got laid off and then found a job in edmonton which is two provinces away and my mom was so stressed and i had to step up and help around the house and take out garbage and clean and do things to get the house ready for showings and i started to get acne and started to get self conscious and i’ve never really been the same little girl that i used to be and i just wish i had someone to talk to i really just wish i had some person to talk to me and want to talk to me and isn’t doing it out of some sort of obligation  just a person who genuinely wants to be my friend and do friend things i miss having someone to just be silly around i haven’t had that in like 15 years i just don’t like where i am right now in life as a person i just wish i had a different life 

anyway yeah i’m going to go sleep for probably 12 hours now thanks 

[lucywithlupus]

Top 4 Bad & Good Things about my Body/ Top 4 Cosas Malas & Buenas de mi Cuerpo

Let's get real: arthritis sucks. It sucks incredibly hard. It sucks so bad not even all of the straws in this planet (serious issue) could suck as terribly as receiving the sad news that you suffer from a rheumatic condition.     And because this condition is that terrible, it can lead your mind, heart, and soul to constantly attack your body with negative feelings, perceptions, and emotions. It is like your mind cannot stop concentrating about how not good your body is, how it fails to do the smallest things, or how it is not doing the things you ask it to do.    The Mental Health Surveys published in 2008 their results on mental disorders among persons with arthritis. With a sample of 10 641 adults (wow!), with 78% response rate in an audience with 23% reporting at least one medical disorder in the past 12 months, they clearly showed that these disorders and mental illnesses go hand in hand. About 35% of people with a mental health disorder did seek treatment, while more than half did not even consider the idea.    These were their conclusions:

"The high rate of not consulting among those with disability and comorbidity is an important public health problem. As Australia has a universal health insurance scheme, the barriers to effective care must be patient knowledge and physician competence."    Aka there is a LOT of work to do. A lot.        Another study by SAGE Journals said first what was said by The Mental Health Surveys in 2005, only focusing on rheumatoid arthritis (RA) About 150 participants, with varying duration of time since diagnosed, and the results were the following:         1. Perceiving illness as that something closest to you worsened depression and overall quality of life.     2. Remaining calm actually worked on those recently diagnosed:

"Optimism related to lower pain in early and intermediate RA. Social support related to lower fatigue in established RA. Indications for interventions targeted by disease duration are discussed."    Sometimes, when the years go by and your good ol' pal arthritis has been sitting in your couch for way too long, it can really get heavy on your shoulders. So much to do, so many things to see and experience, only to be dragged down by your frenemy right there *aggressively stares at chair*.    But it does not have to be this complicated. Your body and your mind are one and the same, they do not have to hate each other, or disconnect from one another in a way that actually will strip away all control from your hands. Your mind and body should not have fights every two seconds, they are both just trying their damn hardest to get by, and you know that. I know that. Your loved ones know that.    So let's do it for them, for you and me, but most importantly, you.    Without further ado, here we go! Top 4 Bad and Good Things about my Body with Arthritis.    

   Bad Thing 1: My body is weak

This used to be my mantra for six years of my life. I used to play this on repeat in my head like the hottest new summer mixtape. I already had enough with high school, trying to get unimaginable perfect grades and carrying the burden of being told every day that I was Einstein or something and I could achieve those grades if I wanted to.

The problem is that I wanted to, but know I know I never did. Does that make sense?

Let's be real. What kid likes to be sat down, all day, staring at colorful post its and trying to remember those English quotes for a massive surprise essay next week? No one! Not even me now, even though I am an adult. Kinda.

I just dreamed of getting to university, the days of the present shifting by while I had my eyes on the prize. At least I managed to get a spot on a university I love and enjoy with all my heart.

But even at arrival, I felt weak. Felt weak that I could not sit in my lecture hall comfortably for an hour. Felt weak because I had to take a nap in the afternoon after a three-hour lab. Felt weak because I could not finish that deadline because my knees hurt way too much to sit down and type away.

Feeling weak is normal, but we need to know that we cannot do everything. Nothing in life is free, but also it does not mean we do not take a break every now and then to make sure our body is taken care of. You cannot achieve what you want without rest. Your body will blow up! Poof!

Do not do that to yourself. Please.

Good Thing 1: My body is strong

Think of the strongest person you know. It's probably its Dwayne the Rock Johnson so let's stick with him.

Dwayne is a huge person. His arms are probably bigger than my ribcage, and his ribcage is probably bigger than my entire body. He trains a lot, eats more than that and is always ready to sing in the next Disney Movie, kick butt in the next action feature or yell in Moati dancing with a bunch of ten-year-old football players (pls do google this. It is hilarious.)

His life is pretty incredible, but that does not mean he did not have his up and downs. His childhood was pretty intense, as he was a major athlete and had to keep up with the legacy of wrestling legends established by his grandfather.

But this 101 on Dwayne's life isn't about him, it's about you! Look at you! You are the Rock too!

You managed to be told you have a condition that may probably never leave you and you successfully did not attempt to quit your life. You basically babysit your body all day, every day, trying to give it what it needs and avoid what it does not. You made and will make sacrifices to make sure you and those with you are ok, under any circumstance.

We get up every morning, in stinging pain, attempting to fling our bodies out of bed and waddle to the bathroom, take a shower, change clothes, brush our teeth, stuff our aching feet into some shoes and get out that door because we know we would go mad if we did not fight this every day. We know that if we did not go through that hassle every day and showed arthritis who's boss, our minds would collapse, we would lose the fight.

So keep fighting.

Bad Thing 2: My body is weird

Needless to say, a typical human body does not wreck itself everytime it goes up the stairs (remember kids: the first step is always the hardest). It is simply not the way it was designed to function, simple biology. Now, that does not mean your body is plain vanilla, but it also does not mean your body is an abomination like the ones in horror movies- or the ones who barely make it through horror movies.

My body is not weird. Period. I already spoke about how people are so legitimately shocked that I can properly function like the productive adult that I am, let alone those who just disapprove of me being me in public. Well, too bad Susan, I am here and so is my medical condition! I can't press the off button today thank you very much.

Your body can do so many amazing things. It can take care of itself and others. It can stump to the places you need to be in, or walk in good days, or run in the best days. It can do so many wonderful things, but you have to stop telling yourself that you are the odd one out. Anyone with a slight glimpse of intelligence will not care that you have to take your pills at this exact time, or that you have to sit down and rest for a while.

Keep those people close, but your enemies closer. No enemies, but confused strangers. Teach them about your condition, educate the public on what it is and how they can actually help us get by (aka this blog!).

Good Thing 2: My body is interesting

Maybe its because I am studying for a degree in science, but natural curiosity is never as bad as some people may think. Your body actually is fascinating to many doctors and field experts out there! The way it behaves and its mysterious ways are like an elegant puzzle, an enigma for them to observe and somehow complete.

Now, don't sell yourself to science, unless you really want to. Find money elsewhere.

I was always questioning why my body behaved this way until I realized the way I felt, when I felt it and how I felt it was pretty consistent, almost clock-like. The way our body operates is highly interesting, investigating on the subject won't blow your mind, but it may lead you to ask a question or two as to why your body is doing this to itself.

Maybe googling or reading a few articles some things will help you share your journey with others. Soon I will teach you the best ways to research for your own condition in a new post!

Just close your eyes for a moment, and focus on every single part of your body, one by one. Think about one good thing they did today: your feet took you to have breakfast, your hands held your favorite book, your eyes watched a beautiful movie today, your mouth helped you eat lunch, etc.

Any insignificant action that your body does is amazing and should be celebrated. Treat yourself for that!

Bad Thing 3: My body is ugly

Ugly duckling never felt so ugly. Now she did not only had to worry about her thick legs that could not fit inside those terribly small skinny jeans or that small bump in her stomach where, surprise surprise, but organs are also supposed to be in. Suddenly, what little body confidence she had taken a whole new spin: her body was now also not cute in other ways. Like abnormally inflated joints, finger stuck in a claw-like fashion, or the constant weight gain and loss I had during my experience with arthritis due to the lack of exercise.

Arthritis and other rheumatic conditions make yourself feel terrible about your appearance. Taking care of your looks sometimes is not a priority anymore. It can even be a challenge: you have to pick outfits, wear uncomfortable shoes, not have enough space in your purse or pockets (women pockets are the worst!period!) to carry your medicine around. Makeup can sometimes even be harsh on your skin when you get redness, or your hair may fall out because of the medication.

Let's not talk about shaving. Avoid for our own good.  

But everyone deserves to feel cute, at least once in a while. Now I really don't care what they tell me: I can look a mess but feel beautiful, every single day. Because my body is my home, it takes care of me, and I take care of it. It deserves pampering and I will provide it every now and then.

Good Thing 3: My body is beautiful

Now, let's repeat the exercise we just did, now open your eyes. Look at yourself in the mirror, take in all that you are, every curve, every little detail, and imperfection. Say one nice thing about it all. Look at those eyes! Look at that hair! So stylish! Look at those shoulders! So strong! And so on.

No one's body is perfect, and trying it to make it magazine ready all day is not worth it. But please have the chance to try new things, look for new clothes (or used ones) that make you feel good, beautiful and confident all day!

So if you see a cute dress that you like and you can afford it, go for it! You will slay whatever place you will wear it to. Did you saw a nice shirt on sale? Buy it! You will look so cool, so fly.

Hint: there will also be a new post coming about tips and tricks on how to buy and wear clothes when you have arthritis. Struggling with that zipper every morning is a major problem! Stop!

Bad Thing 4: My body will never heal

   As already discussed, no one really knows why arthritis is a thing, and thus, no one knows how it leaves and why. Maybe it has to do with stress. Perhaps it has something to do with environmental conditions or lifestyle. Who knows.

But that does not mean you lose hope that easily. Sure, some of us have had our condition for five, ten, even thirty years, and it still there. But arthritis' place in our bodies is not permanent, I swear on Yuval Harari (aka one of my favorite authors of all time).

You can bet all you want that when you least expect it, this uninvited acquaintance will be poofed off, and free you shall be at last. Just make sure you are working for it: be kind to yourself, take your meds, eat healthy (at least try), do some exercise, educate yourself and others, help out those in need, etc.

Good Thing 4: My body will get better

It will, and it is. Yas.

I sometimes I feel challenged to balance my priorities and make sure I am not overworking myself when trying to get better. The irony of it all: we sometimes work too hard in trying to get better sometimes. We read a lot, research to no end. We try so many different diets, hoping one will be the one to cure us at last, we go to so many different treatments, yoga sessions, detox classes, and God knows what more.

Being excited about staying healthy is important, a good solid start. But do not go crazy trying to find a cure that may not even be accessible to you at stores or detox juices. Instead, trust your body. It knows what it's doing, most of the time. It will heal itself in the only way it knows how to: eating, sleeping, resting, drinking water,  and asking for stuff. Lots of stuff. Another hint: new post on how to make a survival kit soon!

Getting better can sometimes feel like a rollercoaster: sometimes we are up, sometimes we fall head first 20 feet up in the air towards the solid ground. Gravity is harsh, man.

But you know what I a trying to say. Things will not always be easy, and sometimes you will not be able to control everything or know what to do. That's why you have to ask for help. From your parents, your caretakes, your doctors and your friends. Build a support circle around you so you always know someone always has your back, sometimes literally.

Arthritis is no piece of cake, and other rheumatic disorders are not either. They are tasks for us to fulfill, but we are not bad. We are not sick. We are not ugly. And we definitely are not going to sit here and take it. Because we have enough things to worry about, and we could not care less about what you or others have to say about our progress. We know our worth, we appreciate ourselves and celebrate our bodies in the best way we can: by treating it right, with respect, dignity, love, and courage.

Love you so you can love. See you around!

Also, I would love to share with your guys this lovely group of families in Kampala with children with disabilities at Ndagire Ritah @ritandagire76 on Instagram. Please copy and paste their username and say hi! Drop a donation if you can! It's for a great cause!

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Seamos sinceros: la artritis apesta. Increíblemente. Es tan mala que ni siquiera todas las cañitas del mundo (problema bastante serio) no podrían igualarse a recibir la triste noticia de que tu sufres de artritis reumatoide.

Y por que esta condición es tan horrible, puede convencer a tu mente, corazón y espíritu de atacar a tu cuerpo con pensamientos negativos, percepciones falsas y emociones dañinas. Es como si tu mente no puede dejar de concentrarse en todo lo malo que tu cuerpo es, todas las fallas que comete, incluso en las quehaceres más pequeños, o cómo no está logrando las cosas que tu le pides que haga.The Mental Health Surveys publicó en el 2008 sus resultados en la relación que existe entre las enfermedades mentales y la artritis. Con 10 641 sujetos adultos puestos a prueba (wow!) y una tasa de respuesta del 78%, el estudio involucró casi 2,500 personas discapacitadas. Los resultados demostraron que los desórdenes reumatológicos y las enfermedades mentales van de mano en mano. Casi 35% de las personas que padecían de una enfermedad mental buscaron tratamientos, mientras que más de la mitas ni siquiera consideró la idea de hacerlo.

Y estas fueron sus conclusiones:  

" El alto índice de falta de tratamiento mental en aquellos que sufren de discapacidad y comorbilidad es un problema de salud pública. Ya que Australia tiene un esquema universal de seguros médicos, las barreras que previenen cuidado efectivo deben ser el conocimiento del paciente acerca de posibles tratamientos y la competencia del médico tratante."

En otras palabras, hay mucho que hacer. MUCHO. Demasiado.

Otro estudio por SAGE journals anticipó en 2005 lo dicho por The Mental Health Surveys, solo enfocándose en la artritis reumatoide (RA). Casi 150 participantes, quienes padecían de artritis por variadas duraciones de tiempo. Los resultados fueron los siguientes.

Percibir la enfermedad como lo más cercano a tu ser puede empeorar la depresión y calidad de vida.

Conservar la calma tuvo, en efecto, un resultado positivo en aquellos que acababan de ser diagnosticados.

"El optimismo mejoró el dolor secundario  en artritis reumatoide de duración temprana y intermedia. Indicaciones de intervenciones dirigidas a la duración de la enfermedad fueron discutidas."

A veces, cuando los años pasan y tu vieja amiga artritis estuvo sentada en tu sillón por mucho tiempo, en serio puede convertirse en una carga pesada. Tanto que hacer, tantas cosas que ver y experimentar, solo para ser empujada por tu amiga-enemiga, que siempre está justo ahí *miro mi silla*

Pero no tiene que ser tan complicado. Tu cuerpo y tu mente son tal para cual, fulano y mengano no tienen que odiarse, o desconectarse de una manera que quitaría todo el control de tus manos. Tu mente y cuerpo no deberían pelear cada dos segundos, solo están tratando de conseguir el mismo objetivo: trabajar super duro para sobrevivir, y eso ya lo sabías. Yo lo sabía. Tus seres queridos también lo sabían.Así que hagámoslo por ellos, por tu y yo. Pero sobre todo, hazlo por ti.Ahora sin más preámbulos, aquí vamos! Top 4 Cosas Malas y Buenas de Mi Cuerpo.   Cosa Mala 1: Mi cuerpo es débil

Este solía ser mi mantra por seis años de mi vida. Solía repetir esto en mi cabeza como esas canciones pop que salen en verano. Ya tenía suficientes líos con la secundaria, tratando de sacar notas inimaginables y perfectas y cargar la responsabilidad de ser vista como Einstein o algo por el estilo. Todo el mundo me decía que yo podía sacar la nota que quisiera sin esfuerzo alguno.

El problema es que yo sí mi esforzaba, pero nunca quise hacerlo. Se entiende?

Seamos honestos con nosotros mismos. A qué niño le gusta estar sentado todo el dia, mirando post its de colores con datos para el siguiente ensayo sorpresa de Inglés la próxima semana? Ninguno! Ni siquiera yo ahora quiero hacer eso, incluso si soy una adulta. Casi.

Yo solo soñaba con entrar a la universidad, los días del presente un abrir y cerrar de ojos mientras yo tenía la mirada fija en la línea de llegada. Al menos logre un lugar en una universidad que yo a mi y disfruto con todo mi corazón.

Pero incluso al llegar, me sentía débil. Débil porque no podía sentarme en mi salón de audiencias cómodamente por más de una hora. Débil porque debía tomar una siesta en la tarde después de un laboratorio de tres horas. Débil porque no podía entregar el trabajo por que mis rodillas me dolían demasiado para sentarme en mi escritorio y prender mi computadora.   No te hagas eso a ti mismo. Por favor.

Cosa Buena 1: Mi cuerpo es fuerte

Piensa en la persona más fuerte que conoces. Probablemente es Dwayne the Rock Johnson así que utilicemoslo de ejemplo.

Dwayne es una persona enorme. Sus brazos son probablemente más grandes que mi pecho, y su pecho es probablemente más grande que mi cuerpo. El entrena un montón, come más que eso y siempre está listo para cantar en la siguiente película de Disney, pegarle a alguien en el siguiente blockbuster de acción o gritar en un baile Haka junto a grupo de niñas de diez años en un partido de football (por favor busquen eso. Es divertidisimo.)

Su vida es muy increíble, pero eso no significa que no tenga sus altibajos. Su infancia fue bastante intensa, pues esa un atleta profesional desde muy chico y siempre trató de mantener el legado de leyendas boxeadoras establecido por su abuelo.

Pero este 101 en la vida de Dwayne no se trata de él. Se trata de ti! Mírate! Tú también eres como La Roca!Tu lograste soportar que te dijeran que tienes una condición que quizá nunca te abandone y victoriosamente no tratarse de terminar tu vida. Tu básicamente de cuidas cual bebé todo el dia, todos los días, esforzándote para darle a tu cuerpo lo que necesita y evitar lo que no necesita. Tu haces y harás los sacrificios necesarios para asegurarte que tu y los que amas están seguros, bajo cualquier circunstancia.

Nos levantamos cada mañana, en dolor agudo, tratando de aventar nuestros cuerpos fuera de la cama y cojear hasta el baño, ducharse, cambiarse de ropa, lavarse los dientes, encajar nuestros pies dolidos en un par de zapatillas y salir por esa puerta por que sabemos que perderíamos la cabeza si no luchamos esta condición todos los días. Sabemos claramente que si no nos tomáramos la molestia de hacer todo eso en la mañana y no le mostráramos a la artritis quien manda, nuestras mentes colapsaría y perderíamos la batalla.Así que sigue luchando.

Cosa Mala 2: Mi cuerpo es raro

No hace falta decir que el típico cuerpo humano usualmente no se destruye a sí mismo cada vez que tratas de subir las escaleras (recuerden amigos: el primer paso siempre es el más difícil). Tu cuerpo simplemente no está diseñado para funcionar de esa manera, biología básica. Ahora, eso no significa que tu cuerpo sea tan básico como el pan blanco, pero tampoco significa que tu cuerpo es una abominación como las que salen en las películas de horror- o los que a las re justas sobreviven la película.

Mi cuerpo no es raro. Punto. Ya hablé de las personas que siempre se encuentran tan sorprendidas que yo puedo funcionar como la mujer productiva que soy, y también de aquellos que me miran con desaprobación en público. Bueno, que pena Susan, estoy aquí y también lo está mi condición médica! No pude apretar el botón de apagado hoy, muchas gracias.

Tu cuerpo puede hacer tantas cosas maravillosas. Puede cuidarse y a otros. Puede lentamente dirigirse a los lugares en los que tu debes estar, o caminar hacia ellos en los días buenos, o correr incluso en los días súper buenos. Puede hacer tantas cosas maravillosas, pero tienes que dejar de nombrarte a ti mismo la oveja negra. Cualquiera con poco de inteligencia no le importará que tienes que tomar tus pastillas a esta hora exacta, o que tienes que sentarse un rato de descansar.

Ten a tus amigos cerca, pero a tu enemigos más cerca. No enemigos, pero extraños confundidos. Enséñales a cerca de tu condición, educa al público de qué es la artritis y cómo nos pueden ayudar en el dia a dia (o sea, este blog!).

Cosa Buena 2: Mi cuerpo es interesante

Quizá es porque estoy estudiando para un bachiller de ciencia, pero la curiosidad nunca es tan mala como algunos creen. Tu cuerpo es en realidad fascinante para varios doctores y expertos de la medicina! La manera en que se comporta y sus muchos misterios son como un elegante rompecabezas, un enigma para que ellos observen y resuelvan.

Ahora, no te vendas a la ciencia, a menos que en serio lo desees. Encuentra dinero en otro sitio.Siempre me cuestionaba por que mi cuerpo se comportaba de este modo hasta que me di cuenta que lo que sentía, cómo lo sentía y cuando tenía constancia, casi de reloj. La manera en que tu cuerpo se opera a sí mismo es altamente interesante, investigar en el asunto no reventara su cerebro, pero te puede llevar a preguntarte algo o más acerca de tu cuerpo y de porqué hace lo que hace.

Quizá googlear o leer unos cuantos artículos de esto te ayudará en tu viaje con los demás. Pronto les enseñaré las mejores técnicas para investigar tu condición en un nuevo post!

Solo cierra tus ojos por un momentos y enfócate en cada parte de tu cuerpo, una por una. Piensa en algo bueno que todos ellos hicieron hoy: tus pies de llevaron a tomar desayuno en la mañana, tu manos sostuvieron tu libro favorito, tus ojos miraron una buena película, tu boca te ayudo a comer tu almuerzo, etc.Cada acción que parezca insignificante es increíble y debería celebrarse. Quiérete por eso!

Cosa Mala 3: Mi cuerpo es feo

El patito feo nunca se sintió tan feo. Ahora no solo tenía que lidiar con sus piernas gruesas que no entraban en esos horribles pantalones entallados, o el pequeño bulto que sobresale de su estómago donde, sorpresa, hay órganos importantes ahí! De repente, su baja confianza en sí misma también tomó un giro de 360 grados, pues regreso al mismo lugar, solo que en una perspectiva distinta. Su cuerpo ahora tenía otras razones por las cuales no era lindo, como las articulaciones anormalmente inflamadas, los dedos atorados como garras, o la constante sube y baja de peso que pasó por la falta de ejercicio.

La artritis y otras condiciones reumáticas a veces te hacen sentir terrible a cerca de tu apariencia. Cuidarla a veces ya no es una prioridad, o incluso puede ser desafiante. Tienes que elegir atuendos, usar zapatos incómodos, o no tener suficiente espacio en tu bolso o bolsillos (lo dire: los bolsillos de mujer son horribles!) para cargar tu medicina alrededor. El maquillaje también puede ser dañino para tu piel enrojecida por la inflamación, o tu cabello se podría caer por la medicina que tomes.

Y no hablemos de la rasuradora. Evitemoslo por nuestro propio bien.

Pero todos merecemos sentirnos lindos, al menos de vez en cuando. Ahora no me importa que me digan: puedo parecer un desastre pero de todas maneras me sentiré hermosa, todos los días. Porque mi cuerpo es mi casa, me cuida y yo lo cuido. Merece consentimientos y los proveeré de vez en cuando.

Cosa Buena 3: Mi cuerpo es hermoso

Ahora repitamos el ejercicio que acabamos de hacer, ahora abre tus ojos. Mirate al espejo, observa todo lo que eres, cada curva y cada detalle y imperfección. Di una cosa buena acerca de cada cosa. Mira esos ojos! Mira este peinado! Qué estilo! Mira esos hombros! Que fuerte! Y sigue asi.

El cuerpo de nadie es perfecto, y tratar de lucir listo para la portada de una revista todos los días no vale la pena. Pero por favor ten la oportunidad de probar cosas nuevas (o usadas) que te hagan sentir bien, lindo y con confianza todo el dia!

Así que si ves un vestido lindo que te gusta y lo puedes pagar, hazlo! Serás despampanante a donde vayas. Viste una camisa que te gusta y está a la venta? Consíguela! Te verás genial, tan cool.Pista: habrá un nuevo post acerca de tips de cómo encontrar y usar ropa adecuada para personas con artritis. Luchando con ese cierre cada mañana es un problema mayor! Detente!

Cosa Mala 4: Mi cuerpo no se va a curar

Como ya lo discute, nadie sabe por qué la artritis existe, y debido a eso, nadie sabe cómo se va y porqué. Quizá tenga que ver con el estrés. Quizá tenga algo que ver con las condiciones medioambientales o el estilo de vida. Quien sabe.

Pero eso no significa que debes perder la esperanza tan fácilmente. Si, algunos de nosotros han tenido esta condición por cinco, diez, quizá hasta treinta años, y sigue ahí. Pero el lugar de la artritis en nuestros cuerpos no es permanente, lo juro por Yuval Harari (uno de mis autores favoritos de todos los tiempos).

Puedes apostar todo lo que quieras que cuando menos te des cuenta, esta conocida sin invitación se desvanecerá, y tu serás libre al fin. Solo asegúrate de hacer tu trabajo y ser amable contigo mismo, tomar tus medicinas, comer saludablemente (al menos trata), haz algo de ejercicio, educate y a otros, ayuda a los que lo necesitan, etc.

Cosa Buena 4: Mi cuerpo se va a mejorar

Lo hará y lo está haciendo. Yas.

Yo a veces me siento abrumada por el balance que debo poner en mis prioridades y asegurarse de no sobre trabajar cuando me estoy mejorando de una crisis. La ironía: a veces trabajamos demasiado en mejorarnos. Leemos demasiado, investigando sin fin. Tratamos tantas dietas diferentes y jugos detox, esperando que uno sea la llave maestra de la artritis. Vamos a tantas cursos de yoga, tratamientos naturistas y muchas otras cosas más.

Estar emocionado de estar saludable es importante, es un buen comienzo. Pero no te aloques tratando de encontrar una cura que quizá ni siquiera puedas comprar o poner en un jugo detox. En vez de eso, confía en tu cuerpo. Sabe lo que hace, la mayoría del tiempo. Se sanará a sí mismo de la única manera que sabe cómo: comiendo, durmiendo, tomando agua, descansando y pidiendo cosas. Muchas cosas. Ya viene el siguiente post de cómo alistar un kit anti-artritis.

Mejorarse a veces parece una montaña rusa: a veces subimos, a veces caemos en picada de 20 metros en el cielo hacia el duro suelo. La gravedad es dura.Pero sabes lo que trato de decir. Las cosas a veces no son fáciles, y a veces no podemos controlar todo o saber qué hacer en ciertas situaciones. Por eso debes pedir ayudar. De tus padres o cuidadores, de tu doctor y de tus amigos. Construye un círculo protector alrededor tuyo para que siempre tengas a alguien sosteniendo tu espalda- a veces literalmente.

La artritis no es una caminata en el parque, pero otras condiciones reumáticas tampoco lo son. Son trabajos de tiempo completo que debemos realizar, pero no somos malos. No estamos enfermos. No somos débiles, feos, raros. Y definitivamente no vamos a sentarnos y escucharte decirnos eso. Porque tenemos cosas más importantes que hacer, y no nos podría importar menos lo que otros tengan que decir al respecto, o que digan de nuestro progreso. Sabemos lo que valemos y celebramos nuestros cuerpos en la mejor manera posible: tratándolo bien, con respeto, dignidad, amor y coraje.

Ama para que puedas amar. Nos vemos!

También me encantaría compartir con ustedes este grupo de familias en Kampala con niños con discapacidades en Ndagire Ritah @ritandagire76 en Instagram. Por favor copien y peguen su username y digan hola! Donen si pueden! Es por una buena causa!

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One Pt.2

Group: EXO Member: Sehun x OC Genre: Fluff, Semi-smut Word count:  7421 A/N: The second to last part. This is super long because its wrapping up this mini series. It has a few time skips so again if you don’t like that I’m sorry but that’s how I am fitting everything in. I changed Y/B/N to Mina so if you’re like who the heck is Mina that’s why. It starts out being 2016 then to 2017. Y/F/N means your full name. 

One Night Stand | One Night | One Pt. 1 | One Pt. 2

It’s been three weeks since the boys left. I started growing a small baby bump, not too noticeable. My brother texted me a few days ago saying he wants to come visit me. Which is the perfect time to tell him the news. He is coming tomorrow so I’ve spent the entire day cleaning up the house. Sehun and I text when he can which isn’t a lot but he’s still in the same country at the moment, so that helps a little.

-

Today I am waiting at the airport for B/N. He texted me before he took off that he would be here in an hour or so. I fidget with my phone while I wait, then my phone starts vibrating in my hand. “Hello?” I answer. “Hi beautiful” Sehun’s voice comes through the phone. “Hi” I melt inside, because yes he still has that effect on me. “How are you and my little peach” I can hear his smile through the phone. “Good, the peach and I are waiting for my brother, B/N, at the airport” I look around me. The thing about having a public relationship with Sehun is that everyone knows me, luckily I haven’t been spotted yet. “Ah, he’s coming out to visit you?” Sehun says into the phone. “Yeah, he said and I quote ‘I haven’t seen my baby sister in so long but then she just pops up in a magazine and I just knew I had to come visit her’ so yeah now I get to see him” I explain.

“Well, then it looks like I’ll finally get to meet him” Sehun says quickly then coughs. “Wait, what?” I exclaim. “I get a week break before going to Japan so I’ll be coming home” Sehun says excitedly. “And you know what that means” I say waiting for him to finish the sentence. “I’ll be there to find out the gender of my baby” He finishes. “Wow, that makes me feel a lot better” I sigh. My brother comes into view when I look up from the floor. “Sehun, B/N is here so text me what day you’re coming back, I’ll talk to you later I love you” I say as I stand up and try to get B/N’s attention. “I will, beautiful, I love you too bye” Sehun hangs up and I put my phone in my back pocket.

“Hey! Big brother!” I smile ear to ear as B/N hugs me. “How have you been, how’s the wife?” I ask him. “Oh my gosh married life is great, we have had our downs here and there, but overall I love it and I love her” He radiates happiness. “Good, I’m so glad you’ve found your happiness” I say as we walk out to the airport parking lot. “Anyway, enough about me, how are you?” He asks as he puts his bag in the back seat. “Well, I’m sure you saw I’m dating Sehun, from Exo, and he’s great he makes me happy” I smile as I start the car and pull out of the parking lot. “Are you hungry?” I ask. B/N shakes his head, “Tell me more about him like how you two met?”

I laugh, “Well funny story actually, we met at a club and we had sex then we realized we really liked each other” We stop at a red light and I lean my head against the window. “I met the rest of the boys, exposed our relationship and then found out there will be a little us and now he’s on tour” I try to put the pregnancy announcement in the middle of the story so he hears it but doesn’t freak out. “Wait, what was that?” He asks. I chuckle awkwardly, “He’s on tour?” He shakes his head, “You’re pregnant?” He asks. I nod my head and put the car in park as we sit in my car outside of my house. “Wow, that’s great, Y/N” He smiles at me. “You’re not mad?” I ask. He chuckles, “Y/N, you’re 22 years old it’s time to make your life what you want it and if this is what you want then I’m happy for you” B/N gets out of the car and grabs his bag.

We walk into the house and I throw my keys on the side table. I show B/N to the spare bedroom, “You can meet him soon, he has a week break between tour dates and we have an appointment Friday to see what the gender is” I sit on the bed and B/N sits next to me. “I would love to meet the guy that makes my baby sister so happy,” He puts an arm around me, “Because god knows we didn’t have much happiness in our life before this.” I sigh and nod in agreement. My phone vibrates in my back pocket signalling Sehun texted me.

From: Sehun 12:47pm I come back tomorrow around 5:30pm

To: Sehun 12:47pm We’ll be there to pick you up :)

From: Sehun 12:48pm Can’t wait <3

“Well he comes back tomorrow so you’ll meet him very soon” I chuckle as I set my phone in my lap. “Okay, well what do you wanna do?” I ask. “Still have the Xbox?” B/N asks with playful smirk. “Hell yeah I do” I laugh and run to my living room. “GTA races or Minecraft” I ask as I throw him my second controller. “GTA so I can kick your ass like always” B/N elbows me playfully. “I doubt it, Sehun and I sometimes do nothing but race and I have won 17 times and only lost 4 times” I say as a matter of factly. We play GTA until our stomachs are growling louder than our frustrated screams. “Maybe we should get food” B/N suggests as he loses for the 15th time tonight. “It's 4:29 so yeah we might wanna get food” I chuckle.

B/N and I order pizza delivery and stay in and catch up on things in our life. “So what do you want the kid to be?” B/N asks as he eats the last bit of his pizza. “I feel like it will be a boy but I could be wrong” I shrug. “Do you see you and your wife having kids anytime soon?” I ask as I grab one more slice of pizza. “Right now, no but eventually yes” He nods. “Do you see yourself getting married to Sehun?” It's clear he scans my face for any negative reaction. “I do, to be honest, I especially see us together for a long while with our kid” I admit. “And yeah, it will be hard with Sehun being famous but we make it work now so I'm sure we will still be making it work later” I take a bite of pizza. “Well that's good” He pats my shoulder.

B/N’s phone starts ringing, “Hey it's the wife you wanna facetime her?” I grab his phone out of his hand, “Hey W/N!” She giggles, “Y/N!” We facetime W/N for an hour. We laugh, she tells how work is, and how her mother is coming to visit soon and stuff. “Oh W/N, Y/N has something to tell you” He says. “Tell me tell me!” She gets excited like a thirteen year old girl. “I am dating someone” I start. “Yeah, you were trending” She deadpans. “Well, you’re going to be an aunt” I smile. W/N squeals, “I’m so happy for you girl.” B/N and I say our goodbyes and then he ends the call and we say goodnight and head to bed.

-

I wake up to the smell of pancakes. I follow the smell all the way to the kitchen where B/N is making pancakes and eggs. “Wow, who are you and what have you done with my brother” I laugh as I lean against the counter. “No, but you’re pregnant so you have to eat good and healthy” He chuckles as he makes my plate. “So pour yourself some orange juice or water” He adds. “Yes, mom” I giggle as I grab a cup from the cupboard. “What time is Sehun getting here?” B/N asks as he sets my plate down at the table and makes another plate for himself. “I’m going to get him  around 5:30 tonight” I stuff eggs into my mouth. “I’ll stay and hang out here while you go get him, and I’ll intimidate him when he’s in my territory” B/N smiles as he eats. “Your territory huh?” I raise an eyebrow at him. “Technically, yes” He laughs. I shake my head as I continue to eat.

After our morning routine we get into my car and drive to the mall for some shopping. B/N buys souvenirs for his wife and some hats. I buy Sehun and I matching beanies, a few t-shirts and a pair of jeans. “So do you have anyone to be with you while you're pregnant and Sehun is on tour?” He asks as we sit in the food court. “Not really, Mina is back to school so she wouldn't be able to check on me very much, you live in Busan, mom and dad don't talk to me, and S/N is too successful in life to acknowledge me,” I shrug, “I can do it by myself and it will only be four months, not like he's left me for good.” A few feet away there is some squeals. Then two girls come up to us and ask for a picture with me, and I say yes. “Thank you so much, take care of you and Sehun oppa” One girl says. The other looks like she's about to pass out, “You're so pretty.” They wave goodbye to us and leave us in peace.

“Is that normal now?” He asks with a laugh. “Yeah a little bit” We pick up our stuff and head home. The ride home is filled with loud singing, though I wouldn't call it singing it was more like screaming, to the radio. “Y/N, I have a question for you and I don't want you to get mad when I ask this” B/N says calmly. “Okay, ask away” I nod. “Have you thought about telling mom and dad that you're pregnant?” He questions. “I mean though we weren't on good terms I told them I was getting married and they even came to congratulate us” He adds as he looks at me with concerned eyes. “Honestly I probably should, I just don't think I want to right now, I'd like do tell them when I'm ready” I nod in content. “Just tell them soon okay?” He gives me a sad smile.

“Okay what should we do until 5:30” I sign as I plop down on the couch. “Racing?” B/N grabs his controller. “What, do you think you can beat me?” I challenge. “Hell yeah” He smirks at me competitively. We end up playing video games for hours. I have won 10 times and lost 9 times. “One more and then I gotta go to the airport” I say glancing at the clock. “Good, maybe I can tie us up” He clicks the start button. By the end of the race I lose and B/N does a victory dance around the living room. “Okay, you goon I'm going to go get Sehun, would you start dinner?” I pick up my keys and phone. “Yeah, good luck finding Mr. Idol” He disappears into the kitchen. I head out to the car and drive to the airport.

To: Sehun 5:23pm I'm here by Starbucks

From: Sehun 5:23pm I'll meet you there then

To: Sehun 5:24pm Can't wait Sehunnie ;)

I lock my phone, slip it into my back pocket and follow the signs to Starbucks. Sehun sticks out like a sore thumb because he's standing while everyone else is sitting. “Boo” I jab the sides of his stomach. “Jesus, Y/N” He jumps. “What I don't get a ‘hi Y/N, my almighty queen, I've missed you and our beautiful fetus these last three weeks’ or something like that” He chuckles and grabs my hand. “Hi, Y/N, amazingly beautiful girlfriend how have you and my beautiful baby boy or girl been?” He walks slowly to me then he strokes my cheek. “Three weeks was too long” I sigh looking from his eyes to his lips. He leans down to meet me in a kiss that was long overdue. “Let’s go home” I say as his lips lightly linger on mine.

“So where are the rest of the boys?” I ask as unlock the car. “They all went home to their families for the week” He throws his bag in the back seat. “That's great” I smile at him. “Yixing finally gets to go back to China to see his family and the boys are scattered around South Korea visiting their family” He buckles up and we drive away from the airport. “Where is B/N?” He asks. “He's at the house” I reply. “He's going to try to be intimidating, though he's really just a teddy bear” I laugh. “I'll pretend to be scared then” Sehun smirks. “B/N we're home!” I shout over the loud music. The music gets turned down and B/N pops his head out of the kitchen. “So you're the infamous Oh Sehun that is dating my baby sister” Sehun nods and holds his hand out for him to shake. B/N sternly shakes Sehun’s hand not breaking eye contact. “What do you think you were doing when you got my sister pregnant?” B/N crosses his arms. “Well, I clearly wasn't thinking because I was under the influence” Sehun and I both crack up which makes B/N cock his head at us. “Oh brother, you're not even a little bit scary” I pat his shoulder. “Come on Sehun let's get you unpacked before dinner” I walk towards my room. “Don't get too comfortable” B/N calls to us. “Oh we will” Sehun yells back.

“I think he likes me” He smiles. “I think he does too” I lay back on my bed. Sehun slides in next to me, “I missed you,” he whispers. “I missed you too” I wrap my arms around him. We doze off before we know it, but it's not too long till B/N is calling us for dinner. “So how's the tour?” I shove a spoonful of mac and cheese into my mouth. “It's okay, the boys and I get to see new places and talk to the fans and I love talking to the fans” Sehun takes a bite of Mac and cheese. “How's life at Y/N’s humble abode?” He asks. “Good, so far we are tied in wins on GTA races and we have gone shopping” B/N smiles at me. I return the smile, “We are 10 to 10 right now and the next to lose has to buy ice cream” I smile proudly knowing I won't be losing. “Have you shown him the last race?” Sehun raises an eyebrow. “What race?” B/N says curiously with his eyebrows furrowed. “Nope, that's my winning map” I smirk at B/N. “Well you sure beat me on that one” Sehun snorts. “What are we talking about” B/N looks between me and Sehun. For the first time in the last five minutes we both look at him. “I have a race that I know I can't lose at” I inform him. “Great, so I better get my wallet ready then right?” B/N chuckles. Sehun and I both nod furiously.

“We won't race tonight though,” B/N frowns at me, “Sehun is probably jet lagged so we'll be going to bed early tonight.” Sehun nods while B/N rolls his eyes. “Yeah because you two in one room with one bed means sleep, I totally believe that” He picks up his plate and walks into the kitchen. Sehun and I glance at each other and start laughing. We eventually clean up dinner and head to our rooms for the night. “Hey Baekhyun’s calling” Sehun plops down on the bed and I crawl over to see his phone screen. “Y/N buddy ol pal I miss you like crazy” Baekhyun yells. “Hey buddy” I scoot closer to Sehun so he can see me. “How's my niece or nephew?” He asks. “Good, growing and somewhat annoying” I say with a laugh. “You love it” Baekhyun chuckles. “How's Baekbeom?” Sehun asks. “Good, he and his wife are visiting my parents as am I” Baekhyun smiles. “Enough about me though, how's it feel being in the same house, no scratch that, same bed together again” Baekhyun teases. “It feels good” Sehun looks at me with a sparkle in his eyes. “I miss you, though” I say breaking my gaze with Sehun. “I miss you too Y/N, as do the rest of the boys” Baekhyun has a sad smile on his face. “Oh I'm telling my family I'm going to be an uncle later” He adds. “How it's like 8pm?” Sehun’s eyebrows are knitted together. “We are going to get ice cream in like 15 minutes” Baekhyun says.

Just then someone walks into Baekhyun’s room, “Hey Baek, we are leaving soon.” Baekhyun nods, “Oh! Baekbeom come back” He says quickly. “You remember Sehun right?” Baekbeom mumbles a yes. “He finally got a girlfriend” He tells him excitedly. “Is she cute? Does she know he-” Baekbeom says. “Hyung he's on Skype with her right now” Baekhyun interrupts. “Oh, hi Sehun, hi Sehun's girlfriend” Baekbeom says before leaving. Sehun looks terrified making me and Baekhyun burst into laughter. “That was close” Sehun manages to say. “Okay well I think we will leave this here, bye guys it was nice seeing you Y/N” Baekhyun waves crazily. “Bye Baekhyun” I smile and Sehun hangs up.

Sehun sighs plugging in his phone to the charger. I get up and change into one of Sehun's shirt and shorts. “How long have you had that?” Sehun laughs as I get into bed. “For awhile I guess” I look down at the shirt. “Well it looks better on you anyway” Sehun crawls towards me on the bed. “So I shouldn't take it off?” I suggest as I bite my lip. “Mm no you should because as good as it looks on you, it definitely looks better on your floor” He says in a low voice. “Then take it off” I say with a sultry look on my face. He does just that and more.

_

Friday

Not sure if it was because I was sleeping next Sehun or the fact that he tired me out again last night but I slept very good. I turn towards Sehun not opening my eyes yet. “Oh you’re awake” He whispers. I put a finger on his mouth. “Come on let’s get out of bed” He tries to get out of bed but I pull him back and cuddle closer. “Five more minutes” I say sweetly. “Y/N you’ve had me all week and yet you continue to cuddle me like I’m about to leave” He chuckles as he stops resisting. “Shh you love it” I say quickly. Sehun gives in and we both fall back asleep. We wake up for real an hour later and make breakfast for the three of us.

“Oh is this all for me” B/N says sarcastically. “No it’s for my growing child” I reply back. “Well damn” B/N puts his hand on his heart in a dramatic way. “We have the appointment today and she’s nervous” Sehun pats B/N’s back as to nonverbally apologize for my attitude. “Oh yeah you find out the gender today” B/N remembers. I sit down and eat while the two boys converse over video games and their stats. “I’m going to shower” I kiss Sehun’s cheek, put my empty plate in the sink and head for the bathroom. One of the reasons I’m nervous is what if our baby isn’t healthy, it’s a thought that goes through every pregnant woman's mind. It’s nerve wracking, but the shower helps me calm down. Everything is going to be okay I repeat in my head.

The drive to the clinic seems long and quiet, “What’s going through your head?” Sehun asks as he puts the car in park. I open my mouth but all that comes out is a weak whine. “I’m scared” I manage to say. “Why, baby” Sehun caresses my cheek. “What if the baby isn’t healthy y’know, like it’s a valid fear” I make eye contact with Sehun and he’s smiling big and toothy. “Yes, it is but how could something be wrong with our baby when you don’t drink, smoke or do drugs, you take you take your vitamins everyday, and you eat healthier” Sehun chuckles. “Let’s go find out what our baby is because I’m ready to know” Sehun says excitedly. “Wait Sehun what if we do a gender reveal, like we don’t find out today?” I grab his arm keeping him from getting out of the car. “Okay who would we give the envelope to?” He inquires. “Joonmyun, he’s been with us since the beginning” I suggest. “I like that I will text him after the appointment” Sehun and I exit the car.

The visit is almost exactly the same as last time the gel is cold, find the heartbeat, locate every body part possible, and of course despite my fear she tells me that my baby is healthy. “So are do we want to know the gender?” Doctor Jung asks. “Can we have you put it in an envelope? We wanna do a gender reveal party” Sehun speaks up. “Yes, I can do that” She smiles and wipes off the gel. She brings the envelope to us on our way out.

“Sehun, what should we do for a gender reveal?” I rub my tummy. This is real, this isn’t a dream, I am pregnant with Oh Sehun’s child. “Let’s see” He thinks. “You get back when?” I ask subconsciously rubbing my stomach. “December 22nd” He answers, “I have an idea!” I laugh at his sudden outburst. “Lightsaber will be a year old a month before that, so we will use lightsabers for the reveal!” He is now bouncing in his seat with excitement. “That’s perfect Sehun” I look at him for a long time with the biggest smile on my face thinking. I would not be this happy with anyone else. I didn’t have to know Oh Sehun, the singer, rapper but most importantly the father of your child, very long to know he was the one. And I hope he feels the same, little did you know he did.

Arriving home we were met with an anxious big brother at the door. “So boy or girl?” He asked furiously. “We chose to give it to someone for a gender reveal” I say. “Okay then give it to me so I can be that person, y’know I am your big brother” B/N laughs. “Sorry B/N, we picked Joonmyun” Sehun cuts in. “Oh well I guess I’ll go cry in my room now” B/N says sarcastically. “Listen, you will find out the gender when everyone else does, including us, but for now get gender neutral things for the baby” Patting his back to comfort. Sehun and I walk to my bedroom for a nap.

Sehun goes back on tour and I start counting down the days till he comes home in December. By then I will be seven months pregnant and showing enough for me not to be able to out in public. So I take advantages of freedom now while I can. Exo’s manager and I have been in contact since the boys left so we can start setting up the nursery and Sehun and I’s bed room in the new house. He is the only one that knows the gender of the baby besides Joonmyun. On the plus side the boys made a group chat for all of us to chat in, or at least some of us. Usually someone sends daily updates on how they are all doing, sometimes they will send pictures, or stupid memes. With the group chat it was a lot easier to tell them there that they are to get gender neutral things for the baby until the gender is revealed. I have also been in the works of making ‘Uncle Squad’ t-shirts for all the boys because they are going to be the best uncles, my brother included.

Speaking of my brother he is still living with me which is fun, but I can sense he misses W/N so I surprised him with her being here for three weeks. It’s been nice having them around so I’m not completely alone through out the pregnancy. B/N keeps bringing up meeting with my parents, which I considered since both him and his wife would go with me as support. After I long time of thinking it over and over and over today is the day I see my parents for the first time in 6 years.

“I’m nervous” I state sitting in the backseat of my own car, B/N and W/N in the front. “I don’t blame you, it has been 6 years” W/N understands what me and my brother went through considering she’s heard every detail from my brother. My brother gives me a sympathetic look through the rear view mirror. “I have to do this, I don’t want my child asking me about my parents and having to explain to them why they aren’t in my life” It sounded like I was explaining my reasoning to the two others in the car but I think I was just trying to convince myself this is the right thing to do. “I mean the most I am trying to get out of this is to at least be on talking terms, I would like to better our relationship but that will take more than an apology.”

The nervousness isn’t quite there anymore when we pull up to the fancy restaurant, that my parents picked to meet at. What I was not expecting was to walk in and see not only my parents but my older sister too. B/N wasn’t expecting either I assume from the complete shock on his face. We walked to the table and my parents stood to greet the three of us. “Y/N, B/N, it’s so nice to see you” Mother said in a pretty nice convincing tone. People around us watching the encounter would be fooled. Father waved to us but didn’t officially greet us. B/N introduced his wife to our sister because she had already met our parents at the wedding.

“So fill us in on your lives” My dad leans in as if I’m about to spill the biggest cup of tea to them. “Why don’t we start off with why I am here” I say sternly. “There is a lot of things going on in my life that I want my parents and older sister to be apart of but not until you realize what you, my parents, did to your youngest daughter and son” I start. Mother squirmed in her seat, I know I struck a nerve. Father remained unphased by my words. “Okay let’s talk” Mother says quietly. “You pushed us away, like we were nothing. And the icing on the cake was you paraded our older sister around to make us feel even worse than we already did. You turned her against her own family. Do you understand that?” I look between my parents sitting in front of me. “And you,” I turn to my sister. “You allowed it, you didn’t stop them because you loved the spot light” My voice cracks a little at the end almost as a warning of tears on their way.

“I just want to understand why you two did it. Who in their right mind does that to their kids?” The hurt is heavy in my tone of voice and I hope it helps get my point across. “An apology won’t fix everything that happened, but it’s a start and your mother and I are truly sorry,” Father finally speaks up. “We just wanted to set an example of how to achieve your goals and make it in life and I think we took it too far” Mother adds. “You think?” I scoff. “Y/N...we want to make it up to you now, if it’s not too late” Mother lays her hand on top of mine, though I am irritated with her I don’t pull away. “I want to fix things between us too because there is so much stuff happening in my life that I want you two and even you, S/N, to be apart of, but it doesn’t all just go away like that. It will take time and I’m willing to go through that if you guys are too” I grab my sisters hand too.

“That’s all we want” S/N says. “Okay?” Father says. “Okay.” The air is a lot lighter now that everything's out in the open, well not everything. “So Y/N, you wanna explain why you were on the cover of every tabloid for like two weeks?” My sister asks. “Yeah...about that” I laugh awkwardly. “Tell them, Y/N” B/N nudges me.

“I’m dating Oh Sehun from Exo but to me he’s not just Oh Sehun from Exo, he’s Oh Sehun my boyfriend, best friend and partner. We’ve known each other for three months which was more than enough time to get to know each other and get me pregnant” I laugh at the thought of our back story. It sounds like a raunchy story line for a movie. “You’re pregnant?” Mother’s jaw drops. I nod, “Three months and counting” I chuckle. “Which is one of the reasons why I agreed to finally talk with you guys after so long. I want you guys to be apart of the baby’s life.”

“Oh honey, that’s amazing!” Mother tears up. “Do you think he is the one, Y/N” Father asks calmly. “Yeah, yeah I do” The ear to ear smile is back on my face. “I’ve been staying with Y/N because she is alone at the moment while Sehun is on tour, but he did come home and visit her while on break and they are truly each other’s match” B/N pats my shoulder and gives me an approving look. “Well then I would like to meet this boy as soon as possible” Father nods. “When he gets done with tour we are having a gender reveal party and you guys are invited to come, if you would like” I explain suddenly feeling shy. “We wouldn’t miss it for the world” S/N says.

December 18th

I can’t help but walk through the big house, practically a mansion, in awe knowing it’s mine and I get to share it with nine amazingly nice boys, and my unborn baby. I finish some last minute things in the nursery before leaving the house and going back to my bland little home. I now have security guards for protection now that I am big enough not to be able to hide anymore. They go everywhere with me which is basically to my house or the new house. They stand outside watching for suspicious behavior around my house. Today they were acting a little weird but I brushed it off. Sehun comes home in four days, I think to myself. Nowadays he is the only thing on my mind, well other than getting this baby out of me and into this world.

I walk into the house and set my keys on the hook. I can hear B/N in the living room on the phone with W/N. Only a few more days until he can go home back to his lover and start a family of his own. I can’t lie though it’s been nice having him around, even when I’m moody and he is no help making it better. The walk to my bedroom seemed longer than usual, the framed pictures of me and B/N, me and Sehun, and  the sonogram picture are at the new house making the hallway a lot more bland. When I opened my bedroom door I did not expect to see a sleeping Sehun on my bed. But oh did he look so precious when he was sleeping.

“Baby” I sing trying to wake the boy up. “Sehunnie” I poke his sides which makes him stir awake. It takes a minute for him to realize his surroundings. “Dang it I wanted to be awake when you got home to properly surprise you” Is the first thing that comes out my boyfriends mouth. “Trust me I am surprised, you aren’t supposed to be here for another four days!” I exclaim shaking him. “No actually I am here on schedule, I lied to you so I could surprise you” He laughs. “I’ve had this planned with your brother for quite sometime” He adds. “Wow thanks B/N!” I yell to the guy in the living room. “You’re welcome” He shouts back.

“We have a party to plan and only three days to do it” Sehun says pulling me down to lie with him. “But first, a well needed nap” He holds me close as if to silently tell me he’s not leaving me for awhile.

December 22nd

Today is the day, the day where everyone is going to get together and find out the gender of my baby. It’s also the first time I am going to meet Sehun’s parents, and his to meet mine. We are officially moved in and living in the new house but everyone stays away from the nursery so they don’t get any ideas on what the gender of the baby is.

The boys have been getting us clothes and little things that SM hasn’t already provided us. They are almost as excited as me and Sehun. Life is becoming one big dream that I hope I never have to wake up from. “Y/N, and my little cantaloupe of course, ready for the day?” Sehun stands in the doorway of our master bathroom. I look in the mirror and the person staring back at me is the happiest person. “Yes, yes I am” I giggle running a hand over my protruding stomach. Everyone was standing at the bottom of the rather large, and expensive can’t forget expensive, staircase. Joonmyun, Minseok, Yixing, Baekhyun, Jongdae, Chanyeol, Kyungsoo, Jongin all there staring up at me. “Now now, let's not treat me like I’m the queen making her big entrance” I joke as I descend the stairs.

“But you are, and you rock it” Minseok kisses my hand. “Kiss up” I wink. “Is there going to be a fight to the death on who’s the best uncle?” I ask looking at the eight boys staring at me. Just then the front door opens, “Good luck with that boys, I think the true brother beats all of you” B/N says. “Big brother” I call out giving him a hug. “Let’s get this party started?”

Despite the cold weather outside, we had a warm time inside with hot chocolate, cookies and of course you can’t forget cupcakes. Everyone is here now, Sehun’s parents, my parents, both my siblings and their significant others, and the boys. “Y/N someone wants to meet you” Sehun guides me over to his parents. They both light up at the sight of me. “Y/N, it’s so move to finally meet you” Mrs. Oh says excitedly. “Yes, finally put a face to a name” Mr. Oh adds. “She’s very important to me. I love her” Sehun looks down at me with the most loving look. “Well I would assume so considering you spent your break with her and not your parents” His father pokes fun at his son. We talk for a few more moments when my parents come over and introduce themselves as well.

“We should probably began the reveal”Joonmyun comes up behind me and Sehun. “Okay, let's do it” Sehun says excitedly rubbing his hands together. This is it I think.

“Can I get everyone’s attention, we are going to reveal the gender of the Oh-Y/L/N baby” Joonmyun announces.He pulls out two lightsabers from behind his back. “This year was the one year anniversary of Lightsaber so as the reveal, Sehun and Y/N will press the on button on the lightsabers, blue for boy or red for girl since they sadly don’t make pink lightsabers”Joonmyun hands the white lightsabers to us. Everyone has their phones out to catch this moment.

“Now wait were you going to reveal the gender without me?” Mina says on the entryway of the living room. I drop the lightsaber and waddle over to my best friend. “I’m so glad you are here!” I hug her so tight. “I wouldn’t miss it for the world!” She says, “Now let’s see what kind of baby you are having” She nudges me back to Sehun.

“3 2 1” We shout. Just then Sehun and I press the on button on the lightsabers light up to reveal the blue color. The room erupts into loud cheering, the boys jump on Sehun, and the moms and Mina come up to me and hug me. A boy...wow I can definitely say I wasn’t expecting that. “Okay before we start partying I have a gift for all the soon to be uncles” I announce. I go and get the nine boxes and hand them out to the boys and my brother. “Okay open them” The boys all open the boxes at the same time and unfold the shirt. They get all rowdy for the second time around.  The party goes on and we all calm down. The rest of the party all of us talk about names and so on.

March 29th

Waking up in pain is never fun, but this isn’t normal pain, it’s contractions, and its also 3:23am. “Sehun wake up” I shake him awake. “What, what’s wrong?” He sits up. “It’s time, he’s coming” I can’t help but laugh at how quick Sehun’s expression changes. Suddenly he’s running around the room like a headless chicken. He’s speaking incoherently as he grabs the hospital bag and decent clothes to change into. He then tosses an outfit to me to put on with a ‘Hurry I wanna meet my son.’ This is the first time I’ve ever seen hims so alert in the morning.

As I walk downstairs and to the car Sehun is banging on everyone of the members bedrooms to wake them up too. Sehun comes outside and hops in the car, a few of the boys follow him out and get into our car or their own car. The ride to the hospital is short and we get checked in quickly. “Y/N you’re surprisingly already dilated to a five” Dr. Jung says as she enters the very spacious birthing room. “It says you only want Sehun, His mother, and your brother in here when you begin to push is that correct?’ She asks me. I nod in response currently going through a contraction.  Sehun helps me breathe through a few more contractions before Dr. Jung comes back into the room to give me the epidural.

“Your baby boy seems to be ready to come out” She says thirty minutes later. Now it’s just Sehun, His mom, and B/N in the room. All the boys and my parents are sitting in the waiting room. I start pushing and everyone encourages me telling me the progress I am making. After six long pushes, Oh Jaemin is born weighing seven pounds five ounces and 19 inches. Sehun cried, I cried, hell everyone was crying. After everything calmed down the boys came in pairs three’s to see Jaemin. A lot of them cried too, especially Joonmyun, Chanyeol, and Jongin.  

One Year Later

Sehun’s POV

It got out quickly that Y/N and I had a kid once they saw us leaving the hospital a few days after Jaemin’s birth. Today is his birthday, he is one now and still the best thing to ever happen to me and Y/N. We all get dressed and head to the ice cream shop downtown to enjoy some ice cream as a family in celebration of Jaemin’s life. Jongin, Baekhyun, and Chanyeol tag along too. I held Jaemin as Y/N fed him vanilla ice cream, his favorite flavor, I think he got that from me. Baekhyun and Chanyeol snap pictures and post them to Instagram. Y/B and I make birthday posts about Jaemin.

Instagram

We head home to start setting up the birthday party in the huge back yard of our house. All the families are going to be there to celebrate and hang out. We are on the last couple months of the Exo’rdium tour and we have this little bit of time to be at home with our families. I may also have something planned for the last concert.

We barbecue up some hot dogs and hamburgers, pour some lemonade and bask in the nice weather. Y/N brings out the cake singing happy birthday. I hold Jaemin as he blows out the candles, really I do it. “Let’s eat cake!” I call. Everyone gets cake and sits around to talk and play with Jaemin.

“Sehun Y/N, when do you two plan on marrying?” Y/N’s mother asks. In the corner of my eye I can see her father perk up. “Soon,” I speak up. “With me being on tour and Y/N taking care of Jaemin I think we sort of forgot but I am working on it” I place my hand on Y/N’s knee. My parents and hers give us approving looks. “I’ll hold you to that” Y/N and her father say at the same time. Shaking my head I laugh.

May 28th

Today is the last concert for Exo’rdium, it’s sad to be honest. But everyone is here for us and we are so ready to give them a show. We start with a high energy MAMA remix to get the crowd hyped up. After a little we all sit down to do our acoustic moment. My Lady is first, I run back stage to fetch Y/N and Jaemin. Did you think they wouldn’t be here? Watching their boyfriend and dad on stage? I carry Jaemin out on stage while holding Y/N’s hand leading her to where the rest of the boys sit.

Jongdae takes Jaemin as Y/N and I sit in front facing the crowd. The boys start singing My Lady as I hold onto her. After a minute they sing quieter as I pull her to stand up with me. “Y/F/N, you’re my lady, the mother of my child and the love of my life. But most of all, my best friend. We’ve had so much fun raising Jaemin but we’ve also had some pretty hard times and the fact that we’ve overcome each and every one of them proves that we are meant to be together. Will you make me the happiest man and marry me?” I’m now down on one knee ring in hand and Y/N is tearing up.

“If you say no you’ll have some pretty unhappy exo-ls on your hands, isn’t that right exo-ls” Baekhyun calls out. Exo-ls yell yes back to him. “Of course I will, Sehun” She says and I pick her up and spin around. The arena erupts in happy yelling. “They’re getting hitched!” Jongdae yells. I kiss Y/N ever so passionately. We carry on with the rest of the acoustic part of the show with Y/N and Jaemin on stage. In fact she got to see me sing some of Baekhyun’s part in ‘Sing For You’. And I guess you could say the rest was a happily ever after.

[lifeasabashly]

Berwick

So I’ve been applying for this camp, through work for the last four years or so, and this year, after almost deciding that I didn’t need it anymore, I got picked to go. It is based in the Berwick Forest, 40km out of Dunedin in May which usually would sound like a whole lot of miserable to me (as I am a sad sack throughout most of Winter) but for some reason I was keen to go. 

Arriving at an empty airport in Dunedin and realising I had been left behind was a shit start that really made me question if I had made the right choice. But that was the last time I had that thought. I got picked up by one of the Lions Club members eventually and dropped at the camp where everyone was already sitting in their ‘watches’ with their GP lines and beanies. I was in Green watch which suited me fab, my fav colour. I immediately was thrown into the team building exercise where we were writing a story about a hole in a balloon. It’s interesting thinking back now to those people I met, and how those relationships changed and grew over the 8 days I was there. 

My watch was made up of Moe (said Moy) (60s), Mark (60s), Julie (50s), Myself (26), Max (24), Erin (21), Kohan (19), William (18), Mikayla (18) & Harry (18). Such a range of people from all walks of life. 

I’d miss the orientation session, along with Charlie and Morgan from Trustpower so we briefly sat down and went through this before heading to our bunks. Being last meant I got a top bunk - which I was fine with as it meant I was closer to the warmth (and farts I guess). 

We woke EARLY the next morning, about 5.40am to bagpipes blasting outside our room. I freaking love bagpipes so this actually put me in such a good mood. We got dressed and headed to our first activity which was like a brain teaser type activity in the common room. It was far too early for me to be able to contribute anything useful  and I’m pretty shit at these types of things anyway so was happy to let the team lead us to success! Finally at 7 we got breakfast, typical camp style lining up for cereals, toasts, porridge the works. I went hard out of fear of not eating again for a long time and a huge day ahead. Before I knew it we were kitted up in our wetsuits heading to our first big activity - Kayaking. Now I’m not really for or against Kayaking. Can be fun, sometimes it’s just boring so I was keen to see what they had planned. We started in a pool, the tiny, local community pool that used to be used by a school that was now shut down. The water was ice. I wore my socks in. They made us do flips in the kayaks and taught us how to safely exit if we did flip on the river. 

Then we were in the river. I had chosen my paddle and kayak that I felt would suit me best, plus they were perfectly colour coordinated so thought I was away for the win. We had barely disembarked before one of our watch Will, had fallen out of his kayak. He was complaining it was too small and hard to maneuver. Me being the good Samaritan *coughs* offered him mine. This was my first mistake and lesson learnt. Never be nice. His kayak was tiny, it took me 3 goes to get in the damn thing without falling out. I was wearing my sneakers (as the river was colder than the pool) and I was incredibly cramped and uncomfortable the whole river journey. To my dismay when I fell out on a turn, I was trapped by my sneaker and spent a good 3 minutes flailing about until Will caught up and was able to help me out. Overall it was still fun though. When I had to get out of the kayak at one point to - kiss the front (the things these instructors made you do) I bruised both legs and by the end of the float (due to falling out so much) I was a freezing, shivering mess. But I DID IT. I think they were worried about hypothermia though as they sent me straight to the van where the heater was blasting. 

We headed back to lunch which was sandwiches and hot pies. God I love a good pie. So delightful. Then we had tea prep so I spent the next hour peeling & chopping carrots with Mikayla. 

Straight into Knots & the Confidence course after lunch. I gotta say, I am possibly the worst knot tier in the history of the planet. I had to be shown about 300 times before it stuck and then the next day I still couldn’t tell you what the damn knots were called. Lucky I had a watch full of able humans who had done guides and were just onto it to help me through the rest of the week where knots were ESSENTIAL to survival! The confidence course was fun. The very first part was a tyre wall which I felt very prepared for after spending Intermediate sitting on the tyre wall at lunch times. I must admit, once I was at the top I was still abit shaky/nervous going over the top. Even more so when we had to carry a bucket full of water over too! Erin struggled with this one, she just would not budge at one point, saying her arms/legs were giving up, bawling her eyes out and Leanne (one of our instructors) would not let her give up. She made it over and I’m glad, but I definitely had a moment of - this feels like bullying. It just shows you though, some people need it. The rest of the course was pretty tame, tarzan ropes onto walls, that sort of jam. It wasn’t until the last bit - a firemans pole that I got a bit nervous again. I don’t know what it is about them but they freak me out. This one was exceptionally high too! Leanne was there giving me technique and before I knew it I was at the bottom. Embarrassed at how easy it was! Unfortunately Moe, was close on my tail and did it straight after me without any technique and sped to the bottom where she snapped her ankle in three places. I got to do First Aid, but poor Moe was gutted. Her ankle did the floppy thing like Harry’s arm in Harry Potter. It was pretty gross but intriguing. She was in no pain! Just shock I guess. Ironically that night after dinner, we had our First Aid training. I was in bed by 9 and asleep by 9.01 for sure. Absolutely shattered.

Day two! We had games first thing from 6am-7am. Again, puzzles in the morning, not my forte. Esp not before kai. After breakfast we had toilet duties which is always a barrel of laughs right? Then on to abseiling. This was based at camp. The hill to the top was a bit of a bitch to get to but abseiling was fun! We did it three times, the third time blind folded. Beef was our instructor. He was a spunk. After lunch we were back on to knots and bush craft which I don’t overly remember doing but again I think this is because I was hopeless at it and all the knots seemed the same to me. Looking at the schedule it’s hard to believe that this took up most of the afternoon. I remember we had to pull a pole somewhere and tow a truck though. Then Dinner, then night exercise. This one was us carrying a massive heavy pole from one side of the camp to the other as a team. It wasn’t awesome. The walk back under the stars was lovely though.

Monday was our first sports session - Netball. I loved it. It made me think how some days I would just play netball and that’s all the exercise I would do.... this was just the first thing for the day! Our team lost, JUST. But our commitment and passion was 10/10! Next was mountain biking which I was super excited for but MAN it was hard. We got kitted up with bikes/helmets and then did some practice stuff on the icy grass/mud. We then headed up the hill. I could bike up all of 2 minutes as it was steep AF. Everyone had to get off and walk most of it. We learnt how to jump logs and break/maneuver down steep hills. I came off the bike twice, one time landing on another stationary bike but it was so awesome! Then we got to boost down the hill. It was SO fast. I felt alive. I loved it. 100% Mountain biker for life.

After lunch we were back into it with a ‘Bridge Exercise’ - they gave us tiny hints to what we were doing throughout the course - but they never really helped. This was intense. When we realized what we had to do, get from one side of the bridge, underneath it and come up on the other side - there was a lot of planning involved. And actually doing it, (and trusting your teams knots) was pretty crazy! We aren’t allowed to share photos of this and I didn’t get any, any way but this was such a cool challenge. After dinner our night exercise this night was hilarious. We were all blindfolded and either had to lead or direct our watch around camp. It was pretty freaky putting your trust in strangers this way, especially at night. I DID end up in a swamp. But it was so fun. Making the most of our other senses and what not. Pretty cool. And just when we thought we were finally done for the night, blindfolds off. I hear this blood-curdling scream and Leanne comes racing up to us in full diva/drunk actor mode yelling about how she pushed her brother ‘Eric’ off a cliff and he’s dying at the bottom. So off we trot following her to save Eric. I got the fun task of taking care of drunk Leanne who was going on about popping cherries, working her ‘night job’ and the likes. Much to Harry’s disgust as Leanne is his mums best friend. So entertaining. Finally with Eric stretchered back to camp and bandaged we were allowed to go to bed. 

Tuesday Tramp Day! This was what I was most nervous about, a 15km tramp through the wilderness. Seemed like not far but boy was it ever. It took us 12 hours. We went the wrong way twice and not just a few steps like probably 2-3kms each time. No instructors, reception, just a map (that wasn’t the best if I may add!) The majority of the tramp was up hill and it was hard. Erin couldn’t hack it. She got blisters day one and the whole tramp (before she got taken out) she was moaning about them and stopping every 20 steps. It meant we moved incredibly slow - I didn’t really get a chance to get tired. She was though. I felt sad for her because everyone was tired/sore in some way and she couldn’t just push herself. Anyway, she got taken out with Max, who was borderline collapsing at every turn and then we could pick up the pace. By 7.30pm it was dark, cold and we were so over it. By 8.30 we were finally at The Hilton, exhausted and starving. I ate mince boiled with instant mash potato and peas. It looked like spew but I devoured it. Then I went to bed, it’s possibly one of the worst huts I’ve stayed in. Made New Beers look like a resort. But I slept solidly. 

Wednesday we were up early to make our way to the Mahinerangi Dam. Damn son. It was huge. We had lunch first - chicken AND ham luncheon sandwiches - just bread and butter no shit, dried apricots and a cup-a-soup. Gourmet I tell you. We set up our tents, wet and dirty from the previous 2 watches and then got set up for our dam abseil. First one, no biggy, no dramas for me. Second one... I’m not quite sure what happened but I was afraid. I didn’t realise I wasn’t going to be able to use my feet and would just have to lower myself down. I think the shock of that suddenly happening just set me off and I burst into tears. Sobbed the whole dam way down. Need any more damn puns? Damn. Others didn’t do the second one, but Harry and Max went all profesh on us, bouncing off the walls like Spiderman. Show offs.

After the dam activities, we were off for another wetties exercise. Raft building. Each team member had to sail out to the island and back without getting our lines wet or drownies. It was actually a really easy task and we finished it so early we had heaps of free time. FREE TIME!? At Berwick? NEVER. I went and set up my tent, I got nominated to tent with the boys as we only had 3 person tents plus we wanted to avoid the snorers (Mark, Will, Max, Erin...) Kohan, in my tent didn’t bring a bed roll, so Harry and I ended up putting our two together and sharing. We played some president which I was excellent at for once. We had some snacks, then went and made dinner. Pasta packets - Mac & Cheese. This was actually pretty tasty. I ate heaps! After dinner we had another activity. Learning to use a GPS. They are super legit - who knew!? And Geo-caching is a thing. I’m 26 and I’d never heard of this, but people leave notes for other people around the world to find. It’s like a world-wide treasure hunt! So cool! Thankfully we got to have an early night and headed back to the tent. I slept in full gear - beanie, puffer jacket, merinos, socks - the works and was still shivering. I’m actually so glad there was no way of knowing how cold it was that night but there was ice on our tent in the morning. 

Thursday was another 4 hour tramp back to camp. We got lost... again and were late getting back. We went straight into lunch then an Initiative course. This was probably the best ever. Or maybe it was just I remember it so well as it was near the end of the week. It was loads of team-based activities that weren’t physically demanding but just hilarious and you had to use your brain and trust your homies to succeed. I got heaved over walls, thrown through ‘spider webs’, held my fingers against holes in a giant drum while the team filled it with water #frozenfingers. I had to sit on Harrys shoudlers  so we could all fit onto this platform after swinging across a mudpit. We then had to dive into another mudpit/lake, do a massive flying fox, ropes again and more. Dinner, then more sport afterwards. Cricket, which would have been amazing except it was inside and you couldn’t smash it so I got out pretty quickly. Had a few successful bowls however. 

Friday morning we had more sport - football (lame but fun for others) then breakfast and cleaning. Everyone was back from the tramps Friday and we were on dinner so had to prepare a shit tonne for the ‘’roast meal’ (8 Roast Beefs!). It was a huge job. Then we were off for our ‘river exercise’ which we were told - all being well you shouldn’t get wet. I have to admit by this point, I had very little clothing left and reaaaallly didn’t want to get wet if I could avoid it. So when our first team mate came across the river and dropped to the side, a sodden mess- I was hugely disappointed. I think this was the only task we actually had to ask an instructor for help. We had to be split into two groups on each side of the river and using our ropes (not getting them wet) we had to get each team member to the other side of the river and back. Thankfully, by the time I had to go across, not only was I being pulled back and forth #noeffortrequired but I did not touch the river with any part of my body! Great success! Harry got dunked which was sad for him but hilarious for everyone else. Back to camp for a quick lunch then we had another group activity (bridge building) and then orienteering. Both were fun, but orienteering took us ages! Makayla, Harry and I were in a team and these two just spent the time waffling. I had to be mother hen quite frequently to keep them on the job at hand! We played some truth or dare which was great on my part because I am an excellent question master and kept orienteering fun, but it was cool because you got to explore the whole camp. I saw a baby wild pig! And there was probably 3 times total I said over the course - surely they wouldn’t make us go up/down/through there.... alas, it was the right way. When we finally got back, Kev the instructor was on his way out to us to check we weren’t dead. Dinner was a bit emotional as it was our last night... then we had to go do our performance ‘Welcome to Berwick’. It was in the tune to ‘My House’ by Flo Rida and our watches show was definitely the best. We even had backing music... just saying. After that we all headed back to the rooms to spend time together before lights off as I knew I had an earlier flight Sat morning and wouldn’t get to do the last relay or wind down drinks/BBQ. Harry was quite distraught. He was crying and saying he didn’t want to leave and that Makayla and I were his best friends and I was just amazing. It was all quite overwhelming for me. I loved these two, so easily and quickly in this weird environment we’d been thrust in - but I guess for me I had a lot of friends, Chris and life to go back to and neither of them didn’t have quite that. So I will try be good friends to them both, because I think they need that. I know they’re gonna do great things. It’s exciting to watch.

Saturday morning was spent cleaning, trying to find all my shit and then a few tears saying goodbyes (even from me! Shock Horror!) Kev drove me away in the van and it was hard leaving. I really could have stayed there another week or more I think. I just loved it.The truth is I really didn’t miss home that much, I was too tired or busy... I didn’t think I had missed Chris even until I saw him and burst into tears. Now being back, it’s hard to explain how life-changing and inspirational it was. I feel like a dick talking to people about it and saying that that’s exactly what it was for me but people don’t really get it unless they’ve been. I LOVED not using my phone or having it anywhere near me, I LOVED the people I met and stories we shared, I LOVED being outside, being dirty and being completely me without anyone's expectations. I loved learning all these new skills and really pushing myself and then finding out how awesome I could be!

Finally, I must admit though, I LOVED coming home to an ice cold bourbon with Chris too. #OGhobby

[silentauroriamthereal]

Okay, so this is extremely long, but my good friend @ravenmorganleigh tagged me in this a few days ago, and I would never refuse her. I’ll put most of it under a cut! This was very interesting to answer! 

1. What was your first fic and could you stand to reread it today?

Ooof, that’s a big ask! My very first fic was a Harry/Snape (yes, I know, groan away!) and the fact that I haven’t re-read it in well over a decade is suggestive that I never will, lol. I couldn’t even remember what it was called, so I just looked it up. It’s called Things Change (not linking it, sorry!!) and it was posted on skyehawke.com after fanfiction.net banned me in September of 2004. Lol. It’s still there, along with all of my other Harry Potter fic (of which there is over 1.4 million words).

2. What’s your most recent fic and how far do you think you’ve come?

I just posted Out of the Woods yesterday, which is an intentionally light-hearted story. My last serious one is the one I wrote just before it, The Clouded Eye, and I would say that between these and my earliest stuff, there is a significant gap in quality, yes. :P

3. In your opinion, what’s your best fic?

That’s honestly impossible to say. It depends what you’re judging on. For intricacy of plot, clearly my novel, Against the Rest of the World. For sheer fixing for series 4, which is a herculean task to explain, fill in the gaps logically, and then actually make it palatable, I would give it to the fix-it that most clearly addresses the most issues with series 4 – the Holmes family history, Eurus’ existence in general, Sherlock’s memory problems, Mary’s wholly unbelievable and unsatisfactory death, the practical issues with the entire concept of John and Sherlock having a child at 221B, etc – and that fic is Hell Hath No Fury. It’s a bittersweet ending, and honestly the most realistic I can see after that disastrous series. For sheer levels of how much it explains and delves into, I’m very pleased with it. For depth and intricacy of emotion, my personal vote goes to The Wisteria Tree. For pure porn, it has to be Best of Three. For one of my overall personal favourites, Bridging the Ravine. 

4. In your opinion and without looking at any numbers, what’s your most popular fic?

Far and away it’s Best of Three, which is rapidly closing in on 100,000 hits, probably the only work of mine that will ever achieve this milestone.

Putting the rest under a cut! 

5. Is there any fic that makes you super happy to reread and remember you wrote that?

I’m equally proud of all of my stories, for different reasons.

6. Is there any fic that makes you super embarrassed to reread and remember you wrote that?

Nah. I’m frankly proud of the silly ones and as to the early stuff, everyone has to start somewhere!

7. What’s the fic you most want to continue (unfinished or no)?

I have no unfinished stories at the moment. I just finished one, so I’m officially between projects. That will probably last for all of 2-3 days and then I’ll start something new.

8. What’s the oldest (longest since last update) fic you most want to continue (unfinished or no)?

Not applicable; I always finish my stories.

9. Have you ever written for a fandom without watching/reading/playing the source material?

No, and no offense, but I find that entire concept ridiculous and rather disrespectful to the source material. Even when I disagree with the canon, I have legions of respect for it.

10. Have you ever written for a fandom without reading other fanfic for it?

Yes, I have exactly one Star Wars fic (though I think I took it down for some reason, years ago) and one Lord of the Rings fic, and I still have never read any fic for those fandoms other than my own.

11. Have you ever written a fic for a concept you know someone else has done before? How did it impact your writing process or feelings after posting?

Only once, at least knowingly: after writing three long series 4 fix-it fics (A Case For Domestic Propinquity, Hell Hath No Fury, and From the Bottom of the Well), I decided that I wanted to finally give in and write a well-known trope, and wrote a fake-couple-for-a-case fic (Bridging the Ravine), which is now up there as one of my favourite fics of my own collection. Happily, I have a personal policy that I don’t read other people’s stories while writing my own, as a deliberate attempt to keep myself free of influence. The downside is that I miss out on probably a lot of good fic. For this trope, I’d only ever read one or two stories that would fit that description and they were literal years ago, so I don’t remember any of their details and didn’t want to. I make a pretty strong effort to not just reproduce the same ideas that other people have already done, which is a tricky thing to do in a fandom that has a lot of similar ideas and desires for the final results (aka, Sherlock and John getting together). I really do try very hard, though! This particular story also contains way more original characters than any other I’ve ever written, many of whom have developed enough backstories to work as stand-alone characters in their own stories and I’m proud of that, too! There are 24 in total!

12. Have you ever written a fic and decided never to publish it? Why?

No. There are story ideas I’ve refused to let myself write, though. Or several that I’ve sat on for months in trying to refuse to write, like my first Freebatch fic. I have mixed feelings about Real Person Fic and tried very hard to suppress the urge to write The A.G.R.A. Complex, and managed to keep myself from doing it for nine months. But then I caved. For the few I’ve refused to write, either it’s been because the concept itself made me sad, or it centred around an unpopular sexual kink, or some other reason like that. But generally, if I want to write something, I’ll just write it, and if I write it, I’ll post it.

13. What’s the biggest change between your style when you started in fandom and today?

I wouldn’t say that there’s been a huge change. I wrote more chaptered stories in the beginning, but I’m very busy and the stress of updating regularly is too much for me right now. I found my stride in the long novella. I strongly prefer the single-chapter format, but if it’s over 40,000 words, I’ll make myself break it up into chapters. The last WIP I posted as I wrote it was Against the Rest of the World, which I wrote over four months in the fall of 2013, leading up to the release of series 3 – in fact, I finished it two days before TEH aired! I was updating on average every six days, and some of those chapters were over 10,000 words long. It was a strain to keep it up, honestly – it meant that I was writing around the clock, day and night. It was the first thing I would do in the morning and the last thing I would do at night. I would come home on breaks at work to write, or take my laptop with me. I lived and breathed that story for four months. It’s told in first person voice (Sherlock’s POV), too, so it meant that I had Sherlock’s voice in my head at all times for four months. I missed him when it was over.

14. What’s the biggest change in your taste between when you started in fandom and today?

I wouldn’t say that there’s been one. I’m always trying to go further and further into the characters, their feelings, their experiences, and relate them so that the reader can ideally not just watch the story unfolding, but feel everything that the POV character is feeling at the same time. One can always go deeper, and I will never stop trying. Obviously different stories call for a heavier or lighter touch that way, but you get the drift.

15. Have you ever purposefully written one fandom/fic idea over another because you knew it’d be more popular?

No. I write the stories that come to me. I never write aiming for popularity. Though of course, I paradoxically always hope that my stories will be! But I never think, “Hmm, what would the fandom market really go for?” I just write the stories that I feel I need to tell.

16. Have you ever stopped writing a fic/for a fandom because it wasn’t receiving enough attention?

Never. I think that’s lame.

17. In your opinion, what’s your most overrated fic?

My most popular, Best of Three! Similar to Bridging the Ravine, I wrote this one after I’d written my initial big trio of series 3 fix-it fics (Deductions of a Lesser Mind, Act IV, and Vena Cava), and just needed to take a break and write something lighter. I wrote the entire thing in under 24 hours. I get why it’s popular – the combination of humour, sheer smut, nod to The Three Garridebs, and then the twist of romance at the end is a fairly unbeatable combination, but at the time I was indignant by its popularity, honestly! I’ve written many, many better, less popular stories. What can you do? Over time, I’ve stopped being exasperated and just rejoiced in Best of Three’s popularity.

18. What’s your most underrated fic?

Ha! That’s so subjective! I really can’t answer that. Instead, I’ll just list some stories of mine that I’ve been very proud of and sometimes wish people would read more: Hell Hath No Fury (again, very proud of this one for its sheer amount of fixing), A Satellite Out of Orbit (this is a companion story to Where My Demons Hide that features Sherlock’s visits to Ella, set just before and during TLD, but also extending to after the point where the original story stops – not compliant with TFP, as both stories were written before it aired, but I’m still proud of them both!), Munich (probably less read because it’s an established relationship, which tends to be less popular), The Legacy of Martha J. Hudson (this one is SUPER sad and I’m not surprised that people have shied away from it, but I still think it’s worth the read! Good for when you need a cry? Because, as the title heavily implies, Mrs Hudson dies in it), Pater Noster (a rather dark fix-it, wherein Mary’s first job was to kill John’s father – I was looking for a reason that Mary thought that John really wouldn’t love her anymore that was that much worse than her trying to kill Sherlock!), The Final Proof (this is even sadder than the Mrs Hudson story – it’s a retirement fic wherein Sherlock dies, then John dies at the end, too. Everyone who has read it has cried (seriously, like 98%) but also said that they found it really beautiful, so - ?). 

19. If you had to pick one fic/scene/chapter of your work to describe your entire portfolio to a stranger, which would you pick?

Well, that’s easy! (Note: it’s not!) Possibly Vena Cava.

20. Have/Would you ever rewrite a fic? If yes, would you take the original down?

No, I wouldn’t rewrite a fic. What’s done is done. Although there are always the typos I missed the first time around. :P

21. If someone starts kudosing and commenting your fics in a spree and has a few works of their own, would you go look through theirs?

Only if I weren’t working on something of my own at the time, which almost never happens. What I really don’t like is when someone reads something of mine and then obligates me to then read something of theirs in turn. It makes me uncomfortable and I find it a bit rude. When I discover that a regular commenter also writes, then I will often make an effort to seek out their work when I’m between stories, but I hate having it pushed on me.

22. Has there ever been anyone who’s made you freak out because they read your work and followed/favorited/reviewed?

Yes, but not in this fandom.

23. What’s the nicest review you’ve ever gotten?

Impossible to say. I’ve been graced with some of the best, most thoughtful readers/commenters in the universe!!

24. What’s the meanest review you’ve ever gotten? Do you think the reviewer intended it?

I don’t like to focus on these, but I’ve received numerous death threats for my portrayals of Mary, especially back in 2014 (the year series 3 aired) when even Johnlockers still liked her. That only changed within the past year or two! Disliking Mary was an extremely unpopular stance at first. I received a number of these as comments on stories, particularly after I disabled anonymous asks here on tumblr. For a long time, one specific Mary stan kept on reading my stuff and leaving me hate. I really wondered why they kept reading my stuff when it obviously was never going to be what they wanted to see. Note to haters out there: that’s a piss poor persuasion technique. As to my writing itself, no, not really. When I started writing fanfic in 2004, in the world of Harry Potter, one of the worst things a reviewer could call a fic was “fluffy”. The meaning of this term has changed significantly in the past 14 years, but what it meant then was that it was a story seriously lacking in real substance, OOC as hell, and badly written. While these days it tends to me “romantic, light-hearted, heart-warming, sweet”, etc, it still makes me wince any time someone calls a story of mine “fluffy” for that reason.

25. What constructive criticism, however well-meaning, always makes you feel bad when you see it in a review?

I wouldn’t say that there’s one aspect that gets commented on in a regular way. Though @totallysilvergirl beta-read my novel and pointed out a specific thing I do in terms of sentence structure, but it never made me feel badly to have it pointed out.

26. What aspect of your writing do you most enjoy to see praised?

I’m always glad to hear when someone liked the main POV, and I tend to get that compliment the most when it’s a Sherlock POV. I’m also always pleased when people comment on how much a story made them feel – that’s really what I’m going for! Also, in Against the Rest of the World, I spent hours and hours on background research – locations in particular, but also things like local architecture, shipping routes and times, flight times, time zones, language, etc, so I’m always pleased when someone comments on that level of detail in that story.

27. If you could only ever write crossovers or single-fandom fics ever again, which would you pick?

Single fandom, all the way. I’m not a fan of crossovers or AU’s. I’ve written exactly two crossovers in my time. One was a Harry/Draco story in which Draco nominates Harry for the old TLC show What Not To Wear, to Harry’s fury. I had fun with that. The other, and this is pure crack now, was one of my earliest stories, a Darth Vader/Voldemort crossover. Though it isn’t actually a crossover, as DV was Harry in Polyjuice. It was very silly.

28. if you could only ever write for a single crossover or a single fandom again, which would you pick?

Single fandom, again.

29. Does the division of your writing across fandoms line up with your reading? What’s the biggest discrepancy?

Not applicable here; I only write for one fandom at a time. JKR turned me off Harry Potter with the ridiculous epilogue on book 7 and then her attempts to include more “canon” information in her interviews. It annoyed me hugely – but mostly it was the epilogue, which was (deliberately, most of us thought at the time) extremely difficult to write around, though I tried it for a few stories. When I finished that (my last HP story was posted in 2010, but it had been a year since the one prior), I thought I was finished with writing and with fandoms in general. Then I discovered Benedict Cumberbatch in May of 2013, and through him, Sherlock. By the time I was on ASIB, I knew with a sinking feeling that I was simply going to have to write this fandom, too. Lol. I posted the first chapter of my first fic on June 15th, 2013.

30. Do you continue to write for a fandom after you’ve moved on or do you focus solely on the new one?

History would show that I focus strictly on the new one. The only exceptions to strictly Sherlock have been my four Freebatch stories (The A.G.R.A. Complex, Having Your Cake, Always Through the Changing, and A Room with a View).

31. Who’s the one character you’ve just never managed to get perfectly right?

No one, I hope. I’ve written a large number of the characters in the Sherlock universe, including (in approximate order of frequency): Sherlock, John, Mycroft, Lestrade, Mary, Molly, Janine, Ella, Mrs Hudson, and Sally Donovan. Sherlock and John are my favourites to write, Mary and Molly my least favourites.

32. Who’s the one character who shines without you even trying?

Sherlock, absolutely. He’s where my heart lives. That said, some of my favourite stories of my own are John POV’s.

33. Is there any particular character whose scenes always wind up being longer/more frequent than you expected? Does the quality hold up?

No.

34. Was there any fic that you wrote that really surprised you in the fandom reaction? Was it just by the numbers or did they take it an entirely different way?

The first time I wrote a Mary POV (Moving on/Making do), I was honestly afraid that I’d made her too relatable, too likeable, but the people who read the story still disliked her. Ha! And again, the sheer popularity of Best of Three always surprised me.

35. Have you ever written a ship into a fic without meaning to?

Yes, I never meant to ship Harry/Draco, but it just happened.

36. Have you ever sincerely written a ship you do not support into a fic?

Yes, for the necessity of canon compliancy, I’ve written John/Mary, which I loathe.

37. Have you ever purposefully bashed a character/ship in a fic?

No. I do my very best to portray the characters as I see them in canon. There are definitely people who would said that I have bashed Mary in my stories, and I respectfully and thoroughly disagree. Mary is canonically: an assassin who killed for the highest bidder, meaning that she killed without principle, for nothing other than money. Personal gain. Gross. She’s also someone who cut and run, leaving at least half of her team alive to be killed or tortured without even checking to see if there was any possibility of rescuing them. She displayed the same urge to run away and leave John behind later, too. I find this distasteful and cowardly in the extreme. On top of this, she canonically gaslights and belittles John, which is emotionally abusive behaviour, yet “playfully” insults both him and Sherlock on an ongoing basis (“I’m not John; I can tell when people are lying” – two insults with one comment!). She displays incredible entitlement after she attempts to murder John’s best friend and doesn’t seem to think that she should need to apologise for what she did, nor that John had the right to be incredibly angry with her over it. She also showed zero signs of remorse for any of her behaviour, past or present – lying to John, anything and everything she did in her deeply criminal past, etc. When people comment and say, “I loved your evil Mary!”, my typical response is “do you mean canon!Mary?” because that’s all I’ve ever tried to write. The ONE exception I will make here is my story Scars, which is a deliberate attempt to extrapolate from Mary’s canonical gaslighting and show where that behaviour typically leads. I did my homework and consulted two therapists who work specifically with men who have been abused by women for this story, and both confirmed that they saw Mary’s behaviour as gaslighting and abusive, too. I wrote this story partly to combat the then-popular notion that Mary and John displayed “playful banter” or “bickering” at the beginning of HLV, when I saw it as clearly one-sided and not at all playful. I still don’t consider this “bashing”, however.

38. Have you ever purposefully written something you know your readers would find uncomfortable/would not enjoy? If yes, why?

Yes, the above story. Why? Because it was a story I felt had to be told. Also: The Final Proof (the one where Sherlock dies of old age), which I knew would make people cry. Again: I write what the muses prompt me to write!

39. Do you consider yourself to have a readership?

Yes, I’m very lucky to have a huge readership and it’s wonderful! (Thank you!!!!!) I don’t have any specifics on the numbers in this fandom, but when I was writing HP fic, someone wrote her doctoral dissertation on HP fanfic and she collected stats from the various archives that were active at the time, then contacted the twenty most read authors in the fandom. To my shock at the time, I was apparently the eighth most read author in the slash fandom (male/male fic), though I was far from being the eighth most popular!! She estimated my readership at close to 200,000 readers. This was HP, though, the biggest fandom in history. I don’t imagine that my readership is anywhere near that here in Sherlock-land.

40. Do you feel like you put out enough content?

Um, yes. I’m now close to 1.9 million words over 78 stories. I write constantly, when I have the time to do so. Occasionally a commenter will say something like, “write more, please!” and while I know it’s meant as encouragement, it can also feel slightly exasperating. I honestly don’t see how I could humanly be producing MORE. But I try. :P

41. If you cross-post your fics on multiple sites, do you have a favorite? Are there certain fics you would only post on certain site?

I only use ao3 these days.

42. How many views has your most popular fic gotten?

As I said, Best of Three is closing in on 100,000 hits now.

43. Your least popular?

My least-read story would have to be my most recently posted, which I wouldn’t consider my least popular by a long shot. That’s honestly difficult to identify because of course one has to consider the length of time a story has been posted. It’s not fair to consider a story posted yesterday against a story that’s been up for four years. But the newest story has about 2,000 hits at the moment.

44. Do you follow/favorite/kudos/comment/review more stories than you have received?

Thanks to my readership, I don’t think that would be possible.

45. If you had to call yourself an author of a single genre (besides fanfic) what label would you give yourself?

I really only have one major work that isn’t fanfic, which is the original novel that I’m still working on getting published (and by “still working on”, I mean that I haven’t had time to work on this since July or so, whoopsie). Its technical genre definition is spy thriller, so let’s go with that! It’s loosely based on Against the Rest of the World with a dash of Vena Cava, a spy thriller with a gay romantic subplot.

46. Do you consider yourself a diverse author?

Yes. While my stories typically come to a similar result, I think they all get there in noticeably different ways! I’ve written amnesia, hurt/comfort, disability, many different character POV’s, gentle romances, heavy angst, deathfic, retirement fic, thrillers, fix-its, addiction (more in HP), magic (HP again), long novels, short sketches, character sketches, silly stuff, dark stuff. If you look at my stories chronologically, you will see a pattern of dark-light-dark-light – if I’ve just written a heap of angst, I’ll typically switch it up and write something lighter, or a different character voice, or a completely new idea (such as the Mary/Molly pairing in The Clouded Eye), etc. I do try to keep it fresh!

47. If someone you know in real life who isn’t involved in fandoms asked to read your work, would you let them? If yes, what would you recommend they read first?

Only if they were already familiar with the canon and open to reading graphic male/male sex, and that limits most of the population that isn’t already in the fandom.

48. Does anyone you know from outside of fandom know you write fanfic? Are they involved in the same fandom too?

A few people know. I’m very careful about who I tell.

49. Has anyone in your life ever read your fanfic just because you wrote it?

My mother. :) She reads all of my stories. We have a very good relationship!

50. Has writing fanfic had a significant impact on your life? Would you say it’s entirely positive?

Yes, it’s had a huge impact on my life. It’s been my secret other life since 2004, with a 3-4 year hiatus in there. Sometimes the drama gets to be a bit much, but the creative outlet of writing and the joy of sharing the love for these characters with a whole universe of other people is just unbeatable.



[mubal4]

Elephant Mountain 50 miler – Race Wrap Up

 Taken me a few days to get this one out just like it took a few hours to finish this bad boy of a race 😊.  As usual, big props to Aravaipa Running for an awesome event.  Special thanks to the staff, volunteers, aid station workers, fellow runners, and all the folks that came out to support us.  Thank you so much to Robin and the girls for meeting me at the finish line and our special friends, June & Pete for taking the time out of their day to also meet at the finish line (twice 😊)!  The weather was epic, did get a bit warm in the later afternoon but a quick dip in the river crossing helped with that.  I’ve shared many times that the people and the culture of this sport is what makes it so special.  This day didn’t misrepresent that at all.  What a great group of folks I had the special privilege to enjoy many miles with last Saturday.  Overall, it was a fantastic day from the moment I woke up till the morning I went to bed (crashed on the couch after a few IPA’s 😊).

 So where do we begin?  Like most races, this was unique, but it was more about the time leading up.  For those that may have been following the blog, I’ve made some slight indications of several changes happening.  Well, last week was the official last week at my prior employer where I spent 11 years with Monday of this week, being the first day at my new one!  Big changes and exciting stuff but last week, with it being my last days, saying goodbye to friends, shutting things down, and working with others, with some great help on both sides, navigate some challenges.  The stress level, and anxiety were a bit high! That in mind, I was very much looking forward to this race and spending a good half a day in the mountains, on the trail, with my thoughts to work through all this madness that was unfolding.  Or better said, I was looking to just get away from everything in my happy place 😊.  Well, that mission was achieved but there was a portion that I was definitely not happy!!!

 We are fortunate to have a few running companies out there that have been able to help create and outline, with the help of land permitting organization, local/state/federal governments, etc., protocols for the ultrarunning community to get back to racing.  Aravaipa & Human Potential Running Series are two prominent ones that have blazed a trail here. One of the protocols are waves starts so I was happy when I had an extra 10 minutes to toe the line and I arrived just in time.  Got to Cave Creek Regional Park at about 545am, got me gear lined up, shoes tied up, and a last few thoughts to myself and at 610am we were off, in the dark, with our headlamps.  The first 11 miles are so climb up and down Go John Trail in Cave Creek Regional and then we head out of there on our way, northeast, to Spur Cross Ranch Conservation Area.  After the first climb about a mile in we have mostly flat trails, a road crossing or two, but overall, several gentile miles until we begin some climbing up the base of Elephant Mountain.  Yes, it actually looks like an elephant. I had a picture that I didn’t share but from Cave Creek Regional you can make out the hump, head, and what can be taken for some tusks, it is a cool shot.  Screw, it, I included the picture.  That was on the way back to the finish later in the day with the sunsetting 😊.  At this point is where I connected with the first of 3 amazing humans, I got to spend time on the trail with, Alan from Albuquerque.  As we hiked up “the hump” we got chatting about running, life, kids, families, spouses, jobs, and a few other topics.  Allen was is an awesome dude and really enjoyed spending time with him.  Made the last few miles getting into Spur Cross Ranch fly by. Once there, Allen had a drop bag and was making some adjustments and I hit the aid station, grabbed some food, snacks, filled up the water bottled than I was on my way.  From here, we were going to be traveling out, way out into the backcountry, circling Skull Mountain clockwise, hitting the Seven Springs aid station about 12 miles out, and then coming back to Spur Cross another 14 miles.  My thought that the 12 miles out wouldn’t be that crazy since the climbing from the race info didn’t look bad.  I wasn’t able to get too much detail about the way back but I knew that would be the warmest part of the day and no aid for 14 miles so I would need to be smart with my food, water, and energy.  At this point, I was making good time, right where I felt was appropriate and the plan was to meet up with Robin and the girls back at Spur Cross, we figured around 2pm or so.  (plan = punch in face 😊!)  As I headed out from the aid station on the way to the Skull Mountain trailhead, there were about 4 river crossing.  We had recently got rain but not too much where the water was high, but it was a good amount, but we were able to navigate through on rocks to avoid getting our feet wet.  Wet feet at an ultra could mean blistered feed later in the day (foreshadowing 😊).      

 After a couple of miles Allen and I met back up and we were joined by Dana from Park City, UT.  Dana is a mom, former restaurant owner, now going to school to be a pastry chef.  We had a ton to talk about because I thought that was brave of her to be venturing out to chase a dream.  Plus, we spoke of our kids, daughters, her oldest runs w/ her and they did Rim 2 Rim of the Grand Canyon.  Just another great human being.  The three of us had a lot of laughs as we climbed around Skull Mountain an the miles ticked off.  Soon after we were joined by Kevin from Bozeman, MT.  That’s right, 4 different folks, running the same race, right with each other, from 4 different places.  Another great thing about this sport. Kevin made the trek down to AZ because MT wasn’t getting any snow and he was feeling bummed he couldn’t get on the slopes!  He had recently started ultras when Covid started and he had done a few 50 milers and Rim 2 Rim 2 Rim of the Grand Canyon. We were all feeling great at this point, but Kevin did tell us a few stories of his few 50 milers where at mile 37 was where he bonked…. miscalculated his food intake he believed. Today however, he was fueling well, and we were moving.   A couple of miles form the Seven Springs aid station and the turnaround point before the 14 miles back to Spur Cross, Kevin and I broke away a bit from Dana and Allen.  Seven Springs was a very remote camping area that was spread out with a few bathrooms, so I took my time in this aid station, but only for about 5 minutes.  During this time Kevin took off and Dana & Allen caught up.  Allen grabbed some food and turned right around and I got a huge bean burrito, not kidding, feel like it weight two pounds, not typical for an aid station, but I was happy to have it for the need for calories over this next stretch was crucial.  Right now, I was feeling sweet, body was in good shape, I was present, enjoying the day, and my plan of letting go of the past couple of weeks was on point.  Allen and I spend a few moments together until his buddy was on his way into the aid station and at that point we broke apart. It was now time to take on the 14 miles back to Spur Cross and I want to be clear, these miles sucked. It took me about 10 minutes to work through that burrito and after I wanted to let that settle for a bit, so the plan was to hike for about 20 minutes.  As I was moving, I noticed that the trail was in tough shape.  The folks at Aravaipa mentioned, often, that this section of the race is remote, rugged, and very technical……. they were not joking.  Not lying, this was the most rugged, and technical trail that I’ve ever been on.  If it wasn’t the rocks, it was the dried-up craters from the horseshoes because of the recent rain.  If that wasn’t it, it was the incessant climbing over and over. Any time that I felt a runnable section coming I would start to run only to be slowed because of the trail or a hill.  It was a grinding on that back stretch.  I was tracking time and as mentioned, the idea was to meet Robin and the girls at Spur Cross, this would be mile 36-37ish at 2pm.  I was not going to make that and figured I was about an hour behind.  However, no reception back in these parts but luckily, we had trackers on us.  Even though, I was feeling some anxiety come on and didn’t want them, potentially waiting at that aid station for 60-90 minutes.  I know they would have been fine, but I felt bad.  Soon after that I ran out of water with about 4 miles to go and then the demons started talking to me, as they do during an ultra.  At this point I was beginning to catch this dude in front of me and by the looks of things, he was having some similar thoughts about this back stretch.  There was this one longer climbs we were doing, steep, where I was struggling and mostly feeling sorry for myself, it was a steep part and I just stopped.  I was wrapped up in getting to the girls, getting to the aid station, the last 14 miles to the finish, no water, no cell service, climbing, blah, blah, blah……..then I just stopped, sucked down the rest of my water & looked around.  The scenery was beautiful, and this was an area of this state I hadn’t scene and wanted to.  I was deep in it and I was bitching about it. The thoughts a few minutes ago were about maybe calling it a day at Spur Cross.  They didn’t last long though considering I directed my focus on getting to the aid station, sitting for a spelling refueling, rehydrating, taking a break for 20 minutes, seeing the family, and then we would crush those last 14 miles.

 As I caught up to my fellow runner heading down the mountain and back to the river crossing, we had a few choice words together for that beast of a stretch we went through.  I was only about an hour behind my anticipated time, but this was the warmest part of the day and the timing for the river couldn’t have been better. I wished my buddy the best and I first dipped my hat in the water then I decided to sit down and let the cool water rinse all the nastiness of those last 14 miles off me 😊.  I was figuring, the family had a fresh pair of shoes, socks, and a new shirt for me at the aid station for the last stretch so all good. Well, when I got to the aid station, later than expected, the girls had gone thinking that I had already been through and were on their way to the finish line (they figured out where I was shortly after & met me at the finish right on time 😊).  Wasn’t the first time and won’t be the last and it was all good.  I got to the aid station, downed a ton of calories, water, electros (coke & Mt. Dew – yes, fantastic during an ultra), salt, and some fantastic avocado, hummus, lettuce wraps (thank you folks 😊) and I sat, for 20 minutes, as planned.  Allen then came in and a few other folks.  Some looked beat up and were taking their time and a few others looked good and were on their way.  Allen got himself situation and was off and then I was about 5 minutes after him. After some downhills and another river crossing (BTW – socks and shoes dried and had now foot problems so all good there) …..there was another climb back up the southern face of Elephant Mountain. This is where I met up with Allen again and gave each other our encouragement.  This is when I started feeling that pull to the finish line even though I still had about 10 miles or so left, I was in great shape.  I had a gradual downhill, some straightaways, and some minimal climbs before I got back to Cave Creek Regional Park for the last two ascents. It was later in the day, the temps were cooling, my body was feeling great and I was on a smooth groove.  As I started approaching the last aid station, 5-ish miles out from the finish I came across and “old friend,” Kevin. I had been several hours since I had seen him and as I passed, it seemed as though he was dealing with that 37-mile issue.  He looked okay but was struggling a bit.  He assured me that he was good and that he was looking to just get to that finish line; I knew he was going to make it.  I hit the last aid station, feeling fantastic, and the ladies there gave me some final words of encouragement to get me through the finish line.  As I made my way through the trails that have been familiar to me for the last two years, I felt comfortable, I felt right.  I made the 2nd to last climb looking back at where I hit the all (see the picture 😊) and then it was a gradual decent before the final hike up. As I made my way up, I came across another runner and when we turned the corner to begin our final run down to the finish line, we both looked up and experienced and incredible sunset.  I was too caught up in the moment and realized I was about 1.5 miles from the finish so did not snap a picture, I wish I did.  That long stretch on the back of Skull Mountain that took me longer than expected made a for a great sunset.  

 The trail to the finish line passed right by my car, where I had parked 12 hours earlier and I laughed as I went by. I guess it was funny in the moment and then again when I finished and went back to the car 😊.  It was great crossing that line, seeing my crew, having some jokes about the nonsense of a trail.  What felt more satisfying is seeing Allen come across the line a little while later and us embracing in a hug, yeah, I know, Covid, but we spent about 25 miles of a 50 mile race together so what does it matter.   It was a great pleasure sharing that time with him and it is something we will both take with us.  Kevin crossed the line sometime later and he wasn’t feeling all that well……that whole 37th mile 😊 – but he did finish, and I was so proud of them both.  I wasn’t able reconnect with Dana but know she was with her fiancée and that made her, and us, happy 😊.  As I crossed the finish line, I finally got the opportunity to see my family for the 1st time of the day, and of course, June and Pete 😊.  I spent the day with some amazing people and then another portion of the day by myself, with my thoughts.  I shared some thoughts with a few new friends and got the chance to ask myself some tough questions. At the end of the day, it is funny, I did not know how this was going to play out.  As I reflect on it, the only thing that could have made it a better experience was having a couple particular people enjoy in the journey.  

[sasspotatodoesthings]

Ranking of the Assassin’s Creed main games

A personal ranking of the main story games of the Assassin’s Creed series. I will be putting ten eleven twelve spots, as there are ten eleven twelve games (one being released soon), and I will just leave the spots open and move them around as I play the games. Please note that I strive to get 100% synchronization so any optional stuff that isn’t necessary does affect my opinion.

Updated: 12/25/2020

Warning: There is spoilers, cursing and opinions below.

12 - Assassin’s Creed: Unity - This game took the longest for me to complete. Literal years to finish. I can’t even remember when I started playing this game (I’m guessing somewhere around late 2017 or early 2018, since I finished III in 2017 and finished Rogue not too long after that) but I had about 70% already done when I picked it back up these last couple weeks and powered through it as much as possible. What really ruined the game experience was the co op missions. I’m shite at the games, so I’m not going to actually try to play with other people. Soloing each of those three times to get all the armor was a nightmare. I’d much rather play the first game again because at least its shorter than this one. The controls are a bit buggy and because the free run system changed, I definitely had a hard time adjusting to it. I didn’t have many opinions about the clothes and weapons, and I never even took much of a look at the color options. Overall game time: I actually don’t know. It doesn’t record the time in game like it has in previous games, but it records it through the Ubisoft site, and mine didn’t sync up I guess. I’m assuming it has a similar game time at Black Flag, so maybe around 60-70 hours? It’s hard to tell because I’ve been playing it off and on for like 2-ish years with loooong breaks in between.

11 - Assassin’s Creed - Fuck this game and its monotonous game play. Fuck its collectibles and not being able to ride horses ANYWHERE. Couldn’t ride my horse in the open fuckin fields or I’d get chased by guards. God dammit I hate this game so much. I hated it so much, I had to take a year break halfway through the game. I hated it that much. Altair is the blandest character in this series and yet they don’t let go of him until Revelations. Even then, there’s still some stuff about him in later games. Altair was a boring character and I didn’t want to hear about him after this game. Overall game time: I don’t fucking know because I can’t find where it would be listed but this game sucks anyway so fuck it. Who cares?

10 - Assassin’s Creed: Odyssey - (This is gonna be long, sorry not sorry.) I played as Kassandra! This game is just a complete monster all on it’s own. I actually made a bullet point list about the things to mention here and I haven’t done that for any of the other games. Major talking points about this game. It’s just too big. The map is too big; there are too many weird, small locations to visit; there are too many tiny fetch quests, too many kill quests. I miss when there was a map with like, maybe 20-40 extra places to visit and some side quests. Most of this game is filler, if you’re trying to 100%. And because the world is just so large, the fast travel points don’t actually help. I could have a quest point that is a minimum of 500m from any kind of fast travel point. That’s not really any help. Along with the large map, some exploratory areas are just too big. The forts are a regularly occurring type of location in the game. These tend to be huge with something like 20-40 bad guys in them. Every time I happened to come upon these, I would groan, save, and then slug through it. Of course, when you have that many baddies, you think it should be easy. But no, it’s just another tedious task because instant assassination is no more! If you happen to do enough damage or the baddie is a low enough level, you can instant assassinate. But if they’re an elite or brute, you’re out of luck. Another major downer for people is the general rpg-like feel of this game. Origins, I think anyway, handled the rpg element much better than Odyssey. Origins gave you an established character, Bayek, and you did not get to change his character in any way. You play as Bayek. Odyssey, however, gives you dialogue and moral choices. They try to give you a half established character and then you take over from there. So you can either try to make decisions you think would align with Kassandra/Alexios, or you can make decisions on your usual play through of an rpg. This was definitely a bad way to handle this game. I think it would’ve been much better if they had given us little to no dialogue/moral choices. Like, for example, for one of the Tales from Greece DLC quests, you help find Barnabas’ daughter. You try to convince her to leave her mother’s farm to join you on your ship with Barnabas. She declines, which is reasonable as she wants to care for her family farm. Weeelllll, with out any kind of input from me, Kassandra burns down the farm and tries to play it off as helping the daughter in the end. I was horrified that the game just did that for me without at least giving me the choice. And these aren’t the only kind of choices that suck. The romance options! They are all basically one time flings that you seduce with a few flirty sentences (what is this, the Sims?) and then they most likely will join your ship. Now it was amusing at first to bang anyone who would let me, but then it got a bit frustrating. Why couldn’t I have a solid relationship? I just wanted to pick someone and date them the whole time and have cute scenes together. Why are they so many women romance options and little men options? I mean, I am a straight woman, but I will romance who I want in games because fuck it, am I right? And the one male romance option I did genuinely enjoy was a bit of a let down, cause it was between two brothers. See, I helped two brothers and I noticed a could romance them both. Now, dummy me I guess, romanced them both and then hoped maybe a little menage a trois would happen. Nooooooo, I couldn’t have both at once, and because I had slept with both of them before at separate times, I couldn’t even get to choose one later! Let me have the threesome cowards. You put statues with dicks everywhere and let me sleep with almost anyone. Give me the threesome. Also, about romancing anyone, did you know you can romance the leader of the big bad at the end of the game?? I sure didn’t until I got to that point. I did it for the shits and giggles but really what reasoning is there behind it? She’s someone who you previously trusted and was previously betrayed by. You never show ANY romantic interest in her before the very end of the game. Like it doesn’t make any sense for them to smooch. Talking about the cult, why are they sooo boring? Except for the few that are integral to the main story line, all the side cult member are boring looking and don’t have interesting reasons for being in the cult. The Order members from Origins were 100x more interesting. They had reasons for being part of The Order. They had interesting character designs. I just wish the cult members had been more like the members in Origins. Uh let’s see more points to hate on the game. I have no idea if this was a problem for other people, but fairly often, characters dialogue would overlap. It didn’t bother me much, as around 100 hrs I started skimming and skipping dialogue. I know this was definitely a problem for others: my game kept freezing and crashing. Comparing my last save time and my time on the Uplay site, I lost about 2 hrs and 20-ish minutes from freezing and crashing. The armor is this game is either subpar or down right ugly. I liked the armor upgrade system in Origins because the armor naturally fit with Bayek and his setting. Where as Kassandra could be running around in Athens wearing Spartan armor because the was made me the most powerful at the time. Now, I realized super late into the game that you could basically change the outlook of your armor to look like any piece you had looted to that point. But, like, why even have the ugly armor to begin with? Ships are a thing. Almost like Black Flag ships, but not quite as good. I’m not sure why they didn’t just recycle the ship system from Black Flag, but they didn’t. The ships feel so much slower and clunkier, and the upgrades start feeling like they do nothing when you get into the higher ones. And in certain parts of the sea, it’s crawling with pirates that aggro you almost immediately. I just wanted to get to that island that was like 1000m away, but I guess I have to battle some pirate ships now. And to finish off for the main game: Layla sucks major ass and I hate her as the modern day protagonist. So, my parents happened to have bought the seasons pass version of Odyssey when they got it for me for Christmas, so that means I got the play some AC DLC for the first time ever! Wooooooo.... yeah I wish this wasn’t the first game I played the DLC for. I’m gonna talk about the Fate of Atlantis DLC first. I didn’t really enjoy this DLC. It starts off with a disturbing scene of Alexios/Kassandra/Deimos torturing a man for information. It made me uncomfortable. I can handle most stuff that make people squeamish, but this one got me, boys. Elysium, which is basically heaven, is very pretty realm and pleases my aesthetic. But, the Isu guards there drain my adrenaline and I am a very heavy user the the adrenaline. About the prettiness of Elysium, Odyssey can be very beautiful. I never did take pictures in Origins, but I did once for funsies in Odyssey, and then I just kept taking more when I thought the scenery was pretty enough. I am pretty proud of some of the photos I took. It’s not much, but one of my pictures got 27 likes! Now back to the Isu! I absolutely adore that fact that all the Isu are taller than Kassandra. Most often, Kassndra is taller than everyone, excepting elites and brutes. But all the Isu were taller than Kassandra and that made me want to fuck them. Ubisoft, stop being cowards and let me fuck the gods, especially Hades because he gives me big MCU Loki vibes and I wanted that, so bad. To get away from fucking Isu gods, Ros, a dog later to be revealed as Cerberus, is Persephone’s dog that wanders around Elysium and I was always delighted to find him hanging out somewhere. I’m pretty sure I even took  a “selfie” with him, as much as you can take a selfie in this game. Persephone gave me a real hard moral choice that I did not enjoy making. She made me choose between my grandfather, or a spy I previously helped infiltrate her own army. I did not like making any choice at all. If I could have, I would’ve just booked it and never looked back. I don’t really have much to say about the Underworld. It’s hell. I wanted to fuck Hades bad. That’s about it. I don’t have much to say about Atlantis either exCEPT HOLY SHIT THE FINAL BOSS IS A FUCKING NIGHTMARE I WAS FREAKING OUT THE WHOLE TIME HOLY SHIT. Ahem- anyway the boss was scary and I was having a mental crisis trying to beat it without actually dying in real life from fright. Fate of Atlantis DLC done, woohoo! I don’t have much thought for The Hidden Blade DLC. It was short and sweet. I didn’t mind getting locked into a straight romance and having a child. I’m a straight woman and if a game gives me the choice to marry, have a child, and still be an adventurer, I’m gonna do it. Finished basically all of it in a day and that finished off the whole game. Boy was it a relief to finally beat everything. Overall game time: 133 hours and 45 minutes to beat the main game with one part of The Hidden Blade DLC done, and 167 hours and 55 minutes to beat the DLC, excluding the one part from The Hidden Blade DLC. Now if you count all the time I lost from crashing, it’s 170 hours and 16 minutes.

9 - Assassin’s Creed: Revelations - By this point, I’ve played three of the games in a row and I was very tired of playing Ezio. It doesn’t help that this game is basically II and Brotherhood but with smaller features added. Also, the colors you could dye your clothes SUCKED. Overall game time: 22 hours and 25 minutes. It felt longer than that and I was surprised to see this was the shortest time so far. Thank god though because I did not like this game.

8

7 - Assassin’s Creed III - Writing this as the credits role. So, heads up, I’ve played this game before so I knew some things that were going to happen, but I forgot most of the game. I’ve read that a lot of people hate this game and I can see why, especially if it’s the first game you play of this series. The game changes quite a bit from the previous games. It has a new free run system, the running is a little more fluid, new weapons, new side missions, etc. I’m giving III a huge bonus for changing the old system in the hopes of something better... it’s not completely better, but better none the less. The downside to all these new things is that they are buggy as hell. The running can be amusing sometimes, but it is a horrible experience if you need to catch someone or stay within a certain distance. The side missions are also super buggy. Many times the icons do not appear on the map (and they tend to be in the areas that the viewpoints do not open up) and just seem not to work entirely right. Currently for one of the delivery requests, I have all the items and I can find the guy I need to turn them into, but can not talk to him for whatever reason. (If you know how to fix this, please tell me because every method I’ve tried hasn’t worked). This may be fixed after the credits, but I think I’m going to have to live with 99% synch and move on to Rogue. To bring up the viewpoint thing again, the viewpoints do not cover the whole map and you manually have to clear up parts of the map, which sucks. Thank god they didn’t do that again. Moving on from game play points, I’ve seen a lot of hate for Connor, which I personally don’t understand. I don’t love Connor, but I like his stoic character who showed moments of true kindness and sadness with friends and family. This review is getting to long now so I’ll just stop here and add more once I complete the game as much as I can. Also, fuck any of the naval stuff. Complete bullshit. Overall game time: First time (2013?) 41 hours and 55 minutes. Second time (2017) 38 hours and 33 minutes.

6 - Assassin’s Creed: Rogue - Well. It took me forever to finish this game, mostly because you can only play so much of the same game. So this game was nice. All of it’s little connections to III, IV and Unity is fun to see and connect the dots. Seeing Shay ultimately shaping what Unity will be was such a great thing to me. This game was such a breath of fresh air. I was sort of dreading having to do anything with ships since III is a disaster and IV had its mistakes, but I was pleasantly surprised. Except for a few ship related missions, you can almost completely avoid sailing. Of course I didn’t because I need to 100% this game. Still pissed I technically didn’t 100% III because of a god damn glitch. Naval related stuff overall was much easier than previous games, including the legendary battles. I took out the first three legendary ships in one try and took down the fourth one on my second try. I had actually planned to use a whole day to beat the legendary ships but I very happy I didn’t have to do that. The game itself is very short, with only six sequences that hold anywhere between two to five memories. That’s the shortest a game has ever been in this series. But they pad the game with millions of locations to explore and millions of collectibles to get. Even though over half of my time spent playing this game was getting collectibles, it was fun. One thing I really enjoyed was Shay’s outfits. This is the first game where I like almost all of the main character’s outfit options. I particularly enjoyed the arctic explorer outfit. I also really liked the Templar outfit you got after defeating the epic legendary ship. This was a good game and in the future, I could consider playing it again, along with II. Overall game time: 31 hours and 55 minutes.

5 - Assassin’s Creed: Brotherhood - It wasn’t a super bad game, but it was basically II with some new things and now you’re only stuck in one place. Also guild challenges. Fuck those guild challenges. ALSO. There’s that mission where you get the apple and can lay waste to the guards in your way, but it uses your health to harm them... and the optional objective is don’t lose any health. Fuck you Ubisoft. Or the mission where you destroy Leonardo’s war machines. Those sucked. The only good thing about this game is the colors you can dye your clothes. Those. Those are good. Overall game time: 35 hours and 3 minutes.

4 - Assassin’s Creed: Origins - Took me about a month and a half to complete this game. It’s very different from the previous game titles and I can definitely see why some people wouldn’t like it. I went into it knowing it would be different and I genuinely enjoyed the game. Just as a heads up, I’ve only got 97% synchronization and I’m not totally sure what will get me to 100%. There’s no definitive list of what to do to 100% the game. I’ve read from some people that you need to do all the hippodrome races and arena fights, and I’ve read from others that you don’t. I’m not going to do the races because they’re garbage and not fun. I’ve finished one of the arena’s fights and I just don’t really want to do the other so I think I’m fine sitting at 97%. Now, this game is very different from previous games. Origins is more like an rpg, but not really. There is like, a bunch more exploration areas. Maybe somewhere between 150-300? I’m bad at estimating but it is a lot. There are side quests too. There wasn’t many side quests in previous games, but including the main quests with the side quests, I did a total of 129 quests. There is a lot of gameplay and exploration. Not much of a challenge, though. If you don’t select the auto-level enemies to your level, you reach a point where you’re about 5-10 levels above the area you’re in because all the landmarks and side quests give you xp. At that point, many enemies are 1-3 shots depending on your weapon loadout. There are a couple of locations early in the game that for some reason have higher level enemies than the area calls for. For example, in Alexandria, you should be around level 12-16. Enemies will be around that same level range. Except, there is one location in the middle of Alexandria that has about 5-6 enemies that are above level 20. Now, it’s easy enough to just come back later when you are also that level, but when I was exploring the area, I had no idea they’d be that level and immediately got killed because my weapons did nothing to them. So that wasn’t fun. The game has couple more “challenging” locations if you do them at the right level. Similar to Black Flag and Rogue, Origins has some legendary battles. This time it’s elephants. The are four different elephants, and one them is actually two, like the ship battles from Black Flag and Rogue. The first couple were a bit of a challenge for me because I wasn’t the cap level and I didn’t have a strategy figured out yet. I saved the double elephants for last because I thought they’d be super hard like the double ship battle from Black Flag. However, before I fought them, I reached the level cap, upgraded my best legendary weapons, had a strategy, and also got multiple level points in skills that would boost my bow and arrow and sword damage. The double elephants actually ended up being the easiest at that point. One thing, though, was around 40-ish hours in, my game randomly lost about 7-8 hours of progress. I lost about 3 large map areas of exploration, 6 levels and 10-20 quests. It made me pretty angry and it took me a few extra days to get back to where I was before lost the progress. Aaannyyywaaayy, enough about that. Bayek is a nice character to play as. He is a serious, dedicated, loving man who can have moments of humor. I loved his relationship with his wife Aya, and I was sad to see them mutually decide to break up at the end of the game. They clearly still cared for each other even after deciding that their paths were not going the same way. Sometimes I would have a very similar mind set as Bayek and it would be pretty funny when I would make a comment and then a couple moments later he’d say something along the same line. And, of course, it was interesting to see the origin stories of The Creed of the Assassin’s. I don’t know if I’ll ever actually play this game again but I enjoyed my experience with it. Overall game time: 82 hours and 22 minutes counting the extra time that I had to make up for lost progress and 75 hours not counting the hours I got from making up the lost progress.

3 - Assassin’s Creed: Syndicate - So it’s been about five months since I finished Unity, and I actually beat this game like maybe a week before updating this. I think it’s because the game didn’t have any credits for me? I don’t know why I didn’t have credits, but I just didn’t. Anyway, wow, what a breath of fresh air, after the nightmare that was Unity. This game takes some elements I wasn’t too fond of in the previous game and improves them greatly. The fighting style of wailing on enemies until you get upgrades to one shot is easier to handle. It also looks way more fun. Evie and Jacob just move so fast when they’re throwing punches and shooting people, it doesn’t feel like I’m taking all that long to kill the baddies. The associate quests were fun and simple, they didn’t require much thought or effort. The main game was also on the simpler side compared to previous installments of this game series. Jacob and Evie were fun characters, I never really got tired of them. The main sequence memories were mostly on the short side, so the game felt like it passed in no time. The only long part was getting all the collectibles, which is unavoidable to 100% the game. All the upgrades and weapon choices were fun to choose from, and it was always cool to get a new weapon that drastically did more damage. Having a gang that slowly got better as I upgraded them, and that would back me up in fights was also super fun. There really isn’t anything that should change from this game. If I changed something, it’d probably be the romance between Evie and Henry Green, also named Jayadeep Mir. It felt kind of forced, and really, romances are always boring in Assassin’s Creed. Anyway, fun game, might play again one day. Overall game time: 37 hours and 37 minutes.

2 - Assassin’s Creed IV: Black Flag - It’s been a couple years since I’ve played this game, so it’s very possible this will bounce around in my list as I play the later games, but I remember enjoying a good part of the game. It was nice to have some variety, especially in the form of PIRATES. Some of my favorite parts were sailing to no where specific and singing shanties with my crew in my suped-up ship. Which brings me to the bad parts of the game; the ship missions. Honestly hated any story/side mission that involved my ship, especially if I had to be sneaky. I’m in a giant ass ship trying to remain in this circle filled with other giant ass ships looking for me. So yeah, fuck that part of the game. But even though it’s been awhile, I remember enjoying this game. Overall game time: 66 hours and 50 minutes.

1 - Assassin’s Creed II - Thank the gods for this game. This is a good goddamn game. Ezio is a fresh breath of air after Altair and being in Italy is honestly great. Upgrading the villa he lives in is great. Leonardo is great. Venice and it’s carnival is great. Only thing that sucked was the Ezio didn’t kill the goddamn Spaniard and then has to chase after him and his offspring in the next game. All in all, my favorite game so far. Overall game time: 28 hours and 37 minutes.

So the game(s) I need to play:

Assassin’s Creed: Valhalla

[cosmosogler]

second night of very little sleep. it had a dramatically more severe effect on my mood today than it did yesterday.

my dreams were choppy, distracted by non-sequiturs and questions i kept carrying between “scenes” as it were. around 7, i think, i woke up, and when i went back to sleep i was standing near the same people i’d been dreaming about and i asked them about something that happened in the previous dream that didn’t make sense but they didn’t know what i was talking about, as i had just arrived. it got frustrating REALLY fast.

at least they were friendly, before i lost track of them and found a bunch of assholes instead.

i was so sweaty from the lack of ventilation in the living room when i woke up that i was almost stuck to the couch through the sheet i was sleeping on. it might have been between 8:30 and 9. we figured out why eve was refusing to move. she doesn’t like wearing the neck brace at all. it’s kind of funny watching her make the angriest face i’ve ever seen on a dog without even showing any teeth.

once we took the brace off she hopped right up and went outside and then came back in and laid next to the couch to watch me sleep some more. i woke up again right at 10 and took a long shower. i just wanted to sit in the room-temperature water forever. i was really snappy at mom when i had like four things to do at once after that. i don’t regret it, because she was being dumb, but i did overreact.

doge had pooped all over my room last night. so dad left the cleaning stuff all over the floor all night and i had to vacuum it. but mom wanted me to put a bunch of stuff in my room and also to do something else but i don’t remember what. also i was starving. she wouldn’t help me find the vacuum though so i had to wait around for my brother to help me get it up the stairs when i did track it down. then when i was moving the boxes to my room one of them was slipping off the top because i was tripping over wiley, but instead of calling wiley out of my way mom decided to take the box off the top of the pile and scold me for almost dropping it. that’s when i got snippy. i thanked her for helping afterward and let her know that wasn’t sarcastic because i know how passive aggressive they all get and she acted like i had gravely insulted her anyway. so whatever.

oh yeah, first thing when i had woken up in the morning i asked mom about the car situation. mom has decided that she is going to pick up my brother’s car from the shop in the late afternoon after she gets home from work. instead of literally anyone else picking it up during the day before i would actually need it. that wasn’t the really frustrating and terrifying thing though. i accidentally called asher “asher” in front of mom. i “corrected” myself right away but i don’t like slipping up at all. not at all. she’s never heard me call anyone “asher” so i don’t know if she thinks i confused him with one of my internet friends or what. i worry.

i don’t like dropping hints about things on accident. i can’t afford to slip up around people with unpredictable hair-trigger tempers. i can’t afford to slip up around people who act like everything is fine until i’m alone in the car with them and i can’t remove myself from the situation when they decide to start shouting in my face for something i did two weeks ago.

i don’t like not being in full control of what i say and do. i don’t like being distracted. i even ran both “names” for asher through my head before saying anything and i picked the wrong one for the situation.

i don’t like being in this position. i don’t like having to lie about asher. i can only hope he doesn’t think i am ashamed of him. i am literally scared that my parents will not allow him to spend time at my house any more or allow me to use the car to visit him. i don’t mind lying to my parents at all, but i don’t like having to use incorrect information that is upsetting to my friend. i don’t care what mom thinks but i care about how asher feels about it and whether or not i can see him and i hate having to pick “talk to asher” over “asher gets to feel like a human in my house.” 

i know my fears are not unfounded, i know they’re not irrational, but still. technically right now they are just fears. i cannot prove how my parents would react, at this point in time, to asher in particular. but i’ve had worse things happen for “smaller” reasons (to my parents). but i hate having to play risk management with my friends. i hate having to pick their friendship over their comfort or happiness.

i guess that did a lot toward putting me in a bad mood first thing in the morning. probably.

did a lot of packing today. and a lot of sitting around reading. i am doing things in short bursts. i need to get more tortilla chips so i can eat the rest of the God Salsa. maybe i can do that tomorrow.

one thing i am concerned about is my ability to drive tomorrow if i get another half-night of rest. i could sleep in my bed, but i don’t want to sleep so far away from eve. trade-offs are hard to navigate when i’m so tired. i wish eve could handle stairs right now so we could get up to my room. she tried to get on the couch today and fell off and landed on her drainage tube. left a little splat of blood on the wood. 

she recovered pretty quickly. i think she was spooked though because she absolutely did not want to try to stand up. she didn’t cry until i asked her to get up and get over to her bed. she was up and about again later just fine though. apparently mike had been anticipating some falls because he did her sutures in a way that allowed for impacts without breaking or coming out.

she also tried the stairs today but only made it up three steps before she turned around and hopped back down. she tried to get up the stairs because i had been up there moving stuff around. if i try to sleep in my bed, will she try to get up the stairs again? should i put up the baby gate or something? eve would be sad. i don’t have a lot of time left with eve before i move out.

she was a lot more coordinated and adventurous today. perhaps because she’s had some practice now, but probably also because we didn’t give her the knockout painkiller. she really is in a much better mood overall though. she only growled at wiley once and that was when he was actively antagonizing her. i didn’t take him for a walk today so he was kind of restless. too busy packing kitchen stuff. mom put it off for like 12 hours so when she finally wanted to do it i had to put aside some of my scheduled things.

i am trying really hard not to let my sleeping schedule slip too much. i didn’t plan on having to set aside around 10 hours a night for “rest” but at least i am still tired at the same (early) time every night. so i can keep going to bed before 12 even if i can’t get up before 9:30. 

and i didn’t listen to more the adventure zone today but i did at least Consume New Media and for that i have to take my victories when i can get them. 

also, as a side note: i would like to never drink prune juice again. i get the feeling i’m going to have to deal with it again due to my fun gallbladder adventures though.

so. lots of things contributing to bad mood today. more than just lack of sleep. i hope that makes a difference. 

i guess not lack of sleep. i am still laying down, with my eyes closed, and interacting with some kind of unconsciousness, for approximately eight hours total. but definitely not restful, uninterrupted sleep. i am afraid to nap though. naps never lead anywhere good.

guess i’ll have to make a decision in the next ten minutes. i get the feeling that no matter which decision i make though it’s going to be the wrong one in its own special way.

[sambart93]

Hakumyu Tag Game!

From allyyyyy0619. Ever since Harada-hen many people were discussing about Hakumyu in many social medias. And I had this thought of creating a hakumyu tag game (yes it’s pretty random xD) Actually if anyone has seen something like this that has been done before pls let me know and I’ll probably just delete this xD. Alright, here are some questions and have fun! :D

1. Which musical was the first that you have watched? Your impressions on the overall production?

I’m pretty sure I went in order so the first one for me was obviously Saitou-Hen. I’ve had a strange relationship with HakuMyu. I watched Saito - Shinsengumi Kitan within the space of like two weeks so it’s all mashed together in my mind. I only just recently did a proper rewatch of the entire series where I took my time on each stage. It’s clearly obvious to see the massive production value step up they’ve had over the years. I’ve always enjoyed the songs though; the songs have always been top-notch. Naturally some dodgy casting choices also but we can forgive them because the overall product is great fun even if it’s a ‘rip out your heart and feels’ kind of fun.

2. Which musical is your favourite in terms of the song performances and why?

3. Which musical is your favourite in terms of the storyline and why?

I’m putting two and three together because it’s the same answer for me: Harada-Hen. 

Just putting it out there. I’ve only seen two HakuMyus in person (Live 2 and HaradaHen) and they are definitely my favourite two. Harada-Hen was this MASSIVE change and step up. It’s phenomenal how different the entire production is in Harada-Hen. 

Also with the previous HakuMyus I struggle to get past the half way point without wanting/needing to turn it off and take a break from it. Not because they’re boring just because I naturally can’t watch a full stage in one sitting at home. I’ve gotten into the habit of turning stages off at the half way point and leaving the rest til the next day. So I naturally get fidgety and stuff now after about an hour and I have to say that’s MY fault and just ruining my own enjoyment of stages xD I’m weird okay...

But I saw HaradaHen FOUR times (and in the flesh) and was not bored at all in fact I hated when we got to the break so it’s definitely a special HakuMyu to me/ Same with Live 2.

Also can I get the CD of all the songs from HaradaHen asap?! Seriously the songs this time around were all amazing! I easily accepted all the new songs straight away!

AND we finally got a proper happy ending in HaradaHen too so it wins int erms of story for happy endings xD

4. Which musical is your least favourite in terms of the song performances and why?

I’ve been relistening to the soundtracks constantly recently trying to figure out which are best and such, and let me tell you: the OkitaHen songs and soundtrack is SO bad! 

Usually I delete songs if I don’t like them one-by-one on my iPhone and seriously I think my OkitaHen album has only about 3 songs left in it, all the others (Hijikata-Hen, Live, Saito-Hen etc.) are still full albums on my iPhone xD just OkitaHen songs, just no.

5. Which musical is your least favourite in terms of the storyline and why?

HA this one is easy: Kazama-Hen. Without getting too hatey - Chizuru is a fucking dumb bitch iwho is responsible for everyone’s deaths and unhappiness in this one. I am never rewatching Kazama-Hen just because of how ANGRY her and her choices make me in this one.

6. The musical that you didn’t initially love, but has/have grown on you?

Pretty much all of them? First time around they were all just one big mush but rewatching them for a second time, I’ve started seeing their differences and each one’s charm. But the biggest surprise... Reimeiroku. First time around I was like ‘wtf we need this?!’ and then the second time around I got to know Serizawa more and realised he had this whole disease and stuff going on and I was immediately totally into it!

7. Original or latest casts?

LATEST! Seriously, after Harada-Hen my ranking has changed completely! Before HaradaHen I was like ‘NO ONE can surpass Shuuto as Shinpachi! NO ONE! He is perfect!’ and then I left HaradaHen and was like ‘Shuuto who? He got nothing in Fukuyama!’ xD and we all know my deep dislike for 2nd Gen Shinsengumi like Shohei and RenRen (not the actors themselves but as the HakuMyu characters). I am SO in love with Fukuyama, Tsubasa and Naya as their HakuMyu characters <3 they’re perfect.

8. Live 1 or Live 2?

LIVE 2!!!!!!!! << I’m MakiChan bias and we got to see him shirtless and it was my first HakuMyu in the flesh so yeah, LIVE 2!!!

9. Favourite actors/characters?

Do I even need to answer this?

10. Actor/actress whom you think has the best vocal skills?

Ooooh this one is a juicy question... I’ve actually enjoyed Kikuchi Mika, Fujikoso Yumi and Isobe Karin as Chizuru, but the best...

Actor would be naturally either Yazaki or Shougo

Actress would be... I’m going to stay bias and say Karin <3 I freaking love her and her arrangement was a little different to previous Myus too which was interesting. After Karin then Yumi me thinks.

11. Actor/actress whom you think did the best in bringing out the character into life

Oh jesus this one is hard... The actor who straight away nailed their character I think is Fukuyama Shoudai and Ikeda Junya. Everyone else seemed to take about 2 or 3 Myus to really understand their character. MakiChan is almost there, Gaku finally got it down this time around. Even Yazakai and Shougo took a few Myus to get their characters just right also.

12. HIjikata,Souji,Saito or Harada,Shinpachi,Heisuke?

This is interesting... I’m going to the San Bakas just because my deep deep hate for Hijikata is never going to go, sorry Okita xD -- Yes, I HATE Hijikata! Always have, always will! Come at me!

13. Favourite minor character?

What do we class as Minor? DOES YAMAZAKI COUNT?! IF SO THEN:

YAAAMMMMAAAAZZZAAAKKKIII!!!!

14. Favourite Shinsengumi member?

As in character or actor bias?

Character: Yamazaki. FOR-E-VA!

Actor Bias: MakiChan as Okita <3 and Fukuyama as Shinpachi <3

15. Favourite demon character?

Shi

Ra

Nu

I!

16. Favourite Chizuru?

I already answered this: Karin

17. The actors/characters that you didn’t initially love, but has/have grown on you?

Fukuyama Shoudai and Kizu Tsubasa. I had like NO opinion of them after and during Live 2 but thanks to the DVD release event and HaradaHen, I am so in love with them as their characters!

18. Least favourite actors/characters? Why?

I already mentioned this too: Second Gen Saito and Heisuke. Shohei and RenRen are perfectly fine actors, but they were just NOT suitable for these roles and characters. Espceially when you compare them to Ryo, Naya, Ikeda and Tsubasa. AND we can all agree was Hide’s Hijikata was a mistake too, right?

19. Favourite solo song?

PAINT IT BLOOD!!

20. Favourite duet?

This is hard... Okita x Saito? I think it’s called We are the power or something?

21. Favourite group song?

The new group song from HaradaHen - I don’t know the title. They sing it twice in Part One though. And Kinniku Love will always be in my heart.

22. Which Yaisa! is the best?

I’m so confused as to what this means... Do you mean the opening or the ending song? All Yaisas are amazing.

23. The songs that you didn’t initially love, but has/have grown on you?

Chizuru’s Yoiyami no Machi -- I am so in love with this son! Any time it comes on I try my bloody hardest to sing it even though I’m tone deaf xD

Kazama’s Itsuka Makotoni is a great song too! I didn’t like it so much at first but I love the Hijikata version with Chizuru’s screaming and shouting in it xD

Also the new Eating song from Shinsengumi Kitan I HATED at first but now I love doing the little dance bob along with the cast and stuff. It’s no drinking song or kinniku love but it’s fun xD

24. Which production are you most looking forward to?

One where Yamazaki doesn’t die xD

Also I really want Yamazaki-Hen and Shinpachi-Hen SO LONG as TakaChan and Shoudai are the leads.

25. What does Hakumyu means to you?

Oh this is difficult. I haven’t even been in this fandom one year yet! I guess I’m only just starting to figure out what HakuMyu is to me. I mean it has things I love: It’s a musical, it has some of my (now) fav actors in, it’s got demons, it has both amazing feelings and also rip your heart out feelings. I think the main charm of HakuMyu is that although it’s technically an awful story, they make it fun and enjoyable and you enjoy going through that pain with the characters and every time the stages are a little different and the songs (we all know) are amazing. But yeah.. I’m still figuring out what it means to me. Definitely HaradaHen 10000% captured the real and true heart of Hakuouki for me personally.

I personally tag @coffee-scramble and @masayume85

Alright! I’m Done!

[dorothydelgadillo]

"Building a Personal Brand Ft. Dennis Yu of BlitzMetrics" (Inbound Success Ep. 87)

There's a lot of hype about what it means to build a personal brand, but in reality there are a few simple things that anyone can do to establish themselves as an expert in their space.

Dennis Yu

This week on The Inbound Success Podcast, BlitzMetrics CEO Dennis Yu shares the simple process he says anyone - from successful CEOs to younger professionals just getting started in their careers - build a strong personal brand.

Dennis is a master at building easy-to-follow, repeatable processes, and his approach to personal branding is no different. In our conversation, he breaks it down in a way that anyone, regardless of their marketing or technical skills, can follow.

This week's episode of The Inbound Success Podcast is brought to you by our sponsor, IMPACT Live,  the most immersive and high energy learning experience for marketers and business leaders. IMPACT Live takes place August 6-7, 2019 in Hartford Connecticut and is headlined by Marcus Sheridan along with special guests including world-renowned Facebook marketing expert Mari Smith and Drift CEO and Co-Founder David Cancel. Inbound Success Podcast listeners can save 10% off the price of tickets with the code "SUCCESS". 

Click here to learn more or purchase tickets for IMPACT Live

Some highlights from my conversation with Dennis include:

Personal branding is really just a sum of stories that you collect that you sequence together.

Four or five years from now, personal branding won't be a thing because it's just what we do as part of communicating, as part of marketing, as part of growing, as part of operating.

Dennis's approach to building personal brand involves the creation of a series of one-minute videos that are lightly edited in tools like Apple Clips and sometimes in Premier or Lightweight Aftereffects or other tools so that they can be distributed then on LinkedIn, on the blog, on Facebook, on Twitter.

Michael Stelzner of Social Media Examiner is a great example of someone with a strong personal brand because he obsesses about creating content to answer peoples' questions and solve their problems - but he's also an influencer because doing this has built a very large audience. 

The secret to creating effective one-minute videos is to share stories that are empathetic, that are educational, and that bring people along in a sequence towards an overall mission that anchors your personal brand.

When Dennis works with clients to create a personal branding strategy, he starts by building what he calls a "Topic Wheel."

Then, he identifies experts in those topics and does one-minute videos with them. The videos aren't about him - they are about the people he is interviewing, who are all recognized experts.

The Topic Wheel has three rings - why, how and what. Why is your mission, how is how you do things (educational content), and what is your offers. This is very much like a circular sales funnel.

The outside layer of the Topic Wheel - the why - is personal branding.

There are many tools that you can use to create one-minute videos, from Apple Clips to the Adobe Suite, regardless of your skill level with video.

Once you've created your video, think about all the different ways you can reuse or repurpose your video, and distribute it out across a variety of platforms.

Resources from this episode:

Save 10% off the price of tickets to IMPACT Live with promo code "SUCCESS"

Visit the BlitzMetrics website

Visit Dennis's personal website

Connect with Dennis on LinkedIn

Listen to the podcast to learn more about the exact formula Dennis uses to help his clients build their personal brands.

Transcript

Kathleen Booth (Host): Welcome back to the Inbound Success Podcast. Welcome back to the Inbound Success Podcast, my name is Kathleen Booth and I am your host. This week, my guest is Dennis Yu, who is the Chief Executive Officer of BlitzMetrics and the author of Facebook Nation and, and, and I could list so many other things. Conference keynote speaker, expert on personal branding, Facebook, et cetera. Dennis Yu (Guest): Kathleen, you're too kind.

Dennis and Kathleen having a blast recording this episode

Kathleen: I was so impressed reading everything that you've done, when I saw your bio. I was really excited that I got to meet you in person a few weeks ago at DigitalMarketer, so thank you for joining me for the podcast.

Dennis: Thank you.

Kathleen: Before we start, I have a really important question. I was reading your bio and I saw that you have run 20 marathons, but you have run a 70 mile Ultra. What were you thinking?

Dennis: I know, what was I thinking? It's my first one and my last one. I said to myself after running all these marathons because you know the thing is, it's a slippery slope because you run one and then you do more and then people are like, "Oh, you should run this Ultra marathon because you're gonna have this spiritual experience." I thought, all right I'm up for that and I ran a 70 mile race. It took me 12 hours. I set the course record. It was just outside of Microsoft's headquarters and when I finished, it was so bad that I had to be put in a wheelchair and wheeled to my gate at SeaTac airport because my legs were so stiff.

Kathleen: Oh my God, I was gonna say, when people talk about spiritual experiences, all I can think about is when you're dying and you see the light.

Dennis: Yeah. I didn't get a spiritual experience, I got a lot of pain. Maybe I didn't see past the pain, who knows? Maybe I needed to run 100 miles. Maybe that's what it needs to be.

Kathleen: Oh my God, I am so impressed because you talk about how people run marathons and then they wanna run more. I ran one and only marathon the year I turned 40.

Dennis: That's smart.

Kathleen: I was like, I better do it now or it's never gonna happen. It's a good thing I did it because after that, I was like, no way, I'm too old for this. I'm glad I did it and I checked the box. That's awesome that you did that.

Building A Personal Brand

One of the reasons I was excited to have you on the podcast is that as part of the presentation you gave at DigitalMarketer's Agency Training Day, you touched on some of the work that you do building personal brands. You actually have a really cool process behind this. I think a lot of people talk about personal branding, but I've never heard anybody actually express it almost as a definable process. So I just want to dig into that and learn more about it and hopefully come away with an idea for people who are listening who might be interested in building their own personal brand, what goes into that?

Dennis: Yeah, a lot of people think personal branding is this Tony Robbins, keynote speaking, motivational figure head who's doing the private jet and mansion lifestyle.

I think personal branding is really just a sum of stories that you collect that you sequence together. If you're an agency, if you're an entrepreneur, it's not that you're showing only these highlight moments of the figurehead.

It's the sum of what your people are doing, of your customers, of anyone that you engage with, someone you just had lunch with and they said something that's interesting and you pull out your cell phone, you say, "Kathleen, wow. That was so awesome. Can you just repeat that again? I want to share that on social." So you need a process to do that.

So we're here in Miami and the last couple of days, we've been capturing one-minute videos for a fintech company that provides loans to small businesses. The kind of marketing they were doing is the kind of stuff that you'd expect that they would do.

We go the CEO on camera. Literally, I was holding an iPhone and I was recording the CEO, asking him, "What's your favorite restaurant here in Miami? Tell me about your parents and the kind of business that they started and how that influenced you to run this particular kind of company. Tell me about what kinds of things stress you out at night."

Then we drove to different small businesses, one is a pet store, another one is a food truck, another one is a computer repair place in the strip mall, and we interviewed these people, asking them about their why, how, what. Then I would put all of that in the bucket of personal branding.

In fact, you know how a lot of people are talking about influencer marketing, content marketing, social media marketing? Now, those things have expanded to be so big that they mean nothing. It's just like digital marketing has expanded to be so big that you really can't define it anymore. Just like the phone was 50 or 60 years ago, or the internet was 20 years ago. It started off as this niche thing that people were specialists in and once it becomes so big, you can't really define it.

I think personal branding is in that teenager stage where now everyone wants to do personal brand until the stage where, four or five years from now, personal branding won't be a thing because it's just what we do as part of communicating, as part of marketing, as part of growing, as part of operating. Because we see that's where things are going.

We have everything we do, from a client standpoint or from our own internal operations or how we train people, encapsulated as one-minute videos.

Everything's a one-minute video. For example, one of our guys this morning recorded a one-minute video on how to quickly see all of your tasks inside of Basecamp. In one minute, he said "Literally, did you know if you press control K plus whatever, it immediately shows you this screen with all of your tasks of the day and your schedule?" I'm like, "Pssh, I didn't know that." Or a one-minute video about this restaurant that's two blocks around the corner and how awesome it is. That's cool, that's very specific.

Personal branding isn't this, I aspire to climb Mount Everest or I want to live a life of riches and make six figures every month. It's individual stories of other people, and thus our approach, which I think you find interesting and other people do too, is that we have a particular process on how we collect one-minute videos. It has to be particular because all of our work is being done by young adults.

So these are 22, 23-year-old kids, if you will. I'm over 40, so I know younger than 40 is a kid. They go through our training. Maybe they served four years in the military and now they need a job and they wanna be able to make 35 thousand dollars a year, whatever they were making before, right, because they have a kid now or whatever it might be.

We have everything check listed out, it's not that it's about personal branding, it's that the collection of one-minute videos. So instead of saying personal branding, I'll say the collection of one-minute videos are lightly edited in tools like Apple Clips and sometimes in Premier or Lightweight Aftereffects or other tools so that we can distribute then on LinkedIn, on the blog, on Facebook, on Twitter. Then amplify them for a dollar a day to be able to drive views, leads, and sales. That is mechanically what we do.

It's not about me trying to motivate other people. We have a number of high profile personal brands like entrepreneurs that are billionaires. We have some of these guys as clients and boy, it's very shiny. But that is not what personal branding will be in five years from now.

It'll be so defacto that anyone who's doing any kind of marketing, by definition will be doing personal branding and social media and SEO and all of that, not as separate functions, but they're all now the same thing actually.

Personal Branding v. Influencer Marketing

Kathleen: Yeah, it's very interesting. I have so many questions for you from what you just said.

The first thing that comes to my mind is it's fascinating to me to have this conversation at this time because you use the word influencer earlier. There is this really interesting evolution of what it means to be an influencer now, especially with people from younger generations who grew up with Instagram and Snapchat and Facebook. They're very comfortable being in front of an audience and being very personal. Their definition of privacy, I think, is different than other generations.

So I guess my first question is really, how do you draw the line between influencer and personal brand?

Dennis: I don't like the word influencer because it's got that taint, look at me, I'm an influencer. You might as well replace that word for thinker. Oh I'm a thinker. I guess you're not allowed to think, Kathleen, because I'm a thinker. I'm an influencer and you're not. I even wrote an article on Influencive, which is the site for people to talk about being an influencer. The title of the article was Why I Am Not an Influencer. I think it got 23 thousand shares.

Kathleen: It's like a dirty word now, especially after the Fyre Festival.

Dennis: I tagged Michael Stelzner, who is one of my mentors. He is the guy in social media marketing. He runs social media marketing world, he's the founder of Social Media Examiner, he's got the biggest blog, biggest conference, makes the most money, has the biggest audience of anybody in the world of social media marketing.

He told me how he was not an influencer and really he was a servant leader and how he does everything to take care of his team. I thought, wow, he is the exact opposite of all these people that are beating their chest. Look at me, look at me, look at me, it's all about me.

Yeah, I would define him as an influencer because he influences the behavior of other people. He has the biggest audience, so by definition he's an influencer because he has the best education. His approach has been to be an influencer in the world of social media marketing to actively do research and find out every day, what are the things that people are searching for? What do they care about? He is so scientifically in tune with the data of what an audience wants that that's how he was able to grow Social Media Examiner to getting millions of visits per month on the site.

There are a lot of people that are social media consultants, there are a lot of people that have a blog, lot of people with podcasts. We had an episode on his podcast, I think it was ... what was it called? He even chose the title because he knows what people want, so he came up with the title, What Marketers Really Need to Know About the Facebook Algorithm. The thing got 50 thousand downloads in the first month. I thought, holy moly. Mike and I chatted for half an hour and he got 50 thousand downloads. People are wondering, wow this guy is so big, will he interview me? I hope I'm next. Oh, will he let me speak in the Social Media Marketing World? That's what all of the moths are doing when they come to the flame.

I ask him, because we spent the day together after Social Media Marketing World? After all that kind of stuff, he and I just hung out. I said, what question do people not ask you? He said, "They don't ask me how I was able to grow Social Media Examiner from nothing to the largest property in this space. The answer is because I use the data and I create content that satisfies that because I look at what the search engine queries are." 2% of his traffic comes to the homepage for Social Media Examiner.

Kathleen: Yeah.

Dennis: The other 98% is on every little micro-topic like why is my Facebook ad disapproved or how do I make a video or how do I use my Google Analytics and what's a good bounce rate? Those micro, micro moments. I define him as an influencer because it's not the tip of the iceberg of him speaking on stage in front of seven thousand people. It's his conference, so he can do that. It's the stuff beneath the water in the iceberg of lots and lots and lots of little stories and his process.

Where he and I have massive alignment is we have deep process. The way he runs that conference that has seven thousand people, the way he organizes volunteers, how he trains them, how they come in a few days before, how they line up and they wear name tags and they know exactly what to do. Every single part of the process. You guys run and event, so you know what I'm talking about. The level of detail that's required.

Can you imagine being a conference organizer? If you were to approach influencer marketing or personal branding the same way that you run a hospital where there's lots of processes and there's lots of detail. I think personal branding and this influencer marketing thing will have to evolve from witchcraft and Ouija boards and voodoo dolls to actual established processes for how you become a doctor, anything that requires an actual process like running a factory.

I believe that's where we'll be in five years, but right now, people can get away with nonsense because there's not a lot of accountability. So it's easy to say, oh personal branding, well what the hell does that mean, right? You can't say hell, that's not good. What the heck does that mean?

Kathleen: You can say hell on this podcast.

Dennis: All right.

Kathleen: Yeah, there's a lot of throw it at the wall and see what sticks. This is the sense that I get, then there's also a lot of copycat like oh, I see so and so doing this and it seems to be working, so I'm just gonna do that because that must be what works, because it worked for them, right?

Dennis: Yep.

Kathleen: I think in some cases that can work. Somebody might have stumbled upon a good tactic, but I think the thing that I've at least observed with people who talk about wanting to build their personal brand but then they don't really do it is they don't have a plan. Therefore, they're not consistent with what they do, so there's a lack of follow through. There's a lot of one off, here and there things, and ultimately that prevents them from getting traction which is why I thought your approach was so interesting to create the process because when you have the plan, you at least have something to follow. Then you know if you're on track or off track.

Dennis: Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Kathleen: I was gonna say, you mentioned in the beginning, meeting with the CEO of the fintech company and getting him to do one-minute videos. I'm really curious to know if you find any sort of, again going back to the idea of a generational divide, is there any kind of reticence, especially amongst the more established business leaders you work with, to get as personal as you're looking for them to get?

One Minute Videos

Dennis: Yes and no, because if you broad brush with the stereotype and you say, "Oh, those people under 30, they were born with a phone glued to their hand and Snapchat and all that." Actually they're digital nomads or whatever you want to call them. I don't think that's necessarily true. At the 40 thousand foot level, yes.

Three days ago I was in Denver and I was with the CEO of a new company, it's my buddy Mark Karloff, he does MNA and buys himself billion dollar companies. I wanna say he's 56 or something like that. I said, "Mark, for your company, we're gonna have to make these one-minute videos to help explain what it does."

It's the Hoover for law firms to be able to serve, it's called Proof Serve, you have to serve people documents, right? That's what happens in the world of the lawsuits, right? A lot of law firms have to do the serving in different states. He wanted to get more law firms to enroll and I said, "Well, you need to collect one-minute videos of the paralegals and what they do day to day because they're the ones who are choosing who's serving. You need to talk to the different people that are doing the serving so that you know that they are legit and not these crazy people that just signed up. You're trusting them to deliver your documents for you. It's an important case, you can't afford these documents to get lost."

Collect one-minute videos so that people can see how real it is, so they can see that there are other personal injury attorneys that are doing the exact same thing, that they trust in their neighborhood, to collect at it's scale across all of the hundreds of customers that he has. Because other than that, what would you do? You'd create a glossy commercial or you're do a website. You'd sign up for InfusionSoft or there's all these marketing technology, but those are all ways that I believe people who, whether they're old or young, they try to hide behind the technology instead of connecting with people directly. I don't think that's an old or a young thing. Are people willing to connect at a human level to show empathy because they really care about their employees, because they really care about their customer?

I think that you have a spectrum where the people who are 40 plus are actually more likely to really care because they're more likely to be more mature, they have more business experience, but maybe they don't understand exactly the mechanics of having to press record. The young people, maybe they make more video, but they are less likely to make video that is uplifting other people, that is sharing deep knowledge based on experience. If you're over 40, like you and me, you're gonna have a lot of stories. We have a lot of experiences to share and it's not just take a look at this food that I'm having, that I'm at the beach. Two days ago I stayed in this penthouse in Miami downtown on the 50th floor. I made some videos from the top.

If I was a 20-year-old, I would more likely make videos showing how amazing this penthouse is. But instead, I made videos showing how this looks glamorous, doesn't it? Look at this view, all the way out to the ocean, there's South Beach, and there's downtown. Do you know this is an Airbnb that I paid $200.00 a night for and it's paid for by the client? Did you know that I flew here on Southwest airlines and I sat in the middle seat for four and a half hours all the way from Phoenix? I didn't tell you that, did I? Do you wanna know what it's really like? Do you wanna know some of the things that I struggle with in growing my company? That's exactly the opposite of what you'd expect of someone who's out on a balcony and overlooking the ocean in a penthouse at the 50th floor, right?

Kathleen: Yeah. Yeah, that's so much more real.

Dennis: [crosstalk] between older versus younger, it's not that the younger people are more willing to make video. It's who can share stories that are empathetic, that are educational, and that bring people along in a sequence towards an overall mission that anchors your personal brand.

So anyone who's going into personal branding and I have to ask them, "Do you have a mission that's bigger than you, that's authentic? Not just because you want to help the world in some vague way, but you want to help small businesses save on their tax bill. You want to help local university students overcome crack addictions because their parents left them."

It doesn't have to be some Mother Theresa kind of thing. We all have some kind of bigger thing that we're doing, like us, we're training up young adults. A lot of them that maybe they didn't go to college, where they just graduated from high school or that they came out of the military and they just had a kid that popped out and now they have to work. They're not trying to be a CEO, they're just trying to pay the bills, right?

When you tie your mission to that, it's a lot easier to then build a sequence. If the personal brand is just look at me and my food, it's pretty shallow because you can't build a whole story around it, you can't get all these other people around it, you can't build the infrastructure that's necessary, what we call the topic wheel.

What you saw when we were DM in Austin, we explained the structure of the topic wheel, about what anchors your brand are all the different topics and the topics move out to the individual stories of all the people you're connected to.

Start With Your Mission (and Build a Topic Wheel)

Kathleen: That's fascinating. So I love the idea of starting, if somebody's thinking they want to build their personal brand, of starting with figuring out what your mission is.

Once someone has been able to successfully identify that, you talk about the topic wheel, the question I think people listening probably have is then, are all my videos about this mission or is it just a certain percentage? How does that fit in to this topic wheel?

Dennis: The topic wheel allows us to all be humans, because there's something that you might do to make money, but you also might like to boogie board at the beach, you might also like Italian food, you might also have a parent who is disabled, you might also have a particular hobby, right? We start the topic wheel with six topics, we call this why, how, and what.

So on the outside, we have different people that are telling stories around six particular topics. One of my topics is education, so Doctor Karen [Freeburg] is one of the people in my topic wheel because she is authoritative on education and we have lots of stories around that, we made one-minute videos around that. There's other people in education that are part of that particular topic.

Another topic of mine is digital marketing and I'll put in people like Ryan Deiss because he's authoritative in the world of digital marketing and I've got plenty of interviews with him, where we've made one-minute videos where I'm not trying to get him to talk with things about me, although he has, but I'm interviewing him like a journalist. It's not about me, but it's about his knowledge and his experience, and I'm making it about him. Maybe I'm interviewing Tony Robbins or maybe I'm on CNN talking about the Facebook controversy or whatever it might be.

Those are all different topics that are not to show that I am an awesome person or famous, but to precede the authority because I am spending time with people that other people recognize are legit in that space.

When I make one-minute videos with these people and I boost it out there on Facebook and LinkedIn and YouTube and all this, that allows me to re-market for my topic, all the way into my product which is when I can sell courses on digital marketing, I can sell packages on implementing the things we talk about.

The idea of why, how, and what is, why is your story, it's your passion, it's a particular moment in time. It could be when I was 18, I dropped out of high school and I wanted to be a professional athlete working for Nike.

True story and I have a one-minute story talking about that and how eventually, they didn't except me, but then we got Nike later as a client to do digital advertising for them and how I learned that what the 18-year-old Dennis thought Nike would be like versus the 40-year-old Dennis was completely different. That Nike was this big corporate and it wouldn't have worked out for me as an athlete because it's long travel on the road. I guess I do a lot of travel on the road, but if your career only lasts a couple years as a pro athlete versus a 20 year career as a digital marketer.

So those stories, the why stories are the outside ring of the topic wheel.

Then move to the middle ring, which is how. Expertise, tips, how to do stuff, checklists, right? Remember, Kathleen, you saw all these checklists that we were showing, like how do you [crosstalk] manager? How do you get a drive in golf down the middle of the fairway or how do you tie your shoes with one hand or how do you juggle the ball? How do you do all the things that you know how to do, especially when you interview these other people who are experts. They've got tons of how do you do a very specific thing, right? So you're marketing from the outside of very specific stories. Not just, oh I was once really sad and now I'm successful, but specific things that had happened, specific moments in time where you point the camera, you can follow the scene of what happened, right?

The beauty of the Pixar is that they focus on specific scenes. So the why we market to the specific scenes of the how, which are specific, let me show you how to do something very useful, like a recipe. Let me show you how to make my brand of chocolate chip cookies with macadamia nuts. I really like macadamia nuts.

Kathleen: That sounds so good.

Dennis: I know a lot, for example, about how to make a perfect batch of popcorn. I have a movie theater popcorn maker in my kitchen.

Kathleen: That is so cool!

Dennis: Do you ever walk to the movie theater and you're like, "Mm." You're almost willing to watch a bad movie just to eat the popcorn, or no?

Kathleen: I, 100%, think that popcorn is the highlight of the movie. Then, so I have to ask you one important question then, this is a slight digression, but are you an add the butter oil to your popcorn person or are you a eat it as it comes out of the maker person?

Dennis: Yes. Whenever people ask an either or question like do you want to eat the fish or do you wanna eat the burger? Yes.

Kathleen: Yeah, I like adding the extra butter, myself.

Dennis: Yeah, I add the extra butter to the popper, then when it comes out, I actually have the movie theater quality bags, right? I wanna simulate the whole experience. I've got a butter pump and I'll pump the butter in there too, on top of that.

Kathleen: Dennis, you're a man after my own heart. I'm all about the extra butter. Gotta do it.

Dennis: See? So then when we get together, maybe just outside of Baltimore, we can make some popcorn together. I'll ship you a popcorn maker, you'll see what I'm talking about. I'll show you how to do popcorn the way Dennis likes to do popcorn.

Kathleen: I love it. I love it. Send me that one-minute video.

Dennis: I'm gonna make a one-minute video, yeah. Yeah, and then we're sharing expertise on how is this different than microwave popcorn, which is garbage.

Kathleen: Yes. 100%.

Dennis: Yes, very different, and how movie theater popcorn tastes so good because it has coconut oil, did you know that?

Kathleen: I did not know that. That's interesting.

Dennis: If you try to use olive oil or butter, the flashpoint is so low that you burn it and that's why movie theater popcorn can go so high because coconut oil has a really high flashpoint.

Kathleen: Oh, interesting.

Dennis: We could make several one-minute videos about microwave popcorn and then you'd come away from that thinking, wow, that's really cool, I didn't know that. So I'm sharing how.

Then I get specific again, into the very center of the onion tootsie roll, multi-layer thing, into the what, which is how you sell. See, conversion is about ... We all understand conversion, buy my stuff, it's on sale. The thing ends on Friday, it's got these many features, it's better than the competitor, fear, uncertainty, and doubt. There's only a limited quantity, but all these different ways of trying to get people to buy, right?

All the things that you say, features versus benefits. That is the what.

Everyone understands what. The trouble is when they get to marketing, they're so eager they can't help themselves. When they're supposed to be making why content, they somehow end up selling it again and they pollute the whole thing. It's like mixing chocolate milk and Coke together. I like both of them, but I'm not going to drink them in the same can. It's nasty, right? Or we ask them to, let's make a series of how videos. So around your product or service, maybe you're an agency, you wanna get more clients, you do additional marketing. Okay, talk about how you set up PBC Canvas. Talk about how you optimize, talk about how, but do not ... Resist the urge to start selling because that's the what.

So if you keep these things separate from the why to the how to the what, then you actually have a funnel, which is a circular funnel. That's the topic wheel, it's every day content meaning you don't have to keep replacing it. It doesn't go stale. I believe if you do it right, from the very outside are all these people that you're interviewing. That's personal branding. The outside layer of your topic wheel is personal branding.

Personal branding is not some separate thing about ... I was thinking, it would be fun Kathleen, we could rent a Lamborghini, how about? You and I, we could rent a Lamborghini for one day and just make all kinds of silly videos and drive around real slow.

Kathleen: That's like Jerry Seinfeld's Comedians and Cars Drinking Coffee. That's what he does. He does a different car each time and they just drive around and talk. He has a whole show that is just that. I love it.

Dennis: Yeah, this is my garage. There's many ways of doing it.

Kathleen: Yeah.

Dennis: But that's the superficial kind of personal branding. That's look at me and look at my lifestyle. If you have actual depth, if you have a structure, you have a process, then you're gonna build the topic wheel because it's the personalities that are the outside that are sharing knowledge, that are organized by topic. The topics then go to the very center, which is your company, your figurehead, the product you sell, whatever it is that you're trying to monetize. When you link why to how to what, you use the what to fund all the why and the how, so it's a self-funding funnel. Because all the people that do personal branding, guess what? It costs money, just like SEO costs money. It costs money to produce video, it costs money to edit, it costs money to put traffic against it, right? So what's gonna pay for that?

Kathleen: Right.

Dennis: Are you just gonna spend money for the heck of it?

Kathleen: Yeah, exactly.

Dennis: I don't see ROI off of this. I ask any of these people to do personal branding and they can't answer this question. I say, "What's the ROI of your personal branding?" They can't answer the question. Why not?

Kathleen: That's a great point. Now, that was a really fantastic explanation of the topic wheel. I think that gives everybody a very clear framework, at least, within which to begin to break down what are they gonna talk about on video.

How To Create Your Videos

Kathleen: So I feel like there's, what am I gonna talk about? Then there's making the video, and then there's distributing the video. So let's talk for a second about making it. Earlier, you mentioned a couple of different tools and my ears perked up because I started to experiment with making videos and I'm gonna just say, I am the least technically competent individual on the planet when it comes to video, but I discovered one of the tools you mentioned, which is Apple Clips. I think it is the best thing since ... I was gonna say since sliced bread, but I don't actually like sliced bread, so I think it might be better than sliced bread. It is the greatest thing ever. I'm wondering if you could talk a little bit more about the types of tools that the average person out there can use to do this and produce a decent looking video.

Dennis: So, there are 30 different tools that we use.

Kathleen: Wow.

Dennis: But that's a mix. We organize them into people that are just everyday people like you and me. Intermediate folks that are specialists that have maybe a year or two of training. Then we have our pro level, the full Adobe Suite, where you're doing things in Premier and Aftereffects. That's pro. I don't think any of us, unless that's what we do for a living, we have 10 people full-time as pro video editors. They are doing things according to standards that we have. But should you and I be learning how to do that? No.

Kathleen: No.

Dennis: You and I should be learning how to use Apple Clips and Otter.ai and the different video tools built into Facebook ads manager, through transcription. We should be pushing things out to fancy hands and Fiver for lightweight editing. Some of the editing that you can do, for example, Apple Clips allows you to transcribe live and it's pretty accurate.

Kathleen: I did that last week and it blew my mind. Then I didn't realize you could also go in and edit it's live transcription so that if it messes something up, you can correct it. It was so easy.

Dennis: There are apps that are built into Snapchat and Instagram and Facebook has 10 different tools that are part of Facebook Mobile Data Studio that allow for editing for free. Adobe has Adobe Express. There's lot of these tools and every day, I get three or four more tools that people say, "Hey, try this editing tool. On your app, it'll add these really cool filters." I even bought a ton of apps on my phone that will add motion, that will add just super cool effects, that you can lose hours of your day downloading dozens of these different apps that do different kinds of things. I would say just use Apple Clips and one or two other ones, and not-

Kathleen: I think that's great advice. I may or may not have spent six hours last week downloading apps and doing exactly what you just described. Then I discovered Apple Clips and that rabbit hole ended.

Dennis: A lot of folks, I know will say, well I'm not a video person. They're secretly afraid of all these tools, like I don't really have time to learn all these different tools. You know what? You have something called an iPhone in your pocket, okay? When you hit video and you hit the red circle to record video, that camera is so smart. The way it does multi point filtering and focusing and light, that if you literally do that and you have decent sound and you don't point it directly into the sun, then you will get good enough video that you can pay $5.00 or $10.00 that someone who's a pro can do the editing for you. I've learned this the hard way because I've probably spent 100 hours, 200 hours of my time playing with all these different apps and figuring out exactly which effects I like from which app. That's a waste of your time.

With that said, Apple Clips, Otter.ai, the native tools inside Instagram and inside Facebook Ads Manager, that's all you need to know. The pro stuff, for example, at TNC, I flew in one of my friends from Facebook to speak. Same thing at Social Media Marketing World, I brought three other people to speak at the conference. I had professional videographers that I flew in that recorded on expensive equipment, everything miced up properly, everything sent off to our VAs in the Philippines, that do the video editing. So we do understand the pro side, but you gotta know when you're doing a lightweight video that's just walking along do a cell phone style video at the beach reflecting on some thought that you had, versus on stage, speaker reel, high authority, in front of 10 thousand people giving a keynote address. You're not always using one tool. Sometimes you need a butter knife and sometimes you need a chainsaw.

Kathleen: Yeah, that makes sense. I love that you just mentioned all those specific tools because I'm totally gonna go out right after this and check them out.

Dennis: We have a guide, I'll give it to you.

Kathleen: That's great. Oh yeah, a link to it in the show notes.

Dennis: All the cool videos and then how they fit into our process. Just because you can use a tool, doesn't mean it's worth anything because you've gotta figure out how it fits into a process with all the other tools and who does what because it's unlikely that one person knows how to do everything. So then take the finished video and turn it into an ad and write copy against it in a headline and to be able to look at the performance of it and to be able to go back and re-shoot. Usually whoever is the one recording the video is not the one who's editing the video. So that requires a process step. Anytime something's gotta move between different people, it requires a process step, right?

How to Promote and Distribute Your Videos

Kathleen: Yeah. Now assuming people figure out a way to get these videos made, whether they make them themselves or they get help, they're gonna wind up with all of these one-minute videos. How do you then ... What is your process then for getting them in front of an audience because obviously that's the objective? If the tree falls in the forest and there's no one there to hear it, it doesn't matter. So can you talk a little bit about that?

Dennis: So once we've gone through video production, which could be as simple as me doing a video on my iPhone and automatically saves to my Google Drive. By the way, that's my little secret, everything goes to my Google Drive. I also have Dropbox and I have the Apple, whatever that's called, the iCloud. I have everything saved multiple places because I'm paranoid about losing it. Whether it's as simple as that or whether it goes through complex editing because it's speaker footage from multiple cameras, like a professional interview. We then distribute that in multiple formats. We take the long format, so it could be a 40 minute interview, and we'll put that in landscape format on YouTube on a channel.

Our buddy, Matthew Januszek, who is the CEO of Escape Fitness, he's interviewed all the top names in the world of fitness. It could be Arnold Schwarzenegger, Lee Haney, the CEOs of 24 Hour Fitness and Lifetime Fitness. All the people because he's the guy. He does professional interviews. So the full length episodes, we'll show on YouTube. Then, we take one-minute snippets that are square, just the highlights, think of it as like movie trailer compared to the movie. The trailer's only a minute, it shows you all the big explosions, all the big scenes, but you don't really get the whole story, just enough to tease you, right? You know, movie trailers.

Kathleen: Yeah.

Dennis: Then we put the movie trailer on Facebook and we boost those through video views to build re-marketing audiences, to then sequence them to other pieces within the topic wheel. We take vertical, 15 second commercials, and we put those on Instagram as stories. We take the same one-minute videos that I mentioned on Facebook and we post those to Twitter and we can promote those posts. We have an annual bid at three cents of engagement, we never select Twitter's automatic thing because they'll bid it to $2.00 and spend all your money. We also will post it organically to LinkedIn, to our profiles. That way, you can create one piece of content, chop it up into 30 or 40 other little pieces of content and be able to use it across all your different channels and obtain multiple, multiple value.

Gary Vaynerchuk posted something on LinkedIn a week ago, showing how he does that in his content pyramid. It's the same thing that a lot of us that are prolific agencies do on behalf of our clients because often you can't get the client to do this everyday. If you put it as part of their process and teach their support people, every time they repair that HVAC and get the customer right there, saying, "Oh, how is it?" That's obviously the best time. Wedding photographers, get them right then when they're happy, when they just got married, don't try to get the feedback two weeks later and get their review later. Try to get it right then. If you can't build it into the process, then you have to collect it every three months or every six months and you try to collect it all at once, with multiple people and you can chop it up.

The odds are, it may be, Kathleen, you and I were expert interviewers but we're not going to be able to get 60 minutes of quality content because it takes 15 minutes to warm up. In the middle, they'll say some things that are good, but are you gonna force someone to sit through a 60 minute video to be able to catch those pieces in the middle? No, you pull those out and use those as carrots.

Kathleen: Yeah. Now, how often should somebody be posting these videos?

Dennis: As often as you have good content. So I think of Facebook, you can get away with once per day, maybe twice per day. If you're in news and media, sports media, you can do maybe six, seven times per day. The Washington Post and some of these other local news guys will do 40 times per day, local sites, 20, 30 times per day. But most brands, once per day. But don't feel like you have to post once per day. What we'll do is, maybe we'll be at Social Media Marketing World and wander around in the hallways and interview a lot of people, just for one-minute interviews, not some scheduled thing, but just by walking around in the hallway, we'll run into people that we know. We'll collect a bunch of one-minute videos, all in one day, and then sprinkle them out over the course of several months.

So I was on CNN in Atlanta, talking about the whole Facebook controversy and Russian interference and senator we run ads, the whole congress thing. I was in front of three and a half million people, live, where they were, in the studio, asking me questions about all this Facebook nonsense. I made the most of that because I got that four and a half minute clip and chopped it up into a few different pieces. I'm now able to recirculate that as different pieces of content, and I've taken some of those highlight components and I've sprinkled them in to my speaker reel, to our company mission reel, to other reels where we're teaching about personal branding. If I can mix and match from all different kinds of videos that we have an reassemble that. Do you know the analogy of Mexican food, Kathleen?

Kathleen: No, tell me.

Dennis: You can take meat, cheese, beans, lettuce, tomatoes, and rearrange it into a chalupa or a tostada or an enchilada or a taco or a chimichanga or whatever it is, but it's the same ingredients, but just in a slightly different format, right?

Kathleen: That's so funny and very true.

Dennis: So that's what we're doing with our ingredients. So the wrong materials come in, meaning like the 30 minute interview with the client, right? Or you're doing it on behalf of a client and you're interviewing the customer and you have a continuous shot of 30 minutes where you're asking them a series of questions and saying, "Hey, don't worry about what you're saying because we're going to edit out the good pieces or whatever it is. If you stumble, just pause for two second and restart, and then we'll chop up different pieces and we can reuse those pieces into whatever combination that we want." So we think about the Mexican menu or the Chinese menu, you now have the ability to produce any kind of marketing material that you want.

So a sales piece about a new product that you have, maybe you could reuse stuff that you already have. 80, 90% of what you have is what you can reuse and then the 10% is the stuff specifically about that new product. Then you don't have to create all this stuff from scratch again. Maybe it's because I'm lazy, but when we do this, it's like I don't want to have to keep redoing things about who we are and what we've done and who our best customers are.

For example, when we first got Nike as a client, I thought that was incredible and making videos out there at the Nike campus, interviewing the executives at Nike is stuff that makes us look highly authoritative, but it also looks good because I can quote them. I can bring them to speak on stage like at the Adobe Summit where Nike says, "Hey, yeah, we use Blitz for social analytics." Well, how awesome is that? In front of the other people who are using Omniture, saying oh, yeah, Omniture doesn't do that. It's Adobe Analytics now, but oh yeah, we use Blitz for social analytics. I can reuse that, I guess we could call it a testimonial, but I can use that snippet in so many different places.

Think about things that have been said to you, that have been said about you, that have been said about IMPACT, about your business partners, about the people that you have met. Think about all those amazing situations, imagine if you could wave a wand and you could reuse them anytime, anywhere, how powerful would that be?

Kathleen: Well, and it certainly sounds like, from what you're saying, that it's making me realize, there are probably a lot of businesses that have a ton of gold nuggets in their B roll and in their video archives and it's like, half the battle is keeping it organized and knowing what you've got in there so you know when to pull those pieces back out and incorporate them. The other half, really what this is telling me, is that if you're gonna be serious about this, especially if you're gonna do it as a business, it probably makes sense to invest in in-house video expertise because you really just need to incorporate this into the fabric of your everyday life within your company.

Outsourcing Your Video Process

Dennis: Amen. You don't have to be a big agency, big budget, big team, or a big marketing group. We literally started with hiring VAs from the Philippines as $3.00 an hour. So you hire one person full-time. Do you know what that costs you for a year?

Kathleen: No.

Dennis: $500.00.

Kathleen: Wow.

Dennis: So $500.00 a month, Kathleen, for someone who's working for you full-time, 40 hours a week, college educated, a real human, they care about you deeply, they're better than Americans in the standpoint that they are loyal, they will stay with you, and they're happy, they're joyful, and we will send them stuff at the end of the day, say 5:00 PM, you know it's the other side of the world, so their time zone's upside down. When we wake up in the morning, it's ready.

Kathleen: That's so crazy. That's the part that I think is actually kind of cool about working with folks in Asia is that if you're organized and you can get stuff to them at the end of the day, it's freaky how fast you can move.

Dennis: Let me tell you my secret which is not so much of a secret anymore. There are one million Philippino's that do digital marketing at onlinejobs.ph. When I found this site 10 years ago, I could not believe my eyes. I said, "Wow, I can hire this guy at $1.50 per hour? Why don't I just hire this guy for fun, just to see. It's only $1.50 per hour. I'll buy him for like 50 hours, just see what happens," right?

Kathleen: Right, can't hurt. That's a good tip. Side note, I absolutely love the people from the Philippines. I spent a lot of time there. Before I went into marketing, I did international development consulting and my last year that I did it, it was right before I had my son, I went to the Philippines, I think six times. That is such a cool place and the people are some of the best people.

Dennis: We go there twice a year and it's just incredible. They love us and I love taking them out because I feel like I'm a big shot. We'll take them out to eat to the nicest places in Manila, send them off on a full day massage. I'll look at the bill, like we'll go to the nicest restaurants, right? Even Makati, which is the most expensive business area.

Kathleen: That's where I used to stay. That's beautiful, yeah.

Dennis: We're doing the penthouse thing and they think we're ballers. At the end of the meal or at the end of whatever it is, we'll go take them out karaoke. We have seventy in the Philippines. I'll look at the bill and I'll work it out, that's like four bucks a person. All right.

Kathleen: Let's do it again tomorrow.

Dennis: Yeah, maybe it's five bucks or whatever it is. I'm thinking, wow, you could live like a king for nothing. You could have an entourage, if you wanted to, I'm not saying do this. But you know this Kathleen, for $200.00 you could have six guys with machine guns follow you around the entire day as bodyguards.

Kathleen: Yeah.

Dennis: I've wanted to do that just for fun because I go there twice a year with our people. I was thinking, it would be cool if I had six guys with machine guns, all dressed up, walking with me as I'm walking downtown. Then have a couple people that follow me around with video cameras, just to see what would happen in the mall. This people think this guy walking in the middle here must be a celebrity.

Kathleen: Yeah, this brings us full circle in our conversation because it goes right back to the very beginning where you talked about if you were in the penthouse standing on the balcony and if you were an influencer, you'd take a picture of yourself with a glass of champagne living the life. Instead, you were very real about, I flew Southwest. Your Philippines example's great because that's where you could be like, "This is just how I roll."

Dennis: Yeah.

Kathleen's Two Questions

Kathleen: I love it. I could literally sit here and talk to you all day, but I'm sure you have things that you need to be doing and I want to be respectful of your time. The last two questions I have for you are questions that I ask every guest that comes on this podcast and I'm really curious to hear your response because you do know so many people in the world of digital marketing. Today, when you think about the concept of inbound marketing, company or individual, who do you think is really killing it and doing it well?

Dennis: Nathan Latka.

Kathleen: Ooh, there's a name I haven't heard before.

Dennis: Oh, you need to look him up. I think he's number one or number two in business podcasts on iTunes.

Kathleen: How do you spell his last name?

Dennis: L-A-T-K-A.

Kathleen: Okay.

Dennis: I first met this kid because he signed up for one of my podcasts or webinar like 10 years ago. He's just some 17-year-old and I'm like, "Who is this punk?" He kept hitting me up. I saw that he had started a company that did Facebook ads and Facebook apps, and he grew it to millions of dollars and he sold it. Then he started to take his money, invest it in other companies. He would go to a taco truck, for example, and say, "Hey, I'm willing to write a check right now to buy your business. Let's make a deal." Then he started turning the camera on, then he wrote his book that became an actual best seller. Then he started interviewing all the people that were entrepreneurs and running SaaS companies and asking them about their revenue and their conversion rater and their cost per conversion and their lifetime value and all their stats. How much revenue, how many employees they had, what's their turnover, and turned it into the dominant podcast for SaaS entrepreneurs. Now he's on TV all over the place.

I think we had lunch, I think it was three years ago, we were in Austin. He was living in downtown Austin, one of the high rises. We were remarking about Donald Trump and how Donald Trump, whatever you say about Donald Trump, who cares what your politics are, he knows how to get your attention.

Kathleen: Yeah, he sure does.

Dennis: Gary Vaynerchuk knows how to get your attention. I consider them the same person. Dennis, what if I became the Donald Trump of digital marketing? I'm like, "You know dude? You're exactly the kind of guy with the personality and the shine and the intelligence and the speed to be able to do it, but just like with Donald Trump or Gary, you're gonna have a lot of haters." If you're willing to deal with the haters, you will kill it. You are so good. That's what he did. The next day, I saw on Facebook, all this commotion and it was Michael Stelsner and the other folks saying, "Who does this Nathan Latka kid think he is?"

He sent out this email to his mailing list of all his customers saying, "You know what? If you don't engage on my emails, I'm gonna delete you from my list." All these influential social media people are saying how dare he do that? He can't do that. He can't be saying things like that to his customers. He can't be saying that to Michael Stelsner. He did. He's like, "You know what, Michael? You don't like my stuff, you can leave." I'm like, Nathan, dude, I know we talked about that, but I didn't think he'd actually do it and he did. Look at how successful he is.

Kathleen: That's cool. I can't wait to check that example out because I get a lot of interesting answers when I ask this question and it's always really fun to discover somebody completely new.

Dennis: Look at his videos. It'll just be a minute, you're in line at Whole Foods and you open up and do a search on Facebook or Google or YouTube, and you're like, "Okay, I'll just watch a little bit of this video." Then before you know it, you've lost two hours watching his videos.

Kathleen: Oh dangerous. So in other words, don't watch them when I'm under a deadline on something, I guess.

Dennis: I'm warning you. He's so good. Full disclosure, he's a client.

Kathleen: Well, thank you for alerting me to him. That's gonna be an interesting one to check out. Now, the other question I'm interested to hear about from you is digital marketing is obviously changing so quickly. Technology is fueling a lot of it. How do you personally stay up to date and keep yourself on the cutting edge?

Dennis: I don't. I know it's kind of a flippant answer because you could say, "Oh yeah, but I know your network and you know these people and these people and these people." Here's my little trick. When I was a younger man, I thought that I could work harder than everybody and keep up with the news and read harder and work harder and I've since discovered, since I turned 40, that I can't do that. So all I do is I associate with the smartest people out there. So the reason I go to conferences is not because I want to be on stage or because I'm trying to get more clients or because I wanna be famous, it's because I want to hang out with the people that have that knowledge so that if I have a question, I know who I can chat up and they will answer my question.

So I don't at all pretend like I'm somehow the most knowledgeable person about everything going on in digital. You and I know there's so many different thing and so many different niches, it's just, even if you had 500 hours in a day, you couldn't keep up with all the things that are going on. All the different tools for video editing, no way I could keep up with that. But I do know that if I have a question about anything, I can literally pick up the phone and I know who to call and I know I can get the answer.

Kathleen: Yeah.

Dennis: So that's my secret. It's not what I need to know, it's who I need to know and that list of who is my topic wheel. So the people that pay us money, the people that we've worked with to be able to create influence is also who I count on for my expertise. So the way I make money is also the way that I'm able to educate. Even if I didn't make money off of these people, I would even pay money to hang out with the people like Michael Stelsner and Nathan Latka and David Burg and Ryan Dice, but we're being paid by these people. Isn't that incredible?

Kathleen: That's a pretty great gig if you can get it, I'll say.

Dennis: Yeah.

Kathleen: Yeah, for me it's my podcast. That's why I do this. People who listen, know I am always saying I would keep doing the podcast, even if nobody listened. Thank God, people do, but I learn so much and today is a great example of that. I feel like I've learned so much from you, so thank you.

You Know What To Do Next

Kathleen: If somebody is listening and wants to learn more about you or Blitzmetrics or has a question about personal branding, what's the best way for them to find you online?

Dennis: They can go to blitzmetrics.com, of course, and they can also look me up on LinkedIn, but please do not friend me on Facebook. I've been at the five thousand friend limit for the last eight years. Don't ask me for a blue check mark, don't ask me if your ads were disapproved, but absolutely, if you want to reach out to me on LinkedIn or go to my website, happy to chat with you there.

Kathleen: Fantastic. Thank you so much, Dennis. If you are listening and you learned something new or you liked what you heard, of course I'd love it if you'd give the podcast a review on iTunes or the platform of your choice.

If you know somebody who's down kick ass inbound marketing work, tweet me @workmommywork because they could be my next guest. Thanks so much Dennis. It was great chatting with you.

Dennis: Thanks Kathleen.

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from Web Developers World https://www.impactbnd.com/blog/building-personal-brand-dennis-yu

[letsmarkwilliams-blog]

The Social Club Intro/Chapter I

I’ve decided to release a few of my chapters on my mostly mute Tumblr account. Enjoy reading them as I release them for free. The full book is available on  amazon, but over time I’ll release chapters on here for free.

The Social Club By: Mark Williams

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.

Dedicated to

My Loving and Supportive Mother

My Junior Year Creative Writing Teacher

An Old Friend Named Joe

My Sisters and their Boyfriends

My Advisory Teacher and Chemistry Teacher

Joe Strummer

Finally, The Group of Brotherhood I grew up with, The Social Club

Prologue: Adderall and Japan

        I remember it was the Thursday before spring break started. It was the end of the quarter and also an end to a part of my life I’d rather forget. It was close to 8:20 in the morning, I had already stopped abusing prescription pills, for the most part, and  stopped drinking in the mornings before school about a week ago. I was regular again I guess you could say, nothing extremely bad or good was occurring in my day to day life. My grades were overall good and everything became more or less normal.

           At 8:22, I had been sleeping on my backpack before school started and I had to walk down to the science hall to take a Anatomy and Physiology test. I had been awoken from my morning sleep by my friend, Manuela, telling me that “She” was back. “Look Mark, she’s back”. I didn’t believe it primarily because of the fact she had been gone for the last 8-10 weeks, and I didn’t think she’d just show up on a Thursday before a week long break.

           But I was wrong, I opened my eyes and began to sit up when I heard her laugh from down the hall. I thought to myself “That’s not her, it can’t be”. In the end I finally looked down and saw her looking for her locker. At that point I honestly didn’t know what to do, maybe I was supposed to say “Hi.” and walk down the hallway or try to engage in a conversation. I was fully dumbfounded until Manuela shouted at me in a gentle tone that was meant in a way to encourage me. “Mark, slap yourself to wake up”. I wasn’t thinking and it honestly seemed like the best idea at the time because I had no idea what to do.

           So several times I stood there and slapped myself like I was stupid or something and then stopped finally after the third time. I turned to Manuela and said “Do I go say hi now?” she looked at me like I had just broken every single commandment that existed. “Just do something Mark”. I turned around and started to walk down the hallway, naturally I became overly nervous and walked by her towards the water fountain, I thought to myself “Wow that was an easy situation to avoid, now I just have to walk down the hallway and not do anything stupid.” On my way back from the hallway, as I walked past her I stopped and walked towards her and said “Hi, nice to see you back.” I paused for a moment and she looked back at me and said “Thanks.” I kept walking back and considered to myself that I didn’t do anything stupid there and I was fine.

           Sadly I proved myself wrong again as I walked past her again to my science class, and once more said “Hi!” and walked by not knowing if she heard me. During the test, a good amount of the ADD meds I took that morning as extra to help me on the test kicked in. That’s when the worrying began to kick in. “Did she hear me? If she did does she think I said it weirdly? Maybe she thought it was a joke or something.” All the way through the test of labeling diagrams of hearts and stuff I kept worrying about it.

           I didn’t build up the courage to full on talk to her until the next day which being the Friday before spring break, was my last chance. I can’t remember the conversation that much talking to her that day on the way to my physics class. It was just small talk and it’s honestly one of the most pleasant times I talked with her before the break.

        Japan for a trip was great. Not the flight though, it’s a straight flight from Houston to Tokyo and it’s not a fun one. Once we were there, we finally met with my sister and her korean boyfriend whose name was Tae, I have no idea how to actually spell the name so I hope that’s right. I guess the most memorable experience from it wasn’t the temples or any of the pathways. It was this one night in Kyoto.

        We’re in the city of temples in Japan and it’s around 10 P.M. and I’m walking the streets of this city with my brother, and my sister’s step dad who is only around his mid 30s. The beautiful part of Japan is that you can basically buy beer, or any other liquor in any store without an ID. So it’s 12P.M. and all three of us have finished off several 40 ounce cans and are on our way back to the hotel. We went up one floor too many to the snack machine, leaving my brother and my sister’s step dad eddy for only a minute when they run past me saying “We gotta go now.”. I didn’t know until later that night, but they went over to a room door and started banging on it asking to be let in, and mind you this is the complete wrong floor to start with. As we run down the emergency staircase to our own floor I can hear a string of Japanese curse words follow us as an elderly lady started throwing stuff at us.

Chapter 1: The Social Club

It’s April 1st now. I’m sitting in a Whataburger booth, high off my ass in between my brother and a Vietnamese kid named Minh waiting for the arrival of a burger, that if I can recall the name correctly was something like “The Heart attack and cardiac arrest”. To put it frankly, it was a chili burger with extra meat. We were waiting crammed in this booth only to have the food disappear faster than we saw it come.

        Now we piled back into a couple of cars and headed back to one of our houses. Our friend Richard had a basement with a couple of couches that we would always go to and melt while watching a movie or a sports game. That night we sat around and watched some football game as we got high out of oranges. Yes, oranges. We had no other way of getting high other than carving oranges, it’s just one of those things for when you first see it you kind of say to yourself “Why the fuck would anyone do this.” That you eventually just accept it and it happens, kind of like drinking excessively.

        That night’s also the night I rediscovered vaping. Vaping is most possibly the most douchey looking thing you can do in public. Mainly because you just see assholes in Tito’s vodka sunglasses doing it, and then breathing the fog out onto people’s faces. Either way, it’s a fast smokeless way to get nicotine in your body, which is what would usually make me able to drive again from a long high, or for me at least.

        Now that night was also the first night I had driven home under the influence of several hits out of an orange bong. Driving while high or for the first time at least is the most grace filled fear adventure I’ve ever had. It’s peaceful because of the music you pick and it’s scary because of the nature of just fearing cops catching you  and finding you high and you’re only response will be some muttered garbage. Once I got home, the hardest and most scary thing is hiding it from your parents, easiest way is eye drops, but if you don’t have them, what I have to do is mutter some comprehensive garbage and leave. I’ve also found that if I can convince my dad to drink with me one night I can avoid being high, and being drunk so it’s all kosher.

        There was one time early on in what  we called our “Weed-ventures” that we had a set of school days off to visit colleges, so with that time in hand we watched our first movie stoned. It was Interstellar, a movie I had started several times and never had finished. It was about 9P.M. when we started the movie that wednesday, and I was already baked and tired. When I came back to around 11P.M., I could only remember one part of the movie which was the bookshelf scene. That’s all I could think of when it came to that movie is the scene replaying for 2 hours. It was probably the worst high to watch a movie like interstellar, slow motion and disorientation. It was a horror show watching the rocket launch as the maximum volume slammed you back, it was a roller coaster.

Then that morning I drove to the second college I had on my mind to visit, Baylor. I had a sister who went there who was a very big stoner and I had planned on smoking with her. After the first 4 hours of visiting around the campus and various talks and all, we headed over to her house around 12:30 in the afternoon. We learned very quickly the divide between Baylor and Waco. We had walked about 500 feet towards her house and away from the college when we realized there were no more green fields or polished brick building. It a wasn’t college housing area, it was Waco. Cracked streets, sketchy gas stations and broken concrete littered our way, the grey sky didn’t do much to make  it seem better.

When we finally got to their house, we realized just how much weed they had. To us, a small bag was a lot, but they had mason jars just full of it. They also had a volcano, which we had no clue what that was until we saw it. It’s some machine that turns it into breathable air or something, I still have no clue how it works but it was amazing to see nonetheless. We were like kids walking into the candy shop in Willy Wonka, just so much for free use and all.

[viralhottopics]

CNN 10 – April 3, 2017

April 3, 2017

In today’s show, you’ll learn how a recent mudslide impacted part of Colombia, how vending machines impact Japan’s economy, and how manatees are no longer on the U.S. government’s list of endangered species. Also featured are a pair of stories related to firefighting: One centers on a new type of mask that could save lives, and another looks at how sports training can help with oxygen regulation.

TRANSCRIPT

CARL AZUZ, CNN 10 ANCHOR: Two weeks into spring, three days into April and about 16 seconds into a new edition of CNN 10. I’m Carl Azuz and it’s good to start off the week with you.

Today’s show begins in South America, where a deadly natural disaster has hit the nation of Colombia. It started in rain, torrential rain on Friday night. That caused three rivers to overflow around the city of Mocoa.

It’s located in the southwestern part of Colombia and the flooding washed a stream of mud into Mocoa. Many people were sleeping when the mudslide came. Other witnesses said it was moving so fast, they had to run for their lives.

Colombia officials say more than 200 people were killed and hundreds more injured. But Colombia’s president expected those numbers to increase as rescuers search for survivors. More than 1,000 soldiers and police officers are involved in that effort.

They say that 80 percent of the roads around the area have problems. So, it’s hard to get to people who might be trapped. Rescuers are racing against the clock with more than 100 people still missing.

In 2015, rain in Colombia’s northwest caused a mudslide that killed more than 80 people. Scientists say heavy rain, lots of deforestation, poorly made homes and dense populations can all put residents at risk.

Spinning the globe for our next story, we’re taking you to the island nation of Japan. With 126.7 million people living there, the country has less than 40 percent of the population size of the U.S., and yet Japan has 5 million vending machines, compared to America’s 7 million. So, significantly more machines per person in Japan.

We’re touring the country now to show the impacts this has on Japan’s economy and its way of life.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

WILL RIPLEY, CNN INTERNATIONAL CORRESPONDENT: There’s one on almost every corner. They line side streets, train stations. Vending machines are an essential part of life in Japan. You could almost go an entire day fueled on stuff from them.

Let’s begin with breakfast.

They have premium banana. Low sugar banana.

Definitely need coffee.

Red means hot. Blue means cold.

One of my absolute favorite things about Japan. Hot coffee in a can.

A hot lunch too. Not your ordinary cup of noodle. This machine sells oden, a savory stew.

Fish balls, or beef tendon, fish balls.

Hmm, I can see why this is popular in the winter times. The can is so warm and it tastes good.

Vending machines work around the clock, so they don’t require people at the cash register. And you can buy what you want, when you want. No matter what you drink, there’s a good chance the vending machine was made here, near Nagoya.

Fuji Electric counts about 20 beverage companies as clients. The machines come in different sizes and colors. But they’re all pretty much the same inside.

“That gives us efficiency,” says factory manager Mitsuhiro Saka. “We used manufacture machines in large quantities. But it’s become smaller.”

There are 5 million vending machines in Japan, according to the latest figures from the manufacturers association. That’s one machine for every 25 people, said to be the highest concentration in the world. But those figures have actually declined a bit over the last decade in part from rising competition. It’s still a very big business.

Vending machines sold more than $42 billion worth of goods in 2015, keeping all that cash safe is a serious concern, even in a low crime nation like Japan. So, we can’t show you the money collection components inside the door. But I did learn how they make my coffee hot.

“We develop a hybrid system,” explains Saka. “That uses exhaust heat created by the cooling chamber to warm up your drink to 55 degrees Celsius, all the while saving energy.”

But now, 24-hour convenience stores the Japanese called konbinis compete with vending machines for customers and beverage makers face a struggle securing new locations.

For operators like Ichiro Yonoi (ph), the challenge is still to refill machines with the bestselling products. He tells us he’s been doing this for 12 years. He handles about 3,500 cans a day.

Technology could make his job easier. Smart vending machines connected to the Internet are able to collect sales data, even notify the repairman when they break down, another evolution for an every day object that’s evolving, along with modern life in Japan.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

AZUZ: The West Indian manatee, the Florida manatee is an example, is no longer considered an endangered species by the U.S. federal government. Back in the 1970s, officials in Florida counted just a few hundred of these aquatic mammals. This year, and for the third year in a row, they spotted more than 6,000 manatees and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service cited their dramatic turnaround as its reason for removing manatees from the endangered species list.

Some environmental and animals rights groups disagreed with this decision, saying it was made too soon and that the government didn’t include a plan for assessing the animals recovering the long term. Government officials say reclassifying manatees from “endangered” to “threatened” will not change the federal and state laws that protect them.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

AZUZ (voice-over): Ten-second trivia:

The U.S. Fire Administration is part of which government agency?

Environmental Protection Agency, National Park Service, Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms, or Federal Emergency Management Agency?

You find the Fire Administration organized under the FEMA, the Federal Emergency Management Agency, which is part of the Department of the Homeland Security.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

AZUZ: The U.S. Fire Administration says between 2005 and 2014, there was an overall decrease in the number of fires and the deaths and injuries they caused in the U.S. But with more than a million firefighters in the country, three quarters of them volunteers, officials are always looking for ways to make them safer. And a British company might have found a way to do that. With a price point of between $1,500 and $1,900, though, funding could become an issue for many fire departments who usually pay around $400 for a basic mask.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

SUBTITLE: MASK, Denbighshire, Wales.

Over 29,130 firefighters were injured on the job in 2015 in the U.S.

Sixty-eight American fighters lost their lives.

One U.K. company wants to reduce that number by helping firefighters see better.

The Scott Sight is the first mask for firefighters to have a built-in thermal image camera.

GRAHAM WILSON, DIRECOR, DESIGN REALTY: One firefighter’s objective is to go into a room and to rescue victims. In a smoke-filled room, you wouldn’t be able to see a thing.

Conventional thermal imaging system, you’re holding it like this and you’re looking into the screen. And that’s where we work very closely with Scott Safety identifying gaps in the technology market to be able to embed this into our product.

This bit here is the camera, that there is the in-mask display. This camera is sending information wirelessly, which means that we don’t have to penetrate the mask with a cable.

What you see in the display inside the respirator is thermo signatures of whatever is there, even if there’s a fire in the background. Significantly, that firefighter can still scan the room and find the victim. You can imagine the environment in which the products go in. They don’t really get treated that well, even though they’re technology.

So, the fact that the firefighter can forget it’s there and go in and it can live up to whatever they’re doing was the real challenge. The benefit for this is the fact that both times, they have a screen they can look at whenever they want. It’s always capturing the thermal scene in front of them. So, they go way more information whenever they wanted.

It’s a proud day when you see such an impactful product improving people’s lives.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

AZUZ: Some firefighters in California recently showed off how they have fun with their training. They took each other on in a friendly game of dodgeball while dressed in full firefighting gear. That adds around 45 pounds. Those knocked out were dragged off the court by their colleagues and it gave even more than exercise and agility training.

This helps firefighters learned how to better regulate the oxygen in their tanks when they’re taking on an emergency, even if they have to learn that while they dodge, duck, deep dive and dodge. But if dodgeball has been a heated game for generations of grade schoolers, this could get oxygenerations of firefighters all fired up for training that could be described as a breath of fresh air.

I’m Carl Azuz for CNN 10.

Click here to access the printable version of today’s CNN 10 transcript.

CNN 10 serves a growing audience interested in compact on-demand news broadcasts ideal for explanation seekers on the go or in the classroom. The show’s priority is to identify stories of international significance and then clearly describe why they’re making news, who is affected, and how the events fit into a complex, international society.

Thank you for using CNN 10

Read more: http://cnn.it/2nxIKSJ

from CNN 10 – April 3, 2017

[fredericksmeg-blog]

2 weeks in London.

Hello I am back!! This is blog part 1 of 2 for the month of March!

Monday, March 6th On the Monday after we got back from Wales, all that I wanted to do was sleep. Instead, I woke up ~early~ to do my laundry before the room got mobbed by everyone who was coming back from break. That was the main event of the day, pretty much. I ate some dinner from the groceries that I had in my freezer and went to my very first Internship Seminar class (because we were starting our internships that week). We talked about our career goals and a whole bunch of hoopla. It was just fine. When I got home, I sorted through my pictures from break and hung out for a bit.

Tuesday, March 7th On Tuesday, I had my BLC class, and we pretty much just talked about where we went on break and then got out early because everything is a joke. I went to Tesco to restock on groceries and almost had to uber home because I couldn’t carry all of them. I ate lunch in my flat before I zipped over to the British Library for my Archives class to look in the gallery that has the Gutenberg Bible, original copies of Beowulf, da Vinci sketches, Shakespeare, etc. We got a very detailed account of them, which I appreciated. I’ve been in there a few times already and it’s not exactly a large room, but I learned a lot about things I didn’t even know where in there.

I genuinely don’t remember what I did for the rest of the night. Probably made some calls, uploaded pictures, and organized my life because I started my internship the next day.

Wednesday, March 8th Wednesday was my first day at Mercato. When I got there, no one that was in when I interviewed was there. Aka, no one knew who I was or what to do with me. I sat around for a bit while my Italian coworkers fed me espresso until I was ultimately sent home early with the promise that there would be more for me to do tomorrow. I was so unbelievably jacked on caffeine that I went home and ran 5 miles. That never happens to me. What a day. Jas and I watched Baby Mama that night. Good times.

Thursday, March 9th On Thursday, I had a more productive day at Mercato. The day flew by and that was ideal because afterwards I met up with Will and none other than Brian Schlaff at the Tate. We went to a delightful pub on the South bank of the Thames called the Founder’s Arms, had a few beers, and ate dinner. After we ate, we headed to Ye Olde Cheshire Cheese, which is one of the oldest pubs in London and it’s essentially a maze. There was sawdust on the floor, and different rooms with hidden bars. I’d never been in it before, and I’d been meaning to, so I’m glad that we went! It was just really nice to see Brian and hang out with my friends. After that we went home and just hung out and planned some more stuff to do that weekend.

Friday, March 10th In the morning, I made breakfast with Will and Brian just like old times. We scrambled up some eggs with toast and it was lovely. Shortly after that, I headed off to my internship for another day. It was just fine, again. Did some spreadsheet stuff. I genuinely can’t remember. I probably won’t go I into much depth about my day-to-day at my internship on this blog, because I already have to write a lot about it for both my Internship seminar and the hundred of job applications that I’m working on. After my internship I hurried back to the flat, changed, and then went to Camden to grab dinner at Brewdog with Will and Brian.

I had a very delicious Pale Ale and a chicken sandwich that was cleverly named Cluck Norris. Then the three of us did the Camden Pub Crawl, and it was really fun. In the middle of it we decided that we would try to facetime our friends from hope and that went about as well as you think it would. We ended up at a club/venue called KOKO and there was the most atrocious white rapper playing there that night so we left pretty quickly. We got pizza (I had half on one, each of the boys had almost 2 haha) and went home.

Saturday, March 11th On Saturday morning we rose from the dead, went to Borough Market, and ate the whole world. It ended up working out that each of us bought something to share with the group, in addition to our own meals. First we had a veggie pie from the Pieminister, then we had some fried balls of ginger and dough and onions I think, and then we had some spinach and ricotta ravioli. I ended up with a grilled cheese on my own, and I also bought a donut. Am I proud of all this? Maybe.

From there, we walked to Somerset House to see the Courtald Gallery, which has a few really neat impressionist paintings including the self-portrait of Van Gogh after he mutilated his ear. We spent about an hour there and it was cool, I had no idea that it was there. We also grabbed some coffee.

Then, we walked to Trafalgar Square and got on the tube to head up to Regent’s Park. We took a nice walk around – it was a gorgeous day – and ended up at Primrose Hill. Will saw an ice cream truck and just about flew into the sun with excitement, so we did that. The ice cream dude asked us where we were from, and we said the states. Thus began the regular conversation of “Ugh, Trump haha” and then we say “Ugh, yeah.” and then he says, “We have Brexit though so we’re not doing too well either.” = this entire conversation is one that I’ve had probably every time I make small talk with a British person. Anyway, we told him that we didn’t vote for Trump and he gave us a deal on the ice creams. Then we climbed to the top and sat down for about an hour.

From Primrose hill, we bopped down to Brick Lane to get some curry for dinner, which was actually a lot more touristy than I expected. I guess at this point it’s kind of well established as a good place to get for Indian food. Then we walked farther into Shoreditch to grab a beer before we headed back to the flat. We had a chill night, and watched The World’s End, which is an Edgar Wright/Simon Pegg movie about an apocalypse pub-crawl. It was really something.

Sunday, March 12th What a magical day!!! I woke up and went to Brixton for the very first time with Will and Brian. We went to the market and grabbed some delicious brunch, which was lovely. We meandered around there for a bit afterwards and went into a few stores. Naturally we went to go see the David Bowie mural and got some coffee. Then we headed to Westminster, so Brian could take some tourist photos with Big Ben as one does. This is when I had to say bye to my dearest best pal because I was going to the Harry Potter Studio tour that afternoon. It was v sad and I won’t see him until probably August. So that was a bummer.

When I got back to the flat, I had a quick snack because I didn’t know the next time I’d be eating. Me, Bri, and Nat were all super jazzed and got on the bus to the tour. I wore my Hufflepuff scarf.

I love the Studio Tour. It was really nice to be able to go again and kind of pay attention to things I didn’t see the first time and what not. I shed a few tears; I’ll be real, but not as many as the first time. The Hogwarts express wasn’t there the last time I went, and that was really emotional. It was really amazing and I had a great time flopping around the studio and drinking some butterbeer .I had to practice a lot of self-control in the gift shop but I still went a little crazy, mostly on gifts for other people. On the way home we were subjected to Pitch Perfect 2 being played on the coach screens, which was less than ideal.

I got home and had a granola bar before I quick-changed and headed to Embankment with Jas’ friend Maggie, because we were all going to see Francis and the Lights! It was an impulse thing that we bought tickets for earlier in the week. But wow, I’m so glad we went. He was amazing, and put so much energy into it, he was dancing everywhere. He was also really genuine. I felt great after that, and it was just so good. Wow. Overall, this was one of my favorite days.

Monday, March 13th Alternatively, Monday just ended up being a Bad Day™ and there was nothing I could do about it. I woke up and hung around the flat until we had a check-in lunch with our UW program director at Comptoir Lebanais, which is a Lebanese food chain. It was pretty nice and I had a falafel wrap. After that I don’t really know what happened. It was pretty nice outside, but I just got into a little bit of a funk and almost didn’t make it to my Internship seminar. I didn’t feel like doing anything and it made me a smidge guilty because I should always be taking advantage of my time here. I dunno. I went grocery shopping after class to pick up the essentials. Went to bed early.

Tuesday, March 14th On Tuesday morning, I woke up and went to Richmond for my BLC class. It was nice, but we walked around for maybe 45 minutes and my professor didn’t say much, so that felt a little pointless. I went home for lunch, and then went to my Archives class; we gave presentations that day. I led my group this week and talked about maps like the crazy geo-person that I am, but it was actually fun to talk about something that I am really interested in. Then I went home and made dinner.

In an interesting turn of events, my friend Hannah from high school (she was on foreign exchange from Norway) is studying and living in London right now. I met her for a drink at a rooftop bar called the Queen of Hoxton and it was a really, really nice time. It was refreshing to talk to someone that I met such a ~long~ time ago and we probably hung out for almost 4 hours. If I were in Europe for longer, I for sure would’ve visited her in Oslo! I’m bummed that I couldn’t.

 Wednesday, March 15th & Thursday, March 16th Honestly, all I did on these days is go to work and come home, make dinner, do homework, go to bed. Having this internship is really nice and it’s one of the main appeals of this program, but at the end of the day it’s hard to squeeze every bit of time out of every day to adventure and do fun stuff.

Friday, March 17th Another day of internshipping! When I got home I met up with my friend Grace, who is studying in the Netherlands this semester and visited London for a weekend! We know each other form ye olde Geography Club and we’ve had a bunch of classes together. We hung out for a bit in my flat because she’d been out all day with all of her stuff, since I had my internship. Then, we went to a pub because St. Patrick’s Day, and I had a Guinness. We were wiped, though, so we went back and went to bed.

Saturday, March 18th On Saturday, we woke up and walked down High Street Kensington to get a quick bite before we went to the Design Museum. We got tartes and they were great, and then hung around the museum for a bit. I’d been before with my art class, but it was a little mobbed from all of us, so it was cool to be able to see all the interactive parts of the exhibit. From there, we took the tube to Camden and went to eat some viral content at Chin Chin (that’s the marshmallow - covered hot chocolate place that’s all over Facebook). It was pretty good and super rich. We met up with another one of Grace’s friends, and split up there because I was going to a tiny ticketed festival in Shoreditch with Jasmine and Sarah, and she had a ticket to see an exhibit at the Southbank center. I hung around the market for a bit more and ate some real food for the first time that day.

Then, I met up with Jas, Sarah, Kenzie, and Jono in Shoreditch. We went to the festival day party thingy and got some onion rings and beers. It was in the middle of a roundabout, which was interesting. We also slid into the Bounce bar, which is just full of Ping-Pong tables, and Jasmine went rogue and stole a bunch of paddles. Then, we went over to Marylebone for a Badger watch party of the basketball game. I met up with Grace there. It was actually a ton of fun; I had some food and hung out with people from our program and a ton of alumni that are living in London. Of course, it was really nice that we won. I was incredibly wiped after that day though, so we went back and went to bed. 

Sunday, March 19th Grace woke up super early and Sunday morning to fly to Paris, and I laid in bed for quite a bit. Around noon, I went to Trafalgar Square for the St. Patrick’s Day Festival with Jas, Sarah, and Bridget. We had a pint of Guinness and even some Guinness cake, which really didn’t taste that much like Guinness. We watched some live music, parts of the parade, and some Irish dancers. We even saw Sadiq Khan (the mayor) speak, which was really cool. After we hung around there for a bit, we walked to Covent Garden and got pizza at Homeslice in Neal’s Yard. Everybody else went home after that, but I went back to the British Museum, which now that I’m thinking about it, will probably be the last time I go to the British Museum on this trip. I went home and made dinner later that night, and hung out in the flat.

Part 2 of 2 coming soon, ladies and gentlemen.