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6blackfilin9 · 3 years

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I love your Anko fanart! Tell me, what are your views/headcannons on Anko X Kazuku?

hThank you so much for the ask, finally I can answer it

here is my big thank you for the waitng

In a nutshell, the shipp was created by accident while me and my buddy were working on our first Naruto AU in 2019, where Kakuzu and Deidara survived their shitty plotholes end eventually ended up in Konoha

Yeah

so, the shipp’s birth date is july the 1, 2019

anything like classy, aristocracy kind of tension-filled passionate gothic romance with playful, psychological games & hurt/comfort vibes with slight scent of rivalry is KakuAnko

Basically, they are: a very, very old man with absolutely horrendous background who’s trying to finally have his mother*cking 10 or 30 years of peace, and a rather young lady with a rocky youth who’s being good & noble yet has very strong antihero tendencies

You know, I think they do have potential, since, in fact, they seem to be very similar, at the core

They are both very pragmatic realists, the people of logic and reason, yet if Kakuzu’s irritability doesn’t affect him a tiny bit due to his ideal self-control, Anko’s can lead her to quite bad places, sometimes. They put their interests in the first place, and even though she tries to attach them to Konoha’s, she still has ‘personal’ things (I’ll write ‘bout it lower*). Their mindsets are so complicatedly organized that, at some point & way, it prevents them from having many close people, and makes them very hard to see through and predict

Both of them are very flexible & adaptive, independent individuals with similar outlooks on plenty of things and high intellectual level. They clearly can find plenty of traits that they would highly respect and adore in each other

Here I will speak mostly for “why and how” kind of things, bc both of them are terribly tricky to accurately figure out. But there will be some headcanons too

So, there are still some odds about them, due to the strong difference in their occupation, like, in plenty of cases they are really tricky to be brought together, because:

- Of the job

In original, Anko is a Konoha’s special jounin, and she is very dedicated to serving the country. Independently of whether she likes her job or not (depends on the plot), she orienteers at the people, at society’s gain from her work. So, accordingly, in any other AU her job is somehow connected to civil service, whether it’s something police-like, connected to science, or something like CCG in Tokyo Ghoul

Kakuzu, on the other hand, is a hitman and a persona non grata in literally all the five big countries, Konoha too (which makes it barely possible to bring them together in the original universe without hard complications or heavy drama. But still possible). He orienteers on his own gain alone, but, depending on the job, it can include others’ gain, too.

This detail makes him a saint once he holds supervising position in some company or any high position in the government (the better the working conditions of the staff now- the more money in the prospective), and the sheer nightmare once he has it on the opposite side of the law. Him as a mob boss is a complete different topic for discussion, but to get the point, in this case, the trouble isn’t him increasing the level of criminality (its rather vice-versa), but taking hold of too much control in the high and underground structures. Even as an ordinary hitman he’s rather tricky, since everything depends on the case

In most of the stories, they come to some sort of compromise, and how hard it is to reach it depends on how shitty his job is and how attached they are to each other at the moment

Like, in the above mentioned Shippuden AU and Harry Potter AU (which I also wrote with my buddy) everything went like clockwork, because there they are both more or less on this side of the law, in Tokyo Ghoul AU (which I also wrote with my buddy) it is a bit more complicated, with her being in-law and him being very much outlaw, in the Avatar AU (which I also figured out with my buddy, but we never happened to write it) it is also pretty smooth, with both of them being outlaws and then jumping out to the glory after all the shit is done, but in another Shippuden AU of mine, this all would be just a motherfucking bloody disaster

- Kakuzu is actually a hard nut to get attached to anyone

He lived too long to be truly afraid of anything, though. Its mostly because he doesn’t really need to get attached to or become close with someone to satisfy his need for communication. The man can get along with anyone once he wishes to, he can have countless acquaintances and plenty of buddies, but he doesn’t have many comrades and barely can call anyone a friend. Because he is used to lose everything and everyone he ever had or happened to have, because of his inhumanly lengthened lifespan.

It requires time for him to get used to the person, and then, eventually, in some cases, spend plenty of it to get attached

Plus, for him, due to his profession, each close connection is a really great responsibility for him. In most cases, he’d think twice of weather he is ready to take it or not

Though it of course has the personal factor, too

In Anko’s case, she has a grand privilege by being a very intelligent and keen woman, not just in cognitive plane, but in emotional, too. High emotional intellect is actually a rare trait, so she automatically stands out of the crowd for him. Even though it won’t guarantee his alliance, it will grant her his high respect and some sort of sympathy

- Kakuzu is, technically, an asshole

He does have his moral compass, which includes a great amount of common social morality, but he also has that “I am working” state

Even though Kakusu has a set of professional principles, and he still acts accordingly to what he thinks is right, one and the very same situation can be solved diametrically different once the context changes from working to casual and vice versa

This, and him being very independent and quite antisocial, makes the degree of assholeness depend on various factors

This can lead to major conflicts of interests, and if they are possible to have any compromise or not is strongly attached to the circumstances. After all, both are very, very prideful and dignified people

- In other words, the only major issue for them would be morality questions. It’s possible to make the case acceptable for Anko, since both of them ain’t truly squeaky clean, along with Kakuzu being willing enough to watch his borders

- She is provident and doesn’t really need a lot of money on a daily basis, which is much of a joy to him lol

- *they both seek for the stable ground, first of all

Taking in consideration the life conditions Kakuzu had in his youth (despite war state, he still stably had family, friends, grand respect from everyone, home, warmth and food) and how terribly he was torn out of his secured social environment, I believe what he seeks through all his bounty hunt and other money-connected manipulations is stability. Sustainability he had back then. The only way to have it in the conditions of our existent world order is to have money (and a very good mind and luck)

Anko has indeed much more altruistic motives, yet it’s still not that simple. It seems to be, on the first sight, yet considering the “Orochimaru related cases” and her very wayward behavior toward them, it’s clear she keeps her own motives and needs in mind oh so well. The service she has is very well payed, it allows her to do what she likes or believes is right, and to have the living conditions she finds comfortable. And only here, relying on the made sustainable basis, she does what she does

- Thus, they both illustrate the principle “first help yourself, next help the other” just right

- She knows she can keep an eye on him, yet it’s clear for her that her influence isn’t borderless, as well as telling him off some stuff is kind of a not wise thing to do. So in the majority of cases, she never interferes

- This is not common, yet he can actually change some plans if the situation is serious and the compromise can’t be found. He is that kind of person who works on a further prospective, and in this context, this would be the relationship with his loved one

- While Kakuzu is quite conflicted and has very reserved controversial persona, Anko is both controversial, conflicted, and sort of two-faced, on top of that

She is a very sincere, cheerful and humbly honest human being, yet she has some darker natural traits of her character that became rather strong with age and traumatic experience. Cunningness, guile, ways-depend-on-the-case and a bit of ruthlessness, that is. Moreover, she has some unsolved personal issues, which makes her even more twisted.

Like, remember the time when she confronted Orochimaru during the exam? And Kabuto, on the war? Getting rid of them is indeed beneficial for Konoha, but it’s clear that for her it is personal vendetta in the first place. She wouldn’t have tried to do this alone, otherwise, because these two are rather dangerous ones, to say the least.

She uses greater good to cover her real motives (even though it is not truly complete bullshit), and seems to have a terrible habit to keep silence about really important things, which makes her quite prone to lying, in some cases

And sometimes it very badly pisses Kakuzu off, since it makes her prone to doing useless but dangerous shit too

Yet this not any kind of separate hidden side, it is integrated into her personality, and coexists with her bright one. That’s where her violent humour comes from, for example.

But Kakuzu, on the other side, is completely monolith individual, yet sometimes his mindset can create contradictions when it comes to something important to him. but it's another topic

And seeing these layered constructions, and motives, they can pretty finely predict each other’s behavior. Not super-neatly, but they for sure see the basis. This is what helps Kakuzu to prevent Anko from doing some stupid shit, sometimes

- Anko has a role of an indicator for the people who don’t understand and see the changes in Kakuzu’s mood sometimes, since she usually reacts quite openly. Yet, when she has the same unreadable mask of cold, or one of guile, it’s a nightmare for them

- They prefer the non-verbal way to show their feelings, even though Anko is obviously the more chatty one

- They don’t say things such as “I love you”, or other sensual stuff like that really often, believing it to be some sort of cherished words that shall not be spelled mindlessly

- Anko isn’t majorly into PDA, but she fancies it much more than Kakuzu does. She has her whole moments of studying something with her hands, whether it’s a hand, scar or face. He’s more into passive display of affection, like wrapping an arm over her waist or leaning to her or something of this kind; they can allow themselves to (not sexually) kiss in public though

- She knows he doesn’t like to walk hand in hand due to considering it a youthful thing, so there are times when she intentionally walks holding on to his sleeve; generally they walk separately in order not to bother each other, but sometimes they walk arm in arm (like an old Victorian couple lol)

- Being older and wiser, Kakuzu eventually upholds some kind of mentoring position, yet he never considers himself any kind of a teacher or master to Anko, believing her to have a good head of her own. He is just insightful enough to break something through to her or give a word of advise

- This, combined with his highly powerful demeanor, also makes him have the leading position in their relationship

- Anko respects him much enough to fortify this, entrusting with plenty of life questions (like organizing the family budget), even though they make the majority of decisions together. Mostly because he is truly wise and highly experienced individual.

- This makes him one of the very few people Anko would actually listen to and take their opinion in consideration

- So basically they have equal relationship with some tendency to patriarchal order

- And it is, really, mostly economically-based disbalance, with him earning much more than she does

- Yet they never have any financial-based issues, since both of them keep in mind and respect the contributions of each

- There is major power play here, too. He has the absolute might, she has seduction. Anko loves how he makes her want to submit to him, let him have all the power, so she likes provoking him. And she knows he adores it, loves the subtle control she has over him

- They don’t have conflicts in their everyday life. Each knows how to avoid pissing one another off

- He cherishes her playful demeanor, her intellect. Combined with her cunningness, it allows her to rival him, in social sphere. The way she constructs her phrases, the way she speaks, mimics, moves, how bewitchingly it suits her feminine snaky features makes his blood boil and heart melt

- Both of them, actually, have rather specific kind of dry, dark humour. Kakuzu’s is very cynical, satirical, quite often menacing and subtly demeaning; Anko’s is very sarcastic and quite dirty, even gruesome and rather violent

- Sometimes they “fight” verbally as a form of a play. In some circumstances they may sound pretty vile, so some unobservant people mistake this for display of hate

- In general, Anko is the one to heat things up with her playful demeanor, which can include provocation and rivalry, and Kakuzu is the one to keep this energy in borders, accumulating it up to much more intense states

- They both put the comfort in the first place when it comes to household. Everything must be cozy, useful, silent and super clean

- Yet they are both very unpretentious and modest, really

- She absolutely adores when he is showing his serious, severe side, or powerful demeanor. She finds it incredibly suitable for him. She also likes how his real age is sliding out in this or that way. Like, even though he has rather young face (that of 37-40 y.o.), his eyes give away that he’ve seen oh so much more than it seems; the grumpy noises and grunts he makes, the lazy attitude in movements and the way how rapidly he finds a comfy pose once he has a chance to take a seat

- They are both rather patriotic, yet while in the most stories Anko’s feelings mostly lay towards the country she lives in, Kakuzu’s more often lay towards some places, so called small motherland.

- Kakuzu actually could be a source of deep, strong admiration and delight for her, despite all of his bullshit. The unbreakable will he has, mighty burning heart, all the wisdom, talents and mind. Being sent to fight god damn Hashirama, clearly a genius of his times, financial & management genius at the least. And, still, after all the hard times he’ve been through, he maintained the very strong sense of dignity and nobility, even though slightly twisted due to the profession and abnormal lifespan

- And the very same things can serve as the source for her chagrin: with all those traits, he could have been so much more rather than a criminal. With all the gifts he’ve got, he could have been of great use to society. He’s much easier about this, since his prospective is much wider and embraces decades (and in some universes even centuries) instead of months & years, and he knows that he’d be switching sides throughout his life, being on this and that side of the law, yet he still is a bit uncomfortable once it’s brought up

- They are deeply into science, which makes them atheists. He’s into medicine and human biology, she’s into chemistry and reptilian biology; both of them are nuts for physics, history and psychology

- They solve complicated physical and mathematical problems together time to time. She is the first one to have tea-breaks due to losing her temper over it, he tries to figure things out right until you can sense the smoke coming off his head

- Actually, they do have a stumbling stone aside from job & morality complications. And this is Anko’s attitude towards Orochimaru

What she does is basically ruins her life very-very slowly, maintaining the issues she has and planning to make him pay for all he’s done

Kakuzu knows exactly what is really going on with this attitude and why, but he can’t really do anything about it. Like, he knows he can’t make her change her mind or put something into her head

All he can do is really nothing but try to explain how those things are working, and even this option is basically a landmine field for him. At some level she does understand that he could probably be right, yet she just refuses to go back on her mind. And this is actually really dangerous, so at some moments they can fight quite badly about it

- He’s scared shitless to lose her, though; especially like that, even though he knows clearly that he will, anyway, sooner or later

- he knows that losing loved ones ends up with sheer disaster for him, yet he isn’t afraid to pay such a high price for those six, five or four decades of being with her. Because these decades are that of a paradise ones for him. Wife and family, as well as stable job, incomes and life conditions, are some sort of physical definitions of sustainability he craves. Especially family, yet it’s far ahead to plan

- The fact that he will have to bury her one day makes her rather depressed, as well as the knowledge that the only thing she can really do about it is to try to bring him as much happiness and comfort as possible before she dies

thank you, i'd say more, but it's too much already

#my art #naruto #naruto shipuden #akatsuki #naruto akatsuki #akatsuki kakuzu #kakuzu #naruto anko #mitarashi anko #kakuanko #they are very entertaining disaster

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antoine-roquentin · 3 years

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This is very personal post. It is my story of the retaliation I suffered immediately after my “economics is a disgrace” blog post went viral. The retaliation came from Heather Boushey–a recent Biden appointee to the Council of Economic Adviser and the President and CEO of Equitable Growth where I then worked. This is not the story I wanted to be telling (or living). Writing this post is painful. I am sorry....

On July 30 the day after my “economics is a disgrace” post went viral my boss, Amanda Fischer, who reports to Heather (and the Vice-President, Casey Schoeneberger) and is also on Biden’s transition team, told me that my post had “put Heather in a difficult position and put the reputation of Equitable Growth at risk.” What? My heartfelt personal blog post calling out the toxic, exclusive environment in economics hurt Equitable Growth’s reputation? How was that a risk to a person and an organization promoting equality in the economy? I told them it was never my intent to harm Heather or Equitable Growth, and I would begin to look for a new job.

The next day I was told to submit my formal resignation and leave by August 31. I was in shock. My blog post was a plea for more a diverse and inclusive economics. I called out elite men in the profession whose words and actions for decades had propagated sexism, racism, elitism, politics. Exclusion that Heather herself has lived during her career. I called our men like Larry Summers who advised Biden, Obama, and Clinton. Heather chose Larry over me. I expected retaliation. I did not expect it from Heather.

I spent an excruciating week pleading with Amanda and HR to rewind our conversations but to no avail. Finally, on August 6, I asked Heather to meet with me. Maybe it was all a big misunderstanding. Nope. She has never replied to me. The retaliation over one blog post and my awful treatment made no sense. I spoke at Equitable Growth’s launch event in 2013; served on its academic advisory board after that; and joined the the organization last November as its first Director of Macroeconomic Policy....

I am not the first person Heather needs to apologize to. After the retaliation against me began, I learned that Heather’s abusive behavior was a pattern. And was an open secret among elite circles of DC economic policy.

While Equitable Growth was still a part of the Center for American Progress, Neera Tanden, President Biden’s choice for the Director of the Office of Management and Budget, received a memo in 2015 detailing how five employees left due to Heather’s abuse. The memo states that these employees left because she has “difficulty managing staff, appropriately communicating her expectations, and is unprofessional in her conduct.” Five years later that sounds painfully familiar to me.

More people knew then too. John Podesta, a leader in the Democratic establishment and founder of Equitable Growth received that memo too. When Mr. Podesta’s email was hacked in 2016 that memo about Heather went on Wikileaks. Ms. Tanden, Mr. Podesta, and others who have since learned about Heather’s toxic behavior toward her staff protected her and not her victims. I was a victim, as are others. She creates a toxic work environment, and she is not held accountable. She has not changed.

Heather is now on track to be a member at the Council for Economic Advisers. A group that reports directly to the President and evaluates economic policy proposals from the Administration. She bring expertise and many skills in economic policy to that important position. Uplifting and supporting her team is not one of them. Working at Obama’s CEA as a senior economist (reporting directly to the a member) was the highlight of my career in economic policy. Staff at CEA need members who will support them.

the sum total of the words towards larry summers in the original blog post:

Elites tolerate the bad behavior of other elites. The reverence toward Larry Summer exemplifies my claim. During his entire career, Summers has attacked others who disagree with him. He is Clark Medalist, a former Secretary of the Treasury, and an adviser to Barack Obama. Summers has done more than any current economist to devalue the contributions of women economists during my career. As the President of Harvard, in 2005, Summers delivered remarks at NBER Conference on Diversifying the Science & Engineering Workforce. One hypothesis he offered for fewer women faculty in the sciences was “different availability of aptitude at the high end.” One could counter “Larry was only “asking questions” about women’s IQ. Anyone who does research knows that the questions we ask reflect our priors and our interests. I was a PhD student at the time of his speech. I did not attend the lecture, but I heard about it. I cannot imagine how the women in the room felt. I know I felt awful when I read it. It is badly argued and tone deaf at the struggles that women face in economics. Summers continues to demean women economics. I had an early career woman come to me recently with an inexcusable interaction with him. Larry, it is not women’s IQ, it’s yours that is the problem. She questioned whether economics was for her. I told her she is an awesome economist. It is true. Why am I picking up the pieces of your bad behavior? Harvard economics what is wrong with you all?

“most diverse cabinet” in which every single person is a horrendously cruel individual, serving only quid pro quo above all

#neoliberalism

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lilikags · 3 years

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When Mom Tricks Come Handy

ೃ‧₊› a b o u t t h i s p o s t° ➮ Pairing: Kenma Kozume x fem! reader ➮ Series: Back to Me ➮ Tags: fluff, royal au, reincarnation au ➮ Part: 6 ➮ Word Count: 2962

--Your POV--

This was just like a job interview. You were dressed up in something nice, and you came prepared to show yourself off to your "employer". Of course, this would obviously last much longer than a job interview, but you could just think of it as an extended one. It was just about the same nervousness, the same confidence you had when you applied for a job during your third year of high school.

The moment you entered the room where you met the Queen, most of the confidence hid away somewhere in you and humbleness stepped forward in its place, sitting on top of your feelings of nervousness's lap. You looked down at the marble freshly polished floor, the carefully painted ceiling, the intricately carved patterns on the walls...

"It's a pleasure to see you, Lady (l/n)," her majesty started off. She had entered the room without you knowing, which startled you. Oh gosh, I need to start paying more attention to my surroundings. "Ah, yes, it's quite a pleasure to see you as well, your majesty," you greeted the empress along with a small curtsy. Her majesty always started with light greetings, promptly followed by a short and straightforward talk. You had talked to her a few times before, and she was definitely an intense person. "As you know, if we are on the same page, I have called you here to give you the details of the first test," she started, and you nodded. "I will have you manage the Archon Palace in the North for an entire month. I will visit you every so often, so please be prepared to greet me. You are to be assessed based on your skills in managing the palace both during events and on a daily basis. I have an informant who will inform me of the details. Your test will start when you arrive at the palace and end exactly a month after. That is all."

You quickly thanked the queen and curtsied, then was escorted out of the room by a servant, who led you to your carriage. You were going home to pack your things and get ready for the test. You hopped into the carriage and sighed, thinking about what you were going to do.

The test was like an open notebook test, used to only assess the application of the knowledge studied. You were definitely nervous; you had never done anything on this scale and it was very new to you. Your mother managed all the household affairs for you, since you had quit studying it a long time ago. But you did manage to go over it over the last few months of cramming, and you could probably relate it to some skills you saw at night.

The (y/n) in your dreams had at least basic skills to survive on her own. Of course, she was taught how to cook and clean and make the place all tidy and presentable. Well, you figured you would use those tips later when you managed the castle, so you wrote down a list of what you could remember and placed it with some other important documents you planned on bringing.

You wanted to pack your things yourself. There was just something special about it; perhaps it gave you the right temporary goodbye to your home that you needed. Or maybe you just wanted to do it because that girl always did it herself, but this is what you wanted to do and you were going to do it. It was definitely weird though, in other people's eyes. Anyone of your status would just tell their servants to get the things they needed and get on their way, unless they were hiding something. Well, you guessed you were hiding something, but it wasn't even in the baggage anyways.

You bid your parents a short goodbye as you left for the northern palace, and you slept to the bumps of the road as you made your way there. As soon as you arrived at the palace, you really knew it was really meant to be a long assessment, not some 10-minute pop quiz. The place was a mess- well, it still functioned, but it was still a mess. There was not an ounce of organization to be seen and you instantly wondered who had been in charge of the place before you arrived.

You were escorted to your room; it was actually quite nice. After all, this was a palace. It was made for the royal family, who always lived in such luxury. It was clean enough; the place looked clean and simple, with it just being very clean. That was one thing you liked about this palace, it was clean. There was no dust laying around, no rodents running around, no random stuff sitting around. It was clean and simple, in contrast to the elaborate paintings on the walls and ceilings; you'd have to fix that.

After taking the day to settle in, you familiarized yourself with the place and the staff. You had one of the butlers show you around, taking you to every place on the map you wished to see. It kinda felt like busy work, but it's not like you could back down now. All that cramming was for this, so you were going to do it. You attempted to speak to the staff, have a nice conversation with them, but nobody bothered to answer respectfully. They gave the shortest answers possible and continued working while you were talking to them. Well, they must be dedicated to their job- or perhaps they were told to act this way, who knows.

At the end of the day, the place was still pretty new to you, but it didn't feel completely foreign anymore. You were able to assess the situation, and in the morning, you'd tell them what they needed to fix up on- and it was a lot.

The next morning, you got up as the sun rose and you changed into something you had brought from home. It wasn't too fancy, but still presentable enough for the staff. Honestly, you wanted to wear (your comfort clothes) but you had appearances to keep up. Anyways, after getting ready, you headed towards your new office space. It was pretty nice, you had to say- especially the chair. It was comfier than any of the chairs you had at home, which was awesome. You then wrote out your entire script for what you were going to say to them. You weren't always up for "public speaking", but you were in the mood to get things done, so you were going to get things done. Simple as that.

Then, you decided to set up your simple system. Yes, you were going to make a system for these employees. Having good employees was one thing, but managing them was another. If you have good employees, but no organization, no sense of community, everything's going to be all over the place and nothing will get done. Well, that's what managers are for, right?

You ordered for the things that needed to be brought to be brought and called all of the servants over. You held your short script that you had made earlier this morning and took a deep breath as everyone piled in.

"Good morning, everyone. I have called this meeting to inform you of the new changes, which will start in three days, as I have supplies that need to be sent here. Now, as I was walking around the palace, I noticed many things about organization that need to be addressed immediately. I understand that it is very different than what you have been previously doing, and I hope you understand how this makes the process of doing your work much more manageable and efficient," you started. You looked at the faces of the servants. Some of them were intrigued, others looking away and not caring at all.

"First of all, I would like to address some of the organization issues you have here. Everything is all over the place, so I would like you to organize them. First, keep things in one place. Every time something is used, it is to be put back in the same place when it is finished being used. Next, I would like to invest in making the storage rooms much nicer. I saw them yesterday, and they are horrendous. I have just ordered some baskets; use them to organize the items in the storage rooms. Label them as well, so that everyone knows what basket is for which items. I will have Cain (the butler) handle the baskets," you explained, knowing this seemed pretty new to them. No one was particularly happy, as things were changing to something a bit different, and that was expected. As long as they did their job properly and followed the rules, everything would be fine.

"Next, I would like to introduce a new system. By my office, there will be a large board, where you can sign up for the tasks that need to be done that day. There will not be a set number of tasks you need to complete, but you must all complete everything by the day. I will also assign a leader to each group of servants, who will write me a report every 3 days on the work everyone has been doing. It does not need to be long, but make it a bit detailed; it just helps me make sure everything has been done well." You heard some sighs, and you knew full well it was more work for them, but you couldn't be going around all day and staring at them doing their work.

So, you put the system to work, and when the baskets and things arrived, you looked over everything. Honestly, there wasn't much to do then, if all the reports were all good. Well, that gave you time to plan for the decorations for when the queen would come visit, and so you spent your time doing that.

You researched different popular themes for the palace and selected one you thought her highness might like, though it required the place to be clean. There were way too many items in this palace, for sure. Of course, you could throw away many of them, but that would be such a waste. You could already think of uses for many of them. So, you decided to buy more baskets and hide them in plain sight. That way, you could keep them, and her highness wouldn't have a clue. It wouldn't hurt her if she doesn't know.

∞ ₒ ˚ ° 𐐒𐐚 ° ˚ ₒ ∞

Long days, always. Living in this place was lonely. Sure, there were tons of servants around, but you never felt much of a connection with them. You needed someone you trusted, someone you knew and someone who knew you. The first person you thought of was Kenma, but you weren't allowed to correspond with him during this time. The Queen would think you were trying to cheat, even if she read what was inside the letters. After all, you hadn't tried to prepare for years, and suddenly you're trying when you find out you're the prince's soulmate.

You were just about to go to bed. It was about midnight, a bit late, but not really. You were tired from dealing with all the servants; there was a huge fuss about a maid breaking an expensive vase. All of them in the room pointed fingers at each other, and after listening to everyone's stories, it was so clear that everyone was lying about something. No one's story matched up with the another's, so obviously everyone was twisting it for their own sake. You decided that you didn't like any of the girls in the group and seriously considered just firing the whole lot of them and hiring new ones. Well, in the end, you just let it all go with a warning. All that was really damaged was the vase; that could definitely be replaced. It wasn't like your budget was too tight; actually it was quite good. The only thing that concerned you was their attitude. These people really need to understand that they can be replaced...

It was about 4 in the morning when you woke up. Cain, the head butler, was literally the only one considerate and pleasant enough to talk to, but he really had to wake you up at 4 in the morning. You only had about 4 hours of sleep; your brain was still taking a vacation and it was truly difficult to force it back out.

As you exited your room in your nightgown, as it was still the middle of the night, you saw Alania, one of the better maids, with a candle outside the door. She led you to the office, where Cain was waiting.

"I apologize for interrupting your rest, Lady (l/n), but her highness has arrived. Please get ready to greet her," Cain explained. "I-" you said in surprise. "Thank you for telling me. I shall prepare right away."

Your brain flew back to your brain, luckily, and you were pretty alert now. Your gait quickened, as your thoughts raced through your mind. You ordered for the place to be quickly prettied up; there were still a few things that shouldn't be left in the open, and you told them to hold small things in baskets which were placed as decoration and large things in the storage rooms. It didn't need to be neat; the place just needed to be presentable.

As the place was being fixed up, you had yourself fixed up. It was much harder in the night, but Alania was skilled and made you look presentable in a matter of minutes. Since you were finished before some parts of the palace were cleaned up, you decided to keep her highness in the cleaner parts as the other parts not yet fully fixed up were worked on.

So, you went to greet her highness at the front of the palace and welcomed her. You apologized for being a few minutes late, though that really wasn't too uncommon. Nonetheless, you were just being respectful. You led her to a waiting room, where you talked and had some tea. You wondered when you could go back to getting your sleep, but it's not like you could leave her highness by herself; that would be extremely rude in this society. Casual did not exist, and that was such a shame.

After a while, her highness decided to retire for the night, and you had a room prepared for her. You led her to her room, then once she had closed her door, you started back to your room. It started as a walk, but as the desire to just get back in bed increased, it turned into a faster walk to a run. You sped up the stairs into your room, where Alania had been waiting for you.

You sighed as you slowed down, getting into a chair so that Alania could take off your makeup and accessories for you. They were so fancy you didn't even know how they worked, so you just let her. She got them off in no time and you changed into your pajamas as soon as they were off and flopped onto your bed. You were very tired by this time, and you instantly fell asleep as soon as you got comfortable.

The next morning, you weren't awoken by anyone. You expected someone to inform you that her highness was awake, but you figured she wasn't awake either. She probably didn't get any sleep until she got to the palace, so it made sense.

Alania knocked on your room when she came by a few minutes later, suggesting a dress for you to wear. You had instructed her to get you whatever dress for you to wear for the time you were in this palace, and she was great at it. You changed into the dress and had her fix up your hair and add on some accessories. Once you were all ready to go, you closed your bedroom door and started to the dining hall.

As you sat at the table, you realized it would be rude to eat without her highness, so you decided to wait as you read a novel you had brought with you, just in case you needed it. It would help pass the time, and it could be used as a conversation starter.

After some time, you heard the steps of a pair of heels entering the room, and her highness appeared. You greeted her as she sat across from you, and breakfast was served. You had small talk with her, making sure to always be respectful. Since you were asked, you showed her around the palace and told her some stories of things that you had to take care of. Gossip was always something women in high society talked about, even the Queen herself.

∞ ₒ ˚ ° 𐐒𐐚 ° ˚ ₒ ∞

You shuffled around the place, bidding your goodbyes to everyone as you hopped into your ride home. It has been a long month... and it was time to go home. You wondered about your results; they'd be released in a couple of weeks. You stared out the window, falling asleep on your way home.

『••✎••』 Extra Info * ˚ ✦ ⇢ If you haven’t read the other parts, find them here!

A/N: Hey guys! It's been a while haha. I actually made it longer than I thought I would. Honestly I rushed the ending a bit bc I'm lAzY but eh whatever welp I'll see you next time and that's hopefully soon! Love y'all! <3333

#kenma kozume #kenma kozume x reader #lili kags #kenma x reader #haikyuu x reader

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njacknis · 4 years

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Are You Looking At The Wrong Part Of The Problem?

In business, we are frequently told that to build a successful company we have to find an answer to the customer’s problem. In government, the equivalent guidance to public officials is to solve the problems faced by constituents. This is good guidance, as far as it goes, except that we need to know what the problem really is before we can solve it.

Before those of us who are results-oriented, problem solvers jump into action, we need to make sure that we are looking at the right part of the problem. And that’s what Dan Heath’s new book, “Upstream: The Quest To Solve Problems Before They Happen” is all about.

Heath, along with his brother Chip, has brought us such useful books as “Made To Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die” and “Switch: How to Change Things When Change Is Hard”.

As usual for a Heath book, it is well written and down to earth, but contains important concepts and research underneath the accessible writing.

He starts with a horrendous, if memorable, story about kids:

You and a friend are having a picnic by the side of a river. Suddenly you hear a shout from the direction of the water – a child is drowning. Without thinking, you both dive in, grab the child, and swim to shore. Before you can recover, you hear another child cry for help. You and your friend jump back in the river to rescue her as well. Then another struggling child drifts into sight…and another…and another. The two of you can barely keep up. Suddenly, you see your friend wading out of the water, seeming to leave you alone. “Where are you going?” you demand. Your friend answers, “I’m going upstream to tackle the guy who’s throwing all these kids in the water.”

Going upstream is necessary to solve the problem at its origin – hence the name of the book. The examples in the book range from important public, governmental problems to the problems of mid-sized businesses. While the most dramatic examples are about saving lives, the book is also useful for the less dramatic situations in business.

Heath’s theme is strongly, but politely, stated:

“So often we find ourselves reacting to problems, putting out fires, dealing with emergencies. We should shift our attention to preventing them.”

This reminds me of a less delicate reaction to this advice: “When you’re up to your waist in alligators, it’s hard to find time to drain the swamp”. And I often told my staff that unless you took some time to start draining the swamp, you are always going to be up to your waist in alligators.”

He elaborates and then asks a big question:

We put out fires. We deal with emergencies. We stay downstream, handling one problem after another, but we never make our way upstream to fix the systems that caused the problems. Firefighters extinguish flames in burning buildings, doctors treat patients with chronic illnesses, and call-center reps address customer complaints. But many fires, chronic illnesses, and customer complaints are preventable. So why do our efforts skew so heavily toward reaction rather than prevention?

His answer is that, in part, organizations have been designed to react – what I called some time ago the “inbox-outbox” view of a job. Get a problem, solve it, and then move to the next problem in the inbox.

Heath identifies three causes that lead people to focus downstream, not upstream where the real problem is.

Problem Blindness – “I don’t see the problem.”

A Lack of Ownership – “The problem isn’t mine to fix.”

Tunneling – “I can’t deal with the problem right now.”

In turn, these three primary causes lead to and are reinforced by a fatalistic attitude that bad things will happen and there is nothing you can do about that.

Ironically, success in fixing a problem downstream is often a mark of heroic achievement. Perhaps for that reason, people will jump in to own the emergency downstream, but there are fewer owners of the problem upstream.

…reactive efforts succeed when problems happen and they’re fixed. Preventive efforts succeed when nothing happens. Those who prevent problems get less recognition than those who “save the day” when the problem explodes in everyone’s faces.

Consider the all too common current retrospective on the Y2K problem. Since the problem didn’t turn out to be the disaster it could have been at the turn of the year 2000, some people have decided it wasn’t real after all. It was, but the issue was dealt with upstream by massive correction and replacement of out-of-date software.

Heath realizes that it is not simple for a leader with an upstream orientation to solve the problem there, rather than wait for the disaster downstream.

He asks leaders to first think about seven questions, which explores through many cases:

How will you get early warning of the problem?

How will you unite the right people to assess and solve the problem?

Where can you find a point of leverage?

Who will pay for what does not happen?

How will you change the system?

How will you know you’re succeeding?

How will you avoid doing harm?

Some of these questions and an understanding of what the upstream problem really is can start to be answered by the intelligent use of analytics. That too only complicates the issue for leaders, since an instinctive heroic reaction is much sexier than contemplating machine learning models and sexy usually beats out wisdom :-)

Eventually Heath makes the argument that not only do we often focus on the wrong end of the problem, but that we think about the problem too simplistically. At that point in his argument, he introduces the necessity of systems thinking because, especially upstream, you may find a set of interrelated factors and not a simple one-way stream.

[To be continued in the next post.]

#leadership #Leaders #Business #government #education #nonprofit #technology #tech

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massielandnetwork · 3 years

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Thriving in an Economic Bubble during Anarchy

12. The Christian Succession – A Tipping Point?

The official results of the November “election” set our country on course to intense crises which are becoming increasingly obvious. To those of us that understand how the American economy works the official results were especially agonizing because we realized the horrendous outcome ahead. In his book entitled “Tipping Point”, Malcolm Gladwell describes how “overnight successes” result from a focused effort over a long period of time that become visible only when they finally reach their tipping point and “succeed”. Some of his examples took 20 years to “arrive”.

We saw an example of that on Sunday, August 15 when Afghanistan fell to the Taliban led by a muslim terrorist Obama released from Guantanamo Bay prison six years ago. I am not sure which one is laughing at Americans more, the muslim terrorists or Obama. What the fall of Afghanistan revealed about the Demented Marxists (DMs) is a singularly important milestone.

Another singularly important milestone was disclosed on Wednesday, August 18, when the minutes of the July meeting of The Fed revealed a high likelihood that in September, they may announce the tapering of Quantitative Easing (QE) starting the end of this year. QE is The Fed buying our government debt and mortgages to stimulate our economy by forcing interest rates to be low. Tapering the QE will result in higher interest rates especially mortgages.

Business prospers when there is certainty but since March 2020 the business community has faced a constant steam of crises. One can trace these crises to our leaders who thought that prosperity and world peace would come from shipping American manufacturing to China. Cheered by PhD’s and other “experts” who had no real-world experience, they eliminated our manufacturing base with no regard for destroying middle class jobs or our becoming dependent on a self-proclaimed enemy. The investment bankers that hollowed out America probably made huge contributions to those politicians. President Xi of China must belly laugh when he thinks about America, his vassal, pursuing self-destruction. Trump was reversing that self destruction.

The Johnson Report in 2020 established that Biden and many of our elected and appointed officials became wealthy on government salaries by catering to the Chinese. The Chinese bought influence with our colleges and universities via Confucius Centers and other “contributions”. Is selling our country to our enemy treason? Fauci used American taxpayer dollars to fund the Wuhan Bioweapon lab and the “gain of function” research into the bat virus thus paying the Chinese to build their bioweapon they unleashed in 2019. Did he buy stock in the vaccine companies? Why is he still a U. S. government employee? Do we have a shortage of traitors so we keep them? Perhaps we have a surplus so we could send some to China.

It is critical to understand how the singularly important events listed above will impact the American economy and therefore the land market. Capitalism allocates scarce resources by price. A major factor in that allocation process is the cost of money called interest rates. The Fed has been buying 10-year Treasuries because that interest rate is the base on which mortgages are calculated. New housing construction influences activity in about one-third of the total economy. That is huge and why The Fed uses new homes construction to revive our economy. The spread between mortgage rates and the 10-year Treasury is normally about 1.5% per annum so if the 10-year Treasury is at 3% then mortgages will be at least 4.5%, perhaps higher if interest rates are rising.

The impact of mortgage rates is easiest to see in the housing market but the impact is the same across all real estate. In this illustration we will only focus on the interest component of a monthly home loan. If a homebuyer can afford to pay $1,000 per month ($12,000 per year) in interest for a home.

a. At a mortgage interest rate of 3%, our homebuyer can borrow $400,000.

b. But if mortgage interest rates increase to 4% our home buyer can borrow $300,000.

c. That is a reduction of 25% in buying power.

d. The result is the home buyer either buys a smaller home or continues to rent until they can afford to pay $16,000 per year for that $400,000 home and the market slows.

Now factor in that the artificially low interest rates have caused home prices to soar and construction costs to soar (the market was allocating scarce resources). Based on exploding sales, homebuilders have made commitments for land, material, and staff to meet a superheated demand. What happens when demand falls because interest rates have risen taking some of the potential homebuyers out of the market? PAIN.

That pain is shared across the board of the homebuilding industry including lot prices. A reduction in lot prices will mean the value of land that can be developed into residential lots also will decline. Now multiply this across the entire real estate market distorted by the pandemic shutdown. We have just defined a TOTALLY UGLY real estate market.

The historic response of the Fed to an ugly real estate market is to reduce interest rates to stimulate demand. But QE and how the federal government has piled stimulus bills on top of stimulus bills has resulted in rising inflation and massive increases in our national debt. Per one analysis at today’s historic low interest rates the annual cost to service our national debt is approximately $500 Bn. If The Fed raises interest rates to an historically normal level, the cost of servicing the debt triples to an estimated 1.5 Tn. If our economy GDP is $22 Tn and historically the federal rate receipts are 20% of the GDP, then the nation revenue will be $4.4 Tn.

But Congress has not balanced the federal budget with $4.4 Tn revenue and $500 Bn in interest expense. What programs will get cut $1 Tn to balance the budget at normal interest rates? The DMs response is that Modern Monetary Theory says that the amount of national debt does not matter. Reality is that this is the same group of academics and idiots just lost Afghanistan, gave our self-proclaimed enemy massive amounts of weapons paid for by the American Taxpayers, not to mention a new base for terrorism against us, subjugated millions of Afghanis to the rule of thugs, and cannot figure out how to get Americans out of harm’s way so they are going to abandon them. Is there anything in this paragraph that gives you confidence in Biden or the DMs in Congress and our bureaucracy regarding their opinion on anything?

Remember my joke two weeks ago about the two truckers, Bob and Billy, with Bob waking up Billy because Billy “ain’t never seen a wreck like this one”. You need to wake up Billy because the highest probability is the next several years will be an historic economic period that will be the topic of many future history and economic PhD dissertations. This wreck will be epic.

Now let us add to this equation the debacle in Afghanistan. Biden and the Elites/DMs running our country have just confirmed that they only care about themselves. They got wealthy shipping our manufacturing base to China, making us dependent on OPEC oil, obtaining campaign contributions to their PACs from groups “Paying so they could Play” in China, not to mention financial benefits given to their spouses and family members. To the Biden and the Elites/DM, we American taxpayers are peasants, expendable like the folks in Afghanistan.

Now that the world including the Chinese who own Biden and the DMs have proof including the Joint Chiefs of Staff and Secretary of Defense are all totally incompetent (in a capable organization they would already have been fired), China invading Taiwan is a high probability.

Never fear, guided by their Saul Alinsky/ Rahm Emanuel mantra the DMs continue their “Never waste a crisis” campaign driving us towards higher energy cost, unreliable electricity, higher taxes, “Social Justice” garbage, teaching our children CRT propaganda rather than reading writing and arithmetic, telling all whites they are racist, forcing vaccinations, et al.

What is so frustrating that Trump had us on the right economic path because he cared about every American. The DMs used their propaganda mill called the news media and their Obama appointed traitors in the government bureaucracy to steal the election so that they could regain control. Now we get to pay the price – inflation because of the stimulus funded by debt and higher interest rates which will give us a stagnant economy (called Stagflation).

Fortunately, God is in control and empowering the Patriots who are demanding forensic audits of the 2020 elections and all future elections to ensure they are honest. The Cyber Symposium in Sioux Falls last week released a “silver bullet”, that spurred many of the attendees from 47 states to form a group of state legislators to push for full forensic audits around the country including a lone Virginia Republican, Senator Chase. The next Republican legislator you see, ask them about the contract Virginia has with Unisyn Voting Systems which is owned by a business partner of the Chinese Communist Party according WND News. AuditVA!

Every portfolio should contain some cash but a great piece of land remains The Best investment long term. Capitalism builds wealth, Marxism/Socialism consumes it in self destruction. Pray for honest and forensic audited elections in the USA. Men make plans, but God ALWAYS wins. Stand with God and support the patriots while replacing the Elites/DMs.

“Therefore, take up the whole armor of God, so that you may be able to withstand on that evil day, and having done everything, to stand firm.”

(Ephesians 6:13) New Revised Standard Version, Oxford University Press)

Stay healthy,

Ned

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progressivejudaism · 7 years

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Hello! Do you have any resources for someone who is wanting to gather a deeper understanding for the Palestinian/Israeli conflict? I have considered myself Anti-Zionist for a while, but I'm very eager to gather an understanding of Israel's positions. There are extremists on all sides and I just want to make sure I'm standing by my beliefs for the right reasons. Thank you!

Hi there!

Sadly, everything that is *out there* is going to be very biased. But I think that it’s important to understand the three major biases out there- and which one I personally prefer.

First of all, you have the two major extremes. Both are dangerous, riddled with bias, and are usually filled with pure hatred. Although I can point to certain periodicals, websites, and writers that tend to lean in these directions, I would much rather describe them so you know what to watch out for.

One extreme argues for the Israeli far-right. On this side, you will tend to see a narrative that paints the Palestinians and Arabs as all extremists, Islam as the most horrendous religion in the world, and will often be very-pro occupation. They often argue that Palestine is a myth, that Palestinian nationalism isn’t real, and that all of the problems that exist in Palestinian society are their own fault.

On the other side sits the Palestinian far-right and the Palestinian far-left (often dominated by non-Palestinians). Both paint Israel and the government as extremists, tend to scapegoat Jews, and develop narratives of “Good Jews vs. Bad Jews”. Although very anti-Occupation, this dual-side will often argue that the entire land mass should be considered Palestinian territory, and portray Zionism as the worst ideology that has ever been created. This side often uses antisemitism to propel their arguments.

Both groups ignore clear history/archaeology, they vilify the “other,” and only think in “black and white”. Both are disgusting, horrendous, and gross examples of pure hatred, bigotry, antisemitism/islamophobia/racism. That is why I like option #3: the centrist perspective.

Those of us in the middle, understand all of the issues of sitting on the extremes of this Conflict. Some statements to exemplify this perspective can be: “the Occupation is a horrible injustice, but Israelis shouldn’t be subjected to extremists attacks.”

I suggest reading and learning about as much as you can while understanding these three perspectives that exist. I personally will only ever post articles (and write my own content) from the third perspective. I do not think that the first two are productive. But, I personally take in news from all three outlets and I think that you should too.

And as asked, here are my own personal resources that I think are the best of the best!

The purest form of Progressive Zionism appears in a book written by Alex Sinclair called “Loving the Real Israel: An Educational Agenda for Liberal Zionism“. I HIGHLY recommend this book for understanding how we can successfully talk about Zionism once you are well versed in the history.

JewishVirtualLibrary does a fantastic job at sticking to facts in regard to all of its content and doesn’t often let emotions (or false narratives) get in the way of teaching real information. I warn you, this site is extremely dense.. but it’s great.

MyJewishLearning also provides some great resources on Isreal. They are much less dense and typically have a more center/left wing bias.

The NY Times gives a relatively simple description of the last 70 years of war. It seems politically center.

ReformJudaism.com has several articles about Israel which should be helpful.

For your convenience, I have listed some of the major organizations/sites that support Israel. I have included where they fall politically.

*ARZA (Association for Reform Zionists of America): The NorthAmerican Reform Movement’s lobbying organization to the World Zionist Congress which promotes Progressive Jewish and Zionist values. (center left)

*The Jewish Agency: “ The Jewish Agency for Israel brings Jews to Israel, Israel to Jews and helps build a better society in Israel and beyond. Our Vision To ensure the future of a connected, committed, global Jewish People with a strong Israel at its center. Our Mission Inspire Jews throughout the world to connect with their People, heritage, and homeland, and empower them to build a thriving Jewish future and a strong Israel.“ (center)

*JStreet: “J Street is the political home for pro-Israel, pro-peace Americans who want Israel to be secure, democratic and the national home of the Jewish people. Working in American politics and the Jewish community, we advocate for policies that advance shared US and Israeli interests as well as Jewish and democratic values, leading to a two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.” (center-leftish)

*AIPAC (The American Israel Public Affairs Committee): “AIPAC’s staff and citizen activists educate decision makers about the bonds that unite the United States and Israel and how it is in America’s best interest to help ensure that the Jewish state is safe, strong and secure.” (right)

*If Not Now: “We are building a vibrant and inclusive movement within the American Jewish community, across generations and organizational affiliations. This movement is open to any who seek to shift the American Jewish public away from the status quo that upholds the occupation. “ (far left)

*Breaking the Silence: “is an organization of veteran combatants who have served in the Israeli military since the start of the Second Intifada and have taken it upon themselves to expose the Israeli public to the reality of everyday life in the Occupied Territories. We endeavor to stimulate public debate about the price paid for a reality in which young soldiers face a civilian population on a daily basis, and are engaged in the control of that population’s everyday life. Our work aims to bring an end to the occupation.“ (far left)

*Shoreshim / Roots: An organization that brings Israeli Settlers and Palestinians together (Center-left)

*Backgammon in Jerusalem (Center)

*Yad v’Yad (Hand and Hand): Palestinian/Israeli schools (Center)

*NasDaily: a 20-something-year-old Palestinian citizen of Isreal who makes 1-minute videos each day. All of his videos are fun, some promote coexistence and love between Arabs and Jews. (center)

I hope that this helps, friend! Please let me know if you have any other questions!

#ask #progressivezionism #zionism #progressive zionism #progressive judaism #islam #reform judaism #judaism #palestine #israel

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thescalers-blog · 5 years

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Bridging the Culture Gap in Remote Teams

More and more companies are building geographically-dispersed workforces. It's not just the Googles and the Microsofts that are going global, either. Small companies can leverage remote workers to cut costs, improve performance, and increase profits.

Many today are building full teams in emerging tech nations like India. They're taking advantage of global diversity and bringing together people from different cultures and backgrounds, with unique perspectives on just about everything imaginable.

In theory, this globalisation helps organizations to scale up their business - but the vast cultural and societal differences between the in-house and remote team members can throw a major spanner in the works.

Defining the "culture gap"

Building an efficient, productive, and successful team is hard enough when everyone shares the same office. When you're working with an offshore team that's located halfway around the world, with a diverse cultural and functional background, communication can be tricky.

After all, an "open door" policy is hard to implement when your team is 10,000 miles away!

What does it look like?

Let's take India. Indians are known for their persistence and hard work: it's an ingrained (and largely positive) aspect of their culture. However, something they are equally well-known for is refusing to say "no".

This isn't a negative trait, but it is different. Indian workers typically accept the need to "grind", even if it means spending extra hours in work everyday! They love a challenge and are determined to prove themselves, especially when collaborating as part of a bigger team. Refusing yet another request from the boss just isn't really entertained.

In Europe or the US, staff are more likely to say, "Sorry, but I can't do that, I've already got too much on my plate." Is this team any less hardworking or dedicated than their Indian counterparts? Not at all. They've simply been encouraged more, over their lifetime, to speak their mind. Candidness and "telling it how it is" is seen more as positive, not negative, in the west.

So what's the problem?

This is just one example of the difference in culture between countries like India and the US. While it's not true for everyone, it is broadly accurate. Problems arise when CEOs, managers, and even run-of-the-mill colleagues fail to understand or connect with new employees.

It's easy to get off on the wrong foot or develop poor expectations. This kind of "culture gap" can take a brilliant hiring strategy - such as building a specialist offshore team - and make it disastrous.

A Global Culture Survey conducted in 2018 showed that roughly 65% of leaders and employees believed that the organizational culture of their company is more important to them than any strategy or operating model.

Unfortunately, more than 80% also agreed they weren't happy with their company culture. This proves that an unaddressed cultural gap is more common than we might expect. While it doesn't exist only among remote teams, it can be more pronounced there than in-house.

Bridging the cultural gap effectively

When working with remote teams, there are a few simple steps that you can take towards "bridging" the gap.

1. Acknowledge and appreciate the cultural differences

Start by addressing the elephant in the room: your team now contains more diverse cultures than before. Cultural diversity manifests in different forms: language, behavioural differences, values, and even the meanings attached to specific words and actions.

Before you can bridge the culture gap, you need to learn what it's made of.

Breaking the ice reveals what's hiding beneath the surface

Ice breakers. All you need is a good internet connection and a Skype account. Get your team members to share their cultural background, expectations for their job, how they work - whatever seems important.

While an elementary exercise, simply encouraging this candid conversation can help your longstanding team understand its new, foreign colleagues - and vice versa. You might discuss cultural differences like:

Approach to conflict of interest

Approach to work and deadlines

Personal conduct

Long-term expectations

You could even go the extra mile and visit your offshore team in person. This could be a great chance to chat in person, get to know each other, and build a more personal connection.

2. Over-communicate until everyone is comfortable

When working with a remote team, you can't just corner someone at their desk when you need something done. Despite perfectly good communications tools, misunderstandings can be a regular issue.

But why?

For a start, body language accounts for roughly 55% of all communication. This means that the tone of a text or the formality of an email is left entirely open to misinterpretation. Most of us have been there in our personal lives, too.

Then what can you do?

Be prepared to adapt your soft skills. Even if totally fluent in English, your new colleagues might miss subtle meanings or misinterpret based on your specific word choice. Indians are known to wear their hearts on their sleeves, which means that constructive criticism can be harder to take.

Rather than saying, "I don't like how you've approached this task at all. Have you considered this approach instead?", you can say "Hey, that's not bad, but here's how I think you can do this task better'.

Particularly in the early days, framing your sentences the right way makes a huge difference. Dedicate time and effort to communicating as clearly as possible. Also refrain from being overly critical: even if it's frustrating, both sides should be candid without aggression.

From the remote worker's perspective, they must accept the need to request repeat instructions, ask for help, and say "no". Consider "checking in" regularly to ensure everyone is on the same page.

By over-communicating, you can establish a collaboration that is built on transparency and honesty. It's better to start slow - and to start well - than to find yourself scrambling and frustrated a few months down the line.

3. Conduct alignment meetings to standardise everything

With an in-house team, it's important to be organised. With an offshore team, it is absolutely crucial.

If you have ten people with ten different ideas on how something should be done, it's recipe for disaster. Alignment meetings can go a long way in establishing norms and rules throughout your organization.

Everyone has their own approach to tasks, problems, and hitting deadlines. In your company, however, everyone needs to be on the same page.

Apply processes and training across the company

Standardise processes, document templates, task management systems, the structure and frequency of weekly meetings - everything that can be standardised, should be standardised.

Most of this is necessary for companies of a certain size, regardless of location. With a remote team, that goes double. You can even offer training on understanding cross-cultural differences for your staff.

Again, go to your workforce for feedback. Some concepts may sound good in theory, but work out horrendously in practice.

Cross-cultural teams are on the rise all over the world, for all number of reasons. This presents challenges, but also unprecedented opportunity. With a little effort, the cultural barriers of building remote teams can be overcome without disruption.

Handled correctly, diverse opinions and perspectives are a powerful asset - not a liability.

At The Scalers, we pride ourselves on building efficient and successful cross-cultural teams. Based in Bangalore but with strong European leadership, we're perfectly placed for what we do.

If you're interested in building a remote team for your business, we'd love to talk to you. You can schedule a call with one of our consultants or take our quick test below to see if you're ready to launch a full offshore team!

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spookyshake · 7 years

Note

I'm REALLY sorry I don't want to seem like a weird stalker or anything but I was looking through petpages and I really wanna know.... is the reason why Imawa looks the way he does because of the fireworks? What's his connection with the twins? (I assume they were the two little kids in the picture w/ young!Imawa) And what does the hissi inn keeper/cult leader do in terms of cult stuff? I really love your ocs and your art!

NO WORRIES!! I’m extremely flattered you’re interested in them, so thank you!(and honestly I’m quite a bit of a petpage stalker myself hahaha)

Brief answer: -Imawa and the Twins are siblings! Imawa is the eldest by a large margin.-The fireworks are more of a recurring visual symbol/theme than anything else-The Innkeeper uh…she and the cult are outwardly altruistic, BUT SHE DEVOURS PEOPLE……

Long answer: I actually have some concept art/material that I’m currently working on for them, so here’s a REALLY HUGE barely coherent dump of some details I’ve been mulling over. Things are subject to change as I go along and refine it, but the general ideas are here.(warning: heavy-ish stuff ahead…?):

[Imawa and the Twins]-They’re siblings!Imawa is older than them by about 10 years or so, and acted more as a caretaker/parental figure.-They’re a bit of a (perhaps overly) tragedy-wrought family.-From a remote farming village in the mountains of Shenkuu, their family was ostracized within the community on account of an ancient offense from generations ago.The offense, the crime, the taboo- whatever it was that occurred in the past was clearly no longer relevant in the present, but in such a sequestered society, it was simply convenient to have a scapegoat for ill happenings and misfortunes.Thus, the family lived under extremely poor conditions.-Scorned by the community and avoided like the plague by the villagers, the only thing they could rely on was each other; family was the most important thing.-The Twins were the lights in Imawa’s bleak life. He wanted nothing more than for them to have a better life, and often went out of his way to keep them entertained by crafting little trinkets and toys with whatever he could find.He’d probably do ANYTHING for them.(the general basis behind the Fireworks images/short script)-The Twins themselves were often perplexed by the odd rules they had to follow in order to stay out of trouble with the village, as they didn’t understand the nuance behind the shunning they experienced.They were blissfully unaware, and were mostly content to just spend time running around and playing in the mountains as kids do; but they were also very curious.-The family consisted of the 3 siblings, and their parents. -Was very close-knit despite their hardships, and maintained a meager but otherwise peaceful existence on the very outskirts of the village settlement.

[EXCEPT THINGS ALWAYS GET WORSE]-While the twins were still very young, their mother had succumbed to an otherwise curable illness; they weren’t able to get any medical attention due to the taboo placed upon them by the villagers.So she died a tragically preventable death :’ (-This was the true start of everything going down hill, though it wasn’t immediately apparent. -Their father fell into a deep depression after the loss of his wife, but he tried his hardest to keep going for the sake of the children. A listless and meek man, he always made it a point to warn the children to stay out of trouble with the villagers.-Imawa became extremely protective over the twins after the passing of their mother-He felt a great anger towards the cold-hearted villagers and a helplessness towards their situation. -(Around this time is when the past-firework image is placed chronologically)-(Some drastic(?) series of events happen that causes the 3 siblings to end up at an orphanage run by the Cult; still working the exact details of this part out)

-(The whole family is so miserably prone to misfortune, big or small, that I’m fairly certain there’s something more sinister going on in the background of the village, which I might expand on later from a different perspective)

[Imawa - Then and Now]-Originally a Grey Kacheek. -Weak of constitution, he couldn’t really help his father out much in the fields so he took to doing household chores and looking after his younger siblings.-KIND OF A ‘MOM’…..since their mother died while the twins were still very young, he sort of naturally took on this sort of role (perhaps unknowingly) to fill that void.

- (This quality remains at his core even in the present day. While generally unfriendly and distrustful of others, he really looks after those that are close to him (Paskur, Delivery Grundo) and hides surprisingly high domestic skills. Also kind of obsessive about keeping places tidy.)

-Was always very resourceful and mature for his age, and quick to learn.-Young Imawa initially hoped to take the Imperial Exam and get a governmental job at the capital, in order to improve the family’s living conditions and just get away from the poverty and scornful villagers. …Things didn’t really pan out in the end.

-While at the orphanage, he was scouted by some shady Virtupets officials for his unusual intelligence (the non-civilian, Dr.Sloth-associated Virtupets?)Desperate to grasp at any opportunity to help his siblings lead a more normal life, he took their offer to be trained and employed at the Space Station, on the condition that the Twins would be properly cared for at the orphanage through his salary.

-He failed to take into account how his absence would affect the young twins. -Shoyru Boy, too young to understand how their older brother was looking out for them, became increasingly distraught as he felt convinced that Imawa had all but abandoned them.This lead to his great fear and anxieties towards abandonment; family was always the most important thing, but what can you do when even family leaves you behind? Their mother, their father, and then Imawa- it was far too much for him to handle.-Kacheek Girl became inevitably chained to her twin as his keeper; while they’ve always been at each other’s side, it took on a much graver meaning as she was now his only mental support. She had to quickly take on a role of responsibility, though she kept holding onto a vague hope that Imawa would come back for them soon.

-While working for Virtupets, Imawa willingly elected to be mutated, as his frail body was starting to fail him– he couldn’t afford to die.-It was largely successful, and granted him a body with an enhanced metabolism and sensory processing. His previously failing eyesight became exponentially sharp and clear.BUT…. it also made him extremely sensitive to light and sound, and prone to crippling migraines.(He LITERALLY can’t quite see the fireworks the same way as he did before :( )-By taking this decision however, he became very afraid of returning to the Twins, and having them see how horrendously he’s changed. Kind of dug his own grave, in a way.-Convinces himself that he’s monstrous and hideously twisted at heart and his mutant appearance an apt reflection of that…..BUT he’s actually very much soft-hearted, with a rational perception of morality and common sense.….However, that doesn’t mean he won’t follow through with questionable or morally reprehensible orders.

[The Cult]-At the surface the cult appears as a sort of charity organization, and often runs food drives, charity events, volunteer programs, and other humanitarian (N…neopetarian??) efforts. -They have a pretty good reputation and nothing seems very suspect, save for the sometimes EXTREME sense of self-sacrifice the members seem to display.Maybe a bit TOO friendly, as well.- The Twins play a part in this by hosting charity concerts and personally helping out at events. The cult supports and organizes their idol activities, and the staff members consist almost entirely of cultists.The plan is to spread the influence of their ideology through mass-media (and in doing so, roping in new members)-The cult tends to target and appeal to those that are in bad situations and are prone to influence; the poor and displaced, youths with issues, those fraught with heavy worries and problems, individuals without a place to belong, etc. Sometimes you also have the types with savior complexes that need fulfilling, or just general do-gooders who are drawn to the idea of doing good for the community.-The cult provides a tightly-knit, supportive community structure bound by the idea that ‘Everyone can help each other if you give your selves willingly’

[What’s actually happening behind the scenes]-Hissi Innkeeper has a delusional belief that she’s a manifestation of the Thousand-Year Martyr, an obscure altruistic figure from a local legend whose story acts as the foundation for the cult’s ideology.-She idolizes the Martyr as her ideal of true beauty– Self-Sacrifice.In fact, she’s so enamored by the very idea of the Martyr that she’s come to believe that SHE /IS/ THE THOUSAND-YEAR MARTYR.She’s both a worshipper, AND the idol of worship itself.-In order to fully ‘become’ the Thousand-Year Martyr, she’s gone to excessive lengths to prolong her life and maintain her beauty– emulating the supposedly immortal figure.-Initially her methods were pretty benign.She dabbled in things like traditional medicines, cosmetics, charms and potions, weird diets, prayer and offerings, spells, etc.But when they didn’t have the effect she desired, she began dipping into more…questionable, occult practices.-More bluntly: She EATS people, under the belief that their flesh and blood will give her new life.-She’s one step away from becoming a real monster.

-While she truly believes in and endorses the cult’s main ideology of Self-Sacrifice, it also serves as a perfect ideology to condition her most devout followers into willingly offer up their flesh and blood.-The conditioning process usually starts off with smaller, secret gatherings that call for ritual offerings of blood, which gradually escalate as the devotees become entrapped in the mythos of the process.-Some of the funds that support the cult were gained by devotees who gave up their worldly possessions, as part of the gradual sacrifice process.-Not everyone in the cult is aware of the more sinister side; there are many peripheral followers that just attend the seminars and charity events, and don’t go much further than that.

[The Cult’s Structure, summarized]—Outer Layer—-Charity organization.-Ingrains members into the community through kind acts and philanthropy, and introduces them to the altruistic(?) ideology behind the cult.-Relatively benign, but often uses peer pressure as a tactic to indoctrinate new members.

—Middle Layer—-The actual ‘Cult’ level. A cult of personality combined with a mystery cult.-Cultists are initiated into the secret rituals and formally introduced to the ‘mythos’ behind the cult.-The Innkeeper/Cult Leader serves as a proxy and avatar to their idol of worship (Thousand-Year Martyr), and adds an occult/mystic element that asks for the cultists to offer up their blood in the name of the Martyr.-The Martyr itself is characterized to the cultists as a sort of conceptual being or divine force that exists within everyone– omniscient, benevolent, sympathetic, compassionate, forgiving, and able to bring about miracles….but requires the worshippers to first show their own ‘kindness’ in return.

-The cool bonus is that you get your very own pretty cultist garb, made from Hissi Innkeeper’s (shed) skin. WOW WHAT A DEAL!!

—Inner Layer–-Hissi Innkeeper’s personal circle.-If you’re here you’re either really high up in the ladder, or completely ready to be served up as dinner.Maybe both.

[Innkeeper and the Twins]-The Innkeeper considers the Twins to be like her very own children, and she dotes on them dearly.-She took in these unfortunate twins from the orphanage (sponsored by the Cult) during one of her visits, and she’s since raised them as her own and indoctrinated them into her cult.-….However, she’s not above using them for the purpose of the cult. They act as her close agents for monitoring and spreading the cult’s activities at a wider scale.-The Twins also participate in and sometimes lead the blood rituals.-While Shoyru Boy is completely loyal and unquestioning, Kacheek Girl holds a fear that one day they may be next on the platter.She can’t really run away or even confront the Innkeeper though, as she does feel a deep appreciation and obligation towards her for taking care of them. There’s also the fact that she couldn’t ever leave her brother behind and betray his trust….-A bit of a complicated ‘Hansel and Gretel’ sort of situation.

#[]asks #◆Concepts #★Imawa #★[Cultist 1]#★[Cultist 2]#★Yaochi #◎Cult #◀ Past

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hiruma-musouka · 7 years

Text

soulmates see color (IzuMito)

Happy late birthday @elenathehun. I wrote IzuMito like you wanted ^.^ 💕

(AO3 link - contains all author notes)

This is fucking ridiculous.

Izuna drags a hand down his face, closing his eyes to the massive warehouse full of various merchandise, and sincerely regrets asking his father for this mission. He certainly hadn't wanted to accompany Uncle Kenrou's group to the western desert with his brother (of all miserable places), but he also hadn't realized at the time that he'd have to track this group of thieves south and east to cut over nearly the entirety of Hi no Kuni, sneak past patrols from several different clans (most of whom would love to kill him), and then curve back upwards to stop within kunai-throwing distance of the Yu no Kuni border.

And now he's finally caught up to his quarry, except they've already sold his client's priceless (and pointless) trinket to a merchant.

A very successful merchant.

One who possess an unnecessarily large stock in his opinion and is either the most disorganized and eclectic woman Izuna's ever come across or who has evidently met her soulmate and decided afterwards to implement a color-based organizational scheme among her products.

Which makes this night so much better given that to him everything just looks like a mass of yellows and grays with a scattering of blues.

What kind of inconsiderate, inefficient, and short-sighted merchant organizes their warehouse by color!? Yes, yes, there are obviously individual groupings of similar items among each greater section - furniture with furniture, rugs with rugs, jewelry with jewelry - but at least seventy percent of the average population is color impaired in some way at any one point in time! How the hell does she stay in business? Does Akiyama only hire workers who can see in full color?

... No. No that would be foolish, Izuna realizes, silently drumming his fingers on his sword hilt. Akiyama didn't establish a large mercantile network by vastly limiting her employee base. If her merchandise is organized by primary color after it's purchased, and all the employees know the organizational scheme, then items wouldn't need to be rigorously labeled for color as long as there's at least one full-sighted staff member who can run checks that the system is being maintained.

Theoretically, it might shave time off in day-to-day affairs. If time is money, that's obviously a benefit from Akiyama's perspective.

This, of course, does not change the fact that Izuna doesn't know the warehouse's system and thus can not easily rule out any areas. He also can't afford to genjutsu one of the workers to fetch it for him because his client wants the theft kept as quiet as possible which means any potential evidence of his presence is a bad idea. And he has to find it tonight because while he has confirmation that one of Akiyama's employees purchased it five hours ago, he has no idea how long it takes this branch to process items.

"A brilliant emerald in a silver setting," Izuna mutters, eyes darting from one end of the building to another. Silver's easy enough, he knows he sees that in the same shade as his matched parents, but emeralds are supposed to be green and green is one of the most widely common problem colors. He has no idea what green actually looks like to soul-matched people, but...

'Red for running blood

Pink for sakura blooming

Orange for mikan

Yellow for the sun

Green for healthy, growing grass...'

Izuna may or may not pout like he's ten-years-old again as he mentally double-checks part of the color haiku. Grass under a summer sun always appears to be a yellow or gray-yellow to him. Which is a problem because over half of the contents of this room are in some variation of yellow!

He resists the urge to sigh and makes his way to the right. He'll need to run a systematic grid search to make sure he doesn't miss the pendant given its small size. At least he can rule out anything that's colored an intense blue. Judging from past experience, those items have to be either legitimately blue or some shade of purple.

... This would be a lot easier if he could afford to use a brighter light.

( It's going to be so very satisfying when he turns those thieves in for their bounty on top of his mission pay. He's positive they must have a bounty among the civilians: he can't be the only person they've angered if they've successfully robbed a noblewoman while being incompetent enough to still get noticed. )

Izuna finally finds the uselessly overpriced bauble at around four in the morning. He's tired, cranky, twitchy from dodging random guard checks, and suffering a horrendous headache both from straining to see details in low-light and from frequently flicking his sharingan on and off for better night vision.

The palm-sized pendant really doesn't look impressive enough to be worth this hassle, if he's honest. He's aware it must be very expensive considering the size of the gemstone and the mission fee his client is willing to pay for its retrieval, but from a purely aesthetic point of view Izuna can barely think of anything to recommend it. The emerald looks like solidified incense ash to him even if the silver is molded in an admittedly elegant, antique design.

But a mission is a mission and his is finally done. He even has a little time left before his family starts worrying, which means he has the opportunity to do something for himself.

Maybe he'll take the scenic route back after disposing of the thieves who have lingered nearby. He's never seen the ocean before.

"We dead. We so dead."

"Shut yer mouth and keep moving! We'll just— we'll put 'er in the pit with the others and be done with it! Nobody's gonna dig up all of those bodies just looking for one girl."

"She got a devil's hair, Taro, a devil's! Ain't seen nothing like it, but y'know the stories. Only the Uzumaki got that 'round these parts." Masaharu starts breathing harder, eyes darting around the inn, frantic mania building under the surface as he searches the shadows of the room. "They catch spirits with glowing chains and eat 'em alive. They know things - know how to write down stuff, make all kinds of things happen. Don't even need words! Just squiggles and paper and—"

"MASA!" Taro snaps, punching his friend firmly in the shoulder. Masa's eyes dart back to his, jerked out of his high pitched rambling. "She's got buns. It's a hairstyle. There isn't anything devilish about it. Now grab that man—" he pointed towards a dead fisherman with blue-tinged skin, bloodshot eyes, and a mouth covered in vomit "—and start getting 'em all on the damn cart. We've gotta get all these folks buried before we can leave, you know that."

"It ain't the style, Taro," Masaharu whispers, fearful as a child. "It the color. It like, like blood Taro. It look like blood and flowers. 'Taint natural."

Of course it's the color, Taro curses internally. Damn Masa's useless soulmate. She met the man, put all these stories in the poor fool's head, and then up and got herself a wasting sickness months later instead of sticking around to deal the results of her messing with her man's brain.

"Listen. Masa," Taro says reassuringly, shaking the idiot's shoulder until he looks at him. "I don't know what color you're seeing, but it's just light colored hair, alright? Look at 'er," he says, waving towards the inn's stairs where the visiting teen had collapsed earlier, sprawled out on the last steps in a simple dress like any other village girl. "She isn't going to do anything. We'll bury them all and be done with it alright?"

Masaharu gulps. "It bad luck to bury the livin', Taro."

"Hey, hey," he scolds, when Masa's attention wanders back to the girl. "She's just a bit slow to die, alright? Some people just die hard, that's all. You heard what those shinobi told us: the poison's fatal, alright? She'll be dead before long just like the rest."

Masaharu hesitates, wringing his sleeves and looking around the inn at all the corpses, each crumbled to the floor wherever they'd been standing when the poison in Taro's pipe smoke had triggered the stuff they'd drunk . "Don't seem right, ta me. It just don't seem right..."

"Well right doesn't keep food in our bellies, Masa, and there isn't any work but what the shinobi wanted. I don't much like it myself, but I'm not gonna let you and me suffer a slow death." Masaharu shudders at the idea and Taro gives him a grim smile and a friendly pat. "Now, have I let you down? Left you behind before even when I maybe should've?"

"No. You're a good friend."

"Right you are. And you're the same to me. So you get the others on the cart, and if it bothers you so much, I'll deal with the girl myself, alright? Alright. Now speed it up, that shinobi was clear about not getting anything till the job is done." He shoves Masa off towards the other bodies and heads to the stairs.

Maybe now they'll actually get somewhere quickly if Masa can just keep focused. He loves the idiot but damn if his brain isn't frustrating occasionally. If the girl just hadn't stopped by earlier today to check in, they'd have had the entire place clear by now.

Taro slows as he approaches the teenager, slipping a hand into his kimono warily and grabbing the shortened fukiya and darts that the shinobi had handed over alongside the poisons. Masa is damn superstitious and probably overreacting, but then again he might not be. The older man always sees things very simply, but sometimes that means he gets straight to the important point without getting fooled by distractions he doesn't understand. Sometimes Masa really is right when his stubborn brain says 'danger', and Taro would be a moron himself if he didn't at least consider it.

And here... well, the girl likely isn't a devil - Taro's mostly sure devils don't get themselves poisoned by normal folks hired for coin - but Masa's right that there's something off about the young woman.

For starters, she actually isn't dead. Which stands out a lot given that the two of them had just spent twenty minutes hauling the bodies of other people who had all died damn near immediately. In addition, now that he's seeing her properly, it looks like he was maybe exaggerating a bit when he assured Masa that the girl is just dying hard. She doesn't much look like she's moving on to the afterlife.

In fact... if anything... Taro would say she looks like she's crawling her way back.

Taro stops a few feet away, staring warily as the teen stirs, eyes shifting under their lids. He glances over her, looking at the dark golden hair buns, the bluish diamond in the middle of her forehead, the pale skin, the cream yukata, the simple sandals...

She's a pretty one, Taro realizes, suspicion dawning as he takes half a step further back, bringing up the fukiya to his lips as she cracks open her eyelids, squinting woozily up at the ceiling with dark colored eyes. She's a pretty one, of marriageable age, with no man accompanying her, and traveling alone... but she was comfortable and composed and rock-solid confident.

The woman's lips pull tight the slightest bit and if he hadn't been getting a little unnerved himself, Taro probably would have missed when she abruptly rolled and tried to shove herself up with an arm. As is, his first dart only grazes her neck and if she hadn't stumbled from the rigged smoke she'd inhaled earlier, he wouldn't have had the chance to reload and fire another.

The girl yanks the poisoned dart out of the meat of her shoulder without a second of hesitation and sends him such a furiously unyielding look through the nauseous tinge to her face that even though she starts to collapse, Taro hurries and hits her with another dart as well.

The girl hits the floor with a muffled thump, and Taro darts a look over his shoulder to check for Masaharu. Luckily the other man is currently on one of his trips outside so there won't be any additional freaking out over this.

Not that it wouldn't be deserved, Taro thinks, knuckles tight around the fukiya as he resists the urge to rub his worn omamori charm between his fingers for good luck. That girl definitely isn't normal after all.

Something dark starts to spread out on either side of the diamond on the girl's forehead. It's colored like spilled ink or black bruising or seeping poison depending on which of the now paranoid voices in his head Taro listens to, and its shape changes as it slowly crawls across the girl's skin. For brief moments Taro swears he can see bits and pieces of words in the messy lines forming on the teen's face - as if a sentence of old calligraphy had been stretched and squeezed and then came to life as writhing worms so that a secret language could inch itself across her pale face.

It's just as unnatural as Masaharu swore she was, and with gritted teeth Taro hauls her up on his shoulder and swiftly makes his way to the cart.

He's not sure he believes in devils or curses, but right now the other possibility is shinobi nonsense and that's just as dangerous and bizarre.

They'll be better off getting done and then getting gone.

The thieves' heads had not been as valuable as Izuna had hoped for, but at least the ocean is living up to its reputation.

He kicks his foot idly as he lounges on a high branch, watching the waves ebb and flow. The tree is tall enough to provide a good view of the sprawling shoreline while still hiding him in its shrouding canopy, and there's a wind coming through that edges the temperature over from unpleasantly humid into tolerable. The sea shines under the setting sun, glimmering off blue waters as far as the eye can see and for a brief moment Izuna activates his sharingan, memorizing it for later.

The trip here is a nice variation in routine, Izuna thinks, eyes drifting over yellow-white sand and up to the tree line where summer boughs are heavy with dull brown and murky yellow leaves. The sight wouldn't be enough by itself to be worth the long travel time it would take to visit again though. And given that his clan doesn't have any alliances past the Senju lands in the east, and few of their customer requests take them this way for anything but pitched battles, he's unlikely to return.

Suppressing a yawn, Izuna shifts, setting down against the trunk for a light nap until darkness fully sets in and he can start making his way home with less likelihood of being spotted. He strains his senses to detect anything out of the ordinary — unusual sounds or a lurking presence — but there's no sign of anyone who might be a threat. There's only the sun on his face, the tree at his back, and the wind carrying the scent of salt and smoke...

Smoke?

With a frown, the fourteen-year-old climbs up the tree as far as it will bear his weight, taking deep breaths and confirming the hint of smoke and ash on the breeze. He looks windward to the north, towards a town he had avoided earlier while putting distance between himself and Akiyama's warehouse. There's the faintest hint of blackish-gray smoke trailing up from the forest and Izuna eyes it, trying to decide if he should investigate. Most likely it was started by civilians rather than anything spontaneous given it had rained recently, so the chance of it developing into an out of control forest fire is low enough...

He rubs his thumb over the wrappings on his sword hilt, debating with himself before triggering his sharingan, and flinches in surprise at a gleaming star of flickering chakra in the center of his sightline.

Izuna drops to the forest floor quickly, sticking to the waxing shadows as much as he can and heading for that beacon of power. It would be reckless to engage someone that strong without cause this far from his clan, but it's better to have information on who it might be and if he'll need the advantage of attacking preemptively.

The smell of burning wood with an edge of metal increases as he approaches and Izuna slows, slipping back up into the trees and taking the slower route over the branches in favor of a lower chance of being spotted. He can see two civilian-level chakra cores now that he's closer, both barely a wisp of energy next to that building blaze, but there are no other shinobi present.

The trees end ahead, opening up onto a large clearing with a roughly dug pit. There's a burning cart not far off and bodies dropped into roughly stacked piles. Two men steadily move around, dragging the corpses one-by-one to the pit and throwing them in.

The source of the chakra is a girl with fair hair laying face-down on the ground some distance from the corpses. The twitcher of the two men gives her a wide berth at all times, and Izuna's brow furrows, trying to figure out how two civilians got involved with what he'll bet his sword is an downed kunoichi. Or why they're disposing of civilian corpses in a mass grave. The bodies don't look right for natural deaths of illness or starvation, and they don't have the wounds he'd expect on war casualties. And although he can't rule out that another shinobi killed them all and these two are stuck dealing with the leftovers, villagers burying neighbors would show more respect in the tone of their actions and treat the bodies like bodies rather than a grim chore to slog through as quickly as possible without a care for roughness.

The girl starts moving, rolling herself over to reveal a pretty face with odd tattoos covering her skin from hairline to the collar of her outfit, and the corner of Izuna's mouth shoots up along with an eyebrow when the twitchy man freaks out and the calmer one spins around and shoots the girl with a dart.

He should have just slit her throat if they're worried, Izuna thinks derisively, watching the pretty pathetic scene of two men failing to deal with incapacitated threat. Not that it's any more impressive that the kunoichi got downed by a poison dart. She has all that chakra but apparently no idea how to use it. What a waste.

He watches them hurry through dealing with the last bodies before grabbing the girl. The twitchy one holds her like she's already the maggot-eaten corpse she'll become in a few days, and they throw her into the ditch on top of the other corpses and start rapidly piling dirt over her body in shovelfuls.

Izuna takes one last look at her face, debating about wasting valuable steel by throwing a kunai for a mercy killing. Given her chakra levels, she's more likely to die through the suffocation of being buried alive than the poison she's fighting off, and that's not anywhere near the type of death he would want for himself.

Suddenly her tattoos alight, nearly blinding now in his sharingan, and a visible blaze of light shines through the shower of soil, swirling into the now-writhing lines on her skin with a rush. The kunoichi's eyes slit open, lip curling lightly into the beginning of a snarl as she glares up towards the edge of the pit from her prone position.

Izuna curses aloud as her chakra spikes violently, throwing himself out of the tree at the realization that those are seals instead of tattoos, and has just enough time to rush through a doton jutsu and hit the ground before the world implodes.

Several tumultuous seconds later, a half-deafened Izuna cracks open an eye from his prone position on the ground, feeling a little like that time he'd failed to dodge correctly and his father had accidentally cracked him upside the head with a shinai. There's something about a handsbreadth away from his nose and he flicks his sharingan back on to see better in the darkness only to realize that the thing above him is a shattered branch and that the rest of a massive tree is balanced precariously above him, ready to crush his ribs from where it had been forcibly impaled halfway through the dome of his doton shield.

Thank you, Uncle Kenrou, Izuna thinks to himself, holding perfectly still as he cautiously flips through hand signs, for having shoved doton jutsu down everyone's throat.

As a note for the future, Mito thinks grimly, spitting out something vile and unidentified and feeling like she'll never be clean again, an explosion is effective but undesirable when you're under ground level and surrounded by corpses.

She slowly crawls to the side of the now-sloping pit, feeling too dizzy and nauseous from the poison her seals are still purging to risk climbing to her feet. There's a series of... squishing sounds every time she shifts her weight and she drags her lips into a forced smile to suppress her gag reflex as her knee sinks into something that's partly liquefied.

She's burning these clothes when she's out of here. Burning them and creating a design for a sanitation seal even if it strips off the upper layers of her skin like the worst exfoliant she's ever owned. She will walk home nude and barefoot. If anyone sees her she'll simply assault them for their clothing.

She's also never drinking oolong tea ever again. A pity that.

Mito digs her fingers into the crumbling earth walls, ignoring the additional dirt that showers down on her arms, and heaves herself up to collapse on the ground. The two men responsible for the worst day she's had in at least four years are several meters away and unmoving, bodies tossed over several felled trees in the newly widened clearing. They're undoubtedly dead or dying from the concussive force and Mito dismisses them as a problem. It's true that she will need to ascertain who was behind their actions and whether she was a target or an incidental victim, but that can come later.

Much later.

Preferably after a thorough scrubbing.

And an expensive bottle of plum wine.

She rolls onto her back, kicking off her shoe into the grave pit with tightened lips when something starts to ooze down the arch of her foot. She's sore all over and she reeks besides and she refuses to look too closely at herself until she either finds a river or gives up and drenches herself in the sea she can smell on the breeze. She reaches up and briskly yanks out the remaining pins from the left side of her hair, disgust lingering when she has to peel a... well, peel something organic and blood-covered off of her bun before the hair can come loose.

There's the subtle rumble of earth moving in the distance and Mito lunges to her feet, no matter how unsteadily.

"You have excellent senses," someone comments. She looks to the side with narrowed eyes, shoving her hair away from her face as it tumbles over her shoulder, and sees a young man—a handful of years younger than her perhaps? Sixteen at the absolute most—step over the gray leaves of a broken cedar tree. He has a hand on the sword at his side, is covered with as fine a shower of soil as herself, and is currently plucking twigs out of his long black hair.

"Mind you," he says brightly, with an undertone that means he's having as enjoyable a day as she is and is probably feeling just as violently inclined, "that doesn't mean I appreciate being nearly blown up."

"What an unusual opinion," Mito responds scathingly, altering her grip on her hair pins as she finally meets his eyes.

The boy stops dead, eyes widening sharply before they proceed to flash rapidly between their current pattern and solid black.

Mito's eyes water as they start itching intensely but she doesn't look away from the other shinobi as colors shift around her. Grey leaves morph into an unknown vibrant color, dark trunks lose the faint pink tinge she'd always known, and even the boy's vivid pink eyes bleed into a richer red.

... This is unexpected.

"Well," the boy says, sounding two pitches higher, wide eyes locked on the wavy fall of her freed hair. He looks a bit dazed as he gives her a smile that's abruptly more genuine. "I did not imagi—" his voice cracks in the middle of the word and Mito raises an eyebrow as he coughs, a dusting of pink surfacing on his cheeks. "This was not quite how and where I thought I'd find you."

"How old are you?" Mito questions pointedly, taking a closer look at the curve of his face and feeling a bit better, in the face of his embarrassment, about the fact that this is quite possibly the most disgusting first impression she could have made.

"How old are you?" he counters evasively with a charming smile that has probably fooled a lot of people who aren't her.

"Nineteen," she answers, a little amused to see a subtle twitch in his cheek right next to the crumbled remains of a no-longer pink yarrow flower that's still tangled in his hair.

"A fine age for such a lovely woman," he compliments, both failing to answer the question himself and apparently ignoring the guts, blood, and unmentionables sticking to her in various locations. She's tempted to humor him for that consideration alone but—

"And you are...?" she prompts.

"Izuna," he introduces, nodding politely. "And what brings such a skilled kunoichi to this backwoods pit of iniquity and corpses?" he asks, briefly glancing at the dozens of cracked and collapsed trees with a newly appreciative smile before pausing for a moment, lips tilting up with a sly glint in his eyes. "Aside from poison. And a cart."

"You frustrate your family at times, don't you Uchiha Izuna?" she asks dryly, finally placing why the pattern of light colored eyes with dark rings and spots are familiar. Regular correspondence with their Senju cousins is not part of her duties, but she and many of her cousins had begun to review knowledge about that area of Hi no Kuni three months ago after the Senju clan head had broached the topic of renewing relations with a possible marriage to his son. Mito hadn't been certain at the time that she was even interested in leaving her clan for one so distant, but alliances are worth upholding and perhaps Senju Hashirama would impress her if one of the others didn't fancy him.

( She's even less certain she'll be marrying a Senju now, but ironically the knowledge of that region might still prove useful. )

Izuna's right forearm tenses, wariness flashing over his face at his clan name before, with a rueful smile, his sharingan fades to black. "I assure you, that has never been mentioned to me," he lies cheerfully. "And your name would be?"

"Uzumaki Mito." Something slides down the back of her head, dripping a slimy chunk down the back of her collar, and Mito grits her teeth and makes the mistake of breathing through her nose.

"Do you know of any nearby rivers?" she asks abruptly, interrupting the younger boy's thoughtful perusal of her.

"...Yes?"

"Good. You may come and burn these garments when I'm done bathing." She gestures with her hair pins, intending Izuna to proceed her, and he starts walking, never moving closer than several body lengths despite a clear curiosity about her. It's a little endearing actually that he thinks that's far enough for a head start if she triggers another explosion.

Then again, wasn't the sharingan supposed to capable of perception outside the norm? Hm...

"You're not going to try washing them?" he teases. "Can Uzumaki manifest clothes from thin air then?

She tilts her chin up imperiously. "I had intended to simply take your shirt since it's long enough for minimal decency."

There's a sharp crack as Izuna's previously silent stride manages to land on a large stick. "I would be happy to provide," he chirps, voice definitely higher this time as he stares at her nose and doesn't quite meet her eyes.

... Well, Mito might break him if he's as nice as he's trying to appear, or they might kill each other outright if they end up at an impasse and Izuna's as fierce as what she thought she saw lurking under the surface during his arrival, but at the very least he looks pretty.

That's rather nice.

(AO3 link - contains all author notes)

#IzuMito #uchiha izuna #uzumaki mito #naruto #soulmates #color blind #my writing #prompt fill #elenathehun

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bestforlessmove · 6 years

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12 Totally Unappetizing Things You Learn When You Try to Grow Your Own Food

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Welcome to another spring, the season of fresh hope and naiveté. Right now, countless gardeners from coast to coast are eagerly awaiting the first tender peas and greens from their vegetable gardens. Nothing beats the pure flavors of your own home-grown food. Right?

I'm not here to dispute that, or to talk you out of this horticultural odyssey. I just want to prepare you for what people don't tell you about growing your own food.

You see, it's not all Barefoot Contessa traipsing out back to snip fresh chervil and frisee from perfect little rows. Oh no. First of all, pro chefs such as Ina Garten have a staff, OK? Gardening takes a lot of work-more work, in fact, than growing flowers and ornamental shrubbery.

So feast your eyes on all the annoying things you'll learn when you try to grow your own food.

1. Carrots take forever…

They do! You plant the seeds in March. By late May, you pull one up just to see and it's the size of a pencil. Buzzkill.

2. … but other plants grow too fast and strangle the slow ones

I love having a regular supply of fresh mint. But it's what's called a “vigorous grower.” Same with strawberries. They send out shoots and take up a lot of space and will crowd out other plants if you let them. So keep mint in a container where it can feel like the king of the mountain.

3. Plants are hella thirsty

If, like me, you do container gardening on a city apartment rooftop, you're going to need to soak your plants pretty much every night. This is especially true through the hotter weeks in summer-it's pretty much a part-time job. If you can automate this task with timed sprinklers, do it. But beware the internet search K holes: If you want to know more about water-efficient irrigation systems, there's so much information on the internet you could spend all night reading about them. And you probably will.

4. Plants are prolific in inverse relation to how much you like them

Note how everyone is always trying to get rid of their zucchini. Does anyone love that vegetable? Like, really, really love it? Meanwhile that finicky little heirloom cucumber plant sends out three cukes and then decides it's done. Why?

5. Aphids are tough little buggers

You may not notice them at first. Instead, you notice your nasturtiums aren't flowering as much, or the blossoms are dying quickly. Too much water? You examine them closely, and then you see the masses of tiny green bugs sucking the very life out of your once-healthy plants.

These are aphids, and they seem to show up just when it's getting hot, especially if you haven't watered your plants in a while, which makes them more vulnerable.

At any rate, if you plan on eating your nasturtiums and don't want to coat them in poison, you can painstakingly wash off the aphids with dish soap and peppermint oil. But guess what? Bathing your garden takes the workload to a whole new level.

6. The caterpillar, it's hungry

Aphids are just the beginning of the pestilence.

7. Squirrels!

Or rats. Or rabbits. Or deer. Or your dog. Or the neighbor's kid. Just when your tomatoes reach peak ripeness, you go outside to harvest them for dinner and witness the destruction. Someone's gone and taken a couple of bites out of every single fruit on the plant. The invader couldn't just steal one tomato. Oh no. The greedy little beast had to go and taste every single one, like your garden is some kind of Whitman's sampler of chocolates. It's heartbreaking. This is why some people wrap their tomato cages in layers of chicken wire. This is also why some people stop gardening.

8. Organic isn't magic

If you're the type to grow your own food, you may also be the type to eschew chemical fertilizers and pesticides. Good for you! Now roll up your sleeves and get ready to work 10 times as hard at your garden. I hope you love pulling weeds.

9. Compost isn't 'free' food for your plants

In theory, composting is brilliant. You get rid of your kitchen scraps and garden clippings, and you come out with food for your plants. Everybody wins! Unless you're lazy, because compost is a demanding creature that needs regular stirring. And you'll want to maintain the pH balance; if that's off, it'll smell horrendous, even worse than the cloying funk it's supposed to smell like when you do it right.

You should also know that not everything decomposes at the same rate. Orange rinds, for example, are extremely slow. Get ready to spend hours arguing with your household members over what is or is not compostable. I like that part especially.

10. Sometimes plants just don't bear fruit (or veggies)

Did you do something wrong? Maybe. Maybe not. Sometimes the seeds are bad. Sometimes there aren't enough pollinators around. Most times it's a mystery.

11. You can't go on vacation

OK, you can go on vacation. But you'll need to hire (or bribe) someone to care for your garden while you're gone, because what if a drought descends and shrivels your lemon balm while you're gone? Growing food is akin to having a pet-it needs constant care.

12. Having a garden is like having kids

Yet another analogy that's spot on is that gardening is like having kids, in the sense that everyone's eager to tell you you're doing it wrong. I'm just sayin', gardeners are some opinionated people. (Note: You are about to become one of these annoying, opinionated gardeners. It's going to happen. At some point you'll catch yourself handing out unsolicited advice about how to stake green beans. And you'll think, who am I even, anymore?)

Suffice it to say, I've since moved to an apartment without outdoor space, so I no longer garden now. (FWIW, indoor gardening doesn't work because there's no way to pollinate the plants-unless you're also an indoor beekeeper, which we don't recommend.) I also shop for fruits and vegetables at the market.

I miss gardening, despite all of its annoyances, but I'm enjoying my summer a whole lot more.

The post 12 Totally Unappetizing Things You Learn When You Try to Grow Your Own Food appeared first on Real Estate News & Insights | realtor.com®.

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armorroofing · 7 years

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Wow! Armor Roofing - New Century KS Roof Repairs

The article Wow! Armor Roofing - New Century KS Roof Repairs originally appeared on Armor Roofing Kansas City.

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How Does Someone Seek A Roof Accident?

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Most Of The Most Important Many Advantages Pertaining To An Extensive New Roof Installation

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Underlying Factors Arguing You Should Stay Away From A Full-scale Roof Covering Package in New Century

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The post Wow! Armor Roofing - New Century KS Roof Repairs appeared first on Armor Roofing Kansas City.

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furynewsnetwork · 7 years

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By Jonah Bennett

Former employees of Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America, one of the largest veterans’ advocacy organizations in the country, allege that the charity’s CEO has abused staff and pressured employees to lie about grant funds and project success to mislead donors.

Seven former employees of IAVA spoke to The Daily Caller News Foundation and said among other things that CEO Paul Rieckhoff, who served in Iraq as an Army first lieutenant, has fostered an environment that puts pressure on employees to aggressively fiddle with numbers so that grant finances and grant project goals can be listed as complete.

“We’re tired of seeing funds misused with no support for actual programs,” the first former IAVA employee told TheDCNF on condition of anonymity.

This employee explained that IAVA doesn’t set aside its grant funds that it receives for specific projects and instead lumps them in general accounts, where the funds are subsequently spent on all manner of other, unrelated expenses.

“IAVA does not set aside their grant money for specific grants,” the first former employee noted. “They don’t do particularly good bookkeeping when it comes to grants, and I don’t think anyone could say definitively that the money that they get from one grant to another goes specifically to match specific grants.”

“Everything goes into one account and then the bookkeeping happens when it’s time to do reports,” he added, saying the bookkeeping would be done in an ad-hoc, after-the-fact manner.

The problems with reporting don’t center purely on the finances, but also extend to grant project goals, said several former employees who managed grant processes at IAVA.

In one particular example, IAVA received a grant for mental health funding to combat veteran suicide through a national training initiative. This grant included holding training events across the country. When not enough mental health events happened, normal membership-type events were counted in the final grant report as mental health events.

“This is not something that the staff is okay with and not something the staff would do on their own,” he said. “This is about a fundamental culture at IAVA that Paul has created.”

“Paul is the mastermind of this stuff.”

Another program former staffers spoke to was the Rapid Response Referral Program, which has suffered chronic staffing issues. While RRRP had grants to hire the employees necessary to complete the task, the money has allegedly been spent elsewhere.

Several former employees said that at one point, RRRP was funded for nine social workers, but had only four. Management consistently told employees that they had no money for more employees.

The program has never in its entire existence had nine staffers, according to a source.

RRRP is intended to help veterans coming home transition seamlessly back into the civilian world.

A second former employee, who worked as a grant writer, told IAVA management in early 2015 that grants had reached “new lows of noncompliance” and expressed frustration that the organization was bleeding away its grant money because it kept disappointing or offending grant foundations by not achieving basic grant goals.

“[W]e essentially threw away our grants … because as an organization–as a culture–we can’t be bothered with grants compliance, even though grants keep us afloat.”

Still a third former employee with direct knowledge of the grant process said reports were exaggerated and doctored to reflect things that either didn’t happen at the scale reported or didn’t happen at all.

“There would be discussion about what needed to be included in a grant to make the funders happy, but that wouldn’t necessarily include facts,” this third former employee said.

“In an effort to be honest, I would say ‘Well, this isn’t real, this didn’t happen’–and I would just be rebuffed.”

Sometimes officers rebuffed the corrections. Other times, Paul himself would reportedly rewrite huge portions of the grant to include accomplishments that were simply fabrications, in order to please donors, the third former employee said.

Since IAVA takes an enormous amount of pictures of each of its events and posts them to social media, this employee added that it would be fairly easy to cross-reference events written up in grants with photos publicly available. If there aren’t any publicly available photos of an event listed in a grant, it likely never happened.

“There were some definite issues around grant compliance,” a fourth employee added. “If anyone ever looked at the books, the problems would be obvious.”

Staffers also spoke to an environment of extreme paranoia, micromanagement and pressure to fill job roles that had nothing to do with their current positions. When employees decide to leave, one former staffer said that “they become the enemy.”

As such, turnover has been a prominent issue at the highest levels. In 2015, the CFO left a resignation letter on his desk the day of a board meeting. All six employees on the communications team, management included, had departed by mid-2016, leaving just one person in 2017 to man the desk.

Since the organization has such problems with staffing, employees are routinely asked to fill functions far beyond the scope of their job descriptions.

A fifth former and senior employee said that the incredibly high turnover rate was indicative of Paul’s terrible management and pointed to reviews of the organization on Glassdoor, a site where employees rate organizations.

“I’ve never seen a company torn apart like IAVA,” the senior employee said.

“I would also say in some ways Paul was abusive. He would be very demeaning of people, frankly including me. Micromanaging to an insane level.”

“Everybody is right down the line about this, he scares good talent away. I’m not saying that about myself. The people who are really good and want to do good things and think they’re coming into a great organization, I saw them head out the door really quickly,” he added.

Several other problems have plagued IAVA over the last several years.

Other former employees, particularly female and minority employees, told TheDCNF they were used as pawns and paraded around in front of donors, told they would receive promotions and then were later totally disregarded.

One former female veteran employee said IAVA is continually hiring more and more civilians, who lack any kind of experience working with or relating to veterans. Veterans are apparently quite poorly treated at IAVA, in comparison to civilians. And morale is so bad at IAVA, she added, that many current employees are starting to send out their resumes to other organizations.

Former employees have further noted that the organization has drifted leftward in alignment with Reickhoff’s priorities, despite the fact that the drift has alienated many of the veterans who are disappointed that the non-partisan nature of the organization exists in name-only. Veterans hit back hard against IAVA during this past presidential election for excluding Libertarian Party presidential candidate Gary Johnson from the commander-in-chief forum at a time when Johnson was the most popular candidate with veterans.

The problems are so horrendous that a letter dating back to 2014 allegedly written by now-former IAVA employees has recently surfaced. The letter, directed to IAVA’s board, asks for Reickhoff to step down as CEO, citing a long history of poor relations with donors, high staff turnover and misspending grant funds.

IAVA did not respond to a request for comment from TheDCNF by press time. Calls to Reickhoff’s personal cell phone went unanswered.

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