#a Nine Year Old made some mistakes and he thinks thats reason to pretty much ruin her life | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

trekkele · 4 months

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You mentioned in one of your tags that you'd like to write a fic where the batkids find out Alfred wasn't so awesome a parent to Bruce and I wanted to ask if you'd like to share some ideas and directions where you could imagine it going?

Would it change the way the kids think and act around Alfred? Or Bruce? And what are some Major Mistakes Alfred made that in retrospect make a lot of sense regarding Bruce's parenting? And what sent the boulder of realisation going in the first place?

I know it sounds like I'm asking for spoilers or the actual, complete plotline which you probably haven't thought out yet, but I'm just curious about various versions of situations and realisations you think could happen. Or things that you'd like to work into your fic but it just wouldn't fit.

Basically, I love your writing and I love this kind of DramaTM within the Batfam and I'd cherish any crumb of information you would like to share.

Thank you and have a wonderful day! <3

Ok so this premise does rely on good dad Bruce, not because shitty parents cant come from shitty parents (they do, usually) but because i think seeing Bruce not do the things Alfred does would be how the kids (specifically Dick) realize what kind of parent Alfred is.

And this is really a reaction to the “Alfred is a saint for putting up with Bruce” fandom attitude because if you, as a parent or a guardian, are incapable of parenting a kid, no matter how difficult that kid is, it is your responsibility to either find a way to become what your kid needs or find someone who can. I know a lot of us had shitty parents but a traumatized nine year old shouldnt be “put up with” or “handled” they should be parented. At the very least they should be loved, and they should know they are loved. (Gets off parenting soapbox, climbs onto fandom soapbox)

Also every time i think about this fic i start thinking “maybe Alfred deserves some more grace” because he was put in a pretty impossible situation immediately after losing two people he deeply respected, if not loved, and lets be reasonable the 80-90s were uh, not an ideal time for difficult parenting, and the therapy available for children back then would have probably made things worse if not outright given Bruce ptsd (if he didnt already have that), so theres that. On the other hand, Alfred is also fairly consistently shown as being deeply unkind about idiosyncrasies, and unwilling to admit when he’s wrong.

And theres only so many times you can call your adult child an idiot, and imply that you believe every one of their choices to be invalid or wrong, before it turns out that you are Part of The Problem, or at the very least, A Bitch.

Anyways.

The thing is, i dont think it would change much. I think they might stop taking Alfreds word as gospel, especially in regards to Bruce, and i think they might be more forgiving towards Bruce when he messes up in the long term, but the truth is that whats it going to change? How do you apologize to someone for that? What are you apologizing for?

Because ultimately i dont think Bruce is ready to admit that Alfred is, or was, wrong. Bruce knows he was a bad kid, a difficult kid. His teachers and his family and the newspapers, and even Alfred, have admitted that Bruce was a hard kid to raise. Probably harder to love. He’s never surprised when people leave him, after all.

He does know his own kids don’t deserve that style of parenting though. But thats because they’re better than him. He has to do better because they deserve better, because he chose to be there for them. Alfred never really got that choice, did he? Bruce’s parents trusted Alfred, and Alfred stayed out of his respect for them. Not the bratty kid who cried for a year and refused to speak and would hide under the bed instead of sleep.

And thats another thing - if Bruce admits that Alfred wasnt a good parent, if he admits that Alfred made some terrible mistakes, does that mean he’s betraying the trust his parents placed in him? Is he casting blame onto two people he can only idolize, because to do otherwise is to admit he doesn’t remember much of them anymore?

As for how the kids find out, i think Dick realized in his own. I think Jason realizes because Dick stops him from walking in and interrupting a conversation between the two and before he can ask whats going on he hears Alfred slap Bruce. Im not sure about the rest.

*i started answering this, got distracted, finished writing it in my head, and then forgot i never answered it in reality. But i think thats most of what i wanted to say.

#asks #but feel free to ask me something specific #i think hitting your adult child is a Big Deal #i think hittinh your child child is a Big Deal #but the batkids wouldbt be around to see it #and to answer this before it comes up #no i dont think alfred hit bruce. i think the slapping is a. like once a year thing #but it does display a level of comfort with that behavior that Jason would recognize #also once is too much lbr #i love alfred i do but WOW fandom refuses to engage with any of his more complicated behaviors #that man did a decent job with bruce but he absolutely fucked up in some way #cw abuse mention

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themoneybuff-blog · 5 years

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Worried About the Stock Market and Your Retirement Savings? Read This.

In the last few days, a number of readers have written to The Simple Dollar regarding the recent downturn in the stock market. Here are a few of those notes, starting with one from Dave: 45 years old, aiming to retire at 62. I have been in the aggressive portfolio in my 401(k) since signing on back in 1998 and contributed regularly. I didnt pay attention to it during 2000-2002 or in 2008 but now I pay attention and these recent drops are killing me. How bad am I hurt if I move things to a less crazy investment? and one from Charlie: 61, was thinking about retiring next year but stock market is ripping my retirement apart! Help! and one from Ally: Im started to freak out about the stock market as I see my investments in my Vanguard index funds plummeting every day. I know I need to wait it out as Im only 34 but its really starting to panic me. Intellectually, I know to stay put and watch the gains as the market recovers but I worry that I may actually need some of that money before it goes back up and start operating from a perspective of scarcity vs. abundance (even though I have lived by the rule of thumb that if I think Ill need it in 10 years, put in high interest savings instead). All of a sudden I start imagining scenarios where Ill need it sooner and put my finances in jeopardy.Please help talk me off the ledge! Were all seeing the same thing. Depending on what numbers youre using, over the last two and a half months, the stock market has lost between 10% and 15% of its value. That means, of course, that if you have a large portion of your retirement savings invested in the stock market, youve seen a similar drop in the value of your retirement savings. Part of what has made this dip so stark is that it comes at the end of a very long positive run for the stock market, dating back almost ten years. Ten years of almost constant growth in the value of the stock market is a historical run, one likely only possible because of the enormous dip of 2008 which gave the stock market a very low point to start from. As you can see, those factors have caused a lot of people to panic and consider changing their retirement investments. My advice? Well in honest truth, I have not looked at my old 403(b) or my Roth IRA in the last three months. At all. Even if I did look, I wouldnt change a thing. Heres how my thinking works on all of this. We Look at the Short Term When We Should Look at the Long Term and Thats a Mistake The stock market is an awful short-term investment. It can lose a significant percentage of its value in just a few days, often seemingly without warning to the average investor. Even over the course of a year or two, you might have individual years where it goes up 20% and other years where it goes down 40%. Its really hard to plan around that. If you are going to need your money back in less than 10 years, you probably shouldnt be invested in the stock market. The thing is, most of us are more than 10 years from retirement. Were invested in stocks as a long term investment. Even people in retirement should have some portion of their retirement savings in the stock market because theres a good chance that theyre going to be around more than 10 more years and they should be investing for that timeframe. At that point a timeline of more than a decade you have to start looking at long-term returns and averages rather than individual years, because individual years arent really all that meaningful when youre looking at time periods beyond 10 years. I like to think of the stock market as a simple gambling game. Its a model that helps me make sense of it. Imagine that theres a game where there are nine red balls and one black ball that randomly come out of a tumbler, like drawing lottery numbers. If the black ball comes out, you lose 40% of your bet. If any of the nine red balls come out, you win 10% of your bet. However, you have to bet your whole retirement savings. What do you do? Well, for me, it depends on how many times I can bet. If I can only bet once, then its probably not a worthwhile risk. I could lose 40% of my bet right away! Not good! However, if I can just stand there and keep betting more than 10 times, Im going to do it and just keep letting my bet ride over and over again. Nine times out of 10, I win 10% of my bet, which far more than makes up for the 40% I lose one time out of 10. If I think about nothing but that first ball, Im probably not going to bet and Im going to want to take my money off of the table. Its only when I think about the fact that Im going to be around for 30 or so balls to come out of the tumbler that I begin to feel good about it. (In fact, I probably dont even pay much attention at all to the individual balls coming out of the tumbler, because it really doesnt matter to me.) The thing is, its pretty scary when the black ball comes out of the tumbler. Suddenly, a large chunk of our money is gone, and its really tempting to take your bet and run away. Thats silly, though. Its like quitting a game of basketball because you missed your first shot. If you were only going to care about your first shot or your most recent shot you wouldnt bother to play that game at all. If a basketball player quit when they miss a few shots in a row, no one would ever play basketball. At the same time, no one would bet their entire life savings on one single shot of the basketball. For most people, the stock market is a very long term investment more than 10 years and making decisions on that investment based on the last month or two is a grave mistake. Its like firing Michael Jordan because he missed 10 shots in the game last night and his team lost. Instead, look at the last 10 years of stock market returns when making your decision, because thats the kind of time frame you care about. Dont look at this chart when making financial decisions; look at this one instead. In other words, look at the long term, not the short term, because if youre investing for more than 10 years down the road, the short term is meaningless. We Listen Too Much to Current News and Media and Thats a Mistake The United States currently has three different major 24 hour news channels available on most cable providers, two devoted financial television channels available on many cable providers, and countless journalists and prognosticators trying to make a name for themselves on the internet, particularly on social media. All of that has to be filled with some kind of content, and its usually whatever content that they can find that will attract eyeballs. What attracts eyeballs? Fear. Its why disasters get breathless coverage. Its why the efforts of Washington are constantly painted to be doom and gloom and disastrous and even evil. That kind of coverage is constant, too its around the clock on news networks and social media. The same exact thing is true with the stock market. A 10% drop in the stock market really isnt anything unusual it happens every few years at least but to hear the news networks and social media and the prognosticators and the talking heads tell it, its apocalypse out there. The sky is literally falling, everyone is going broke, people are jumping out of buildings on Wall Street. Its being reported as something unique and something disastrous because thats what attracts eyeballs, and eyeballs are what makes the news networks and the reporters on social media lots of money. Theres so much time to kill and space to fill that the same things get reported on over and over and over again until the urgency of the supposed disaster seems almost overwhelming, driving people to emotional extremes. My belief is that social media and cable news are not very useful for understanding the world. They present current events from the singular angle that makes them the most money and thats through pushing emotional buttons, mostly fear. That emotional button drives people to poor decisions, and its abundantly clear when it comes to finances. In other words, social media and other news sources tend to encourage people to react emotionally to things rather than rationally. Investing is a rational game rather than an emotional one; if you make emotion-driven investment decisions, youre going to lose out. Thus, at least in terms of investment decisions on the scale of the individual investor saving for retirement, you should pay no attention to the 24 hour news cycle. It nudges you toward emotional decisions rather than rational ones. We Put Our Faith in Salespeople and Thats a Mistake Another problem is that many of the people out there talking about the stock market are effectively salespeople. They want people to buy some product theyre selling, whether its an account with their brokerage, their services as an investment manager, or an investment sold by their company. In general, brokerages make money when you do something with your investments, whether its buying shares or selling shares or something like that. They want you to take action regarding your investments. So, if the stock market is doing something, they have a financial interest in making it sound like a great reason to make a move. If you tune into CNBC or Fox Business lately, all of the chatter is about moving your investment money around to avoid getting hit hard by the stock market slide. Most of that talk is coming from guests who work for brokerages, who make money when you move your investments around. Always ask yourself where your investment suggestions are coming from and why theyre being given. Yes, that includes me. I write because I believe in what Im saying, and I make money by having more readers, not by convincing anyone to take any action. The more readers I have, the more advertisement views the site gets, and the more money everyone involved makes. Thus, it is in my best interest to do my best to give realistic advice and thoughts. With the talking heads on financial television, the goal of the host is to keep you watching, while the goal of the guest is to entertain you and, along the way, try to nudge you to their point of view because the guest makes money by being entertaining (from the network) and makes money by having more customers buying and selling investments (from their own business). In other words, take the words of investment advisors on financial networks with a grain of salt. Most investment advisors will do right by you in a one-on-one situation, but thats not their goal when theyre on television. On television, theyre there to entertain, to get the name of their brokerage out there, and to nudge people to take action on their investments whether its in their best interest or not. Practical Approaches Together, these three issues along with natural human risk aversion cause people to get extremely jittery when the stock market grumbles. Every time a 10% drop happens, I get emails and messages from readers with sentiments like those expressed by Dave and Charles and Ally. While I cant offer a perfect solution for everyone, here are five practical steps you can take to help quell the desire to make abrupt retirement moves when the stock market drops. For starters, just stop paying any attention to the day to day financial news. Dont watch CNBC. Dont watch Fox Business. Dont read financial news. Leave that to people who do this for a living and might change their investments every 15 minutes to try to score a short-term buck. Thats not the situation youre in and thus most of the day to day financial news is irrelevant. It provides you with information that isnt relevant to your decisions and emotional twists designed to nudge you to make a mistake. Just stop watching its not providing value to you. While youre at it, stop paying much attention to the 24 hour news cycle. Almost all of it is driven to trigger emotions and garner eyeballs, not to actually inform you in any meaningful way. Learn from well-researched books and well-referenced articles, not from hot takes and high pressure combative guest appearances. If youre taking financial advice from someone, know who that person is, where theyre coming from, and whether theyre trying to sell you something. Who is this person who is encouraging me to sell? Why are they saying this? What do they have to gain from it? If you can clearly see how they gain from your moves, take their advice with a grain of salt. Dont look at your account balance except on a regular infrequent pattern just to make sure everythings working fine. Looking at your balance frequently makes you start to overinflate the importance of day to day changes compared to long term changes, and its the long-term changes you care about. We often buy into the idea that we should be worried if our investments have gone down the last few times weve looked at them. Know what your plan is for saving for retirement and stick to it regardless of the news. A good plan is based on principles, and for retirement, that means staying put through thick and thin and only making changes in specific situations that you considered outside of the news cycle. Stick to that plan and dont let short-term changes and emotional responses change that plan. In short, stick to the plan and stop listening to people who are just adding noise to the mix. Good luck! Related: https://www.thesimpledollar.com/worried-about-the-stock-market-and-your-retirement-savings-read-this/

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vrheadsets · 6 years

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VR vs. Some Very Stern Words

It’s odd what some people get bent out of shape about. Spending your career (I think I can call it that at this point) in an online role means you see plenty of it – and if you’re involved in social media you’re going to see a heck of a lot of it. You’re also going to get a lot of it too. Over the last decade or so I sort of fell into social media as it rose to be a marketing tool and I’ve had all sorts slung at me down the years. Threats, abuse, slightly too interested in my personal life girls (and guys), people ringing up the office to ask the legal team personal questions about me. The works. So, if you’re gonna call me an idiot just know that, well, I’ve had worse. In fact, I’ve said worse about me myself, so, there you go.

Recently there was an interesting two and eight in the comments about a post where a virtual reality (VR) videogame was announced and someone was very angry it was listed on the ‘PSVR feed’ when it was not a PlayStation VR title. The reason why it was tagged as PlayStation VR was because the developers expressly said they had plans to bring the title to Sony’s headset. News about PSVR? That’ll be tagged PSVR then. Except, they insisted, that was news “not relevant” to PlayStation VR at all. Any title could come to PlayStation VR, so we shouldn’t tag that. It was an interesting argument, one I couldn’t understand for the life of me. The developers expressly mentioned Sony’s headset but it isn’t news about it? Huh?

In the end I apparently failed to explain to their satisfaction that, well, 1 = 1 and we’ll obviously tag a story with whatever it is about. Instead I was a jackass who didn’t know what they were talking about and I should take my “condescending attitude” and “shove it up your Mod ass”. Rather un-phased by the whole thing I just responded that “my ass is glorious and majestic. Thank you for noticing.”

And it is. Very.

All of this got me to thinking about another set of comments we once got on VRFocus. Which had me heading over to YouTube to ‘relive’ what is quite possibly the most epic and, frankly, unhinged rant a channel I’ve had a hand in has ever received.

Now, YouTube is as YouTube does at this point – am I right? Being a channel owner on YouTube is like spinning the wheel on Wheel of Fortune. Who knows, you may have a big hit. At the same time the way YouTube is setup and ever changing its own rules you know there’s the chance all your had work will ultimately be for naught and your channel lost to the ages. It’s felt for a while that YouTube’s ‘Wheel of Fortune’ has been adding more and more ‘bankrupt’ sections as the years roll on. It has also been on a bit of a redesign kick in recent months and a Beta of YouTube Studio is waiting in the wings to fundamentally change the back-end experience for YouTube channels. To that end I got thinking about whether or not the aforementioned rant was still there as I’d been ‘saving it’ for a special occasion. In that way Social Media Managers always save messages that prove points or are so outrageous as to be something to discuss at later events, panels or what have you.

This rant was particularly special in that it came, of all things, at the expense of the poor Samsung Gear VR. It’s terrible crime? It launched.

Back on November 23rd 2015 we put up the Gear VR Launch trailer aka “It’s Not A Phone, It’s A Galaxy” as Samsung celebrated the launch of their smartphone-based head mounted display (HMD) and showed both it, and some of the Gear VR experiences that you could enjoy at the time, off.

youtube

One man though was very, very angry about this and his name was Chua Neng Lis. I know very little about him. He used to work in a plastics factory in or near Minnesota. He also got very upset about North Korea, America and South Korea once on a CNN video, so I imagine wherever he is now he’s been pretty miffed about the last few months. Lis was not pleased about the situation with the Gear VR at all – especially as he seemed to think he’d come up with the idea in the first place.

I should point out that I’ll be posting the message text as is without changing any punctuation, spelling or presentation.

“thats still not virtual reality. your. just. mocking. and. manipalteing. my. ideas.

and. you. think. its. so. fa faaaanny. cause. the. poor man. can. get. wealthy. off. of. the. poor. mans. idea. so. you. stoled. it. from. him. and. kept. the. poor. man. poor. so. you. can. point. fingers. and. laugh. at. the. poor. man. to. do. something. about. it.”

There is of course something to be said about corporations and capitalism and the ability of the rich and poor to earn a fair living, and on reading the first time I honestly thought up until this point that this is what Lis was trying to convey.

“when. i. take. your. brains. out. youll. understand. how. the. world. goes. round.”

Oh. Okay it wasn’t that at all.

That was just the first of nine messages left on the video by Lis which proceed to get more and more bizarre.

“HOE. WAS TELEPATHY. STEALING MY IDEAS FROM TELEPATHY AND TELEPATHY CHANNEL. OH RIGHT. I CAN DO ANYTHING ABOUT IT. BUT WAITE. TO KILL YOU AFTER IM DEAD.

AND NOW YOUR TRYING TO STOP THAT. LOL. NOW ASK YOUR GHOSTS THOUGHTS STEALING FROM. YOU. IS IT EASY OR HARD TO KILL ME AFTER IM DEAD. OR ALIVE.”

Whose ghosts? Ours? Samsung’s? I should point out that no he’s not referring to ghosts as in spooks/spies, but actual ghosts. It seems Lis has a BIG thing about ghosts. Also vampires. According to him America is full of cults and vampires. I blame Buffy. She’s slacking off.

“AND THATS STILL NOT VIRTUAL REALITY. YOUR USEING THAT DEVICE TO STEAL MORE IDEAS. FROM PEOPLES BRAINS AND HEADS. EVEN USEING AND STEALING OLD DATA AND INFORMATION. YOU ALL TOOK PART HACKED. AND STOLED. INTO YOUR OWN MINDS BRAINS AND DATA. TO ACT OUT LIKE ITS YOURS. WHEN YOU KNOW IN YOUR BRAIN AND MIND. ITS NOT YOURS. EVEN IF YOU WOULD. “LIKE”. TO THINK SO.

OH YEAH. ASK YOUR GOVERNMENT. “GHOSTS”.

THEY KNOW I CAN KILL YOU. USEING THAT DEVICE.

NOW HOW ABOUT THAT ARE YOU GOING TO STEAL. AND UPLOAD WHAT I JUST SAY AND SAID. AND MY BRAIN. UP TO THAT DEVICE ALSO TO. CONTROL AND KILL THOSE PEOPLE AND MINDS.”

He can kill ghosts with VR? Literal ghosts working for or with the Government?

“yeah i can kill you with that device of yours. AND IM NOT JOKEING.”

Well, that clears that up at least.

“MISTAKES. ARE MADE. AND PROBLEMS. HAPPEN. AND YOU DONT THINK. I DONT ENJOY OR HAVE FUN. KILLING PEOPLE ON MY OWN. LOLOLOL.

YOU SHOULD LOOK UP YOUR NEWS MEDIA FEEDS. AND HOW MANY DEATH IS OCCUREING. DEFINETLY NOT YOU HOOKING ME UP. ITS YOU HOOKING YOUR SELVES UP. TO. SOMETHING. THATS KILLING YOU. AND WAITEING. WAITEING TO JUST NAB YOU AND KILL YOU RIGHT AFTER. YOUR BRIGHT IDEAS AND SHOWS. ^_^. NOW WHOS WATCHING AND LISTENING TO ME OVER THIER. HRMMMMMMMMMM.”

Yoda’s changed a lot over the years, hasn’t he?

“HONESTLY THOSE GHOSTS GIVEING YOU IDEAS. AINT SAVEING YOU OR YOUR ASS.

YOU CANT CONTROL THEM. THIER CONTROLING YOU.

LOL. CANT HELP YOU THIER BRUHHH. YOU CANT STOP THEM. LOL.”

So if you’re keeping track on this and I can’t blame you if you’re not. Either we, Samsung or the American Government (I assume) are in league with the undead who are stealing minds potentially via VR which isn’t VR and he invented it.

“NOW. WHO CAN STOP THEM. THAT YOU HEARD. YELLING AND TALKING ON TELEPATHY CHANNEL. HRMMMMMM. 2013. was. the. DATE. LOOK IT UP YOUR SELF. I HAVE THE SECRET CODE TO KILL YOU YOUR CULTS RELIGION GOVERNMENT AND RACE OFF. AND YOU THINK. YOUR GOING TO BE RECORDEING MY THOUGHTS ON TELEPATHY.”

Well, no… I mean you’re kind of telling everyone your thoughts via a YouTube comments section. Not really the same thing as telepathy.

Incidentally though reader, those thoughts you’ve been having? Demonetised.

“NOW HRM HRM HRM. WHY WOULD YOU GO AND SAY THAT. YOU CANT EXTRACT THOUGHTS YOUR SELVES. AND WORSHIPING A GHOST TO.

HOW ARE THOSE GAY CULTS. AND GAY VAMPIRES AND VAMPIRES TREATING YOU. HUNTING THEM DOWN VERY WELL. ARENT WE.”

Ah, there are the vampires I mentioned earlier. And yes, he also has something of an issue with homosexuality too. Because clearly we needed some issues with homophobia in the rant as well.

“ALSO YOUR STEALING MY MORES CODE FROM ME. STEALING FROM. TETRIS. AND. ASIANTOWN.NET.

EVEN MY PERSONALITY MORE CODE. WHERE I CREATED MULTIPLE PERSONALITYS. HRMMMM. NOW WHERE AND HOW DID YOU GET THAT FROM. HRMMMMMMMMM. FOR SURE YOU KNOW YOU STOLED. IT. AND FOR SURE. YOUR PLAYING THE BLAME YOUR SELF TO CLAIM GAME. NOT YOURSSSSS. FOOO.”

Yeah, foo. That L block’s got it coming.

“yeah,. to. bad. you. couldnt. kill. me. and. interrupted. my. cause.

AND NOW YOU HAVE TO LIVE WITH IT. KNOWING. I WILL KILL YOU ALL OFF. FOR GOOD. AND HUMANITYS SAFETY. BECAUSE OF YOUR OWN RULES AND LAWS. YOU STATED. ON TELEPATHY CHANNEL. AND IN YOUR MOVIE SCRIPTS SCRIPTS. AND DOCUMENTS. ABOUT ME. AND MY KIND. AND PEOPLE.”

Well, er, I think killing us all off because Gear VR launched is a bit over the top. I mean, why can’t you just write a grumpy petition on Change.org?

I won’t go into the next bit too much because he just descends into ranting about whoever his targets are at this point being gay and getting their comeuppance (I guess?) by being violated by the supernatural. Needless to say, it all comes to a universe redefining climax with the inadvertently hilarious phrase-

“SPIRITS. UP THE BUTT HOLE FOR YOUU. FOO;”

And to prove I’m not making this all up…

Yes, these did get reported by the way and I’m very much hoping someone got to speak to them.

But when you get upset with me or us online just bear this in mind: I’m really not that phased, and that’s because honestly you are not in the same league as someone like this guy. Hell, you aren’t even in the same dimension, probably. And here you were thinking people getting bent out of shape over exclusivity periods was over the top.

More FOO you.

from VRFocus http://ift.tt/2EDAmxe

#VRFocus #vr #virtual reality #canada

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