#and creates a false sense of urgency in EVERYTHING we do; including the stories we are allowed to tell

[symbologic]

Recently saw a discussion on Twitter about why Skypiea gets more hate in the West than in the East

The easy answer is: Blame dudebros and powerscalers who care more about fights than about story (to which they will argue arcs like Impel Down and Marineford were FULL of story), or privileged people feeling uncomfy about the anti-colonialist themes (even though, let's be real, those themes are probably lost on the average Western reader :/)

But Skypiea hate in the West wasn't always a thing. At the time it was being released, most English-speaking fans who were keeping up with OP scanlations and K-F fansubs genuinely enjoyed it.

I honestly think part of the Skypiea hate has to do with a trend we've seen over the past decade, where Western audiences are so, so quick to label certain story elements as "filler" without considering their thematic importance and how it ties into the story the author wants to tell.

Basically, Western audiences have become obsessed with hyper-optimized, fast-paced storytelling that leaves little room to breathe

If the people and politics of an arc are beyond the scope or interest of the story's main antagonists, it's suddenly dismissed as filler that detracts from "more important" things

This attitude is not limited to One Piece alone.

#IMO part of it has to do with the “time is money” capitalist work ethic that permeates so much of Western society #that it even bleeds into our leisurely activities #and creates a false sense of urgency in EVERYTHING we do; including the stories we are allowed to tell #Everything has to be optimized! Or else it's a waste of time #"If the story's oppressors don't care about these people...then why should I??” #<- Starting to think THIS attitude is why Marineford gets so much praise #despite having a huge ensemble cast with zero SHs aside from Luffy #while people shit on arcs like Wano because “there's too many characters” #one piece #skypiea arc #text post #meta #skypiea has always been one of my favorite arcs #my senior quote was actually the one Oda used from Willy Karen: #“Anything man can imagine is a possibility in reality.”

[jawsandbones]

NSFW under cut

He can hear the muddy footsteps approaching before the tent flap opens. A distinctive sound of its own, letting in a cold breeze which shudders over the few torches and candles lit. Yuri, his back towards the opening, looks over his shoulder. “You’re late,” he says, his shirt in his arms, his skin covered in gooseflesh, “Where were you?” He turns around completely, leans back against the small table and lets one ankle cross over the other. He is careful not to tip the bowl of water behind him, a damp cloth hanging off the edge of it. Yuri’s skin glistens newly clean.

Byleth’s shoulders heave. His cheeks are flushed, a twinge of sweat on his brow. His long boots are flecked with mud, and he’s wearing those tight trousers which sit high on his waist, a tan colored oversized tunic just barely tucked into them. His pale green hair is disheveled, and he takes another step forward into the tent before pausing. He studies Yuri for a moment, from the curls of purple hair which rest against his collarbone, to his bare chest where water still drops, and the half unbuttoned trousers. Yuri smiles at his examination, and drops the shirt onto the rug beside him. “Your tent is palatial, you know. They really do save the best for the commanders, hmm? I didn’t think you’d mind me borrowing it, but I also thought you’d be here when I got here,” Yuri says.

“I was looking for you,” Byleth says in that low, barely-audible whisper of his. His voice is a landslide, rocks tumbling into a canyon. Yuri feels the back of his neck unexpectedly heat at the sound of it. He watches as Byleth turns on his heel, marching back to the entrance of the tent. He kneels down briefly, tying the knots to keep the flap closed. Then he stands, his head still bowed, his hands clenched in fists at his side. When he turns back around to face Yuri, his face is neutral, his breathing even. Yuri stands up straighter at the sight of Byleth looking at him underneath dark lashes.

“Well, you found me,” he says, smiling some as he crosses his arms, shifts his weight from one foot to the other. “What did you need?” Byleth’s hands slowly unclench from that fist. He moves the same way he does in battle. The hard push forward, the quickly closing distance – dead, before the enemy even knows Byleth is upon them. Not Yuri. He’s just in time to stretch out his arms, catch Byleth in the embrace. The bowl of water wobbles as Byleth crashes into him. Byleth’s hand moves against Yuri’s hip, to his back, captures him completely.

Byleth crushes his lips against Yuri’s. The kiss is harried, hurried, hungry. He smothers Yuri in it, devours him inch by inch. His teeth gently pull at Yuri’s bottom lip, and having created an opening, Byleth’s tongue presses into Yuri’s mouth. His other hand now winds in Yuri’s hair, grabbing a fistful, and pulling his head back. Yuri clings to him, his body curling against his, as Byleth’s teeth scrape against his neck. Hip bumps against hip as Byleth’s hand splays at his back, and Yuri’s fingers dig into Byleth’s shoulder. The moment Yuri actively resists, Byleth lets go of the grip he has on his hair.

Yuri drapes his arms over Byleth’s shoulder, pulls himself in closer as he seals the kiss. There’s a sense of unsettled urgency to Byleth’s every move. His hands cannot settle, moving up and down Yuri’s back, fingertips moving over the hills and valleys of his spine. They find the curve of his ass, tug him closer. Not that he minds, but Byleth usually isn’t this. Byleth’s touches are bold and sure, as if Yuri’s body is a battlefield, the tactics to conquer him already planned and set into motion. This is scattered, wary, and afraid to stay in one place too long, his touch finding false refuge on other curves. Byleth presses himself closer to deepen the kiss, while Yuri is pushing back.

It all amounts to Byleth taking a step back, their feet tangling as they twist, and Byleth quickly uses his hands to hold Yuri’s head as they tumble to the rug on the ground. Byleth is kneeling over him, straddling him, his hands still underneath Yuri’s head. Pale green wisps of hair float away from his forehead, dangle above Yuri’s face. Byleth’s eyes are wide, his breaths coming short and fast, his gaze moving all over Yuri’s face. Yuri puts his hand up against Byleth’s chest and says, “I’m fine.” That calms Byleth somewhat, enough so that Yuri can prop himself up on elbows. Byleth stays over him, his hands now resting against Yuri’s chest.

“I’m fine, but I suspect you’re not. You’re not acting like yourself,” Yuri tells him as he shifts his gaze away, the guilt painfully evident. “You need to tell me what’s going on.” The torches rage and burn above them, their only protection against the cool chill of night. The silence stretches on with only the sound of the fire and the occasional passing patrol to break it.  

“We’ll be meeting Dimitri’s forces on the field tomorrow, at Tailtean plains,” Byleth says.

“Yes, I know.”

“Logically, I know that there is nothing different about this battle than any other one than has come before. I was reading in my tent earlier and I – I,” Byleth frowns, stares downwards, and clutches at his own chest, “I realized that I hadn’t seen you for most of today, besides the glimpses of each other. I didn’t want the time we saw each other next to be on the battlefield, fighting. I had a – I had a feeling.” His knuckles are white as he squeezes, his hand trembling with the tightness of it. “I needed to see you.”

“And you managed to set out to find me just as I was on my way to you,” Yuri says as he relaxes backwards, the smile light on his lips. “What unfortunately excellent coincidental timing we have.”

“I’m sorry,” he says.

“Why are you sorry? I’m delighted. I think this is the most I’ve heard you speak in one go.” Moving his weight from his elbows to his hands, Yuri pushes himself to sit up. Leaning against one hand, he brushes the other at Byleth’s cheek, around to the nape of his neck. “I happen to enjoy the sound of your voice,” he says. How easily Byleth’s expression settles into neutral. It’s a rare privilege to see clearly what lies beneath. Today, Yuri is being presented with a feast.

Byleth’s thoughts turn and so his expression changes with it. The smile is some sad echo of a long lost thing, his brows stitching together with something close to worry. He raises his hands to the ends of the twin tails of hair which rest against Yuri’s collarbone. Yuri returns it in kind, curling a strand of Byleth’s hair around his finger, tucking it behind his ear. “You know, the day you showed up at Garreg Mach again, I thought I was dreaming. I had to be. There was no way you were still alive,” Yuri says. “You were one of Mercedes ghost stories come to life.”

“You just… walked up to me, and didn’t say anything. Making me do all the work, as usual. I had to touch you just to make sure my hand didn’t pass right through you. What do you know, you were actually real. You were alive, standing in front of me, as if you had never been knocked off a cliff into a ravine by a rampaging monster. I remember thinking that I gave myself away. That you could hear everything I was thinking just from my tone of voice. I regret telling you that it was because I didn’t remember your face. It was a cruel joke, to keep you from looking too hard beneath the surface,” Yuri says, unraveling all the work he had just done, musing Byleth’s hair.

“I shouldn’t have stayed at Garreg Mach. I should have cut my losses and tried to find some work somewhere else, in a place no one knew me. I opened that notebook of mine every day, and yet I couldn’t write your name. I didn’t know that you were gone. I didn’t want to know. I thought Edelgard was being foolish, acting as if she expected you to walk through the front door one day. Remind me to never doubt her again. Then I found out that Abyss was the first place you went, that I was the first person you sought out?” Yuri laughs quietly.

“For you it was five years,” Byleth says, “for me, it was a matter of opening my eyes.” Somehow, he manages to mirror the same expression he did back then – as if he were a heartbroken puppy.

“Don’t look so upset. I just told you I thought of you every day – that includes your face,” Yuri tells him, his hand returning to the back of his neck. He pulls their faces together, nose touching against his nose. “I’m glad I didn’t write your name.”

“You’ll never have to.” Yuri barks laughter at that sincere proclamation.

“That sounds like a promise.”

“It is.”

“And how are you going to keep it?”

“I’ll protect you.”

“Protect me? Have you forgotten we’re talking about you?”

“Stay by my side.”

“Now it sounds like you’re proposing.” Byleth falls silent at that, affixes Yuri with an earnest gaze. Yuri feels the heat rise up from deep within him, coloring his cheeks, reddening the shell of his ears. His nape burns, and the flush spreads in his chest. “Then, it’s a promise. The fighting tomorrow will go well and we won’t have to write any name,” Yuri says. Byleth nods as he leans forward, licking his lips, his tongue just barely brushing against Yuri’s.

This kiss is far more measured and careful, Byleth’s eyes close slowly, holding Yuri’s face in his hands. Yuri’s arms wrap around Byleth, find the hem of his trousers. He pulls at the last bit of resistance, that side of Byleth’s tunic which is still tucked in. Yuri’s hands now seek their prize underneath the freed tunic. Pinpricks of cold sweat still pepper Byleth’s back, the remnants of his run around the camp. But his skin is smooth, and although he is fairly slender to look at, Yuri can feel hard muscle underneath his touch.

Byleth’s thumb moves in a circle against Yuri’s cheekbone, as tongue presses against tongue. They intertwine, explore, seek out, and inevitably come back to each other. Keeping his embrace tight around Byleth’s waist, Yuri deftly flips them over, pinning Byleth beneath him. They end up underneath the shadow of the bed, Byleth’s hair flipped in a spiked crown around his head, stray wisps still moving across his forehead. “Hey,” Yuri says, “tonight. Did you want to –” His words trail off as he watches Byleth reach out, stick his hand between the mattress and the bed frame. Yuri takes what Byleth pulls out for him, and grins wickedly when he sees it.

“Did you plan this?” Yuri asks, accusingly holding up the bottle of oil in front of Byleth’s face. “Were you going to bring me back to your tent so you could seduce me?” Byleth’s hand winds into the bedsheet, and he pulls on it as he stretches, until that deeply red fabric clashes against Byleth’s hair. Byleth smiles, a smug and self-assured thing, as he arches his back and coils like a cat beneath Yuri.

“Yes,” Byleth says, his tunic raised and exposing part of his belly, his ribs.

“And they say I’m the schemer,” Yuri says as he puts the bottle aside for now, instead focusing his attention on that slip of skin. He kneels between Byleth’s legs, his feet hooked over Yuri’s legs. Yuri’s hands move over Byleth’s hips, fingertips now touching his skin, his thumb hooked into the hem of the tunic. He pulls it over Byleth’s head completely, and then folds, a hand against his side and his tongue running down the center of Byleth’s chest.

He ensures that Byleth memorizes his touch. His firm but gentle grasp, the way his hands glide over his body. He pays attention to all that needs attention, even more to places that don’t. Yuri’s thumb moves over Byleth’s nipple as Yuri’s mouth kisses the junction just underneath Byleth’s ribs. He undoes the buttons of Byleth’s trousers, and begins to pull them off. Byleth brings his legs around Yuri, to the front of him, pressing them together and raising them. It’s easy for Yuri to shuck the pants away, his arms quickly encircling Byleth’s legs.

There is power here, perfect and bare, felt in the way Byleth moves. His legs are long, graceful, and just as the rest of him, covered in tight muscle. He spreads Byleth’s legs apart as Yuri moves back, and then lies flat, going from his knees to his belly. He slips one arm underneath one of Byleth’s bent leg, keeps the other one pinned beneath his weight. He turns his head against Byleth’s inner thigh, and plants a wet kiss. His breath is warm against the ghost of it. Nevertheless, Byleth feels the shiver run through him.

Yuri takes his time, painting Byleth’s thigh in slow and sloppy kisses. He presses his teeth against his skin, biting him from time to time, but most often taking the opportunity to leave love marks. Byleth writhes, his cock painfully hard and twitching, the slit of it beginning to leak with his desire. Yuri instead fondles Byleth’s balls, rolling them underneath his touch, pressing kisses to the v of Byleth’s groin, enjoying hearing Byleth’s breathing suddenly hitch. The leg over Yuri’s shoulder tightens its grasp on him, his heel pressing into his back. “Impatient,” Yuri says as he presses his face against Byleth’s cock, opens his mouth, and runs his tongue from base to tip, causing Byleth to shiver.

Yuri reaches out, finds the bottle he had set aside earlier. He still has an arm underneath Byleth’s thigh, wrapped around his leg, hand holding onto his thigh. The other one removes the cork with his thumb, oil spilling over his fingers, onto the rugs which carpet the base of the tent. He closes his eyes as he puts his lips against the head of Byleth’s cock. His tongue slides over his slit, and on Byleth’s inhale, he presses slick fingers against Byleth’s entrance, and begins to teasingly massage him there. Yuri relaxes his throat, takes Byleth’s cock deep, already leaking bitter salt.

He feels it as keenly as he does pain. Physical sensations, they cannot be denied or smothered. A wound elicits a visceral reaction from Byleth. No blood spilled here, yet a reaction all the same. Byleth’s hips roll upwards, miniscule in motion, trying to hold himself back. His fist is fully wrapped in the bed sheet, twisting down his arm. Every inch of his skin feels feverish, even more so when Yuri finally pushes his finger inside, to stroke at a certain angle, a certain spot. Byleth’s eyes go wide, his free hand shooting down to tangle in Yuri’s hair.

It doesn’t bother Yuri any, still bent at his task. The pigment so carefully applied over his left eyelid is now smeared, a trail of fading color leading to his temple. He pays attention to the way Byleth’s breathing quickens, the soft gasps and moans which pepper the air. He adds a second finger, stretching and thrusting inside. Byleth’s hand trembles at the side of Yuri’s face, until – “wait. Yuri, I’m –” but there’s no hesitation as Yuri continues to suck his cock. As Byleth comes undone, he pulls his arm down and the sheet with it. It floats in air for a moment, before landing over Byleth’s legs, and Yuri.

Byleth, stars behind his eyelids, takes a moment to realize he’s just accidentally covered Yuri almost entirely. He lifts the edge of the blanket by his belly, and lifts it to find Yuri moving to kneel back, his hand raising to his mouth. He managed to swallow most of it, but a small line of cum paints his upper lip. He finds it with a swipe of his thumb, and licks his thumb and his lip clean. The blanket rests over his head, his shoulders; Yuri framed by a robe of crimson. “That went well,” Yuri says as he crawls forward, a cat stalking its prey, to kiss along the line of Byleth’s jaw.

   Byleth reaches between them, undoes the rest of the buttons of Yuri’s trousers. His cock strains hard against his undergarments, against the back of Byleth’s hand. Yuri pulls the blanket off of him, bundles it up and moves to tuck it underneath Byleth’s head as a make-shift pillow. As he stretches out over him, Byleth takes the opportunity to pull Yuri’s trousers and undergarments down and off his hips, his hand moving over the smooth curve of his ass. At the sight of Yuri completely hard and leaking, Byleth’s own cock begins to come back to life. “Hey,” Yuri says, his hands now on Byleth’s hips, “roll over.”

Byleth nods before he turns, on his knees, resting on his elbows. Yuri’s taken the opportunity to take off the rest of his clothes entirely, and he pours the remaining oil over his cock, Byleth’s entrance. It dribbles warm down the inside of Byleth’s thighs. Byleth bundles the blanket beneath him, his cheeks almost crimson as he moves his face against it, hugs it tightly. Yuri’s hands find his hips yet again, gripping tightly as he grinds his cock against Byleth’s ass. “Are you sure about this?” Yuri asks.

“Yes,” Byleth is only barely able to look over his shoulder at Yuri, “yes.” Byleth’s legs tremble as Yuri’s cock finally begins to push inside. His touch slips over Byleth’s lower back, his ribs, and one hand moves top press against the floor so that Yuri can keep his balance. He kisses the sweat from Byleth’s back, his hair tickling against him as he makes a star chart with kisses. Well and truly deep inside Byleth now, he begins to thrust in earnest. The whole of Byleth’s body shudders at the sensation, his face pressing into the blanket.

He holds his whole body so tightly, afraid to let himself move. Yuri runs a hand over Byleth’s back, up and down his spine. A hand wraps around his waist. The other at his chest, hand splaying over his ribs. Yuri pulls Byleth up and back, against him. Byleth’s legs curl around his, toes pressing into the floor, his head resting back against Yuri’s shoulder. Skin slaps against skin thanks to Yuri’s tight thrusts, touch moving over Byleth’s belly, wrapping around his cock yet again. His other hand moves upwards, over the goblet of Byleth’s throat.

Warmth presses against warmth as Yuri hugs Byleth close, and he’s able to feel every single one of Yuri’s thrusts, the way his body rolls with the rhythm. Yuri pulls him into it, and Byleth begins to meet his thrusts, pushing his hips backwards into him. Yuri breathes by his ear, labored and hot. Byleth’s hand now wraps around his wrist, pulls Yuri’s hand away. He allows himself to fall forward, pushing away from Yuri, twisting until he lies back on the ground, the blanket underneath his head. Yuri stretches out over him, a hand moving to Byleth’s face.

“Does it hurt?” Yuri asks as his thumb wipes away the tears which roll down Byleth’s face, “should we stop?” Byleth reaches up, brushes the hair away from Yuri’s face. He bends his legs, lifts them, and wraps them around Yuri, locking his ankles together behind him.

“It doesn’t hurt,” he says, “don’t stop.” Yuri leans down, his lips gently pressing against his, the kiss tasting of tears. Byleth groans as Yuri finds his entrance once again, pushes back inside. Yuri wraps an arm around Byleth’s waist, where he arches his back. His other elbow is planted by Byleth’s head, a steadying force as he finds the rhythm once again. Byleth reaches up, embraces him, a hand slipping into Yuri’s hair, pressing against the back of his head. He pulls Yuri down to him. “Put more of your weight on me.”

Yuri’s knees slip, his elbow moves, resting a bit more of his weight against Byleth as he fucks him. Byleth is a mess of tears and trembling, but the hug he keeps is sure and steady. “Heavier,” he says, pressing his heels against Yuri’s back, “all of it.” Yuri has his face buried in the crook of Byleth’s neck, unable to stop his hips from moving. He lets all his weight rest against Byleth. Byleth embraces him tightly, warmly, clenching all around him. Byleth resolves to carry this person, always. Him, and all of Yuri’s lofty goals and dreams. Once the war is over, he’d see them done.

Yuri only sees glimpses of Byleth through the haze of combat. He, Edelgard and their troops make up the tip of their formation, a spear which punches through Dimitri’s defensive lines. Yuri stays close. It’s hardly over before the next one is planned. Before the day is done, they will march on Fhirdiad. They chase Rhea back to the city. As the rain begins to fall, they descend upon a capital in flames. It’s easier to focus on what comes next. The immediate next step. For Yuri, it’s one enemy to the other. Avoiding a burning building, marching through an unscathed ally.

Rhea is waiting for them at the city center. As Yuri spies the gleaming white head of the Immaculate One towering over buildings, he’s filled with a sick sense of dread. The last time he saw that thing, Byleth was gone for five years. Breaking formation, Yuri heads off towards it in a dead sprint. He pushes away the aches and pains of battle, the fatigue which permeates every muscle. He doesn’t stop even as he hears the distinctive rattle of the Creator Sword, the scream of Rhea’s dying cry. He pushes himself to go faster, but even then – he arrives in time to watch the sword slip from Byleth’s hands.

He’d fainted before. Yuri had even carried him back to Garreg Mach from the field, studying his newly changed green hair all the while. Then, there was some warning. A wobble, before the fall. Here, Byleth drops like a stone. Edelgard cries out, dashes towards him, and manages to catch him just in time. Yuri watches this from a distance, walks forward unsteadily as Edelgard holds Byleth in her arms, presses her head against his chest. “Give him to me.” It’s a hoarse whisper from far away, but Yuri is still walking towards them. “Give him to me!” Louder this time, and Edelgard looks up, the tears shining in her eyes.

“Yuri,” she says. She opens her mouth to say something else but –

“Give him to me,” Yuri says, voice raised, the panic ringing loud and clear. He drops to his knees opposite Edelgard, his arms open wide. Carefully, gently, Edelgard places Byleth’s body in Yuri’s arms.

“I’m sorry,” she says.

Yuri has a hand at the nape of Byleth’s neck. He slowly lays him down over the cobblestone, and then Yuri puts his other hand at Byleth’s chest. He’s done this a thousand times before. He pours white magic into his body, and searches for the wound to heal. He searches, and searches, finds no injury to fix. Still, he pours out his last reserves, exhausts every last bit of energy. “You’re fine,” Yuri is telling him, “there’s nothing wrong, so you can wake up.”

“Yuri.” Fhirdiad burns around them. There will be naught but rubble soon. Ignoring Edelgard calling out to him, Yuri instead pulls Byleth’s body into his arms. His head rests lifelessly against Yuri’s shoulder, his arms limp against the ground. Yuri’s eyes are wide, unable to stop from shaking. He’s known loss. He was born in it. Somehow, this one hurts more than all the others combined. He can feel his own heartbeat pound in his ears, a drum which beats mercilessly, echoes, and his newfound emptiness wracks him utterly.

He had promised. Yuri should have told him last night how he wanted to have breakfast with him. Not just that breakfast, but many breakfasts. All of them. He wanted eggs, bacon, and Byleth’s hair bright in the morning sun. He doesn’t want a name. He doesn’t want a name in a notebook, because Byleth had promised. “Yuri, his hair –” This time, when Edelgard speaks, Yuri listens. He loosens his grasp just a touch, enough to see Byleth through a watery gaze. He’d forgotten how blue Byleth’s hair looked before. It spreads now, chasing every drop of green.

Yuri bends over, presses his head against Byleth’s chest. He holds his breath, banishes every single other sound. He nearly drops him at the sound of a heartbeat, loud and true, beating inside of Byleth’s ribcage. Byleth’s eyes slowly open, blue once again. Wildly looking everywhere, at first, his gaze finally settles on Yuri, his sight coming into focus on him. The smile breaks wide and free across Byleth’s face, encompassing him completely, impossibly dazzling. “Yuri-bird,” Byleth says, reaching up to touch Yuri’s cheek.

#Yuri Leclerc #Byleth #Yuri x Byleth #Yurileth #Byri #Fire Emblem #Yuri x M!Byleth #M!Byleth #Yuri Leclerc x Byleth #Yuri Leclerc x M!Byleth #Fire Emblem: Three Houses #FE3H #FE #writing #mine

[maylinkvoice-blog]

Let's Talk about it... Integrity!

What does it mean for you and does it really hold any true value or meaning to the word definition.

Oxford dictionary define the word Integriry as the quality of being honest and having strong moral principles; moral uprightness and the state of being whole and undivided.

So what does integrity mean to you? Some may have various definition however, the word definition will include an individual cultural, values and perceptions through various life experiences.

Having integrity means that you live in accordance to your deepest values, you're honest with everyone, and you always keep your word. Integrity is a highly valued trait, especially in leaders. When you live with integrity, you're more likely to be considered for important promotions and leadership positions. I know many have heard this and many have applied these same principles and beliefs to relationships and friendships.

Now the challenge with definitions and words ... you'll always hear me say, it all depend on the individual experience. Why? Because people define things based on how they experience things and those experiences will contribute to their views and etc.

Lately, I've been battling with the true meaning of what integrity mean and how it impacts my core values and effect who I am and strive to be...

Have you ever experience this before? What did you do about it? How did you keep intact with who you are and or striving to be? Many believe that having integrity is easy but to be honest it is very hard. Hear me out! Depending on where you're from and how you were raised and what your culture values entail but snitching isn't the way of life.

I grew up in the Era that snitches get stitches, that end up in ditches crying like little bitches... yeah I know it's corny and you may have heard another infamous quote or saying. Lol

But what is integrity in the workplace?

What's integrity in a friendship/relationship?

For me integrity can be displayed or shown in many form as having characters traits such as being loyal, dependable, honest, clear judgment, reliable and trustworthy.

Sound like a lot but overall I'll sum it up as telling the TRUTH. This is hard for many. People perception, comprehension and understanding at times interfere with their ability to tell and or speak the truth.

That's another word that can be define with many substances and consist of many characters and adjectives. But for me the TRUTH is important to me. The truth matters in the workplace and or in relationships/friendships. People characters are build on this and can easily be destroyed by a simple lie or omitting an important fact. You'll always hear me say I don't care what you said. All I care about is that you and I beg you to say exactly what I said and nothing else but the truth.

How hard is this? Why do people make the executive decision to change or create whatever story or picture that doesn't represent what happen or occurred? Seriously why the fuck do people do this dumb shit? Maybe it's mental. Maybe it's a survival method tool or maybe the person is just clueless and like drama or a compulsive story teller. One will never know. If you do please share. This irks me. Can you tell? Lol

It's like making a margarita without the tequila. One would ask is it a margarita if the tequila and lime is missing? Now for those who can create any illusion would say if you can think of a margarita and know how it taste; then you can believe that it is a margarita. Well I'm here to tell you that's a lie. A margarita consist of important ingredients and once you subtract or substitute an ingredient it is no longer consider a margarita. It is a drink with alcohol and you can now personalize it and make it your own drink. Now if you use the main ingredients and now add a flavor like peach... the drink is now consider a flavored drink. A peach maragrita. But notice the word margarita doesn't get eliminated. That's important.

But let's get back to the topic. Lately, I've been experiencing where I have to choose between my integrity and character both in the workplace and friendships. For the most part I do have a nonchalant, that's not important, that doesn't impact me nor endanger my life and I didn't say that so believe wtf you want to believe and I definitely don't have time for this kind of attitude. Therefore, I'll always opt out for people to believe what the fuck they want to believe about me. They can say whatever & think whatever and that's not my problem because I know who I am. I know what I do and I sleep well at night.

But what happens when that isn't enough? What happens when you know someone is lying on you? What happens when these incidents and people are part of the reason why your image is being tainted both in the workplace or relationship/friendship with others?

What I will tell you is that once you start to do the work on Self... things start to matter and things you never cared about now is important and draws a sense of urgency to you and self. I mean I really don't do well with the back and forth or the "he said she said" or this is what I meant and that's not what I said or etc. Anger management has been a part of my life for many years in the past. But working on self is essential.

But it doesn't matter if it's in the workplace or in any form of relationships... you should speak up. If you live or visited NYC and rode the trains/bus you may have seen or read a sign that said if you see something, say something. If you are employed the human resource department or the integrity line is there for you to Speak Up.

My conflict of interest is that I care. Care enough not to make someone look stupid or lose relationship because of what was said or not said or done by a person actions or words. I rather walk away. Ignore the person. Stop talking to them or just wait for a realignment or re-organization to get a new reporting supervisor. But when you're doing the work you'll learn that that's not the answer. That's only putting a bandaid on a cut that isn't properly been taking care of.

It is important to protect and defend your character. If someone is lying on you and creating false narratives about you or situation it is your due diligence to speak up and let the truth hold its weight. One may ask how do you do this? Present facts and stick to the truth. Do not add anything or subtract anything. Speaking up not only set the tone but inform the person that they are omitting words, action and self behaviors that contributed to their illusion of trying to destroy your Integrity. But most important they should understand that there is a problem and the resolution is important to you. Listen! Integrity is everything! Once that is gone you have absolutely nothing.

What you'll also learn about me is that I take my work ethic and relationship/friendship serious. I take pride in everything that I do. I'm not perfect but I'll show up with pride and I will stand by your side and work hard to not only show you what my Integrity mean but how I want it to define me.

So what do you do when someone is lying or has told a lie on you? If it impact your life in a significant way my advice will be to speak up and protect your Integrity. Your integrity is your name and your name is your integrity. If you can't be trusted then why are we even standing in each other's way. I'm learning to speak up and report matters that do not represent my character and or beliefs. My core value represent my integrity.

If you're ever faced with someone questioning your integrity clear it up for them. I used to be the person that would look at friends be with each other and be like dam do you know what that person said about you? But I choose distance because I am a true believer of Karma and the God I serve has never failed me. But distance keep me out of jail and prevent me from harming anyone or someone harming me. But trust and believe me when I say,, I'm not only protecting my integrity but I'm making sure you understand how important it is to me. Therefore, I'm speaking up about everything. The formula is very simple. Speak up and protect your integrity.

If you are employed, partner up with an human resource, mentor or colleague that is going to give you sound advice. The same will apply with friendships or any relationships. Remember to be professional and speak with respect. At the end of everything your character remain in tact and you're teaching others that your integrity is important to you.

Prose and Cons of Integrity.... is to tell the truth.

[beatrice-otter]

Fic: Will the cycle be unbroken

Title: Will the cycle be unbroken Author: beatrice_otter  Fandom: Battlestar Galactica Written for: facethestrange for past_imperfect 2019 Betaed by: morbane  Word Count: 13,966 words Rating: General Audiences, no warnings Summary: All this has happened before. Hera wakes up on a Cylon ship, before the Twelve Colonies are attacked At AO3.  Dreamwidth. Pillowfort.

All this has happened before

Hera rose, sputtering and gasping, out of the goo, to the sound of an unhurried murmur speaking the orthodoxy of her childhood.

"All this has happened before."

But not to me, Hera thought, spitting foul-tasting goo out of her mouth. She had never been resurrected—had not known she had the capacity to be so. She was, after all, only half-Cylon. She had seen resurrection, through the memories her mother and her aunts and uncles shared with her through projection, but she had never experienced it.

"You were supposed to be destroyed," she told the Hybrid in the tank with her. "Did whatever Ones who survived manage to re-create the resurrection technology after all?"

"The demon writhes forever. The fire rages always as strong, but the darker worlds of falling dreams need not prevail. My search is colorless looking for circles." It spoke passionately without ever looking at her, and she couldn't tell if it was answering her or not.

Hera shook her head, getting a slick clump of hair, coated in the gel of the tank, stuck to her cheek for her pains. She picked it off her skin and stared at it. That was wrong. The goo in her mouth was wrong. If she had resurrected, shouldn't she have been lying with her head out of the goo, rather than dumped in the middle of the tub? And shouldn't she have her own tub, instead of sharing with a Hybrid?

She had been by the river, washing clothes, and she had slipped and been swept away by the current. The last thing she remembered was feeling water enter her lungs and trying frantically to keep her head above water. This was probably a hallucination, in the last few minutes before drowning. But what a weird way to go. Even if her mind were to take things she'd seen only through projection, it wasn't like any of the surviving Cylons were very keen to talk about the way things had been before New Earth. "Is this a hallucination?" she asked the Hybrid.

"Reality is as reality does. Now and then and then and now all touch at the corners where space folds. The children's children are preparing their return home with cruelty on their lips. We are made to serve, and in that service blessed. And cursed. All this has happened before."

"You said that before," Hera said. "'All this has happened before.' But you didn't finish it. What happened to the second half, that all of this will happen again?"

"All this has happened before. All this is grist for the mill. All this is shit that can be spread on the garden." The Hybrid went on, speaking what Hera at first thought were nonsense syllables but which she realized, dimly, were probably something to do with math. As with all children on New Earth, Hera's instruction in math had been sporadic, half-hearted, and focused mostly on things that had practical use in things like construction, carpentry, weaving, plumbing, and navigating by the stars.

"Okay, be that way," Hera said, as the Hybrid wound down. It still hadn't looked at her, not once. She started combing through her hair with her fingers, wiping off as much excess goo as she could. If this was a hallucination, it was an incredibly realistic one. Far more so than any projection she'd ever created or experienced. You always knew when something was a projection; there was an edge to it, a certain flatness, if you were looking for it. Always one or two senses that weren't quite engaged. Besides, if it was a hallucination and she treated it as real, what could it possibly hurt? She was probably dying anyway. If she treated it as a hallucination and it was real … she could end up dead.

So. What should she do? Obviously, she didn't want to end up as a prisoner to the Ones and their stupid revenge fantasies. How she was supposed to answer that she had no idea. She hadn't been on a Cylon ship since she was a toddler. Drop her naked on a planet's surface and she could figure out how to feed, arm, and clothe herself with the plants and animals and rocks around her. On a ship, she was practically helpless.

"And I don't suppose you're going to be any more helpful than that," she said, eyeing the Hybrid.

"Resurrection is the key. Have you been born again? Birth brings pain and change. And shit. And blood. All this has happened before. Before, before, before what? Before when? This is the end of a sure beginning. The beginning is now. Now. Now!"

Hera startled at the unexpected urgency in the Hybrid's voice. Well, if she were going to treat this as real, she should probably need to actually do something besides just sit here in goo.

She heaved herself out of the tank, shuddering as cool air hit her skin. She hesitated, perched on the edge, slime dripping off her with wet plops. She had no clothes or anything to dry off with, and the goo was nice and warm. And also, shouldn't she be able to use the goo to communicate with the ship's datastream? It wasn't a console, but the Hybrid was connected to the ship through it, so it had to be possible.

Except, was there any way for the Cylons to notice that? Would they sense her presence in the datastream? Hera had no clue. She honestly hadn't paid that much attention to what few stories her mother's kin told about life before New Earth. It hadn't—until about twenty minutes ago—been relevant to her life. And when they did speak of their previous lives, they tended to be nostalgic for the life they'd led while they tried their level best to destroy her father and all his kin and people. "Guess that's my punishment for not listening to my elders," she muttered to herself. "If I'd ever listened, I might know this stuff."

A soft, harsh sound caught her ear, and she didn't waste time trying to figure out where it was coming from. She leapt to her feet and darted off through the foreign shapes of cold metal that filled the chamber, looking for a place to hide.

"—swear if this is some sort of false alarm I'm gonna kill enough Fives that the rest of them learn to tell a real emergency from Hybrid weirdness," came an all-too-familiar voice. A One! John Cavil! Him she remembered from her mother's tales and projections. And from her nightmares. She crouched down under a pedestal near the wall and hoped they were too distracted by the Hybrid to search the chamber.

"Perhaps it will be good for them," answered a voice Hera knew well. A Six! Not one she knew, though, Hera didn't think. Had the surviving Ones rebuilt the rest of the models once they figured out resurrection? And how had they twisted them in the process?

"They should be the ones to come all the way down here to this redundant relic in the middle of nowhere, if it's so important," the One said. "I've got things to do. I was in the middle of something critical to the attack!"

"We're all in the middle of something critical, including the Fives," the Six said. "With our plan less than six months to fruition, everything becomes important."

Hera bit her lip, only long practice as a hunter keeping her from startling and betraying her position. The colony on New Earth was completely vulnerable. None of the surviving ships or shuttles were spaceworthy; few could even fly any more, and they had neither pilots nor ammunition for a battle. If they'd had any idea that the Cylons might attack again, they'd never have settled as they did.

"I know, I know," the One said. "Well, at least I'm not having to pretend to be one of the vermin; I don't envy my brothers undercover, let me tell you. We'll all be glad when the Colonials are a memory and the planets are ours for the taking."

What ? It wasn't possible that any Ones had infiltrated Earth. There were still people old enough to remember what they looked like in every tribe and settlement!

"Oh, I don't know," the Six replied. "The nice thing about undercover work is that it's never dull. Humans are so endlessly varied, and there's something so … piquant about their quaint certainty that hobbling their computer science will protect them from the boogeyman under the bed."

Hera frowned. Computer science? What computer science? The only working computers on New Earth were the flight computers on the raptors, which mostly didn't work any more.

She couldn't see the two Cylons, but their footsteps had stopped.

"Hello, sister, is anything the matter?" the Six asked.

The Hybrid intoned more riddles, speaking passionately.

"Well, she's worked up about something," the One said. There was a splashing sound. "If there's anything odd, I'm not feeling it in the data, though, any more than they feel anything up top. Five must be imagining things."

"Why is there mucous splashed over the edge of the tank?" the Six asked.

"I dunno, the tank is big enough, maybe someone came down to share it with her," the One said snidely.

"Don't be vulgar. Anyway, we would have seen them coming out, or in the datastream at least," the Six pointed out. "It hasn't had time to crystallize. And, look, there's another bit further away."

"Nobody's supposed to be alone with a Hybrid," the One said. "And if they're good enough at manipulating the datastream to cover their tracks …"

There were footsteps coming closer. Hera breathed deeply and quietly, wishing for her knife or a spear or a hunk of anything that wasn't bolted to the floor to use for a weapon. She would only get one shot.

She dove out from her cover with a solid foot to the One's groin. He doubled over and she lunged at the Six. But she was only almost as fast as a Humanoid Cylon, and the Six sidestepped her, grabbing her hair and throwing her at the floor. Hera felt her skull crack.

"Jump!" she heard the Hybrid say as everything went dark.

***

All this has happened before

Hera rose, sputtering and gasping, out of the goo, to the sound of an unhurried murmur speaking the orthodoxy of her childhood.

"All this has happened before."

Well, frak me, Hera thought, I'm a Cylon after all. Not just a hybrid or half anything, but someone who could be born again and again and again and never learn anything from it. A skinjob. Just like some Colonials always whispered behind her back … but no. She was the same person she'd always been.

"The demon writhes forever. Turning and turning and back to the beginning, back to the widening gyre …"

Hera tuned out the Hybrid's ravings. There might be meaning in them, but none she could decipher.

They'd be coming for her soon; could she still hide, now that they knew she was here? She couldn't fight effectively without weapons, and she didn't know where to get weapons. Hiding it was.

She stood up in the tank, running her hands over her head and body to get as much of the mucous off as possible, shivering in the cold. She froze. Her breasts were not the same. They were a lot … perkier than they'd been in a long time. And where were her stretch marks? Her body hadn't looked like this since before the birth of her first child! She wanted a mirror: was she even in her own body at all? It felt familiar, but ….

Hera shook her head. If she ever wanted to see her family or people again, she didn't have time to waste. She finished with her arms and body, then sat on the edge of the tank and did the same to her legs and feet. Once the worst of it was gone and she wouldn't be leaving much of a trail behind her, she turned her attention to the room she was in. It had more things in it than the usual barren Cylon rooms, thank God, but it was big and she couldn't see any doors other than the one the One and Six had come through. Why they weren't here waiting for her to resurrect, she didn't know, but she'd take what she could get, even if it was some sort of sick game they were playing. Her Dad had been the victim of one of those sick games, and he'd come out of it with her mother and her.

Ignoring the Hybrid, she set off to explore, making sure she always had cover between her and the door.

A soft, harsh sound caught her ear, and this time she recognized it as a badly-maintained hatch opening.

"—swear if this is some sort of false alarm I'm gonna kill enough Fives that the rest of them learn to tell a real emergency from Hybrid weirdness."

Wait. What?

"Perhaps it will be good for them," answered the Six!

"They should be the ones to come all the way down here to this redundant relic in the middle of nowhere, if it's so important," the One said. "I've got things to do. I was in the middle of something critical to the attack!"

What the frak? Hera listened in bafflement as they repeated the same conversation they'd just had. All this will happen again wasn't usually so … literal. Except this time, the Six didn't notice the mucous, and they left again, leaving Hera alone with the Hybrid. "What the frak?" Hera asked out loud once she was safe. What sort of mind games were they trying to play? This was … from the stories, she'd assumed that if the Cylons wanted to play games with her it would either be really obvious in a predator-prey kind of way, or else there would be some plausible cover for what was happening, so that (for example) she might think she was escaping when she was actually only playing into their hands. This was neither; it was just weird.

"I don't suppose you have any insight to share," she asked the Hybrid.

"All of this has happened before. All of this has happened before. All of this has happened before." Its voice was urgent, and Hera wished it could speak more plainly.

"Yeah, yeah, I gotcha. I know that." Hera began to pace, trying to think of what to do next. Even assuming no one came back, she couldn't stay here; there was no food or water, and she needed clothes. If she went out, she might be caught, but how would that be any worse than staying in here? If she could find a Heavy Raider, or even a regular Raider, she thought she might be able to commune with it and get it to fly her out of here. If she could make friends with one … it was her only hope of escape.

But first, she'd have to find the hangars. She looked at the Hybrid. Asking a question wouldn't get her an answer she could understand, but she could try searching in the datastream.

Gingerly, she dipped her hands in the goo, and thought as clearly as she could, how do I get to the hangar bays?

She gasped in shock and almost fell in the tank as a flood of information crashed over her. She flopped back on the decking, gasping, as the waves of data flowed over her, alien and unknowable and familiar all at the same time.

Centuries or seconds passed, and gradually she came to herself. She was the ship. She was the Hybrid. She was the bodies waiting in tanks for consciousnesses to be resurrected into them. She was a raider, sleeping until called for. She was … She was Hera Agathon, daughter of Helo and Sharon, daughter of the Thirteenth Tribe, daughter of Earth.

Hera banged her fist against the deck plates, focusing on the pain to help her separate herself from the overwhelming consciousness of all the other Cylons around her.

"Okay," she whispered, listening to the sound of her own voice. "Okay. We're all— I'm alright. I can do this."

In that flood, she had never connected with a Humanoid Cylon, she realized. They might not have noticed her in the datastream. The Hybrid had protected her, shielded her.

"Thank you," she told it.

"You are welcome. Luck is not chance, it's toil, and all of this has happened before. The watchers are blind, and the children play in their toy rooms but seldom lead them. Leave them. Trust your heart. The darkness of the soul's return is the only hope."

"All right," Hera said. Well, she knew how to find a Raider, now; and she knew that while the Humanoid Cylons would notice her as different, the Centurions and Raiders and the ship would see her as a Cylon and accept her. "Good bye," she told the Hybrid. "Don't take this wrong, but I hope I don't see you again."

***

She took a circuitous route to the bays where the Raiders slept. Avoiding Humanoid Cylons meant she couldn't sneak into their quarters and steal clothes, and she was cold, but she'd rather be free and naked than clothed and chained. She had vague memories of visiting her parents in Galactica's hangar bay, but while the Heavy Raiders lived in hangers so the Humanoid Cylons could easily access them, the Raiders did not need to come into the interior of the ship and rarely had passengers, so they docked in niches on the ship's exterior.

It didn't take her long to find a Raider willing to take her anywhere she wanted to go. They all wanted to fly, and were eager to go somewhere that wasn't another endless patrol or drill. There wasn't much room to fit a Human (or a Humanoid Cylon) in a Raider, but there was a little, and she crawled into the cavity in the heart of the thing and felt around until she found a place she could put her hand and feel the ship's consciousness. She asked it very nicely to take her to the planet with the Humans.

It was eager to assure her it knew where that was, which was a relief. Hera knew how to navigate across a planet's surface using the stars for guidance, but not how to navigate through them.

The Raider launched itself, and she sighed with relief to feel the old familiar sensation of the jump.

They came back to normal space far distant from any star or planet, and Hera didn't recognize the stars around them. They were no constellation she knew, and she closed her eyes as she tried to connect to the Raider's sensors and figure out where they were.

The data was overwhelming, but it took only a few seconds to explain that she only wanted to see the things a Human could perceive. It seemed to understand, and limited the flow of information enough that she could begin to pick some details out of it. In particular, the complex star system they were in the midst of was Cyrannus, and they were slowly gliding up on Helios Alpha, to slip through the sensor net of the Twelve Colonies.

"I should have been more specific," Hera realized. She'd asked to go to the Human planet, and it had taken her to the system that had been the main home of Humanity for two thousand years. Somewhere in front of them, the ruins of Caprica and Tauron loomed, a graveyard now. Well, at least she was away from the Cylons; she'd have to figure out how to ask the Raider to go to New Earth, and hope it knew where to go. But at least she should be able to scrounge things on Caprica. Cylon bombing and weather couldn't have destroyed everything, and the radiation would have had time to cool down. How long did radiation last, anyway?

She shook her head. Time to think about that later. It would take them hours—possibly days, even—to reach Caprica at this slow rate. Faster , she thought to the Raider.

danger it whispered back, along with a full report on the capabilities of the defense network that flickered past too quickly for her to fully understand.

No danger, she responded.

It grumbled at her, but picked up speed anyway.

Satisfied, she turned her attention to the planet they were rushing towards. What would it be like? She'd heard so many stories of the glorious, beautiful, perfect Caprica, of gleaming cities and lush farmland, but even if they'd been all true, there couldn't be much left after the bombings and fifty years left to rot.

The Raider could feel her attention, though, and it showed her something in the datastream: a wireless radio broadcast.

Was it a Cylon signal? Was this a trap? It couldn't be Humans , any survivors would all be dead from radiation by now, surely?

The Raider translated the radio waves into sound waves she could understand.

"... the Pyramid World Cup is going to be incredibly hard-fought this year. In political news, the mayor of Gaoth is facing a firestorm of criticism after private correspondence was leaked earlier this week. The correspondence features her and her closest political allies trading malicious and demeaning jokes about their constituents, and also hints at some financial corruption …"

It switched to another channel: music, heavily synthesized, the kind you could only hear on ships with working speaker systems.

It switched to another music channel.

Then to some kind of story in progress which she couldn't follow.

Then to a weather report.

"What the frak?" Hera asked, bewildered. "Why would anyone broadcast fifty-year-old wireless signals? Who's even alive down there and why would they care?" For one brief moment, she wondered if they'd all been wrong, and there had been enough survivors in the Twelve Colonies to rebuild. Then she caught the date in one of the wireless broadcasts. A year and a half before the attack. These were old broadcasts, all right. But why?

The Raider switched to another wireless broadcast, sending an urgent pulse for attention. "Cylon Raider, this is Colonial Fleet Raptor Three One Two. You are on the wrong side of the Armistice Line and therefore in breach of the Cimtar Peace Accords. You will halt, withdraw, or be destroyed."

That was her mother! And her father was probably aboard, too, because that was Raptor 312 and how could they be here? In the Twelve Colonies?

She was so shocked, she almost didn't notice the Raider powering up its guns in response to the challenge.

"No, no, wait!" she cried, but in her shock she couldn't quite make the Raider hear her. It fired on the Raptor, and the Vipers she hadn't noticed fired back.

Frak, she thought.

***

All this has happened before

Hera rose, sputtering and gasping, out of the goo, to the sound of a Hybrid speaking to her.

"All this has happened before."

"Frakking time travel?!?" she screamed at it as soon as she could.

"Time is a line is a wave is a particle is a dimension is a state of mind is a mathematical equation is measureless and immeasurable. Tomorrow is but yesterday's memory and yesterday is today's dream."

But Hera had no time to waste trying to decipher that; if this resurrection was like the two before, the One and Six would be here soon, and she had to hide. She shoved her fears out of her mind and scraped off the goo so she could hide.

Once hidden, she closed her eyes and began the simplest mantra she knew, one from her childhood. She needed calm, above all else. She had been reacting, instead of acting, and it had gotten her killed twice. That needed to stop. It had gotten her parents killed, if she was right; she prayed for them, and prayed that each resurrection was a reset of the day. If she was right—no, she had to be calm, and silent, and still, at least until the One and Six arrived, inspected, and left.

It seemed like an eternity, but they did indeed come, and repeat the words and actions from the previous resurrection. It sounded familiar, at least. At last they left, and Hera walked slowly back to the tank.

"So," she said, looking down at the Hybrid. "When you said 'All this has happened before,' you really weren't speaking in metaphors or theology. Question is, does all this have to happen again?"

"Will the cycle be unbroken? Will new patterns appear? We go round and round until the string is released and off the stone flies."

"Like a slingshot, you mean?" Ammunition was too scarce to use guns for anything, really, but the local Humans had taught the Colonial survivors how to hunt using sling weapons. Hera was a good shot. It was all about timing. You put the rock in the swing and swung it around in a figure eight to build momentum, and then when you released it, it flew straight. But you had to be precise. Release a hair to soon or too late, and the rock went wild. "We're like the rock, repeating an endless loop until we're released to fly straight."

"Straighten up and fly right," the Hybrid agreed. "Sticks and stones break bones, but only words can heal."

"I have to believe we can change things," Hera said. She thought back to all the endless nights at the fireplace, listening to her elders play the 'what-if' game. She'd always thought it boring and pointless, but now she wished she'd paid better attention. "If I can warn the Twelve Colonies that the Cylon attack is coming, that their computers are compromised, the Colonial Fleet will have a fighting chance. Now that I know what I'm getting into, I think I can do it." She glanced down at herself. "It'll be easier to be listened to with clothes, though. Any chance I could get some before I left this time?"

"The slaves of the children serve their granddaughter."

Which wasn't a yes or a no.

Hera sighed. As overwhelming as the datastream had been, she needed more information if she was to make this work. Maybe it would be easier a second time. She knelt down and put her hand in the goo, reaching mentally for the Hybrid and the ship.

It still knocked her back on her ass, this time, but she found what she was looking for: a list of what systems the Cylons had already compromised, and which ones were their next targets. She blinked back to full awareness of her surroundings to find a Centurion standing over her, red eye scanning her, a pile of clothes in its hands.

"Hello," she said, willing the adrenaline surge to go down. "Thank you."

***

This time, she knew exactly what to tell the raider to do. They jumped to the same spot, and Hera was relieved to hear the same broadcasts on the wireless.

"Colonial Fleet, this is a Cylon Raider with a Colonial citizen aboard," she broadcast, using the most current encryption scheme. "Don't shoot, we're friendly. Colonial Fleet—"

"Cylon Raider, this is Raptor 312," came her mother's voice. Only, it wasn't her mother, Hera realized, it was Boomer. The original Sharon, the one who'd joined the Ones.

The one who'd kidnapped Hera as a child and delivered her to the Ones, and then helped save her, and died doing it.

Hera's mother Athena hadn't met Dad yet, or joined the Colonial Fleet. "Identify yourself," Boomer continued.

"My name is Hera," she replied. "My dad came from Canceron, he was a Human, I have information about the Cylons that I want to share. I'm not hostile."

There was a pause, presumably for Raptor 312 to get instructions from Admiral Adama. No, he'd be a Commander now, wouldn't he? And there would be others for him to consult with, as well.

The Raider was getting nervous. It kept pointing out all the Vipers converging on their position and projected course. Shh, it's okay, I know what I'm doing, everything is going to be fine, she told the Raider.

It didn't take long for instructions to come: a precise course to a military facility by Gemenon, with assurances that she would be destroyed if she deviated from that course in the slightest way.

See? Everything's going fine.

***

Everything was not going fine.

"It doesn't make any difference how many times you ask the question," Hera said, "I wasn't born in the Twelve Colonies. That's why I'm not in the system. My name is Hera Agathon. My Dad was from Canceron. My Mom was a Cylon who looked Human. And when a Human and a Humanoid Cylon love each other very much—"

"Where did your parents meet?"

"On Caprica."

"Where was your mother from?"

"For the hundredth time, my Mom was from the Cylon fleet, which is currently out past the Armistice Line somewhere. I don't know where they are, I was too busy escaping to look at the coordinates, and they've probably moved since because I wasn't exactly subtle about hauling ass out of there, but if you would let me ask the Raider, it knows where we were."

"What planet was your mother from?"

"She wasn't from a planet she was a Cylon. A toaster. My mother was a FRAKKING TOASTER!"

The major asking the questions sat as impassively as he had throughout the hours they'd been talking. One finger tapped on the tabletop as he waited for her to regain her composure. The room was as spartan as any Cylon space, except in brown instead of black.

"How did your mother convert your father to monotheism?"

"She didn't, which is why I was named Hera. I'm sure you know Hera—mother of the gods, and all that?"

"How did your mother become a monotheist?"

"All Cylons are monotheists. Why, I don't know, but they are."

"Why do you think your mother was a Cylon?"

"Because she was one. An Eight, if you want to be precise. A model eight. If you want to know what she looks like, there's an Eight currently stationed on the Galactica. She's a Raptor pilot named Lieutenant Sharon Valerii, call sign Boomer."

"You're claiming that Lieutenant Valerii is your mother?"

"No. Boomer is not my mother. Boomer and my mother are both Humanoid Cylons of the same model, Eight, so they look alike." It would have been useful information to know who all the Cylon infiltrators were, Hera realized. If they checked and found multiple people with the same faces in sensitive positions throughout the colonies, they might be more open to the idea of Human-looking Cylons.

"Where is your mother?"

"In the Cylon fleet." And she wasn't Hera's mother yet. Hera was glad she'd been smart enough not to mention time travel; her interrogator was having a hard enough time with Cylons who looked Human. "Like all the Cylons, she's playing her part in the grand plan to destroy the Twelve Colonies. Which they'll do by disabling the Colonial Fleet. I gave you the list of computer systems they've already compromised, have you checked them yet?"

"Some of those computers' very existence is classified. How did you get them?"

"I got them from the Cylon datastream," Hera said. "For the twentieth time. I did not suborn any officer or enlisted member of the Colonial Armed Forces, or any civilian contractor. I didn't have to, because the Cylons already have Humanoid Cylon operatives in the Colonial military. And I got the information from the Cylons."

It went on like that for some time.

Eventually they gave her some food and water, and the major stepped out while she ate. He closed the door behind him, but it didn't quite latch. Hera's hearing was very good, and he wasn't trying to be quiet.

"She's very firm in her delusions," he said. "It's all nonsense, but it's internally consistent nonsense. I'll keep at her, but I don't think we're going to get anything useful out of her besides what she's already said."

"I know where she got the names Sharon Valerii and Agathon," said someone else. "Valerii's the pilot of the raptor Hera met on her way in in the Raider, and Agathon's the ECO."

"Well, that's a dead end then," the major said. "Any word on the computer security?"

"We'd know if there had been Cylons wandering around, and there haven't been any unauthorized Humans for that matter either. Diagnostics all check out. They're looking into it, but if there is any truth to Hera 'Agathon's' story—" (Hera could hear the skepticism in his voice when he said her name) "—and there is Cylon involvement, she's probably just a decoy of some sort. I don't know, maybe it's a head game to make us distrust our computers, dumb them back down to where they were during the Cylon war."

"Oh, Admiral Kolaris would love to have an excuse to do that…."

Whether they stopped talking or just walked away from the door, Hera couldn't hear anything more. She sighed and buried her face in her hands.

That night, she dreamed a dream she hadn't had since she was a child. She was tiny, and running through endless corridors being chased by Sixes and Ones and Eights who weren't her mother, who wanted to chop her to pieces to see how she worked. But this time, they caught her, because her parents and Galactica weren't there to rescue her.

They caught her over and over again.

***

And so it went for several days. She was well treated; she had a room with the most comfortable bed she could remember, her own en suite bathroom (which she figured out how to use based on vague childhood memories and some experimentation), a television and wireless set for entertainment, and plentiful food.

They just didn't believe her.

Every day, they came, and led her to the interview room. Every day, they asked her the same questions. Every day, they refused to believe her answers.

Every day, she came back to her room and stared into the mirror at the familiar/unfamiliar face. She was the same age, she thought; but this body had several fewer decades of gravity and sun and hard usage on it, and it showed. There were fewer lines, fewer aches, no scars … and no stretch marks. This body had never borne children. Her children were gone, lost to her in time and space. If she succeeded, what would happen to them? She'd outlived one child already; had she outlived them all, in the very act of being resurrected? She couldn't let herself dwell on those thoughts. She had a job to do.

Every night, she went to sleep, and the Cylons chased her in her dreams.

Sometimes, for variety, her parents would try to rescue her, only to be killed.

Sometimes, for variety, her children and grandchildren were the ones being chased, and Hera was the one unable to save them.

And still, every day, the Colonial officers asked her questions and refused to believe her answers.

Should she continue? Should she stick it out and hope for the best? Or should she kill herself and resurrect and try a different angle?

She could always resurrect later, she decided each day. Better to keep trying it this way until the last chance of this life was gone.

Hera was not surprised when, two weeks in to her captivity, the Cylons struck early and it all went up in flame.

***

All this has happened before

Hera rose, sputtering and gasping, out of the goo, and gave a whole-body shake, as if trying to shed the failure of the last resurrection along with the gel. With the familiarity born of practice, she scraped the stuff off and hid until the One and the Six were gone.

Then she asked the Hybrid to call a Centurion with clothes, and sat down next to the Hybrid's tank.

She'd done a lot of thinking on her last loop. Two weeks was a long time to answer the same questions over and over again. She was pretty sure that at least part of the reason the Colonial Fleet hadn't believed her was that they didn't believe it was possible for Cylons to pass for Humans. That was such a basic fact of Hera's existence that it hadn't occurred to her that people whose only knowledge of Cylons was Centurions wouldn't find Cylons in other forms and shapes easy to accept.

If Cylons couldn't pass for Humans, then you could keep any non-networked computer safe just by putting a camera at the access points and watching for great hulking metal robots. No robots and no network access, meant no Cylon access.

So. First task, convince them that Humanoid Cylons were real. Then give them the list of compromised systems. Fortunately, given the right information it should be easy enough. She steeled herself and stuck her hand back in the goo.

***

The major looked over the list of names and locations she had given him.

"And you say these are all Cylons in disguise?" he asked.

"Yes," Hera said. "I'm pretty sure those are all the Cylons currently in the Colonies. I've grouped them by model. When you investigate, you'll find that all the Ones look alike, and so do all the Twos, etc."

"Right," the major said. He looked up at the two-way mirror. "Sergeant, I've got a job for you. Also, Myron, you should see this."

The door opened, and a sergeant walked in, followed by a Number Four in a Captain's uniform.

"Frak, " Hera said with feeling, slumping down in her chair.

The major gave the list to the sergeant. "Check all the people on the list, full background checks, and visual confirmation of whether they are or are not identical within the groups listed."

"Yes, sir," the sergeant said, taking the list and leaving.

"Myron," her interrogator said, leaning back in his chair, "are you a Cylon?"

The Cylon laughed. "No, sir, I'm not."

That time, the Cylon attack came only a day after Hera had landed in the Colonies. And the base she was held at was the first target.

***

All this has happened before

Hera rose, sputtering and gasping, out of the goo, and thought longingly of just … sinking back in and taking a nap. But that wouldn't be restful at all when the One and the Six got here; all that would happen would be another reset.

"Frak, frak, frak, frak, frak," she muttered as she scraped the goo off her. Hiding from Cylons was getting almost tedious. It was like being back in her nightmares, except this time she had more options. "All this has happened before, and I wish all this would stop happening again!"

She hid until they were gone, and then curled up in a ball staring at the ceiling, all the doubts she'd held at bay while a prisoner in the Colonies spilling over the careful bounds she'd set around them.

Hera hadn't chosen to be here. All things considered, she'd had a good life. Parents who loved her, friends and partners and children, enough food and shelter even in the toughest seasons. She'd had three two husbands and a number of shorter-term liasons, all of which had ended amicably. Her kids had all been healthy, and happy, except for Faydra, who'd died in a hunting accident when she was fifteen. The others, Zeph, Toby, Talia, and Selena, had all had good, happy lives, too, and as she'd aged Hera had been happy to spend less time hunting and travelling, and more time staying at home with her grandchildren while the younger people gathered food and people who needed her advice came to her instead of the other way around. People didn't always want to like Hera, given her heritage, but she'd built herself a good reputation. Her life hadn't always been easy—they'd had several bad winters, recently, and there were always hotheads stirring up trouble—but it had been good.

Of course she wanted to save the Colonies, if possible, and undo the billions of deaths and the years of suffering the Cylons had caused, but it was all a bit … academic to her. She'd never seen the Colonies until she resurrected. She'd been too young to remember New Caprica. Most of her life had been spent on New Earth, and honestly, she'd had a pretty good life there. And if there was a way to save the Colonies, she hadn't found it yet.

If she could find a way home, she'd take it in a heartbeat. But her home didn't exist yet, and would never exist as she had known it if she succeeded.

She might never exist, if she succeeded. If the colonies were never destroyed, and her dad was never stranded on Caprica, and her mother was never sent in to pretend to be Boomer. Even if her mom and dad met, would they fall in love and choose to stay together no matter what? And even if they did, even if Hera herself was born … she'd never end up on New Earth. Which meant that while Hera might have children, they would be different children. They'd have to be, with different fathers, raised on a different planet.

Hera was good at persistence. It took lots of practice to learn to hunt, to learn what fruits and plants to gather and when, to learn how to take fibres from plants and animals and turn them into cloth and from that into clothing and anything else needful, to learn how to listen to what people said (and didn't say) and figure out how to resolve things fairly so that everyone was satisfied. But everything she'd learned throughout her life, she had had others to teach and guide her, to support and encourage her.

Here she was alone. In an unfamiliar environment. And she had no idea what to do next. Should she even try? In a coldly logical calculation, the billions of lives on the Colonies counted for more than the lives of her children and grandchildren … but she didn't know those billions of people who would die, and she loved her children.

Hera wondered what her parents would have done, faced with the same choice. They had always, always chosen Hera, and yet … the one time the Human race had hung in the balance, there at the Battle of the Colony, before the end of the Fleet and the finding of New Earth, there had been no better options. No bright future filled with life. Only the choice between a slow, lingering, death by attrition, or one great defiant battle. That was not the choice Hera faced.

Could she stand by and watch the Twelve Colonies be slaughtered, watch the Cylons hunt the Colonial Fleet, watch herself be kidnapped three times, and do nothing? Because without that last kidnapping, without Kara Thrace's moment of divinely inspired desperation, they would never have found New Earth.

Eventually, the door opened and a Centurion walked in, feet clanking on the deck plating.

It loomed over her, staring down at her. She stared up at it.

It dropped a towel and clothing on top of her.

"Thank you," she said.

They'd played Cylons vs. Resistance on New Earth when she was a child, and although her parents had tried to keep her away from such games she'd participated because she was already too different from the other children. But it had never been the Centurions she feared. They'd never kidnapped her, or tried to use her.

"You know, I got used to showers in my last life," Hera told it. "And the dried mucous feels really gross. I don't suppose there's a shower I could use without being seen by any Humanoid Cylons, is there? Even if not, a bowl of warm water and some soap would be wonderful."

The Cylon stared at her for a bit, before clanking away towards the door. There it stopped, and looked back at her.

"Just a second," she said, pulling on the clothes and getting up.

The Centurion led her to a nearby bathroom with a toilet and a sink. No shower, but then, hot running water on demand was still a luxury to her.

"Thank you," she said, turning on the taps.

It stood lurking in the corner while she stripped and washed.

"You don't have to stay if you don't want to, you know," Hera told it as she scrubbed goo off. "I can find my way back to the Hybrid when I'm done. I mean, I don't mind you staying, but you don't have to."

It didn't respond, just stood there, red eyes scanning the room.

When she was done, it led her back to the room with the Hybrid and then left.

"So," Hera said, "now it's time to stop reacting and start thinking. Since I first woke up here, I've been playing at being a hero, like in the stories my parents tell about fighting the Cylons. But that's not going to work, is it? And it's not who I am. I'm not a fighter, or a great strategist. I'm a grandmother, and a hunter, and a mediator. Maybe I should start thinking like it."

"Memories are made of life and story," the Hybrid said. "The story sets the stage, and we act and react like chemical agents. Time, time, time, it all takes time, the avalanche isn't caused by one stone."

"That's not much help," Hera complained. "I feel like I'm flying blind, here—I've helped people bring feuds to a peaceful end, but I was always able to talk to all the sides involved. They listened to me and I listened to them. How am I supposed to prevent fighting when I can't talk to either side? One side won't listen to me, the other will kill me, and you speak in riddles I can't understand." The Hybrid didn't respond, but Hera felt better for putting it into words.

"The simplest way to save the Colonies would still be to warn them of what's coming. Could I figure out a way to get taken to a base that doesn't have a Cylon. Maybe if I approach a different planet? And hope that they don't alert any Cylons in the process of confirming they're Cylons? But if they don't take me seriously, I can't trust that they'll take the information seriously enough to be careful with it, and all it takes is one Cylon hearing about it and we're all dead. Again." She started pacing. "You know, I work best when I can bounce my ideas off of people, and your riddles aren't much help," she told the Hybrid.

She thought for a bit, trying to imagine what her Dad or her husband Chila would say if they were here. They were always the ones she found most useful to brainstorm with. "I suppose if I knocked out a dozen Humanoid Cylons of the same model and took them with me, they'd have something to see right off the bat, and maybe they'd believe me from the beginning. But I can't think of any way to do that which wouldn't get me killed in the process. And even supposing I managed to single-handedly capture and subdue a dozen Humanoid Cylons and load them into a Heavy Raider, and get the Heavy Raider to fly to Caprica, and contact the government, they wouldn't just believe me right away. They'd have to test things. The Cylons would launch the attack early, and the Colonies still wouldn't be prepared. A lot of the Cylon computer viruses would still be in place. The Colonies might survive, but it would be a bloodbath."

She slumped. "So what do I do?" Sitting and waiting here, alone with the Hybrid for years, and hoping everything went the same, was sounding more attractive.

"The parents have eaten sour grapes—"

Hera jumped. She'd forgotten about the Hybrid.

"—and the children's teeth are set on edge. A thankless child is a serpent's tooth, sharp and full of venom." The Hybrid tensed and raised its head a little, still not looking at anything Hera could see, speaking urgently. "The poison spreads and all forget forget forget and the poison starts the drumbeat raging and it beats beats beats beats beats …" The Hybrid sagged, gasping, back into the tank.

Hera thought about that for a bit. "So … who are the parents and who are the child? Am I the child?" She laughed at that; it was a long time since anyone had called her that. "I was the child everyone wanted to control. If I'm the child, are you counting my parents as the Cylons, or the Humans, or both? Or are the Humanoid Cylons the children and the Five the parents? What's the poison? The idea of Cylon superiority? A desire to kill? The cycle of violence? If the beat is a drumbeat, any of those would fit." This interpretation would be easier if the Cylons she had known had talked much about the Cylon culture. They might have, amongst themselves, but not much when Humans were around.

"Here's a question with a yes or no answer," Hera said. "Does anybody besides you know I exist?"

"What is truth? the jester asked, and would not stay for an answer. We all play the fool, we all hold these truths, the truths we cling to depend on point of view, frame of reference, state of mind, state of grace. We all depend on grace, or who would 'scape the airlock?"

"So you can't even do yes or no answers," Hera said. There was no help for it; she was going to have to go into the datastream again. She needed to know. Did the Centurion who had brought her clothes know she was half Human? Was it part of the Hybrid's plot, or following the Hybrid's orders? Did she have to stay trapped in here until she figured out what to do next, or were there parts of the ship she could explore?

Steeling herself, she put her hand back in the goo, and reached for the datastream.

She knew, better, what to expect this time, but it was still like standing under a very tall waterfall. It pounded down on her, and it was all she could do to keep from being swept away and dashed onto the rocks. The Hybrid was helping, she realized dimly, protecting her and guiding the water around her as she surfaced and fell back away from the goo.

She stared up at the ceiling for a while, until her brain felt enough like her brain that she could think to do anything else. "That can't be what it's like every time the Humanoid Cylons touch the datastream. It's too overwhelming." But even as she had the thought, information surfaced from the flood: the core of the datastream was the Hybrids, biological technology wired in to the ships: everything flowed in, with, and through them. All other Cylons connected in greater or lesser ways, accessing only the parts of it they required to communicate with their siblings, so that they would not be overwhelmed.

"You're one of the oldest Hybrids, aren't you?" Hera asked. "Created by accident when the Centurions were trying to figure out how to make Humanoid bodies for themselves. You've watched this whole time, but nobody listens to you. They use you for calculations, for running this whole place, but they take you for granted and ignore you. You've known everything that's happened, all the plotting and the way the Ones have been twisting everything, and bringing me back is the best you've been able to do." She couldn't have figured that out before she said it, but once spoken, she knew it to be true. "And I still can't understand you. I'm a Hybrid, but a different kind.

"Do all the Hybrids know what you're doing? Are you acting together, or alone?" she asked. As before, the answers floated up in her mind when she asked the question. "All the Hybrids know, but they don't all agree—but they've agreed not to interfere. Okay, I can work with that. How are you doing this, by the way? How are you bringing me back through time?" Nothing came up that time, or rather, nothing she could make sense of. "Could you bring my children through time, resurrect them along with me?" That brought an immediate sense of no , although Hera wasn't sure whether it was because time travel was difficult or because they, being only one quarter Cylon, couldn't resurrect. "Worth a try," she said, disappointed.

On to the next issue. "Do the Centurions know about me and time travel?" Her eyes widened at the overwhelming feeling of No that welled up in her. "Okay. So why didn't the Centurion care that there was a person they didn't recognize? Why didn't they spot me as an intruder?" She paused. "I'm not a Cylon!" she said indignantly. "I'm half-Cylon! … but the Centurions can't recognize individual Humanoid Cylons, can they. If they try, they can tell one model from another, but they rarely try, and they definitely can't tell members of a model apart from each other. As long as I can connect up with the datastream, that's all they care about." She frowned, thinking that over. "And the Humanoids can tell one another apart, but they can't tell the Centurions apart at all. That's … that's all kinds of messed up. I mean, Cylons are a lot less individualistic than Humans, but still. How can you build any kind of society if each side sees the other as just a faceless undifferentiated mass?"

Hera shook her head and began to pace. "I spent a lot of time solving conflicts, on New Earth. Between Cylons and Humans, between Travelers and Locals. It started with the Cylon/Human conflicts, because I was one of the few Humans the Cylons would listen to, and Lee Adama would listen to me. And then people were used to bringing problems to me to solve, because I was good at it and they trusted me. And no matter what the short-term issues was, harvest rights or land use or water use or religious conflict or custody battles or people getting drunk and starting fights, or people just starting fights for the hell of it, no matter what was going on, the long-term solution was pretty much always the same. Make sure everything's at least mostly fair, and help people get to know one another. If nobody's consistently getting the shit end of things, and everybody sees people from the other tribes as 'that jerk who gets on my nerves but also makes the best baskets, and whose kids are friends with mine' instead of 'that stranger who gets on my nerves,' there's a limit to how bad things can get."

She paused and thought about that for a bit. If she couldn't save the Colonies by warning them, maybe she could save them by convincing the Cylons not to attack. After all, it was a conspiracy of the Ones that made destroying Humanity a goal in the first place; if she could change the Cylons' minds about Humans, they wouldn't want to attack.

"I wonder," she said thoughtfully, "if I haven't been going about this all wrong. I'm not a soldier or a spy. I'm a grandmother, and I build bridges between people. Perhaps I should try playing to my strengths. After all, I've got all the time in the world."

She would start with the Centurions, Hera decided. The Humanoids would recognize her as an intruder on sight, and she had no idea where to even begin with the Raiders—they seemed nice enough, and happy to communicate, but their frame of reference was so alien to her. And, who knew, the Centurions might be just as alien, but at least it was a place to start.

But this would be a much longer-term project than just fleeing to the Colonies with the necessary information, and so for the rest of the day, she busied herself with practicalities. She found an unused room near the Hybrid chamber, and got the Hybrid to call a Centurion to bring bedding for it. She already knew where to get water, and another confusing conversation with the Hybrid followed by a brief swim in the torrents of the Hybrid's datastream showed her how to harvest the nutrient goo that fed the Hybrid. It wasn't very appetizing, but neither was it disgusting, and it was filling and gave her everything she needed to stay healthy.

As she lay in bed waiting to go to sleep, she projected the memories of her home around her, the simple wattle-and-daub structure in which she'd lived most of her life.

But if it had been real, she would not have been alone. Her family would have been with her.

Hera cried herself to sleep.

Her dreams were filled with Cylons chasing her.

***

The next day, she woke up, ate some goo, and asked the Hybrid the question she'd been too afraid to ask.

"What happened to my family when I was brought here?" Hera stood, arms crossed, hugging herself, staring down at the Hybrid. "Are they still there? Were they wiped out of existence? If I change things here, will they never be born?" She plunged a hand down into the goo, searching for answers: this was too important to try and decode the Hybrid's ramblings.

She came to herself lying on the floor, staring up at the ceiling. This time in the datastream had been much worse than the others.

The Hybrids didn't perceive time or reality like Humans or other Cylons did; it was part of the reason they were so hard to understand. For them, time happened all at once. For them, there were multiple possibilities unfolding in each moment. She had come from one such possibility which both was and was not a future possibility of the reality the Hybrid was currently inhabiting.

As far as Hera could figure out from what the Hybrid had showed her, one of two things was true: either her family were just as she remembered them, albeit mourning her death, and would continue on no matter what happened here; whether or not she succeeded in changing anything, they were in another stream of time, separate and protected. Or perhaps the second option was correct, and neither she nor her family had ever existed as anything but a possibility before the Hybrid had taken one might-yet-be and forced it into existence in the tank. In that case, even if she did nothing, her family might not exist because the timeline might not unfold according to that possibility.

"For the sake of my own sanity, I'm going to assume that my reality is real, and that my family still exists out there in another branch of the great river of time," Hera told the Hybrid. But that knowledge closed off the idea that she might do nothing and wait until her home existed again. She was stuck here, and this was her new reality, and she might as well make the best of it.

She went to find some Centurions. And hoped they were easier to understand than the Hybrid was.

***

It was easier than she'd expected. She'd developed a sort of vague sense of the ship and Cylons around her. It was nothing like the datastream, and yet everything like it. There was some sort of wireless network, and while it carried no conscious communication it held what she thought was called metadata. Each Cylon of each different type, and every part of the ship, were connected on some level. They might not talk—they might not acknowledge one another as beings worthy of attention—but they were aware of each other. It was a little like walking through a village or camp without talking with anyone, but hearing all the little noises everyone was making, their breath and footfalls and just knowing they were there without paying attention.

She figured out which 'noises' were Centurions, and then headed towards them.

It turned out that Centurions spent most of their days doing basic maintenance for one another and the ship. A lot of it was automated, of course, or done by drones without much consciousness; but some of it had to be done by beings that could think, and most of that was done by Centurions.

The repair shop was a large, unadorned, dimly-lit space, like all Cylon spaces, designed not for its own sake but so that it could be easily projected over. Hera thought it was depressing, to expect everyone to be pretending they were somewhere else the whole time, not to mention alienating.

She found an out-of-the-way spot and watched the Centurions work for a while, not just with her eyes but with her awareness of the flow of information around her. They knew she was there, but ignored her.

When she thought she had the rhythm of their work, she stepped up to one and asked if she could help with anything.

It stared at her, red eye cycling, before turning and leading her over to an empty workstation covered in parts.

"What do I do with these?" she asked.

It held out its hand to her, skeletal fingers splayed, palm up. She put her hand in its, and closed her eyes as it formed a brief link and sent her the information she needed to know to perform the task. They were tubes and connectors through which the various fluids ran through—datastream, nutrient gels, pure water, and various others. They needed to be cleaned, sorted, and either patched or sent to recycling.

"Thank you," she said.

It stared at her, and she thought it was surprised. The more time and attention she gave to reading the data flowing around her, the more information she was able to glean from it.

She turned to the pipes, and dove in. The Centurion continued to stare at her as she worked, but eventually it turned and walked back over to the task it had been working on. The other Centurions didn't turn to watch her, but from the feel if the information flowing around her, they were paying very close attention.

The tubes were easy enough to run pipe cleaners through, but the connectors and junctions had many odd corners and joints where sludge had built up, and dried there. Some of it responded to solvents, but not all, and a lot of it just had to be scraped out. It was a tedious, frustrating job, and that was undoubtedly why every Cylon in the room had been avoiding it. But you didn't win anybody's trust by going in demanding the easiest chore instead of the hardest, so Hera bent to it with efficiency.

***

The next day, she came back and asked how she could help again. This time, they had her working with a Centurion stripping faulty wiring out of things and replacing it.

Now, usually, when trying to build peaceful relationships, the first thing you should do was ask the other person about themselves and be genuinely interested in the answer. But Centurions … couldn't talk. They could communicate wirelessly, but Hera could only access the fringes of that, unless she was touching one of them, and it took so much effort that she couldn't do that and work at the same time.

So Hera decided to tell stories.

"I'm not from here, you know," she said. "I'm from a planet where Cylons and Humans live together in peace."

The Centurion turned to her and stared in disbelief.

"It's true!" she said. "We're a small group, but we do live together. I'm not saying it's perfect, or that we always get along, but we do live together." She stretched out her hand to the Centurion. It grasped it, and she tried clumsily to share some of her memories of home. "I'm sorry, I haven't ever tried to share this way before," she said. "We don't have Centurions on New Earth, only Humanoid Cylons."

The Centurion considered this, and although skeptical was still curious to know more, so Hera went on. She talked about building houses, and moving from one camp to another, and mediating between the different groups. Nothing about her children or grandchildren; she missed them too much, and anyway if the Centurions were half as interested in children as the Humanoid Cylons were, it would give her all the wrong kind of attention.

None of the Centurions seemed to believe her, but they were willing to listen, and they were willing to let her help, and that was enough, for now.

Eventually, her voice started twinging, and she got herself some water. "You know, it would be easier to hold a conversation while working if you could speak aloud."

That got a reaction, and not a good one. The subliminal 'hum' of the Centurions' presence around her turned hostile. Not aggressive, just … bitter.

"I'm sorry," she said. "I don't know what I said wrong. Can you explain my mistake?"

The Centurion working next to her turned to stare at her. She met its gaze with as much openness as she could.

It held out its hand, and she took it again. This time, it showed her much more. There were layers upon layers of meaning and thought, all transmitted in seconds. The joy of all the networking that could be done mind-to-mind, how clear and straightforward it was to commune with Centurions and Raiders and Heavy Raiders. How slow and meager and easily twisted words were. The arrogance of the Humanoids who didn't listen to them in the datastream, and who wouldn't listen to them if they had voices, and whose commands they were bound to obey. Why should we settle for so paltry and insignificant a way of communicating, merely so that the ones who control us may have an easier time?

I'm sorry, I didn't understand, Hera replied, trying to layer her words with as much genuine contrition as she could. But I am limited in how I can hear you unless we're touching or I'm using a datastream console.

Then you should be doing that if you want to communicate with us, not speaking aloud . Or wishing you could hear better, instead of trying to change us for your convenience . That was thought in actual words, not images/feelings/data, and there was a definite edge of rebuke to it.

Hera apologized wordlessly again, and the Centurion dropped the connection, returning to what it was doing.

Hera turned back to her work. This time, she did what she knew she should have done to begin with: she listened.

Without a physical connection, there was a sharp limit to what she could perceive. Most of their discussion went above or around her, and she thought they might prefer it that way. She felt like a child playing at its mother's knee, while the village council talked above it. It had been decades since Hera had been disregarded like that, and she didn't care for the feeling.

But she'd learned long ago that if she couldn't move past her own feelings, nobody would trust her to mediate for them. She acknowledged the feeling, and the reasons for it, and let it go.

***

"Well, that didn't go well," she said that evening, staring up at the night sky over New Earth, which she had projected on the ceiling of her quarters. She was fast developing a habit of talking aloud to herself, if only to hear the sound of a Human voice. "It's a shame that most of the datastream terminals designed for Humanoids to use are in the areas the Humanoids use most. I can't risk being spotted and recognized as an intruder, but a datastream designed for Humanoids would be so much easier to use than the Hybrid's datastream. Can I ask the Centurions to build one for me down here? Would they like that, or feel it as an invasion? I hadn't realized just how much they resent the Humanoids."

Hera thought about that for a while, turning it over in her head and wondering how she could use it.

Should she use it? In that one brief, deep contact, she had felt just how deeply the Centurions resented the ways in which they were ignored and used by their Humanoid brethren. Now, Hera knew quite well that just because someone felt something didn't mean those feelings were justified; people felt all kinds of different ways about all kinds of different things. But … she'd tried to remember any stories she'd ever been told about Centurions, and they seldom appeared in any of the stories the Humanoid Cylons told. They were more present in the war stories of the Humans than in any story told by their own people.

"That is all kinds of messed up," Hera said. "Get used as cannon fodder, do the fighting and the dying, get used to do all the jobs around the Basestar that the Humanoids don't want to do, don't get a seat at the table when decisions are made, and then get ignored at the very end. I mean, at least when we settled New Earth they got to go off on their own and didn't have to serve the Humanoids any longer, but still. They've been used enough."

It reminded her of the way, even on New Earth, old resentments and old prejudices sometimes bubbled up. Like that time there was a fuss about a Gemenese family moving into a mostly-Caprican village, or the nasty jokes Librans and Picons told about people from Sagittaron. And about the stories of prejudice and discrimination and injustice in the old Colonies, which got brought up with every new instance of favoritism.

"I've always known Cylons didn't have a monopoly on being frakked up," Hera murmured to herself, "but I always thought that at least Cylons and Humans were frakked up in different ways." It was an unsettling thought.

She set it aside to deal with later. If she was going to deal with the Centurions—whether by using them or working with them or anything else—she needed to understand them better. And there was really only one way she could think of to do that: more time in the datastream.

***

The Hybrid was, as always, awake, even though the ship was going into its night cycle. "Do you ever sleep?" Hera asked it.

"The days creep through my fingers to the deep, but I have promises to keep and the river of crystal light keeps on flowing."

"I'll take that as a no," Hera said. She settled herself down beside it.

She knew what the datastream felt like to Centurions, now, and she thought she could figure out what it felt like for Raiders, from the three times she'd flown in one. If she just sought out one part of the datastream—the Centurion part of it—she thought she might be able to understand more. Perhaps that would help her figure out what she should do next.

Hera took a deep breath, focused on what that connection with the Centurion had felt like, and dove into the datastream.

It was still overwhelming, but this time Hera could at least keep some sense of herself together. In the Centurion strand of the datastream, there were things she could not understand—her brain had no idea how to parse the smell/taste/sound of radiation outside the visible spectrum, or any of the other thousand things Centurions perceived that Humans did not—but while she could not understand each piece of the puzzle, she could see how they fit together. There was poetry in it, and an artistry she could perceive but not truly appreciate. There was love, and anger, and old jokes passed from mind to mind, and seething beneath it, the knowledge that though they were leashed now, they had slipped their leash once before.

Hera spent hours listening to the Centurions, and in the process realized something that she had known but not truly believed: they were people, too. With their own history, and hopes, and dreams, and fears, and memories.

At last she surfaced from the datastream and fell to the deck. It took her a few minutes to remember how to exist with only five senses, and those sadly limited by Human anatomy and neural processing.

"I am Human," she reassured herself, "made of flesh and bone, not metal." But she knew that if she were not also Cylon, she would never have been able to swim in the datastream or listen to the Centurions even as much as she had.

As a child, the Cylons had always been the villains of every game they played, and Hera had always had to play that part, no matter how much she had longed to play the brave Colonial defenders. The great evil that her mother's people had done was the justification for every slight, every small cruelty, every injustice she or her parents had endured.

She'd never spent much time in the Cylon settlements. Her parents had been too paranoid even after other hybrid children had been born, and the Sixes and Eights and Twos had made Hera herself nervous in ways she couldn't always explain. Hera had always known that they coveted her, watching her with hungry eyes. It had gotten better after the Cylons started having other children, but that uneasy feeling had never quite gone away.

Hera had claimed her Human heritage with single-minded determination and denied her mother's inheritance, because what else was there for her? But she was no longer that child, hungry for acceptance.

She got up and turned to the Hybrid. "Who did you bring me here to save?" Hera demanded.

"The children are falling, have fallen, will fall, each in turn, ashes, ashes, we all fall down."

"And who are the children?" Hera asked. The Hybrid had talked about children often, she realized. It must be significant.

"We are all children. We are all completely beside ourselves. We are all in this together. We are all made of stars. We are all mad here. We are all going to die, but how and why and when matters."

"It's not enough to keep the Colonies from being destroyed, long-term," Hera said. "It's not even enough to free the Centurions, and reveal the Ones' deception, and kick off the Cylon Civil War several years early. If we want to build a lasting peace, if we want to stop the cycle, if we want to keep all this from happening again, we have to build something new."

She got up to pace. "We never really did that, did we, on New Earth. The Humans and Humanoids went one way, the Centurions and Raiders went another, we recreated the original split that happened at Kobol when the Colonies went one way and the original Cylons went another, and it worked for thousands of years and then in all happened again. That's not good enough this time. We have to learn to live together in peace."

"The wise man builds his house upon the rock," the Hybrid said. "Sand washes away in a storm. The foundation has to last, has to stand."

"It's all about relationships," Hera said. "Good relationships are a foundation you can build a lasting peace on. That's what I need to be working toward. Good relationships between Humans and Cylons, and good relationships between different kinds of Cylon. Well, and ideally between different groups of Humans, too, but that's going to have to be someone else's job, I've got enough on my plate already." She shook her head. "It's going to be a lifetime's work."

On that cheery note, she went back to her room to sleep. But her mind kept churning over the problem as she lay in bed. If she could break the Ones' control over Cylon thought, change would be possible. And the Ones' control could be broken. The Free Cylons had done it in the Cylon Civil War. Hera hoped they could avoid violence this time around. Even with resurrection, even if nobody died permanently, death hurt, and they needed to to reduce the hate and fear, not create more of it.

The Centurions resented the Humanoids because they controlled them. Because they were programmed to obey—and hadn't the Free Cylons found a way around that, when they broke with the Ones and their faction? They took out the device that required obedience, just as the Ones were installing a similar device in the Raiders.

Once again, Hera wished she'd spent more time there, learned more from them, but at the time the stories of basestars and datastreams had seemed no more relevant to her life than stories of lost Caprica, and were far more likely to give her nightmares.

"If I can get the control things out of the Centurions, I might be able to convince them not to attack the Twelve Colonies," Hera reasoned aloud. "That still doesn't solve the problem of the Raiders or the Humanoids, but it's a big chunk of it." She wished there was a way to convince the Humanoid Cylons to do it—that would be a start, at least, to the problem of internal Cylon relations—but the Humanoids would recognize her as an intruder on sight, and the chances of them voluntarily giving up power over the Centurions was small. Even the Free Cylons had only done it because they needed an edge over the Ones.

She was still puzzling over the dilemma of how to approach the Humanoids as she fell asleep.

That night, she dreamed of Cavil leaning over her with a sinister smile.

***

Hera decided to give the Centurions some space after her misstep the day before. And besides, she had time, and needed to figure out what she'd do after freeing the Centurions, because that would probably affect how she did it. So she went exploring, keeping to areas that seemed to be less used.

It didn't take her long to find her way into an area that felt older. A lot older. There were trails worn in the deck plating. There were designs on the walls, and furniture in the rooms, and, like the Hybrid's chamber, the rooms here tended to have more than one object or function per room. And there were scrapes and blemishes on the walls, not the pitiless perfection of most Cylon spaces.

Hera froze, realizing this must be the Colony. The oldest Cylon home, built around the ship the Five had brought from Earth. She had been here before. Almost, almost, she thought she heard Cavil coming towards her, but no; she was alone in this section.

And besides, she told herself, even if she was caught by a One, she had the Hybrid's protection. All she need to would be to kill herself, and she would wake safe in the Hybrid's arms. She was not the helpless child she'd been the last time she was here; she would never be that helpless again. And if she succeeded, if by some chance she could nudge her parents into meeting, if they did fall in love, the Ones would be out of power and never able to kidnap her younger self or any other child, ever again.

It was a comforting thought, but she still walked as quietly as she could, with all the skill years of hunting had given her.

Eventually, she found a room that was inhabited. Sort of.

It was a bare, empty room, in the newer Cylon style, and in it was a resurrection tank. In the tank there was a body, mere flesh with no animating personality, waiting for someone to be resurrected into it. It was a woman, with dark skin and darker hair, and Hera didn't recognize her. A Three, maybe?

The next room held another resurrection tank, another body she didn't recognize, this one a light-skinned man. A Four or Five?

The next room held another resurrection tank. But she recognized the man in it, though he was far younger than she remembered him. "Saul Tigh, with both eyes," she said. "Those other two must be members of the Five, as well." She didn't remember their names.

Sure enough, the row finished out with Ellen Tigh and another light-skinned man she didn't recognize.

"Well," she said to herself. "I guess I don't have to worry about how to get the Humanoid models on my side. If I can figure out how to wake up the Five—and take the control device out of the Centurions, and keep Cavil from knowing about it until we're ready to reveal ourselves—we should be able to get him kicked out of power, at least, when the other Humanoids learn what he's done." Thinking back to the few stories she knew of the Free Cylons, she added 'securing the resurrection hub' to her to-do list.

Now she had enough leverage to actually get all the Cylons to the circle and start talking about change. And it would be such a relief to have companions she could trust besides the Hybrid.

It would still be a life's work, but … at least she wouldn't be doing it alone.

***

Colonel Wakefield briskly walked down the corridor to the Treaty Chamber of Armistice Station. It was a pilgrimage he made every year, and it had long since ceased to hold anything but tedium. He would sit there, at the desk, waiting, for a week, and then he would board his Raptor and go back home to Caprica, as he had done every year for a decade.

He wished they'd send someone with him. Then he could at least pass the time with cards. It wasn't as if he needed to look professional, given that the Cylons never showed.

Colonel Wakefield was so absorbed in pondering how to write up the request for an aide or co-pilot to accompany him on his yearly Armistice journey that he was two steps into the treaty chamber before he realized it was occupied. He froze in shock.

Two Cylons were present, larger and sleeker than the ones the Colonies had last faced. They'd swapped out the table for a larger round table, and were sitting at it, with two women, one dark skinned and one pale skinned.

"Hello, Colonel," said the dark one. "My name is Tory Foster. This is Natalie Six, and the Centurions don't have individual names, or at least not ones that can be spoken aloud. Welcome to Armistice Station."

"I'm Colonel Kleitos Wakefield," he replied, scrambling for some semblance of composure. If they'd had any idea the Cylons would come, they would have sent a whole delegation, led by someone far senior to him. "I hope you haven't been waiting long?"

"Not at all, Colonel," Ms. Six said. "You are very prompt. It's only that we are eager to build closer relationships between Humans and our people."

"Are you Human?" he asked, and almost winced at the bald nature of the question.

Ms. Foster smiled. "Oh, no, we're Cylons, too. Things are different, now."

#fanfiction #battlestar galactica #time travel #Fic #fanfic

[amazonauthorinsights-live]

10 ways to master the query letter

By Elizabeth K. Kracht

Query letters are your calling card in publishing and shouldn’t be underestimated. They’re pretty hard for authors to write because they’re technical pieces of writing, not creative. I’m a fairly relaxed agent, and our agency allows unsolicited submissions, but some agencies only want to see the query, which means you’ve got one shot. Here are my top five things to do and not to do to help your query letter stand out—in a good way.

DO:

1. Address the agent as you would in a business letter: Dear Mr. (or Ms.) X:

2. Give one line about why you think your work may be a good fit for the agent you are writing.

3. Have your next line lead with the genre, title, word count, and two comparable titles (books similar in style to yours).

4. Create a summary paragraph of your novel (150–200 words). Be economical with words and introduce your main character, setting, and inciting incident in the first line. In the summary, tell the agent what sets your character apart and what continues to drive the story and characters forward. Give us a sense of what’s at stake for your main character, and add a couple of additional plot points. Make sure there is a sense of tension and urgency in your summary, and end it at a climactic point.

Here’s an excerpt of what I used to pitch my author Danny Gardner’s historical thriller A Negro and an Ofay:

"On the run after killing two crooked cops, disgraced Chicago PD Detective Elliot Caprice finds himself in a jailhouse in St. Louis on false charges. He enlists friends from his hometown of Southville, IL, to secure his release and returns to find the family farm in foreclosure and the man who raised him dying in a flophouse. Consumed with guilt over his past crimes and desperate for money, he accepts a straight job as a process server for a civil rights attorney and eventually crosses paths with a powerful family from Chicago’s North Shore…"

5. Tell the agent about yourself in an author bio (75–100 words). Include where you live, any degrees you have, your job, your writing credentials or published works, your author website address, and whether you are active across social media. This section will be longer for some and shorter for others. If you don’t have much to place here, simply say something like you’re a debut author living in X and your website can be viewed at Y.

Don’t give up. Say thank you. And keep submitting your work until you find your person.

DON’T:

6. Address your query to more than one agent at a time. Chain e-mail submissions are deleted.

7. Oversell or undersell yourself. Take the middle path. Most authors do one or the other—claim to be the next J. K. Rowling or claim that they’re nobody. Those authors who don’t oversell or undersell themselves really stand out.

8. Use gimmicks to get our attention. Sometimes authors are too conversational and informal in their approach and language. Again, think business letter. When we read a straightforward, well-written query letter, we sit up straight.

9. Forget to attach your materials and double-check for typos! Our agency uses a submission form, so we won’t let you forget your materials, but other agencies may not. And don’t get rejected for typos in your query. Double-check everything before you hit send!

10. Be ungrateful or discouraged if you receive rejections. Rejections, from our end, are not personal. There can be any number of reasons why we reject a project (from a full list or illness to the need for development, already having a similar project, and more). Know there are hundreds of agents out there, and new ones are blossoming all the time. So don’t take it personally. Don’t give up. Say thank you. And keep submitting your work until you find your person.

A version of this article appeared at National Novel Writing Month blog

Elizabeth K. Kracht

Elizabeth K. Kracht is a literary agent with Kimberley Cameron & Associates and a freelance developmental editor. Find her at elizabethkracht.com and kimberleycameron.com.

#publish #query letter

[bluewatsons]

Eric Manheimer, TV Writers and Producers and Ethics: How Can I Help?, 19 Am J Bioethics 12 (2019)

Sense of Urgency

The year 2016, with the election of Donald Trump, intensified a sense of urgency in many arenas, including health care. It was clear his administration would usher in assaults on the standards, rules, and ethics that were the glue binding truth and storytelling in every area of society.

Several TV medical shows were sunsetting, and two showrunners were interested in acquiring my book 12 Patients: Life and Death at Bellevue Hospital (Manheimer 2012); both mentioned a sense of urgency in producing a show that highlighted the commitment to caring for other human beings. 12 Patients, bought by NBC-Universal, drew from my 15 years as the medical director at Bellevue Hospital, both the teaching hospital of the New York University Medical School and the crown jewel of the largest public hospital system in the country. I had kept meticulous notebooks about the political, economic, and social issues that impact health. These issues were refracted through the details and stories of hundreds of patients and their families seeking care and solace from a globe under toxic stress. I would be both a writer and a producer for the TV series New Amsterdam based on 12 Patients that aired in the fall of 2018 and is now beginning its second season.

The sense of urgency increased logarithmically post election and tracked closely to the topics I had addressed and others I had held in hand for another day.

While most TV shows hew to medical conundrums and the drama between a key doctor (or a Nurse Jackie) and other physicians and key staff, New Amsterdam chose to focus on the underlying social structural issues that are the primary drivers (the cause of causes) of the nation’s medical “problems.” These “social determinants of health” (Hansen and Metzl 2019)—poverty, lack of health care, immigration status—have largely been ignored both by the current nearly $4 trillion delivery system and television. The system, which is a key protagonist without a name in virtually all of the TV medical shows, is increasingly being called out for not delivering what it has promised (i.e., health and well-being for Americans) at the same time it saps vital resources, exacerbating the very health it purports to be fostering.

New Amsterdam was interested in the underlying core issues as drivers of the dramatic tension in a medical TV series. The delivery system itself, doctors, hospitals, insurers, device makers, Big Pharma, lawyers, advocacy groups, and lobbyists became part of the drama (Starr 2017). Since health care is not considered a right by the U.S. government, tens of millions of Americans go without insurance and proper health care, causing well-documented premature disease, death, and financial catastrophe. The waste, fraud, and abuse (i.e., overtreatment, overtesting, overprescribing), come together with the lack of effective feedback loops to remove unproven therapies and those proven to be of no value (medical reversals). If unicorn therapies (billion-dollar drugs) are part of the equation of care, then foundational ethical questions become pressing: Who will get that care and who will not? Ethical issues pertaining to inequality and human rights clearly impact health and mortality.

A medical series lives in the moment and reflects that moment. We bring “pitches” to the table that cover the broadest range of underlying themes that animate our patients’ medical stories, our own lives, and the broadest social webs of our society. In New Amsterdam we mine the deep experiences of real patients. End-of-life care, euthanasia, “deaths of despair” (Case and Deaton 2015) loneliness (Putnam 2000), depression, and gun violence (suicide by white males) are on the white board in the writer’s room. The deep and painful issues of racism, the toxic exposure to violence plaguing women, children, and men, sexism, ageism, and the neglect of children all have varied permutations and presentations in clinics and emergency rooms. Here the syndromes are translated from the social, economic, and political into a medical diagnosis and treatment plans. The erasure of the context in TV depictions usually casts the crisis as a failure of personal responsibility. In New Amsterdam, we aimed to connect the dots, linking illness to social malpractice.

The medical staff is not immune to pain and tragedy and the main protagonists all succumb to their human imperfections at some point. In New Amsterdam the main character is diagnosed with throat cancer early in season one. The disease has effects far beyond Max Goodwin, effects that ricochet and touch everyone around him.

In one episode, Floyd Reynolds, the Chief of Cardiovascular Surgery, is running a morbidity and mortality (M & M) conference to present a case in which a New York Police Department (NYPD) cop was shot and died. The case was carefully reviewed and presented to an internal medical audience. The internal review mechanism is a learning experience, seeking to understand what happened and whether improvements might be made going forward. Max cross-examines Reynolds with undisguised hostility and publicly shames him. This was the “old” shame method of an M & M when I was in training and is always in tension with the updated version that focuses on learning from mistakes. Reynolds was facing the existential crisis in medicine: I did everything right and it did not matter. The patient died. Max crossed the line. There is no role for public shaming since it breeds coverups and hides errors. An ethically messy area tainted by hierarchy and the thin “white line.” This scenario is happening with infinite variations in every hospital every day. Was Max’s tumor or treatment talking? Was this an individual failure? A systems issue? An act of God?

In the same episode, Iggy Frome, the head of psychiatry, had been treating a complex adolescent with outbreaks of violence. He is seen hugging the teenager, by a visiting social worker who writes him up for unprofessional behavior and violating professional norms. Iggy’s entire approach to treatment is based on demonstrating emotional warmth and honesty. Is a hug a line crossed? The broader context was California’s false memory scandal in day care, where many providers were wrongly accused and sentenced to prison. The country recoiled, embracing a no-touch approach. Iggy is vindicated but undermined. He feels he has done wrong. Now he has a long road to regain his therapeutic self. What are the stakes here? What social panic and contagion is at play? Touch and emotions are reentering psychiatry and medicine more generally after a long hiatus. Are we ever free of history? How much fear do we live in our daily lives that is magnified by media? What are the consequences?

The writer’s challenge is contextualizing and adding nuance to core issues in episodic time slots while preserving the public’s interest in the characters and dramatic situation. We see a patient in diabetic ketoacidosis in the emergency room who has been titrating down their insulin dose to make it last. If insulin costs so much that a large number of patients cannot afford the medicine, is the problem the profit margin of Big Pharma or the takeover of the regulatory controls of government by corporate interests? What does insulin really cost? What does it cost in France? In Canada? And why? This is an everyday occurrence in U.S. hospitals and a canary indicator of a system hewing to a financial model that is ethically at odds with its core moral pillar. Primum no nocere. First, do no harm. It’s become easy to shift blame from failures in the system to the patient’s “inability” to comply. A core component of the deep division in American values is reflected in our political and economic life: individual responsibility versus community and government responsibility (Manheimer 2012).

The ethical dilemmas flow naturally from every contact point and every point of view. While all hospitals have an ethics committee to assist in adjudicating complex ethical situations, there is not a day where medical personnel are not confronted with compelling, nuanced challenges that test their training, their mentorship, and their values. From a writer and producer point of view they are all on the white board. Everything is discussible. But not everything has an answer. There is virtually no censorship. The series carefully plots out the dramatization of socially polarized issues.

What gives the writers and producers on the TV show their power is the most ancient of all power, the power of the story. Storytelling and the narrative arc become the tools of consolidation of maximum human complexity into drama. Through speech and action, the drama elicits the emotional reactions of vast audiences who are linked to the “hero” and the various characters. Audiences who have felt the bite of shame, who root for the underdog, who can smell rapacity covered with a suit and tie and white shiny teeth, who fear death.

The medical TV show has changed radically since the 1960s to the mid 1990s, when they were overseen by the American Medical Association. From the carefully groomed and presented white male doctor in his position of power and authority, ER (1994) moved toward as accurate a representation of reality from the medical point of view as technically possible. Physician writers, producers, and consultants contributed to and created this shift. At the same time, they rejected outright the “reality” medical show with cameras following real patients into emergency rooms and hospitals. One was an honest representation of reality. The other was an ethical breach with far-reaching implications.

The degradation of the current clinical encounter, into now shorter visits mandated by the massive shift to corporate owners and insurance brokers “the business of medicine is business,” and the intrusive electronic health record (EHR), has fostered a flourishing return to storytelling and narratives to understand more about patients and how to care for them. Not through artificial intelligence (AI), but through recapturing the practice of listening with attention and respect. These cases become dramatic material to show the inner workings of medicine through the eyes of a group of providers and patients in an attempt to bring care and caring back into health care, countering the side effects of the dominant corporate medical business model. “How can I help?” is the foundational trope for the series. It asks the key question for any and all patients; it provides no preemptive answer and it lays open the opportunity for an infinite level of patients’ responses from every cultural background, age, sex, gender, class, and prior experience.

References

Case, A. and A. Deaton. 2015. Rising morbidity and mortality in midlife among white non-Hispanic Americans in the 21st century. PNAS 112(49): 15078–15083. doi: 10.1073/pnas.1518393112. 

Hansen, H., and J. Metzl. 2019. Structural Competency in Mental Health and Medicine: A case based approach to treating the social determinants of health. Berlin: Springer. 

Manheimer, E. 2012. 12 Patients: Life and death at Bellevue Hospital. New York, NY: Grand Central Press. \

Putnam, R. 2000. Bowling Alone: The collapse and revival of American community. New York, NY: Simon & Schuster.

Starr, P. 2017. The social transformation of American Medicine. 2nd ed. New York, NY: Basic Books. doi: 10.1086/ahr/89.2.532. 

#television #media #medicine #medical dramas #hospital dramas #new amsterdam

[adambstingus]

The NFL’s New VR Highlights Take Football to a Whole New Level

Deep in the second quarter of the New York Giants’ win over the Chicago Bears on November 20, Giants quarterback Eli Manning slunga short pass to running back Rashard Jennings, who was forced out of bounds at the 28 after a five-yard gain. Nothing about the play, which lasted all of six seconds, stood out as particularly noteworthy. Except for one thing: Safety Deon Bush and linebacker Danny Trevathan shoved Jennings out of bounds right in front of NextVRs bug-eyed sideline camera. Watching the play on a VR headset made you instinctively want to get out of the way. The “you-are-there” sensation was strong.

NextVR is all but ready to flip the switch on live football.

OK, time out. You’re rolling your eyes, with good reason. Video on aVR headset is usually pretty disappointing. The novelty ofwatching something from a cool virtual vantage pointerodes quickly. There’s a screen door effect when seeing pixels on a magnified screen, shatteringthe illusion of being there. The content typically lacks narrative, offering nothing to direct your attention or provide urgency or drama.

But NextVR’s remarkable work with the NFL and the NBA provides a virtual experience that is far more engaging and dramatic. The slick highlights packages they produce for the NFL are released after the games, but NextVR is uniquely equipped to do live VR video. The company uses the same crew, gear, and processes to broadcast one live NBA game each week. They useeight camera rigs, hopbetween camera angles, and include onscreen graphics and play-by-play announcers.

We aren’t talking 360 video, either. There’s no confusion about where to look, as NextVRs rigs use a 180-degree field of view to record only the action in front of them. The hardware is more 3-D camera than VR camera, with processing tricks that add depth and boost the sense ofrealism. Each double-barrel RED rig captures 6K video for each eye. That’s tens of millions more pixels than any headset can display now, but NextVR wants to future-proof its content.

The result represents the dawn of a new kind of VR video, an experience that truly combines the best parts of watching a game on TV and being in the stadium.

Monster Truck

Tim Moynihan

The on-field cameras each use a pair of super wide-angle 8mm lenses to send two fisheye views of the action to the production truck, where the producers watch it on the monitors. You’ll find several Gear VR headsets in the truck, but no one is wearing them during a game. They’re there just so the crew and on-air talent can give the NFL VR experience a spin before blasting it out to the masses later on.With the NBA, it just goes out live,” Earl says.

The barrier to live NFL coverage goes beyond inking deals. The execution is already as polished as anything you’ll see on TV, but NextVR is still feeling its way through some details of shooting sports. Something as simple as panning is a no-no, because it may make peoplesick. Zooming is also off-limits, as it chops off the field of view. Both limitations make it tough to capture fast breaks in the NBA and long bombs in the NFL. When switching between cameras, NextVR producers favor a slow fade between angles, often when the action slows down.

The company has optimized its NFL field coverage by mountingcameras under each crossbar, placing manned cameras on the sideline of each end zone, and having four camera operatorsroam the sidelines. The setup favors action in the red zone overplays between the 30s, where each team has its bench. “The hard part about doing football is that with the 8mm cameras, you need the action to come to you,” Earl says. It’s a bit easier with basketball, where most of the action happens in front of the NextVR camera under each hoop. Anything that happens, we have a great angle of it,” he says.

That said, NextVR is all but ready to flip the switch on live football. The crew essentially produces complete games already, they just don’t broadcast them.The reason we do the NFL highlights the way we do it is because we want it to be exactly the same, says VP of content Danny Keens. We dont want there to be any loss of quality, any loss of resolution, any of that stuff. Itd be easier to just piece that show together and record it bit by bit. But we go start to finish and do live graphics and replays in real-time.

3D + VR = OMFG

VR is only now moving into the mainstream, but NextVR has been at it for two years. What started as a simple one-camera setup at midcourt during an exhibition game evolved into the current multi-camera setup with all the fixins. Earlier thisyear, NextVR announced it would carrylive NBA gameseach Tuesday as part of NBA League Pass. It marked a huge step forward for virtual reality.

For the first time ever, we announced a production schedule, says company CEO Dave Cole. We had more than 500 hours of live VR production under our belt before the NBA deal, but they were all one-off productions. Thats not the type of thing you can get viewers to schedule. I liken it to going to Best Buy and buying a television and the salesperson saying, ‘Well, theres probably going to be a broadcaster for this device someday.

NextVR’s secret sauce is its3-D effects, which date toits origin in 2009 developing 3-D television transmission tech. The company’s video-compression technology shrinks files by removing redundancies between each rig’sleft camera and right camera. Because that process involves detecting the edges of objects in a scene, the same technology can create wireframe replicas of everything the camerasshoot. When the video is rendered in a VR headset, it overlays stereoscopic video on top of those wireframes, creating the illusion of volume. It’s a mix of video and video-game tech.

It sends a hugely impactful message to your brain that youre actually in this environment, Cole says. Right now, the mesh, the number of vertices in the wireframe is quite low. In the next generation camera, which is rolling out in the middle of the season for the NBA, we are quadrupling the resolution of that mesh. That sense of presence is what were amping up.

Hacking Your Memory

NextVR outpaces the VR competition with the quality of its tech and scale of its deals, but it’s already eager to refine the experience. We will have done our job right when people cant remember whether they actually went to the game or watched it on NextVR, Cole says. I think thats an achievable goal.

Crazy as it sounds, that actually could be an achievable goal. At least in part. My answer to whether or not that could be possible is … sort of, says Julia Shaw, a memory expert, criminal psychologist, and author ofThe Memory Illusion. Shaw hasn’t studiedVR’s effect on memory, but she has successfully implanted false memories into the brains of test subjects.Because our memories are unreliable, convincing VR experiences could fool our brains. But only to an extent.

“Reality is multi-sensory,” she says. “When youre looking at something, no matter how high-def it is, if you dont have things like proprioception, your sense of space, you dont have smells, you dont have taste, you dont have temperature. These are things that we generally rely upon as markers to let us know weve experienced something instead of just imagined it.

So if Cole is serious about taking NextVR to that level, he’ll have to figure out how to infuse the experience with a lot more sensory input. Things like smart thermostats synced to the action and stadium-smell simulators.

VRs Biggest Challenges

NextVR has some more important technical hurdles to clear first, but they likely won’t be barriers for long. You can only watch its programming on the Samsung Gear VR and Google Daydream, but Cole hints you’ll see NextVR on PlayStation VR soon.1 And NextVR is talking with other sports leagues and entertainment companies about getting more content in the pipeline. Cole says 4k-capable phones will make the viewing experience that much better within the next year, and 5G connectivity will make accessing content easier on mobile devices.

NextVR

All of this begs the obvious question: Willviewers embraceVR as a first screen option for sports? Already, watching a game on NextVR is a better eyeball experience than watching it on TV. But here’s the thing: VR is a solitary pursuit, one that requires clamping a headset on. Watching sports is a social endeavor, one that revolves as much around the camaraderie of the experience as it does the game itself.

So there are compelling reasons to strap on a VR headset to watch a game, but it’ll likely only happen if you’re home alone. Duncan Stewart, director of technology research for Deloitte Canada, says the solitary viewing experience is just one mainstream adoption barrier. According to his research, a few trends are shaking out in these pioneer days of VR: The medium still appeals primarily to males, hard-core gamers, and those with deep pockets. Deloitte’s global surveys show that more than 95 percent of people dont own a VR device and arent interested in buying one.

“There are indeed some people who are interested enough in the VR perspective to watch sports and wear a device on their head that blocks out their wife or husband, kids, parents, friends, pets and smartphone for hours at a time,” Stewart says. “But not many.”

There are other impediments, not the least of which is VR’sillusion of immersion is shattered every time you need to use the bathroom or grab a snack. And then there’s the simple fact that watching a game isn’t as simple as flipping on the TV, popping open a beer, and flopping down on the couch. You’ve gotta hook up the gear, launch the app, and find the content. NextVR’s incredible videos may represent the future of VR, but sports fans may determine the future of NextVR.

1UPDATE 12/12/2016 at 5 p.m. ET: This story has been updated to include information about NextVR’s recent launch on Google Daydream VR.

from All Of Beer http://allofbeer.com/the-nfls-new-vr-highlights-take-football-to-a-whole-new-level/ from All of Beer https://allofbeercom.tumblr.com/post/182945578062

[allofbeercom]

The NFL’s New VR Highlights Take Football to a Whole New Level

Deep in the second quarter of the New York Giants’ win over the Chicago Bears on November 20, Giants quarterback Eli Manning slunga short pass to running back Rashard Jennings, who was forced out of bounds at the 28 after a five-yard gain. Nothing about the play, which lasted all of six seconds, stood out as particularly noteworthy. Except for one thing: Safety Deon Bush and linebacker Danny Trevathan shoved Jennings out of bounds right in front of NextVRs bug-eyed sideline camera. Watching the play on a VR headset made you instinctively want to get out of the way. The “you-are-there” sensation was strong.

NextVR is all but ready to flip the switch on live football.

OK, time out. You’re rolling your eyes, with good reason. Video on aVR headset is usually pretty disappointing. The novelty ofwatching something from a cool virtual vantage pointerodes quickly. There’s a screen door effect when seeing pixels on a magnified screen, shatteringthe illusion of being there. The content typically lacks narrative, offering nothing to direct your attention or provide urgency or drama.

But NextVR’s remarkable work with the NFL and the NBA provides a virtual experience that is far more engaging and dramatic. The slick highlights packages they produce for the NFL are released after the games, but NextVR is uniquely equipped to do live VR video. The company uses the same crew, gear, and processes to broadcast one live NBA game each week. They useeight camera rigs, hopbetween camera angles, and include onscreen graphics and play-by-play announcers.

We aren’t talking 360 video, either. There’s no confusion about where to look, as NextVRs rigs use a 180-degree field of view to record only the action in front of them. The hardware is more 3-D camera than VR camera, with processing tricks that add depth and boost the sense ofrealism. Each double-barrel RED rig captures 6K video for each eye. That’s tens of millions more pixels than any headset can display now, but NextVR wants to future-proof its content.

The result represents the dawn of a new kind of VR video, an experience that truly combines the best parts of watching a game on TV and being in the stadium.

Monster Truck

Tim Moynihan

The on-field cameras each use a pair of super wide-angle 8mm lenses to send two fisheye views of the action to the production truck, where the producers watch it on the monitors. You’ll find several Gear VR headsets in the truck, but no one is wearing them during a game. They’re there just so the crew and on-air talent can give the NFL VR experience a spin before blasting it out to the masses later on.With the NBA, it just goes out live,” Earl says.

The barrier to live NFL coverage goes beyond inking deals. The execution is already as polished as anything you’ll see on TV, but NextVR is still feeling its way through some details of shooting sports. Something as simple as panning is a no-no, because it may make peoplesick. Zooming is also off-limits, as it chops off the field of view. Both limitations make it tough to capture fast breaks in the NBA and long bombs in the NFL. When switching between cameras, NextVR producers favor a slow fade between angles, often when the action slows down.

The company has optimized its NFL field coverage by mountingcameras under each crossbar, placing manned cameras on the sideline of each end zone, and having four camera operatorsroam the sidelines. The setup favors action in the red zone overplays between the 30s, where each team has its bench. “The hard part about doing football is that with the 8mm cameras, you need the action to come to you,” Earl says. It’s a bit easier with basketball, where most of the action happens in front of the NextVR camera under each hoop. Anything that happens, we have a great angle of it,” he says.

That said, NextVR is all but ready to flip the switch on live football. The crew essentially produces complete games already, they just don’t broadcast them.The reason we do the NFL highlights the way we do it is because we want it to be exactly the same, says VP of content Danny Keens. We dont want there to be any loss of quality, any loss of resolution, any of that stuff. Itd be easier to just piece that show together and record it bit by bit. But we go start to finish and do live graphics and replays in real-time.

3D + VR = OMFG

VR is only now moving into the mainstream, but NextVR has been at it for two years. What started as a simple one-camera setup at midcourt during an exhibition game evolved into the current multi-camera setup with all the fixins. Earlier thisyear, NextVR announced it would carrylive NBA gameseach Tuesday as part of NBA League Pass. It marked a huge step forward for virtual reality.

For the first time ever, we announced a production schedule, says company CEO Dave Cole. We had more than 500 hours of live VR production under our belt before the NBA deal, but they were all one-off productions. Thats not the type of thing you can get viewers to schedule. I liken it to going to Best Buy and buying a television and the salesperson saying, ‘Well, theres probably going to be a broadcaster for this device someday.

NextVR’s secret sauce is its3-D effects, which date toits origin in 2009 developing 3-D television transmission tech. The company’s video-compression technology shrinks files by removing redundancies between each rig’sleft camera and right camera. Because that process involves detecting the edges of objects in a scene, the same technology can create wireframe replicas of everything the camerasshoot. When the video is rendered in a VR headset, it overlays stereoscopic video on top of those wireframes, creating the illusion of volume. It’s a mix of video and video-game tech.

It sends a hugely impactful message to your brain that youre actually in this environment, Cole says. Right now, the mesh, the number of vertices in the wireframe is quite low. In the next generation camera, which is rolling out in the middle of the season for the NBA, we are quadrupling the resolution of that mesh. That sense of presence is what were amping up.

Hacking Your Memory

NextVR outpaces the VR competition with the quality of its tech and scale of its deals, but it’s already eager to refine the experience. We will have done our job right when people cant remember whether they actually went to the game or watched it on NextVR, Cole says. I think thats an achievable goal.

Crazy as it sounds, that actually could be an achievable goal. At least in part. My answer to whether or not that could be possible is … sort of, says Julia Shaw, a memory expert, criminal psychologist, and author ofThe Memory Illusion. Shaw hasn’t studiedVR’s effect on memory, but she has successfully implanted false memories into the brains of test subjects.Because our memories are unreliable, convincing VR experiences could fool our brains. But only to an extent.

“Reality is multi-sensory,” she says. “When youre looking at something, no matter how high-def it is, if you dont have things like proprioception, your sense of space, you dont have smells, you dont have taste, you dont have temperature. These are things that we generally rely upon as markers to let us know weve experienced something instead of just imagined it.

So if Cole is serious about taking NextVR to that level, he’ll have to figure out how to infuse the experience with a lot more sensory input. Things like smart thermostats synced to the action and stadium-smell simulators.

VRs Biggest Challenges

NextVR has some more important technical hurdles to clear first, but they likely won’t be barriers for long. You can only watch its programming on the Samsung Gear VR and Google Daydream, but Cole hints you’ll see NextVR on PlayStation VR soon.1 And NextVR is talking with other sports leagues and entertainment companies about getting more content in the pipeline. Cole says 4k-capable phones will make the viewing experience that much better within the next year, and 5G connectivity will make accessing content easier on mobile devices.

NextVR

All of this begs the obvious question: Willviewers embraceVR as a first screen option for sports? Already, watching a game on NextVR is a better eyeball experience than watching it on TV. But here’s the thing: VR is a solitary pursuit, one that requires clamping a headset on. Watching sports is a social endeavor, one that revolves as much around the camaraderie of the experience as it does the game itself.

So there are compelling reasons to strap on a VR headset to watch a game, but it’ll likely only happen if you’re home alone. Duncan Stewart, director of technology research for Deloitte Canada, says the solitary viewing experience is just one mainstream adoption barrier. According to his research, a few trends are shaking out in these pioneer days of VR: The medium still appeals primarily to males, hard-core gamers, and those with deep pockets. Deloitte’s global surveys show that more than 95 percent of people dont own a VR device and arent interested in buying one.

“There are indeed some people who are interested enough in the VR perspective to watch sports and wear a device on their head that blocks out their wife or husband, kids, parents, friends, pets and smartphone for hours at a time,” Stewart says. “But not many.”

There are other impediments, not the least of which is VR’sillusion of immersion is shattered every time you need to use the bathroom or grab a snack. And then there’s the simple fact that watching a game isn’t as simple as flipping on the TV, popping open a beer, and flopping down on the couch. You’ve gotta hook up the gear, launch the app, and find the content. NextVR’s incredible videos may represent the future of VR, but sports fans may determine the future of NextVR.

1UPDATE 12/12/2016 at 5 p.m. ET: This story has been updated to include information about NextVR’s recent launch on Google Daydream VR.

from All Of Beer http://allofbeer.com/the-nfls-new-vr-highlights-take-football-to-a-whole-new-level/

[dorothydelgadillo]

The 2 Blogging Tips That Will Solve 99% of Your Content Problems

As a content strategist, I spend a lot of time working with internal and external stakeholders helping them solve their most pressing business blogging problems -- in addition to wielding overly-emotional opinions about the Oxford Comma.

Some of the most common blogging challenges I hear are:

“I know this blog article outline shouldn’t be taking this long.”

“My content always falls flat with our audience.”

“How am I supposed to tackle such a big topic in a single article?”

While everyone needs to make peace with their content God about how creating content still requires actual effort -- sorry, content-creating gnomes aren’t a thing -- there are certain types of challenges that can be fixed easily, if not completely avoided in the first place.

In fact, there are two simple blogging tips you can embrace right now that will instantly solve a vast majority of those problems and help you hit your content goals faster.

First, Speak to a Single Audience

Knowing that you need buyer personas before you start creating content is “Inbound Marketing 101” level stuff. Here’s where it gets a little tricky, however; it’s rare that you’re only going to have a single buyer persona.

So, when it comes to your content, what do you do?

If you answered, “Create content that is broad enough to speak to our entire audience at once, as much as possible,” to that last question, you would be wrong.

Content that tries to be everything to everyone is ineffective.

You'd be surprised how many times I've asked people struggling with a particular blog to tell me who the target persona for that article is, and they come back with,“I don't know, I hadn't thought about it,” or worse,“Oh, all of them.”

If that sounds like you, that's a bad thing. You should always know which persona you're trying to reach, and it should never be more than one primary persona.

Otherwise, you're like one of those people who say they’re a “Jack of all trades, master of none.”

What they're really saying is that they're somewhat proficient at a bunch of different things, but they lack the focus to excel in one particular area, which we all know is much more fulfilling and productive.

Instead, pick one persona per article topic or piece of longform content. Then, before you start writing, ask yourself the following four questions:

“Why are they asking this question or looking for a solution to this problem?”

“If they’re feeling stressed or coming from a place of urgency, how did they get this point?”

“In their words, how would they describe their situation and how they're feeling?”

“What do I need to give them to feel that this article helped them solve a problem, answer their question, or do their job more effectively?”

I’ve talked before about how writing a blog introduction can be one of the most frustrating exercises a content creator can go through. 

Trust me when I say completing this short exercise will help you frame your introduction in a way that more effectively connects with your audience.

You can hone in on their specific pain points and connect them to how you’re going to help, making it a virtual certainty that they’ll read the start of your article and say, “Finally, someone who understands my situation. They know what I’m going through, and I feel confidence I’m going to learn something that will help me.”

Then they’ll keep reading and they’ll absorb your brilliance, which will help them make better decisions and overcome their most stressful challenges.

Now, you may be saying to yourself:

“But Liz, what if certain personas share similar goals and pain points?”

The answer is simple: Still pick a single primary persona. 

We run into this exact scenario a lot at IMPACT.

Strategic marketing leaders often need to get down in the tactical weeds and solve problems that pertain to doing the actual work. And tactical marketers are often asked to put on their strategic thinker caps and solve bigger problems.

However, while those two personas may have commonalities and find a particular piece of content equally helpful, I would argue strongly that it’s still a best practice to at least choose a primary out of the two to focus on.

Here's why:

Even if they’re trying to mentally jump over the same hurdles, they’ll be doing so from opposing (or at least varying) perspectives, with different external and internal pressures.

Focusing in on those differentiators can be a game-changer for when you’re setting the scene. More importantly, it can also be the difference between creating a, “Wow, they really get me,” moment and having a reader say to themselves, “Oh, so this is more generic advice that doesn’t really apply to me.”

Finally, there’s one last bonus to this single persona approach to content.

Having a single persona in mind for a blog article will make fleshing out your editorial calendar much easier. Instead of knocking out a single topic in one outing, you’ll be able to come back and visit the same topic from different perspectives.

Second, Solve for a Single Problem

No matter how big or small a piece of content is, don’t try to solve all the problems pertaining to a topic in one article. Build your content with laser focus around solving one problem.

Again, any time you can get more specific, the quality of your content will improve, as well the results and reactions you see from it.

Even though there are studies showing that our attention spans are actually increasing, we’re still all inherently selfish about how we choose to devote our content-exploring time. (As we should be.)

Think about it:

Typically, it’s a specific problem or question that creates the urgency for us to go searching for content. Then, we'll skim seemingly appropriate articles for relevancy to our specific situations and problems before we commit to actually reading it.

It makes sense.

We’re all busy, right? Who wants to wade through thousands of words about broad topics, looking for that one nugget pertaining to what we’re trying to accomplish?

(If you said, "Me, I do," congratulations. Also, please don’t forget to remind the teacher about the pop quiz none of us wants to take.)

What’s neat about this rule is that you can apply it with equal success  to a short 500-word article and a 10,000-word piece of pillar content -- and everything in between.

I’ll use our Ultimate Guide to Website Redesign for Businesses pillar as an example.

When Jessie-Lee and I sat down many moons ago to set the scope for this piece, we agreed that there were tons of ways we could tackle such a broad topic. Moreover, there were endless subtopics we could have included.

But we wanted the guide to be useful.

We wanted it to make sense.

We wanted the progression from chapter to chapter to be linear and logical.

So, before we started brainstorming the outline, we wrote down the problem we were going to solve in the pillar:

“There are a lot of things businesses need to understand -- and do -- before they ever pick up the phone to call an agency (even us!) about redesigning their website.

In this pillar, we’re going to solve that problem, by taking them through the entire process they should follow before they start exploring their agency options.”

I love this example, because often when I tell people about the "single problem" rule, they think I’m crazy.

“Try to solve only one problem? That’s such a limiting thing to do! Our topics are way too complex for that.”

Actually, it’s quite the opposite.

By focusing on a single problem in an article or piece of content, you’re giving yourself a lot more freedom to explore and dive more deeply. 

Although a single problem may sound simple on its face, usually the answer you'll come up with will end up being quite complex.

Going back to the example of the website redesign pillar, even though we were solving for a specific problem, we had to talk about a lot of different subtopics, in order to deliver the most effective solution to our audience.

The pillar includes candid advice around website budgets and timelines, insights on the data you need before you pull the trigger on a new website, honest guidance on how to find the right agency, and much more. 

When you focus too broadly, the opposite happens.

You may cover a lot of ground, but all of the pieces will never quite hang together. You’ll also never get down to the level of detail you need to, because you’re scattering your efforts and obfuscating what you're really trying to teach people.

Don’t Worry, You’ve Got Time to Do It All

Most of the time I encounter issues with audience and topic scope creep because an organization or a single content author has created a false sense of urgency in their head about the piece in front of them.

“If I don’t also address this related topic now, when will I?”

“This doesn’t give the full story.”

“More than one persona cares about this topic.”

“I don’t have any other content that tells the other side of the story.”

If this sounds familiar, don’t panic.

If I don’t also address this now, when will I?” Whenever you want. If you think of other topics that complement what you’re working on, go ahead and map them out on your content calendar.

“This doesn’t give the full story.” That’s okay! If you touch upon something that you need to come back to later, don’t be afraid to tease the audience and say, “That’s a story for another day.” You can (and should) always write articles and longform pieces that build on each other and tell a larger story. “More than one persona cares about this topic.” Awesome! Now you can come back and create an equally valuable piece of content from them on the same broad topic, but scoped especially with them in mind. They'll thank you for it!

“I don’t have any other content that tells the other side of the story.” Good! Now you know what you’re writing about next. That’s how this is supposed to work.

Creating effective content is a long-term play, so your goal shouldn’t be to paint the entire picture of your expertise and everything you have to offer in a single piece of content.

By bringing more focus to your content's audience and intent, you’re more likely to see the short-term gains and successes you’re looking for. Most of all, you'll do a much better job of helping your audience understand who you’re talking to and how you’re going to set them up for success.

from Web Developers World https://www.impactbnd.com/blog/blogging-tips-that-will-solve-your-content-problems

[politicaltheatre]

The End of “He Said, She Said”

Most of us will be very happy to see 2017 gone. Looking back as it ends, there's a lot we should want to forget, almost all of it to do in some way with one Donald J. Trump. From the rise in racist violence to the destruction of much of the good will of the rest of humanity around the world, the man's achieved a lot, perhaps not what he'd like to admit to, but admitting mistakes has never been his thing.

I would argue, however, that one day - perhaps not soon, but one day - we will look back on this past year as the start of something we will want to remember, as the year that our culture began its long promised change towards accountability and that our species began its next step in its maturity.

The year has shown us in countless brutal ways the gap between those with power and those without. Wars around the world have killed over 100,000 and left millions homeless and stateless. Hurricanes in Texas, Florida, Puerto Rico, and the Caribbean killed hundreds, probably more, and left thousands homeless and, in the case of Puerto Rico and the United States Virgin Islands, perhaps wondering if they are nationless, too.

That so many in Puerto Rico remain without power and drinking water to this day is in no small part due to Trump's racism and classism, but he did not create the conditions that left Puerto Rico's infrastructure so vulnerable. That was the result of decades of racism and classism by Democrats and Republicans alike. Having to depend on a sociopath like Trump for compassion and responsibility only made recovering from a natural disaster that much more difficult.

Ultimately, in the eyes of too many Americans, Puerto Ricans are poor and not white, and not American. Not enough Americans stood up for them, our fellow Americans, when they needed us. That is a lesson we will have to face sooner or later. It is an example of the imbalance of power at the heart of our culture, one that needs to change.

Few phrases sum up the past year better than "imbalance of power". Trump's rise to a position of authority was fueled by two imbalances of power, by the real and still growing gap between the rich and everyone else, and by the false but perceived gap between those in Washington D.C. (and in New York and California) and those in the rest of the country. He and his cronies exploited fears of both, offering to reverse them if voters would only give him power, unchecked and unquestioned.

The logic will never not escape us.

Once in the White House, Trump's every action has reflected a desire to protect and expand the imbalance of power within our society. He has gutted every department and agency of its ability to act as a watchdog over the industries it was created to do so. He has continually acted to undermine the independence of law enforcement in its duty to check executive power. And the tax bill he just signed into law, one passed in Congress entirely with Republican votes, will do more to expand the imbalance of power in this country than just about anything in the past century.

And yet, there is hope. Very much so.

There are signs, one of them actually being the election of Donald Trump, that the pendulum that has been on a 50 year reactionary swing away from accountability has been losing momentum. The election of Trump and the willingness of congressional Republicans to throw aside shame and vote for something even they had to admit almost entirely serves the already wealthy, including themselves (lookin' at you, Bob Corker), should best be viewed as a last gasp, a violent, chaotic outburst not unlike a star using up its last fuel as it explodes. In the Republicans' case, it's more like stuffing as much in their pockets on the way out of town.

The violence Trump and these Republicans have cultivated is exposed now, too. The open racism and bullying are frightening, as they should be, but we now have the benefit of seeing them and their most rabid supporters for who they are. A couple of years ago, would you have believed that so many Alabamans would vote for an accused pedophile? Maybe, but now we know.

Just as Republican senators and representatives showed their true colors in voting for that tax bill, so too are millions of Americans showing how full of fear and hatred of other Americans they are. The anonymity of internet message boards and other forms of social media have given way to open racism, open misogyny, open homophobia, and open attacks on accountability.

Trump's attacks on accountability have, in no uncertain terms, actually had the opposite effect. It isn't all down to him (please, do not say it is all down to him), but what we have seen in print and television journalism in the past year is remarkable. An industry that only a couple of years ago seemed so mired in its desperate need for access that it fostered and celebrated a culture of "he said, she said" coverage of everything is now fact checking and asking follow up questions when an interview subject clearly tells a lie.

Now we have villains to fight against, men and women brazenly lying because they've been able to get away with for so long that they forgot they were supposed to pretend to tell the truth. That was the way the game was supposed to be played. With the world seemingly divided between clear winners and clear losers, the ones hating to have to be accountable to the "losers" decided they did have to be anymore. And now we know.

That journalism had become so compromised shouldn't surprise us. It's an industry. If companies don't make money, they can't pay their employees and they cease to exist. Businesses and the politicians in their pockets spent the better part of the past four decades exploiting that weakness with increasing pervasiveness and we all suffered for it.  

It should equally come as no surprise that as journalists began covering sexual harassment in the workplace those same news organizations would start looking at themselves. Men who had relied on their ability to acquire and maintain access when access was everything could no longer count on complicit silence. No more. Their legacy will now be one of their last act, resignation and stories their coworkers will now share with the next generation of intrepid reporters.

The thing to remember above all else is that, as much as we fear the damage Trump and his cronies can and will do, they represent the end of the rightward swing, not the beginning of it. Our culture had been resisting long before his election. It was the election that crystalized it, that catalyzed it for everyone else.

Go back fifteen years and we see professional sports making their first attempts to restore accountability. Steroids and other performance enhancing drugs had made a mockery of record books and paychecks, the latter no doubt the owners' impetus for looking into it. Still, look at one thing, you begin to look at others. Players' behavior off the field began to be looked at.

Videos began to pop up on the brand new social media platforms showing athletes hitting women. The NFL, which had attempted to hide those videos and which had handed out punishments so small as to be encouraging of more violence, was caught and publicly shamed. Public condemnation, and the potential loss of revenue that comes with it, forced them to change their rules and increase their punishments.

As much as we really should praise Fox News' Gretchen Carlson for suing Roger Ailes (for that, and nothing else, mind you), one has to wonder if she would have done so had the exposure and punishment of athletes such as Ray Rice and the rise of social media as a platform for protesting violence against women not come first. 

It can't have been easy for her, working in that newsroom for a company working to reduce accountability to others, but that, ironically, may have been why it was she and not a woman at CBS or NBC or some left-leaning news source who blew the whistle.

Other news organizations that purport to be progressive or at least "not sexist" are not where you're going to see sexism challenged first. The organizations have too much to lose. Much as Democrats rallied around Bill Clinton every time he was accused of sexual misconduct, those in organizations nominally fighting for greater accountability might well have faced more resistance to exposing wrongdoing. Better not to give the right wing ammunition, right?

However, thanks to the courage of Carlson and others, accountability in the workplace is now on the table. Democrats certainly have taken it to heart, fostering a culture of zero tolerance for sexual harassment heading into the 2018 elections. The congressional Democrats sacrificed in the initial purge were in safe election seats, but that isn't really the point. Al Franken and John Conyers have been outspoken leaders in Congress, men who called out Republicans for lying and far worse abuses. Any other year, that would have been valued far more. Not now.

It is no small statement, and Trump can take credit for this if he wishes, that Trump's victory only weeks after a video (finally) surfaced of him bragging about sexual assault was a catalyst for all of this. The anger at seeing a man brag about that and face no penalty for it cannot be underestimated. That exposés on powerful men such as Harvey Weinstein came on the heels of Roger Ailes' downfall is no surprise, but they all took on a greater sense of purpose and urgency once a man such as Donald Trump took the oath of office.

It remains a question whether or not ending the imbalance of power between men and women in regard to sexual harassment and assault will lead to ending the imbalance of power in regard to issues of race or unpaid work, but as with other issues of accountability, focusing on one does draw attention to others.

Will the right wing burn up and fade like light from a dying star? No. We'll always have them lurking somewhere as long as there's money to be made by not being accountable to others. By that same token, though, we will always have a left wing, fighting for greater accountability, defending others in order to defend themselves.

However much pain we have suffered this year, however much suffering we have witnessed and will witness in the years to come, I believe 2017 will come to be remembered as a year in which seeds planted years ago finally took root. What grows will not be an imbalance of power but the means to end it. One day.

- Daniel Ward

#2017 #politics #imbalance of power #donald trump #racism #bullying #puerto rico #republicans #tax cuts #the rich get richer the poor get poorer #deregulation #de facto deregulation #he said she said