#but also I’m experimenting with simpler things that don’t require so much attention to detail

[starwarsfic]

Innocent Bystander

Originally posted October 5, 2020

Summary: Plo might be the closest thing Jon has to a friend. For the Marry Plo Challenge.

Details: Jon/Plo. Friends to Spouses. Trans!Jon.

CW: suggested child abuse, a transition during the fic (ie misgendering, but not maliciously)

xxxxxx

Plo thought he was the only Jedi for systems.

To find two others was...surprising. Until he realized who they were.

"Master Kuro," he bowed, carefully, attention in the Force darting to the Padawan at her side who he vaguely recognized.

"Knight Koon." She was respectful, but cold, always so cold, in tone and in the Force.

Master Tyvokka had not been fond of her, he remembered, had sometimes spoken out against the way she trained her Padawans. Which was probably why there was no knowledge of them being there--she was taking a detour to force poor Padawan Antilles to do who knew what.

"I have been called by the Force to assist you in your mission."

He frowned behind his mask. Kuro was a successful Master and Padawan Antilles was near her Trial, and not much younger than Plo by human standards, but...it was a more dangerous mission than a Padawan would normally be assigned to.

As if sensing his hesitancy, Kuro continued, "With the three of us, rooting out these pirates should be much simpler."

"...As you say, Master."

Of course she'd appear after he'd had to stop sending comms to the Temple, because of the risk of the signal being spotted by the pirates' scanners. He had no way of running this by the Council.

A typical An'ya Kuro move, according to reports and the Temple rumor mill.

"Sorry about this," Antilles muttered as they fell back, Kuro taking the lead as though this weren't Plo's mission.

He shook his head. "Reining in one's Master is not actually the responsibility of a Padawan, even if it often feels like it is."

And, just to re-enforce what he was saying, he sent playful understanding through the Force. From the way Antilles tensed, Plo thought she might not experience anything like that often, and he made a note to bring it up to Tyvokka--it was unhealthy for a Force sensitive, especially as powerful as Antilles, to be without commune with others.

"We'll be out of your hair soon. She doesn't like to stay anywhere for long."

"...Maybe you should both come back to the Temple for a rest? This traveling can't be good for your studies."

She wavered, looking closer to her age than the stern mask she wore for her Master would show, but shaking her head. "I'm studying remotely. I'll be back for the end of term exams, anyway."

"Right."

They did successfully take care of the pirates, though with more outright violence than Plo's plan had called for and a small injury on Antilles' part that she waved away like it was nothing (which Plo would also be making a note to mention).

Then they separated and Plo moved on with his Knighthood.

***

He gave a brief thought to Antilles when he'd seen the list of successful Trials, but it was over a decade before they met again.

Plo had a Padawan of his own by that point, one he very carefully left behind at the Temple when he went on his most dangerous missions, despite their protests. Antilles had no Padawan, had not even been seen at the Temple in years, except to update his personal records with changes he might have hesitated to make sooner. He'd gained his Knighthood and all-but fled, possibly from Kuro, who was only getting worse, possibly from the foreignness of the Order for someone who had spent so much of his life outside of it.

It seemed like a lonely way of living to Plo, but he would not do Antilles the disservice of bringing it up.

"Jon," he was told, after he'd helped Plo protect his charge--a local political leader--from an assassination attempt. "I'm going by Jon, now."

There was a small table between them, a mostly empty tap caf in vague disrepair around them, but it felt like a private moment. Plo wasn't sure how many other Jedi Antilles had spoken to at all since becoming a Padawan.

"I like it," Plo had said before he could think better of it, not sure if that would sound too much like he thought Jon required approval. "It is simple. Too many human names are...not."

Jon smiled with his teeth, more like a predator might than most humans. "Yeah, I...didn't want anything too memorable. Not with what I do."

"You don't have to wander, you know, just because your former Master does."

"No, that's...that's not the issue. I like it. I don't...I've never felt comfortable in the Temple. Too many people, too much...everything. Even with shielding. It's better out here."

While Plo couldn't relate, he could understand, and he let the conversation move on to some of their recent missions. The stories they exchanged were more detailed and personal than would ever make it into a report.

***

They saw each other off and on after that. If Plo was perhaps the Jedi who saw Jon the most--well, that must just be the will of the Force. Certainly not that Jon had a secure comm which Plo could send his Outer Rim mission updates to.

Eventually, Plo was a nearly appointed member of the Council, still reeling from Master Tyvokka's death and had gladly taken any and all work that the other Councilors had seen fit to give him (which was a great deal of it).

Such as a yearly review of the nomads of the Jedi Order that bothered to check in, sometimes. He'd sent out messages, requesting their presence at the Temple (or a nearby location of their choice), and just had to wait and see who showed up.

He wasn't actually expecting Jon, who had avoided such check-ins for years, to be one of the first.

"I had to see it for myself," was the answer, in a voice gravelly from disuse.

Plo chuckled, motioning for Jon to take a seat on the cushion beside him. "Is it that unbelievable?"

"After the kriff you pulled on Nal Hutta?"

"I pulled? You'll find that the report shows that you had taken charge of that mission. I was an innocent bystander."

Jon cursed, and laughed, the sound more disused than his voice. He didn't spend a lot of time around others and spoke to them even less. Socialized with them less than that.

Which actually gave Plo an idea.

At the end of the official meeting, he said, "I have a mission coming up for the Council, I wouldn't mind some company. I apparently must spend a few days in a moderately comfortable hut to show the planet's natives our commitment to waste our time on them."

He'd originally been thinking of forcing it on his friend Qui-Gon, whose Padawan clearly needed a break from him, but he could find something else for them.

Jon knew what he was doing, of course, but did not take much pressure to give in.

***

The planet was peaceful, calm. Nothing like the Outer Rim stations that Jon could normally be found in and the complete opposite of Coruscant, as well. Plo wasn't sure of the etiquette of bringing another, but the natives did not seem to mind.

There was always some discomfort in long days inside his mask, but Jon provided a welcome distraction. They had brought food, but Jon proved adept at catching it, as well. Plo himself wasn't a bad hand at cooking, although he had to stick to soups and other foods he could eat through his mask.

It was almost...domestic. Something that both of them refused to speak to, because that wasn't something they were comfortable examining.

By the end of the odd ceremonial retreat, he had almost loosened up to where he'd been once upon a time, a Knight nearly freed of a too-strict Master. He was still a little feral, as all of the wanderers were, but it was more amusing than unnerving.

Neither of them were expecting a party when they'd returned to the city--it wasn't in any of the reports that Plo had read.

"To the newlyweds!" one of the natives crooned as they made their way to the center of the celebration, shoving a ring of flowers onto Jon's head.

Jon, who was glowering at Plo as though this was somehow his fault. "If I said I didn't know, that I was completely innocent in this, would you believe me?"

"If you make it sincere, I might make your death quick and report it as something less than embarrassing."

There was no doubt in Plo's mind that Jon knew how to cover up truths in his reports to the Council--there was, after all, that kriff Plo had pulled on Nal Hutta--but he was hoping murder might be an exaggeration.

"Divorce isn't an option?" Jon took a step closer, eyes glinting in the shadow under his hood, but he let his amusement flavor the Force in answer to Plo's own.

xxxxxx

A/N: I was trying to come up with a ship for this that I hadn't seen before but I could still write as something more than complete crack and was like running through my head of the lesser known Jedi and, well, here you go lol

I may or may not be doing more for the challenge, but I've paid my dues haha

#character: plo koon #character: jon antilles #ship: plojon #theme: alien culture #theme: jedi culture #theme: hurt comfort

[slightly-nerdy-rambles]

TTA Oneshot: Creature Feature

This oneshot was spawned from me wondering why, if Beast Boy can become alien animals, he never takes advantage of that fact to morph into sapient alien animals with superpowers of their own. I still don't have an answer for why he never tried going dragon after the team fought Malchior, though. Maybe that form is too big to maneuver through the city?

Fun fact: the episode Betrothed is immediately followed by Crash, which actually gives this story a neat little niche to fit in. You'll see what I mean later in the story.

(This oneshot is crossposted on fanfiction.net, as part of the Moments series)

Creature Feature Beast Boy narrowed his eyes and stared at his hand. He was alone in the common room, sprawled out on the couch with a forgotten comic tossed to the side.

The Titans had recently returned from their first-ever trip to Tamaran, and it had certainly been… an experience. A good experience in the end, mind you, but the whole wedding thing and Starfire being a princess and Blackfire having at some point taken over the planet and then the wedding thing being a trap that they stopped and Starfire kicking her sister’s sorry butt and taking the crown… It had all been kinda overwhelming.

Pretty cool though. Even if Beast Boy still couldn’t figure out how half the furniture on that planet worked. Was that what Star had felt like when she first came to Earth?

Anyway, point was, so much had happened during their little space trip that he had almost forgotten something cool he’d learned about himself. Now that he remembered, though, he couldn’t get the thought out of his head.

A low whoosh signaled the entrance of another Titan, and Beast Boy’s ears pricked. He sat up and looked over the back of the couch to see Starfire floating through the doorway.

A wide grin split his face. “Hey, Star! You got a sec? I actually wanted to talk to you about something.”

Starfire perked up at the sound of his voice, and she made her way over. “What is it?”

Beast Boy started bouncing in his seat. “So, you know those giant freaky Tamaranean guard dogs?”

Starfire blinked. “Guard do- You mean the gloorgs?”

“Sure, the gloogs or whatever. Point is, when we were trying to crash your wedding, I was able to morph into one! How cool is that?”

Starfire’s eyes widened a fraction, and she sat down and scooted closer to him. “Fascinating. So, you wish to learn more about Tamaranean wildlife so you may better wield their forms?”

Beast Boy shook his head, still grinning. “Not exactly. See, sentient lifeforms like humans are just really smart animals, right? So if I can turn into Tamaranean animals, then I should be able to turn into a Tamaranean. How cool is that?!”

Now, when he had pictured this conversation in his head, this part had led to a lot of gobsmacked awe and maybe a call for celebration over the sheer potential of his newfound power. Tamaraneans were, after all, a plainly powerful race – and not the only one, either. With a little effort, he could probably morph into a Martian, or an Atlantean, or even a freaking Kryptonian.

He could be ALL the superheroes.

Instead, Starfire’s response was simply to clap once and smile at him. “Oh, that does sound interesting! I would be quite happy to share more of my heritage with you, if that is what you wish.”

Well… That wasn’t quite the expected level of enthusiasm. Beast Boy deflated a little, but he shook it off. She probably just hadn’t considered all the ramifications yet.

“Okay, just sit tight,” he said instead, adjusting his position. “I’m gonna try it.”

Starfire nodded, and Beast Boy squinted and tried to focus. His shapeshifting was more-or-less an instinctive thing, but he needed a firm grasp of the animal in question to do it. He was too used to thinking of Star as just another person with powers, rather than a whole different species.

After a few moments, he pinpointed what he wanted and stretched. That was the only way he could ever think of to describe it, even when he was shrinking his form.

It was a… bizarre sensation. He was used to changing shape completely, his flesh warping around itself in a way that was a lot less unpleasant than it sounded. This time the shift was much more subtle – little more than a vague tingling sensation and a few more noticeable shifts in his face and gut. That was… probably a good sign?

Not sure what else to do, he held up a hand and looked at it again, flexing and curling his fingers. He couldn’t see any difference, but no real surprise there. Still…

“Hey, do I look any different to you?” he asked her. “Taller, maybe? I feel like Tamaraneans are all really tall.”

Starfire looked him over and hummed in thought, then smiled. She zipped over to the kitchen and rummaged around for a few moments before returning with a large metal platter and holding it up to him.

Beast Boy squinted at his reflection. It took him a moment to notice what with all the green already on his face, but then his eyes widened.

The whites of said eyes weren’t so white anymore. Also, his eyebrows had shrunk to little dots.

With a triumphant cackle, he leaped up on the couch. “Dude! It really worked! I’m a Tamaranean now!” He started punching the air.

“Okay, when do I get to start chucking starbolts at bad guys?”

Starfire set the platter down and commented, “I very much doubt that you will be able to do that.”

Beast Boy froze mid-punch. “Huh? Why not?”

Starfire leaned back on her hands. “It takes a significant amount of power to generate enough stellar energy for ranged use. It bears similarities to training the muscles to increase your strength.” She shrugged. “I required several years of training to use starbolts with any consistency.”

Beast Boy frowned. “Oh. I guess that makes sense.”

Well, bummer. Still, he wasn’t about to be deterred. Hopping down to the floor, he asked, “So what about flying then? I could still fly around and punch stuff and not have to worry about my arms getting tired!”

Starfire perked up. “Oh, that is much simpler! For that you must focus on the unbridled joy of flight. If you feel flight, and allow that feeling to buoy you, then it will come to you naturally.”

Joy? Piece of cake. Beast Boy squeezed his eyes shut and pictured himself zooming through the air, doing loop-de-loops and punching through walls and all the other cool stuff he’d seen Star do even when she wasn’t hurling glowey green lasers around.

It was going to be awesome.

With that last thought, something clicked in his head and he felt his feet leave the ground. His eyes snapped open to find himself halfway to the ceiling.

“Ha-hah!” he shouted, pumping both fists in the air. “Behold the mighty Space Boy! I am invincible! I am –”

And that was when he smacked his head hard against the ceiling.

“So that’s how I learned that stopping and steering with weird mental flight powers is a lot harder when you haven’t grown up doing it.”

Beast Boy, human again, held an ice pack against the back of his head as he finished his story. From where she was meditating a few feet away, Raven cracked an eye open and turned it on him.

“Did you really hit yourself hard enough to need that?” she asked.

Beast Boy shrugged. “Eh, not really. Tamaraneans are pretty tough.” With a grumble he added, “And now I know why.”

He pulled the ice pack away and frowned at it. “Also, apparently they need to focus on something to make super strength work, too? What is even up with that?”

“Considering Starfire can tear through solid concrete with the muscle mass of a bean pole, I’d imagine a lot.”

Beast Boy’s eyes slid over to her, and a smirk made its way to his mouth. “Buuut, you know what does make sense as something you need focus for?”

Raven opened her other eye and narrowed both at him. “I don’t like where this is going.”

Beast Boy jumped to his feet and started bouncing on his heels. “Seriously! You’re from, like, another dimension, right? And your magic kinda works on its own, so it’s gotta come from whatever species you are instead of being something you have to study for like a wizard. Tell me I’m wrong!”

His companion simply crossed her arms. “I’m half human.”

“Really? Oh, well, the other half then.” He gasped. “Or maybe I could actually be a hybrid! Why did I never think of that before? I could mix together all the best species and become some sort of ultra-beast!”

Raven rolled her eyes. “Hybrids don’t work that way.” Sighing with the air of defeat that said she’d never get her meditation done now, she swung her legs out of the lotus position and stood up.

For his part, Beast Boy shook his head. “Right. One thing at a time.” He returned his full attention to her.

“Sooo, spill the details. What do I need to know about your super-cool interdimensional magic half?”

Raven looked suddenly very uncomfortable, for reasons he couldn’t quite place. Looking back on the conversation later, he’d come to conclude that it probably had something to do with the freaky giant probably-not-the-human-parent “father” he’d once seen in her mindscape (and much later he’d understand that it had everything to do with him). But for now, all he knew was that she was avoiding eye contact and hesitating as if looking for an excuse to change the subject.

Finally, she shook her head and settled on a simple, “Forget it. It’s way too dangerous, and if you couldn’t handle Tamaranean powers then there’s no way you’d be able to handle mine.”

Beast Boy deflated. “Aww, how come? Your powers are a straightforward ‘think a thing, make a shield or whatever,’ right? No special physical training or weird emotion games.”

Raven let out a long-suffering sigh and pinched the bridge of her nose. “First off, it’s not that simple. But more importantly, let’s put it this way. You remember the incident with the Puppet King, when Starfire and I had to save you with our bodies switched?”

Beast Boy shuddered a little at the memory. “It’s kinda hard to forget.”

“You might not have noticed considering your… condition at the time, but the differences in our training and emotional states meant we both had trouble with each other’s powers. In my case, I had a hard time accessing her powers because of the emotional energy they required.”

Beast Boy snorted and muttered, “Yeah, no wonder,” under his breath. Raven turned a withering glare on him, and after a few moments of squirming he cleared his throat.

“Uh, sorry. Go on.”

The sorceress just kept her warning look on him as she continued. “In her case, she was in a constant struggle to keep from accidentally blowing us up.”

It took him a few seconds for that to fully sink in.

“…Oh.”

“Aww, come on, you gotta have something!”

Hot Spot let out a low sigh over the communicator. “I don’t know what to tell you. I was raised by human parents, my powers and the ones the other hybrid kids have are all different, and I haven’t exactly taken the time to study H’san Natall biology. For all I know, you wouldn’t get any new powers at all.”

Beast Boy groaned dramatically and flopped over on his chair. “Duude, I’m having like no luck with this!” He huffed. “Thanks anyway.”

Hot Spot gave him a flat look. “Yeeeeah, next time you want to learn more about the vicious alien invaders who secretly sired and later kidnapped me, just feel free to hit me up.”

After a moment’s thought, he added, “Have you tried Aqualad yet? You guys are buddies or something, right?”

Beast Boy chewed on the inside of his cheek. “Yeah, turns out like half of his powers are some kinda magic that doesn’t come with the species.”

There was a long awkward moment where neither hero knew where to take the conversation. “So, is that everything?” Hot Spot finally asked. “Because if you didn’t need anything else…”

Beast Boy sighed. “Yeah, that was it. Talk to you later.”

The line went out, and he looked morosely over his list of non-human Titans. It wasn’t too short considering there were only five core members and a handful of honoraries, and he’d been so sure he could find something that worked. But Hot Spot had been his last hope. Maybe he should just try morphing into a H’san Natall and see what happened?

He tried that, squeezing his eyes shut and focusing on what he knew about Hot Spot. He strained for several seconds, but nothing clicked, nothing stretched, and in the end, he probably just looked like an idiot.

Well, nuts. Either he couldn’t do hybrids after all and Hot Spot wasn’t enough to give him the full species, or whatever had let him morph Tamaranean didn’t apply here.

Technically, he could still ask Robin to hook him up with the Justice League’s alien members. But if he couldn’t even work out how to mimic his own teammates, what was the point?

With nothing else to do now that his little project had failed, Beast Boy found himself heading toward the garage. Cyborg was there, making yet more upgrades to the T-car.

“This is delicate work, don’t touch anything,��� he said by rote as he saw his friend enter.

Beast Boy sighed again and plopped down on a workbench. “Yeah, I know.”

Cyborg looked up from his work. “No luck with ‘Space Boy,’ I’m guessing? Because I hate to tell you, but I don’t think robots count as a species.”

“You heard about that?”

“The girls filled me in.” Cyborg switched tools and got back to work.

Beast Boy flopped back on the bench. “You know what’s really nice? Animal instincts. Not having to work out how to fly, or pounce, or use your teeth and claws, because you just know.”

Cyborg raised a brow at him. “You have to train with your animal forms all the time.”

The shapeshifter frowned. “I guess. But they still make more sense than starbolts or magic.”

Cyborg snorted and wiped his hands off with a cloth. “Coulda told you that.” He frowned thoughtfully.

“You know, maybe you’ve been going about this all wrong. That Tamaranean guard thing was impressive. Have you tried anything new other than sapient beings with complex powersets of their own?”

Beast Boy’s ears perked, and he sat up slowly. “I guess I haven’t really thought a lot about it yet. You think I could do more alien animals?”

Without another thought he shifted back into a gloorg. Cyborg yelped and ran around to shield the car with his body, but the now-alien creature just shifted his weight a little and trotted in place, testing out the new form.

Morphing back, he hummed in thought. “Not too different from some of my dinosaurs, but I still don’t know all of its tricks and there’s a whole planet of probably terrifying animals to explore. I gotta talk to Star!”

Cyborg glared at him, still pressed against his baby. “Please don’t experiment like that next to the delicate machinery.”

Beast Boy waved off the comment, barely registering it. “Yeah, sure thing. Ooh! Maybe I can do hybrids, like a liger or something. Would that be any better than a regular tiger? Oh! Or what if I go the opposite way? Maybe I could be an amoeba. It’d be the perfect infiltrator!”

Peeling himself off the car, Cyborg frowned. “Does that even count as an animal?”

“Not according to modern taxonomy, but neither should alien creatures, so who knows!” Beast Boy cackled and started vaulting up the stairs to the tower proper, two steps at a time. “Space Boy, AWAY!”

He couldn’t see the look on his friend’s face as he ran off to find Starfire again, but as much as he wanted it to be awe and maybe a little envy over his mad skills, he knew it was probably something more akin to pure bafflement. That was okay. As far as he was concerned, Beast Boy had a whole world – no, a whole galaxy of options just waiting to be tried. He didn’t know how many of those options he’d end up using on a regular basis, but that was okay too.

Because whatever happened, it was going to be awesome.

#Teen Titans #Beast Boy #Starfire #Raven #Cyborg #writing #fanfiction #Moments series

[astronomifier]

Magnus Relisten Eps 7 and 8

Day three. Piper and Burned Out

Episode 7: Piper Case #0140912 Statement of Clarence Berry, regarding time spent as a staff sergeant and serving alongside Wilfred Owen in the Great War.

This was another episode i was surprised to enjoy a lot, for I didn’t remember it as particularly notable on my initial binge. But, jeez, this episode is amazingly atmospheric and interesting for the ongoing lore/mystery element of the show. The motif of the strange music and the ongoing focus on Owen’s supernatural shell-shock give this episode a surprising melancholy for something set in the trenches of World War One. I think its how the Piper seems to doom people... gives it such a somber tone. The description of the Piper/the War is also very interesting, though its a bit too... fantasy to be truly scary, if you ask me. What i think i most like about this episode is just the subtle implication that Owen, somehow, *became* the war when he “met” it. I’m not sure if thats exactly whats happening, but his sudden, supernatural death at the moment of the armistice, after impossibly surviving a shell blast... It implies to me that Owen survived using borrowed time, and that time was very specifically the duration of World War One...

Narrator watch this episode is pretty minor. Berry has a bit of personality, especially when he describes himself talking to Owen using very old-timey phrasings, but for the most part he’s just a vessel for plot. I suppose on notable thing is that he seems to have been the only person to become aware of the Piper’s song who didn’t die as a result. Interesting, wonder if it means anything...

7/10. What boosts this episode above average, for me, is the atmosphere. Its beautifully somber more than anything, which is, in my opinion, a great thing.

SPOILER PARAGRAPH: The main things to pay attention to as a second-time listener this episode is the information it gives us about the Slaughter, and what knowledge of Avatars tells us about Owen’s fate. Lets start with the Slaughter, because its simpler. Our very first Slaughter episode emphasizes the musical aspect of the Slaughter a LOT, which is something that will come back in later episodes, most notably Grifter’s Bone. This brings up an interesting topic: that a Lot of entities have a secondary thematic motif not directly related to their relevant fear. We saw this with the Flesh and christianity in “Thrown Away”, the Buried and debt in "do not open”, and while I didn’t mention it at the time, the Corruption and interpersonal closeness in “Squirm” (in the form of a sexual encounter). These secondary aspects are an interesting little detail about Magnus entities, and ill be bringing them up more going forward. Beyond that, though, this is a pretty standard Slaughter ep, one focused on the “war and mass casualty” side of things more than the “random violence” side. Now, about Avatars. Owen is in my mind clearly an Avatar of the Slaughter, becoming one during his semi-death during the shell hit. I mean, for one, theres the significant death, which seems so often to be a requirement for becoming an Avatar. And then theres the way he fights, which is described as impossibly brutal, something reminiscent of Slaughter-marked Melanie King in seasons 3 and 4. And, of course, the fact that he dies when the war ends implies that he is inextricably tied to it much like an avatar would be, though i don’t think theres any other examples in the show of an Avatar dying when something that represents their Patron is destroyed.

Episode 8: Burned Out

Case #0071304 Statement of Ivo Lensik, regarding their experiences during the construction of a house on Hill Top Road, Oxford.

In many ways, this episode reminds me of Episode 4: Page Turner. both are effectively a series of horror vignettes connected loosely by a central narrative, and both are concerned more with presenting unsettling mysteries to expand upon later. I will say though, this episode does not, in my mind, do it nearly as well. The vignettes in this episode seem more disconnected from each other and in many cases more expository than spooky. Which, exposition is useful in a mystery show, but it means that this episode isn’t the spookiest for me. The final scene, with the tree and the apple, though? thats terrifying. Loved that bit, especially when it links to Agnes Montague’s suicide at the end. 

Narrator this time around is pretty interesting. The idea of a character who is afraid of becoming schizophrenic is interesting, especially as an innocent witness rather than the all-too-common “schizophrenic horror villain” trope. I will say though: if he wasnt hallucinating and didnt believe in ghosts, how was he explaining Fielding’s appearance to himself? weird. probs just cognitive dissonance though.

5/10. This episode is more concerned with setting up mysteries for the future than being scary or atmospheric in its own right, but the individual vignettes are on average scary and interesting enough to keep this episode above “thrown away”, our current lowest ranker.

SPOILER PARAGRAPH: This episode sets up a TON of stuff related to the ongoing Hill Top Road plot, frankly way too much to talk about in one paragraph. In fact, because this episode doesn’t really do much *besides* set things up, and we’ll have plenty of future opportunities to talk about this stuff, im going to leave that for now, except to note that I think that the destruction of the Tree and death of Agnes marks the point where the House falls out of the Desolation’s hands and back into the Web’s domain. The other thing to talk about in this episode is of course the first appearance of the Spiral and Micheal. Ivo’s father is clearly marked by the Spiral, and witnesses’ Micheal as “the man with too many bones in his hands”. But we also get Father Edwin Burroughs appearing at Hill Top Road in this episode, and in his own statement will learn that he is probably Spiral marked as well. Muuuuch later we will learn from Helen that the Distortion has some inexplicable interest in Hill Top Road, as shown by a Spiral victim who see’s Distortion Doors drawing them to the site. The Spiral definitely has an interest in Hill Top Road, though we don’t yet know *why*, and its interesting to me that this interest is established from the very first Hill Top Road episode, despite the site seeming to mostly be based around the Web/Desolation conflict. Now that I think about it, though. It may be that this statement happens before the Door encounter mentioned above... in that case maybe this is when the Spiral first takes interest, and the removal of the Desolation left a power vacuum here for the Spiral to attempt to fill? Im not sure that the dates line up though, I haven’t looked at that other episode in a while. either way, its interesting.

#the magnus archives #tma #Magnus Relisten

[harayjoye719]

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Table saws aren't really for somebody who simply needs to cut a piece of wood. The best table saw work is to make a huge work (cutting a great deal of wood) simpler. For more modest positions, a round saw may do fine and dandy…

I know from individual experience while on a place of work that when the sum total of what I have is a roundabout saw and I need to make a ton of cuts… I'm petitioning the saw divine beings to drop a table saw from the mists (or convey by drone nowadays) so I can return home to my family you can purchase best table saw under 300 from saw offers  .

Similarly as with anything, it's not difficult to get overpowered with the assortment of types, sizes, highlights, colors, loads, what, when, why, where, who… (let me pause and rest). For the time being, we should zero in on what's appropriate for you with our How to Purchase the Best Table Saw Guide. We'll begin by recognizing quality brands that line up with your necessities. Also, who needs to purchase something that will not work?

DeWALT 7491RS 10-inch Place of work Table Saw with Moving Stand:

DeWALT is a verifiably solid brand and this table saw doesn't break that design. I have little uncertainty you will be happy with the DeWALT 7491RS. Truth be told, I accept "fulfilled" might be underselling it altogether. Just a single method to discover.

Style and Toughness of the DeWALT 7491RS Table Saw:

Let's be honest, DeWALT is perhaps the most well known brands of force apparatuses on the planet. What's more, on the off chance that you own various DeWALT hand instruments, you're really prone to buy a similar brand when choosing what devices you need for the greater undertakings.

That arrangement doesn't generally work however with the DeWALT 7491RS table saw it does. Thus, you're not just purchasing a table saw that coordinates the remainder of your instruments, you're purchasing a table saw that will do the work right.

From the outset the deck of this saw has all the earmarks of being made of plastic, and if there is anything I know it's plastic parts on force instruments is rarely a decent sign. Be that as it may, the deck is really such an aluminum composite and is truly strong.

There are some little parts made of plastic, yet in the course of the most recent couple of years the sturdiness of plastic has expanded dramatically. One of the bigger plastic segments is the miter check. The plastic measure is minuscule and can have issues with exactness.

​If you are one to utilize the miter measure frequently you might need to consider buying an OEM check isolated on the off chance that you can discover one that is viable. In any case, in case you're simply utilizing the saw for Do-It-Yourself projects and not skilled worker quality custom woodwork, you ought to be okay.

The moving table saw stand is worked for compactness and simple stockpiling. However, it is made out of aluminum which makes it both lightweight and solid. The actual stand just weighs 33 lbs however it holds up to 200 lbs. Just, kindly don't give standing a shot the DeWALT Table Saw.

The table saw stand is so natural to work with due to the plan. For example, it has brisk delivery switches that permit it to overlay up when you're set, enormous wheels that permit you to turn over whatever might stand out, and even kickstands for better security.

It's the easily overlooked details like the elastic feet to hold it back from sliding, the agreeable handle for moving, and even the tallness of the table that make this table saw a victor.

Any table saw is pointless without a decent edge. The DeWALT 7491RS accompanies a 24-tooth sharp edge that turns out great for most harsh applications. In any case, it is consistently imperative to locate the correct saw sharp edge to coordinate the style and force of each saw you use. I locate a 50-tooth carbide cutting edge works impeccably with the DeWALT 7491RS.

The 50-tooth carbide cutting edge is extraordinary for nearly everything from wood deck to cupboards. In contrast with the 40-tooth it cuts a lot of smoother and still traverses outlining lumber sufficiently quick.

Obviously, a 80-tooth sharp edge will leave a much smoother finish yet it will require some investment to complete your cuts. Also the wear continually utilizing a fine-toothed sharp edge will put on the engine of your saw over the long run.

Usefulness of the DeWALT 7491RS Table Saw:

A roundabout saw is incredible for starting cuts of pressed wood sheets or single cuts. The miter saw is the thing that you would use to make exact calculated crosscuts. A jigsaw is useful for bending cuts or anything complex. The table saw is an unquestionable requirement when you have a lot of tearing and timber style crosscuts.

The extraordinary thing about the DeWALT 7491RS is that it folds up little enough to store and not stand out. It likewise has various additional items like the table top slide out augmentations (side and back) which function admirably.

For the most part, convenient table saws don't have an expansive enough surface to cut full sheets of compressed wood. A full sheet would need to be sliced into a halfway sheet to use on a versatile table saw securely.

What really sets the DeWALT 7491RS separated from some other in its group is the rack and pinion framework. No other compact table saw has this element.

The rack and pinion fence is exceptionally exact and steady. It can undoubtedly tear dead on inside 1/16 of an inch or less. Also this saw has the biggest tear limit out of any like it at 32 ½ inches.

The DeWALT 7491RS is a 15-amp saw and ought to be worked on a 20-amp circuit. It tends to be worked on 15 amps yet it could trip the breaker on harder material or if some other source is drawing amps.

15-amp saws are extraordinary for their convenientce yet won't withstand the determinations and amount like a $2,000-$10,000 bureau saw will.

Make certain to allude to the manual to make all the changes and estimations for vertical, zero-miter, corresponding to fence, tear scale, and so on It requires around 30 minutes and will bring about a lot higher exactness. This simply saves you time and dissatisfaction over the long haul.

Security Highlights of the DeWALT 7491RS Table Saw:

The DeWALT 7491RS has various security highlights one can expect in a table saw. The two wellbeing highlights I'd prefer to call attention to are the on/off switch and the sharp edge watch/riving blade arrangement.

On/Off Switch of the DeWALT 7491RS Table Saw:

The on/off switch has a lockout highlight. Essentially, on the off chance that you didn't need the catch to be pushed incidentally you can draw in the lockout include.

​The on/off switch additionally has a huge switch added to make it simpler to kill if there should be an occurrence of a crisis. Envision, tearing a piece of compressed wood, while your hands are full, and something occurs yet you can't relinquish the compressed wood. You can really raise your knee and hit the switch in view of the larger than average switch of the DeWALT Table Saw.

Cutting edge Watchman:

Furthermore, the edge monitor and riving blade set up is exceptionally simple to introduce. The explanation this is a particularly serious deal is that the fundamental explanation the vast majority don't utilize sharp edge monitors is on the grounds that they are such a torment to work with. Not the situation on this machine.

If it's not too much trouble, recollect however, wellbeing highlights ought to never sub for past style focusing.

Criticizing:

Albeit the DeWALT 7491RS has the capacity to utilize a dado sharp edge, it doesn't accompany a dado plate. Thus, in the event that you realize how to dado, you need to buy a dado plate for this saw independently.

​The saw doesn't handily separate from the stand. Now and then it's helpful to set the saw up as a seat top saw, however the DeWALT 7491RS doesn't accompany snappy delivery switches to achieve this without any problem. For this situation, you would need to utilize a drill to eliminate four screws to isolate it from the stand. I wouldn't prescribe doing this except if you need to on the grounds that over the long run the screw openings will strip.

#besttablesaw #besttablesawunder200 #besttablesawunder300

[batterymonster2021]

Shai NEW CLASS & June Keynote Updates Black Desert Online 2019

New Post has been published on https://hititem.kr/shai-new-class-june-keynote-updates-black-desert-online-2019/

Shai NEW CLASS & June Keynote Updates Black Desert Online 2019

What’s up guys, Pearl Abyss, the corporation at the back of Black desolate tract on-line today had a keynote presentation where they introduced upcoming planned content, shown some teasers and trailer and printed a brand new category coming very very quickly to the sport. Only a rapid video detailing what used to be recounted for you guys at present. Earlier than we begin I wanted to assert that I won’t play BDO anymore but i am nonetheless in the game and what they do, due to the fact I do nonetheless like the game and would return at any time if the rights matters alternate or are added.I do additionally want to say that with this keynote it does seem like they’re planning a more international unlock variation of the game and having content synced up throughout regions which is a particularly exceptional inspiration for many causes, one of the things I hate most about MMORPGs now days is that you simply always understand the whole lot that is coming on a month via month basis either in view that it is already out in one other vicinity or due to the fact that of public test realms and knowledge mining, on prime of this being up to now at the back of in content material and receiving things months later does make our areas consider like we don’t matter or we’re an afterthought. With PA self publishing the sport in many areas now, I did count on this to occur but we are going to see over the approaching months simply how serious they are about this. A global patch cycle adds somewhat extra of a shock detail to content material and i am hoping they do it right however we’ll see what occurs. I will attempt to handiest touch upon the extra most important stuff in the video so it can be no longer overly lengthy. I do feel it was once all in Korean from what I saw, with subtitles.So some data probably slighty off but i am using multiple distinct group sources to quote my expertise and will update in a later video if something hugely alterations. First up we now have the brand new type which is referred to as Shai. Something I recounted in my previous video about alterations i might like to look in BDO was once more staff content and more race form in playable characters and it looks like that is coming actual. The Shai is an lovely category which is utterly exceptional from what we’re used to in BDO as it’s a most commonly support centered category. It’s an even more youthful persona and once more a feminine persona, so as to a lot of your complaints that the devs center of attention on female characters and race locking yeah that is nonetheless going down. But for folks who already play BDO, new content is new content and you’ll be able to have already got approved that is just how it is.So the Shai will begin with master tier gathering and alchemy which is beautiful cool, just right ways to generate profits correct off the bat. They point out the category is generally help targeted and now not going to be very powerful as offense however is not going to be tremendous a ways in the back of different lessons in phrases of pve grinding speed. It is set to launch on June nineteenth and may have customization within the next patch of June 12th. New forms of donkey mounts are also introduced to the game which have precise talents handiest useable through the Shai type. It seems they’re meaning to expand the gameplay flavour and experience of the game with these newly added classes and plan to free up at least 1 per year which must constantly have extraordinary mechanics and appears, similar to dwarves and Rhutums. Honestly a pretty cool addition and we are going to see how the category performs. Looks as if they’re focusing more on team content with the addition of a pure help category like this although which is likely one of the game’s main flaws.The UI is to be updated wholly once once more, making it regular between the XBOX and laptop releases, a brand new updated enhancement UI is also deliberate. New PVE content material referred to as the altar of blood which is a tower defense like minigame for three plaayers the place they shield a relic from monsters which attempt to damage it. They’re pronouncing conversation and stratergy might be involved more so than gear, involves a ranking procedure. Not a nasty concept however as now we have seen with some of BDO’s implementation of prior just right suggestions it might finish up being utterly worthless or abandoned pretty quickly after like that silly musket minigame thing and the shadow arena so we will need to wait and see on this one. Node battle alterations are coming, making it extra newcomer friendly so smaller and weaker guilds can take part less complicated. Looking to make the sport more accessible for inexperienced persons is something I’ve observed them doing for a while now and with the sport being out for a whilst now and having endless equipment scaling this isn’t a nasty idea, the stat capped nodewars have been a step within the correct direction for me and expectantly they preserve this thought up.They may be planning to make more tiers of content material for more suitable or weaker guilds like we’ve now with tier 1 node wars the entire approach as much as fort sieges, although extra important points will come later in a seperate topic. Summer time updates deliberate are lifeskill enhancements, they may be trying to balance out the earnings between the lifeskills which I agree is a giant drawback, precise lifeskills aree undoubtedly worthless proper now except for the fun component. Additionally announcing lifeskill improvements won’t be colossal however will make being a bigger degree higher. Recommendations being floated around are extra things to do whenever you hit special phases reminiscent of being in a position to catch more fish, constructing plantations or ranches, upgrades to imperial supply and imperial crafting delivery. They may be looking to stability out grinding spots in order that folks don’t just grind at the equal spots causing congestion in these areas, the areas most persons grind being bandits, crescents, aakmaqn and hystria.Ash forest is being transformed to be a new end sport team grinding spot with a 310 ap and 400 dp requirements with buffed drops, this is set to unencumber in June. Loopy high standards and anything most persons will on no account get to, as I’ve mentioned before i’d love to peer extra crew content material for minimize tier gamers from to conclude and not simply keep adding on group content on the very top tier. More data on node and conquest wars, territory conflict function is anything they’ve mentioned before which used to be in actual fact calpheon v valencia faction established factor.It’s still within the works but they are specializing in node war alterations first. Now not so much acknowledged right here besides anything known as platoon subjugation where plaayers can send their characters every weekend to generate sales. No inspiration what this even approach but we will keep an eye fixed on it. They may be pronouncing they may spend more time testing matters so we do not get a repeat of the fight stability patches last 12 months that ruined the game for months and gave the impression tremendous 1/2 assed. Adding functionality for interacting with npcs while on a mount, making food cooldowns not ridicuously infuriating to preserve on top of, making bettering simpler in distinctive methods like growing dragon scale fossisl turn in from 20 to forty stacks.UI changes once more with debuffs and other buffs having their own bars, a good alternate when you consider that at the second your buff scale back debuff bar is solely ridiculous when fully buffed up. O’dyllita was deliberate for unencumber this yr but has been delayed considering that it wasn’t as excellent as they wanted it, this used to be a new field or map enlargement if i’m not mistaken. After this extra planned Sea content material, seeking to make the sea extra than just fishing or sea monster looking content. Changing how travelling on the sea works by adding in currents and wind instructional materials so that you could get a lift to how your boat strikes with clever planning, customizable ships with crew hire, extraordinary contraptions viable to add on…Quite cool thought but we’ll see the way it’s carried out.New ships being added, the carrack , galley and extra to come back including a ship currently in development known as the Panokseon which is an armored ship. New island added which doesn’t have a number of info in regards to the content incorporated however they mention histroy of Patrigio on one and crio and papu battle on an extra. Sailors you could add to your boat to shoot your cannons at the same time you journey on my own. Update will likely be released in two constituents, phase 1 will have a new ship and new islands, section 2 will characteristic new content material distinct to ocean exploration whatever that suggests. I agree ocean content material is beautiful barebones right now and it’s like half of the arena map being water, so fine to look they may be adding some content material there but we are going to see if it winds up being fluff or precise substance.On prime of this as a unique gift each person will receive a free wizard gosphy pet on june 12th so make certain you log in and get that. I feel that about covers the whole lot. I do know I had stated i’m accomplished with BDO however i’ll of course be returning to determine out these content material updates and performing some content material on these when you consider that this does sound like plenty of content material. One factor I’ve constantly said about Pearl Abyss and BDO is that they do add various stuff to their game and at the same time it would not at all times hit the mark, they do certainly try and maintain the game recent. I might no longer return to playing on a day-to-day basis however for all my BDO subs, that you may count on to see some more BDO associated content as this stuff releases. .

[maritzaerwin]

15 Tips to Find and Hire a Top Web Developer for Your Team

Web developers come in all shapes and sizes, with various amounts of experience and different personalities. Hiring such a professional for a project or team can make all the difference between success and failure. Therefore, when wondering how to how to hire a web developer, think about how a candidate will fit the company’s culture and team.

Attracting the top web developers on the market requires that your team knows what they are looking for and where to find the right candidates.

1. Freelancer Pools

Pre-vetted freelancer pools can be a fabulous research tool. You can easily compare the skill level and cost on a sliding scale. What expertise is expected at each tier? What skills and experience can you find? What is the overall culture of these freelancer pools?

All of these are important questions that will help you understand, not only your options but also the freelancer’s options on the market.

2. Independent Contractors

Independent freelance web developers essentially work as a single-person company.

Some of these solo endeavors or small partnerships can be quite well-regarded and sought-after.

3. Professional Recruiting Services

Recruiters, for a not-so-small fee, find freelancers for your needs. They also render a lot of the research and technical examination portion of the interview. Thus, if you don’t want in-house interviews, you can rely on one of the services that select and onboard flexible top web developers based on your needs.

Here are several tips that can help a company make the selection process easier:

4. Hire for Attitude and Determination

Managers tend to hire the most skilled and experienced people for their organization, but the attitude of many employees doesn’t match the company’s culture. Work experience is important, but it’s not such a big predictor of success. Ask yourself what is more important and then create a checklist with the traits you are looking to find in your next developer.

5. Experience

Now, you know more about the prospective web developer, but you may want to dive a little deeper. What experience do they have in the industry? More importantly, can past managers and coworkers vouch for them? Are they capable, reliable, and honest?

Ask to see past projects, collaborations, and portfolio submissions. Getting a feel of what the candidate knows is great in deterring prospects that are wasting your time or simply not putting themselves in the best light.

6. Deeper Insights

While looking at the interviewee’s portfolio, discover more details by asking a few key questions:

What sparked your interest in web development?

What tools do you usually use?

How long do these projects take you, on average?

What’s a mistake you’ve made on a web development project in the past? What did you learn?

Have you ever been blamed for something that wasn’t your fault? How did you react?

Tell me about a project that disappointed you. How would you change it?

Can you describe how your current team is structured? How do you work together? How do you make decisions?

What do you do outside of work hours to become a better developer?

7. Start With a Small Project to Be 100% Sure You Made the Right Decision

Even though you believe you found your top web developer, assign him or her a small project to analyze if he or she is efficiently delivering results if the candidate can communicate problems on time and observe how the final product is.

Thus, you will also have the opportunity to observe how he or she will organize and prioritize his or her activities.

8. Adapting to Change and Learning New Technologies Are Important Criteria

When a new technology comes along, you want a web developer who can adapt quickly to change. By asking a developer about his or her favorite tech events, courses, and what new programming languages he or she has learned recently, you can find out if he or she is interested in discovering new things.

It is the personal traits of the developer that matters most when assembling a team that produces consistent work at a reasonable pace. The interview process is the time to figure out if the candidate is skilled enough, but also if the candidate will ultimately fit into your workplace culture.

The battle for great web developers is a fierce one. For young companies and for new entrepreneurs, the hunt for excellent developers can seem like a futile gesture. Instead of succumbing to the frustrations of hiring top web development talent, however, you can overcome the usual hiring hurdles and secure the best web developers on the market.

How do you get ahead of larger organizations and hire dedicated web developers? There are a few methods you should be aware of. Here are the top tips for hiring web developers as swiftly as possible:

9. Create a Well-researched Job Description

Attracting the right web developer can be a tricky thing. On one hand, you don’t want to bore potential candidates with an overlong description. On the other hand, you don’t want to get inundated with irrelevant resumes because of a vague but intriguing job listing. Do your research in order to avoid both traps.

A great web developer job description will list essential job duties, skills, experience, and education. In addition, you’ll want an attention-grabbing hook at the start of your job ad and a punchy call-to-action at the close.

What makes your company unique? What makes the web developer role such an amazing opportunity. Pull from other popular web developer job listings to craft the perfect balance of intriguing and informative.

10. Write a Unique Interview Script

Boring interviews kill otherwise wonderful hiring processes. One fatal mistake to rip an interview script from another company, blog, or site without refining it or playing an interview by ear.

The alluring ease of an already-finished interview script can be overwhelmingly tempting. However, it’s important to resist that temptation. A canned interview can ruin the rapport you are trying to build with interviewees.

Pull from technical interview questions for web developers, personal interview questions about an interviewee’s passions, hobbies, and dreams, and cultural questions that assess the interviewee’s work style and personality. Weave these questions together to create a unique interview script that expresses what your company is about and what your company is looking for in a web developer.

11. Consult Other Web Developers

The best way to find out what web developers want and what web developers do may be simpler than you think. If you want to know how a web developer thinks, simply talk to a web developer. Whether you have a small development team or a large one, you will surely gain valuable insight simply by surveying your team.

If you don’t have a full-time web developer on your team already, try asking web developers outside of your company for advice, through friends, LinkedIn connections, or software development Q&A platforms like Stack Overflow.

Ask web developers questions like:

What is your ideal web developer role?

What motivates you as a web developer?

What attracts you to one company over another?

What kind of interview questions interest you? What kind of questions disinterest you?

By gathering information about what web developers like and what they crave from companies can be a tremendous help to your company. Writing unique interview scripts and compelling job advertisements with concise job descriptions will prove much easier.

Web developers are in high demand. Sadly, not every company can compete. The best web developers often get absorbed into large companies that can afford to offer alluring compensation packages and exceptional benefits. All is not lost for small and medium companies, however.

By employing smart hiring strategies, your company can get a shot at hiring top web developers. Companies can attract top web developers by crafting well-researched job listings with compelling blurbs about your company and the opportunity you are offering.

Go the extra mile to attract the best web developers by writing an interview script tailored to your company’s style. Be sure to pepper in technical and personal questions as well. One of the best ways to make sure you’re asking the right questions is to confer with other web developers. Don’t forget that their insight can be invaluable to your hiring journey.

Use the tips explained above to get ahead of the crowd to attract and hire some of the best web developers on the market. With a bit of patience and persistence, these tips could help you build a better web development team for your business.

Top 4 Web Developer Interviewer Mistakes and How to Avoid Them

Interviewing web developers is hard work. Using a boilerplate list of interview questions simply isn’t going to cut it. You’ll need to craft a custom interview script according to your business’s needs.

In order to do that, you’ll need to avoid the most common web developer interview mistakes. Here are the top 4 interview mistakes interviewers make and how to avoid them:

1. Not Asking for a Portfolio

The portfolio is the most integral step of hiring a web developer. It demonstrates what the candidate believes his or her best skill may be. This is important for a variety of reasons. For one, it’s hard to get a feel for a candidate with just their resume alone. Secondly, it’s a good way to gauge not only the quality of work but the consistency of that work.

Asking for the development portfolio before the interview is the preferred method. Why? This way you’ll be able to come up with important follow-up questions about their resume.

Ask questions like:

Which project are you most proud of?

Which project did you learn the most from?

I’m very impressed with this project… can you go through the planning and development process?

I’m seeing some issues with this project… how long did you have to create this website? What was your role?

2. Failing to Find Out More About the Interviewee

When interviewing candidates for a web developer position, interviewers can often get lost in assessing skills. They want to make sure the candidate is a firm grasp on web programming, web development frameworks, and design patterns.

While assessing someone’s technical prowess is definitely an important facet of an interview for a technical position, it is only a facet. It is still of utmost importance to assess whether or not the web developer you’re interviewing is a cultural fit.

Contrary to popular belief, top web developers have high social and emotional intelligence. They can’t simply code away at their computer alone. They need to be team players.

Try asking questions like:

What are you passionate about?

What made you decide to become a web developer?

What do you know about our company?

What attracted you to this opportunity?

What web developer tools do you prefer?

3. Forgetting to Pass the Mic to the Web Developer Candidate

One of the most useful interview techniques doesn’t involve you asking any questions. It involves quite the opposite really. You turn the tables and ask the interviewee to ask you questions.

If the interviewee can come up with some insightful questions, or, better yet, has some questions prepared, that can act as a key indicator of the dedication, passion, and curiosity.

Look for questions like:

What would my role be?

I see you have worked on these kinds of projects… How would you describe the development process?

I see that your company has this motto… Could you describe the ethos of your company a little more in-depth for me?

What’s the best way to communicate and collaborate as a team?

I’m interested in growing and learning with this company. What growth opportunities does your company provide?

4. Skipping the Face-to-face Meeting

In this day and age, it’s easy to forgo meeting in person. After a few quick phone calls and a couple of courteous emails, you may be ready to pull the trigger and hire a promising web developer candidate. After all — you were able to see all of their work on GitHub, peruse their projects, and delve into their professional history — all without ever having a face-to-face meeting. Great, right?

While this sounds appealing, it’s actually quite dangerous to hire this way. Not because a candidate poses any kind of threat per se — but because making a wrong hire can be extremely costly. Even if you’re hiring a remote web developer, you’ll want to schedule a Skype meeting with them so you can read their body language before you bring them on full-time.

Remember: when you’re interviewing, you’re assessing how well a candidate fits into the role. You’re not simply assessing the talent or experience of an individual, but also their passion, personality, and teamwork skills. How to conduct interviews well is still a matter of debate — however, there are some tips that can help you get the best results possible.

In the interview, you’ll need to assess:

Technical ability.

Professional history.

Work ethic.

Cultural fit.

Passion.

Dedication.

In order to assess the traits listed above, you’ll need to ask for their portfolio, find out more about the interviewee, open up the discussion to include questions from the interviewee, and get some face time with well-performing candidates.

The post 15 Tips to Find and Hire a Top Web Developer for Your Team appeared first on CareerMetis.com.

15 Tips to Find and Hire a Top Web Developer for Your Team published first on https://skillsireweb.tumblr.com/

[theheartoftheboat]

The Responsibility That Leads To Greatness- A Coxswain’s Story

What is a coxswain? A coxswain is the one who gets the whole team in shape, with their leadership, confidence and high responsibilities- just to name a few. Coxswain are the eyes and ears of the boat and are in charge of steering, making calls, determining how fast the rowers should row, and what side of the boat needs more pressure (row harder).  This large role of the boat can be the difference between winning or losing a race. 

Originally from Clifton Park, New York, Kayla Brownhill came to Endicott College majoring in exercise science and hoping to prolong her career in rowing by joining the Endicott club crew team. Brownhill has been involved in the sport of crew since fifth grade when she attended a school involvement fair in her middle school cafeteria where a local crew club was recruiting members. Brownhill hopped on an erg rowing machine and instantly fell in love. 

Starting off as a rower, Brownhill became comfortable with knowing the ins and outs of the physical aspect of crew. But five years later Brownhill began to have shoulder complications that needed medical attention and forced her to sit out from a sport she loved. In addition to her injuries, Brownhill went through two coaches that were not the most effective coaches when it came  to fostering her rowing career..  But that is when boys varsity coach, Sean O’Brian, threw her into the coxing seat and told her to cox. O’Brian taught her everything there is to know about crew, from the different rowing techniques to how to read a cox machine that tells the coxswain how fast everyones going. These skills set Brownhill up for her future success as a coxswain. 

Having been a rower in the past, Brownhill has the ability to cox the rowers to a higher level than  they thought possible. By understanding the perspective of a rower she can cox rowers from their perspective to help them grasp techniques better. As well as knowing how much physical exertion it takes when rowing either in the boat or on the rowing machines, ergs. 

Brownhill emphasises on the importance of responsibility when it comes to taking care of oneself and their roles being a part of the team. Additionally, Brownhill sees the responsibility even more due to the fact that she not only has to take care of herself but a whole team. 

How did you hear about the sport of crew when you were in middle school?

“They were advertising it, like they had an erg set up in our cafeteria and one of the rowers was like “want to join crew?”  And I had no idea what crew was but I just got on the erg and fell in love.”

What persuaded you to even start the sport?

“I went to their free week, and I actually got to sit in a boat. It just felt right, like I was a gymnast beforehand and that was great, but I didn’t get the same feeling that I got from crew so that’s kind of how I knew crew was where I was supposed to be.”

What is different from high school rowing to collegiate rowing?

“I would say our collegiate work ethic is a lot simpler than high school. My high school team was very rigorous with the workouts and practice and even though it was a club in high school, practice was not an option. If you’re on the team, you’re at practice. And it was seven days a week, Monday through Friday was three hours and then on the weekends it was only an hour and a half. As a rower and as a coxswain, you were held to a lot of responsibility, like as a rower you were required to bring your own personal notebooks to write down our erg scores and the coxswains also had to write down everything for the rowers. Then we had to bring our own equipment like our stroke box, cox box, uniforms, and grips if we had them. So our high school team definitely held us to a lot more responsibility than my collegiate team did. But overall it’s still a good experience.”  

What is something you would change about Endicott’s crew program? 

“A lot, but the big one would be how relaxed everything is. I feel like my high school team was much more strict, so going from such a strict program to Endicott was a big change. I Feel like it’s very relaxed and we could be more uniformed as a team.” 

Knowing that you were a rower in the past and are now a coxswain, how has your experience being a rower helped you as a coxswain?

“It allowed me to get a better sense of what the rowers are feeling. A lot of coxswain’s have only just coxed so they don’t know how it actually feels to be sitting in a seat of the boat. But I think now I can visualize what the rowers are going through and I can kind of almost cox them from a rower’s position and I can correct them from the rower’s position. It’s more helpful than a coxswain that is just looking at them row and not having actually rowed before. But it better helps me understand what they’re going through.” 

Anything you would tell a brand new rower coming into a collegiate level of crew?

“I would just tell them to make sure they want to do it. To understand the responsibility of this sport and understand it takes up a lot of time, effort, and dedication. As well as the physical aspect to it, it’s not something you can just jump into. So I think I would just make sure they know what they’re getting into.” 

What makes you passionate about this sport? 

“How easy it felt going into the sport. Gymnastics was great, I loved it, still miss it, but it just felt forced, I wasn’t a natural gymnast, I had to work at my skill and flexibility. But with rowing, I pulled a good split naturally, and was able to transfer from the boat to the erg and it just felt right, like I was supposed to be rowing.”

Who inspires you the most when rowing?

“I would definitely say my high school coach. He taught me pretty much everything there is to the sport, as a rower I was on the girls team and then injuries forced me into coxing, so then I had to switch coaches as well, and his name was Sean O’Brian. He taught me way more than I thought there was to know about rowing. I knew the basics of rowing obviously, but then when I got to work with Sean he taught me more details about the stroke, like elbow placement and wrist placement, and more calls to teach as a coxswain. There was just a lot to the sport to know and Sean really helped me with all of that and helped me be the best coxswain I could be for the boys and told what he expected out of me and held me to a responsibility that I needed.”

What do you think is the most important part of crew in terms of the sport overall? 

“Responsibility. I think it teaches great discipline when we have 5 a.m. practices and we’re at regattas 12 hours on Saturday and Sunday,  practice five days a week sometimes six days a week. The sport really isn’t something that you can pick and choose when you want to show up to, and I wasn’t responsible as a teenager, I’m still not responsible, but I think the sport really helped guide me onto a path. If I learned discipline and responsibility in crew, I can put that into other aspects of life as well.”

How has crew impacted your life? 

“I think it helped me become more responsible and well rounded. As a rower you have to be responsible for yourself but as a coxswain I was responsible for myself and the entire men’s varsity team which was about 30 people. I didn’t have time to mess around because I had practice at 5 a.m. the next morning.” 

If you were to give your younger self just starting crew advice, what would you tell yourself? 

“It’s worth it. There was definitely a time in my life where I lost my passion for crew given the coach I had, he wasn’t a good person so I wanted to quit but I stuck with it and ended up on the guys varsity team. So if I could tell myself that, like sticking with two seasons of a bad coach, it’ll turn out great in the end, and it did. Push through it because overall you do love it.”

What was your favorite regatta? 

“Head of the Charles, October 2017-2018. It was my first Charles, and it's the biggest race in the world. I was thriving my senior year of crew and the fact that I could spend my first race with my high school crew team and had a coach who walked me through the entire thing.  I was as prepared as I could be and my boys helped me through it because some have raced there before.”

What was your least favorite regatta? 

“Head of the Hudson in 8th grade. It was a small unorganized regatta that was literally under a bridge in Albany. The weather conditions were terrible and they made us race anyway, but during the race, one of the officials came up to our boat and said, “yeah, you’re done.” It was sleeting out, so when we tried to get the boat out of the water, the riggers were icy and we couldn’t get a good grip on it, it was awful.”

What is one crew pet peeve that you see in rowers or in the sport in general?

“When people don’t take it seriously. This is a sport that you can’t just do in your leisure time. You can’t pick or choose when to go to practice. I think a lot of people see it as a club and don’t take it as seriously as they should. But it’s definitely a sport that takes 100% of your effort or not at all.”

What is something your high school coach told you that you use at college? 

“Fake it until you make it. He taught me a lot going into being a coxswain, I was not confident, and he threw me into a boat and told me to cox. I was like “oh okay”, but he taught me to come off as confident and I think I use that in all aspects of life now. Like even if I don’t feel confident, I want to come off as confident so that my rowers have faith in me. Because if I'm sitting at the starting line panicking about the race, I'm going to make my rowers panic. As a coxswain, it’s my job to make sure all of my rowers are in unison, calm, and ready to go. But I can’t expect them to be like that if i’m freaking out.”

If tomorrow was your last day ever doing crew, what is one thing you would do differently and what would you do the same? 

“If it was my last day of crew I would tell myself to stop complaining. To get up at 4:30, take the responsibilities of the rower, do the jobs you don’t want to do because one day you’re going to wish you were doing those jobs again. One thing I would do the same is putting in effort, I would like to think I have a good work ethic when it comes to coxing. I take on jobs people don’t want to do and I like to keep organized. Like when the coach gave me the responsibility of scheduling the spin class for the team, it was new because it’s not normally my job, but I also liked that he gave me that responsibility because he could see that I could get this team organized and in place.” 

[brain4utaxservices]

5 Tips to Increase the Value of Your Accounting/Bookkeeping Business

Regardless of whether because of new possibilities, different responsibilities or inevitable retirement, most proprietors and business visionaries will proceed onward from the organizations they make. In any case, in case you're a proprietor and you're in any way similar to me, you don't need each one of those long periods of hard work to add up to nothing, which implies that one day you may think about selling your business.

Presently, I'm not a specialist in mergers and acquisitions, yet I will probably construct my redistributed accounting bookkeeping service by administrations firm, Legacy Advantage, into a worldwide brand, and the best way to do that is to develop. One of our methodologies has been to make acquisitions in key markets to extend our quality, and in December of 2016, we finished the obtaining of a bookkeeping firm from a woman who was resigning.

In light of that experience, I can unquestionably say that the way to drawing in a purchaser, and selling your business at an extraordinary cost, is to PLAN AHEAD. You are, successfully, selling your customers. All things considered, when you sell your business, there will probably be a three-to five-year maintenance condition in the agreement.

This implies the last measure of cash you get for your business toward the finish of the maintenance time frame will rely upon what number of your previous customers remain with the new proprietor. Along these lines, expanding your customer base and improving your customer maintenance will prompt a superior result. How would you do that?

We should investigate the five most significant things you can do now to improve your odds of selling your business later on.

1. Construct an Attractive Company Culture

As a potential purchaser, I'm searching for organization societies that fit with our own. In the event that there's no fit, it just prompts struggle not far off. As a dealer, you can't really control what I'm searching for, however you can concentrate your energies on purchasers that you realize will be intrigued. Right now, workers will represent the deciding moment it for you. Why? Since they encapsulate the way of life you've made.

Do you represent anything, and do your kin get tied up with a big motivator for you firmly enough to stick it out? Or on the other hand, are your workers simply employed to carry out a responsibility and are soldier of fortune to such an extent that they'll leave at any indication of difficulty? Which do you believe is increasingly important to a purchaser? Think about this: If your workers don't become tied up with your business in accounting outsourcing companies in mumbai, your customers may not either. This could fate your arrangement, or your maintenance.

2. Make Employees an Asset, Not a Liability

Regardless of how comparable two organizations are in culture, they will consistently do things another way. Change of proprietors ordinarily accompanies the presentation of new procedures, new programming and another method for getting things done. Will your representatives grasp the change, or oppose it? You may figure this isn't generally your concern, yet it is, and let me reveal to you why.

At the point when we procured the accounting outsourcing companies I referenced, the majority of its representatives said they were available to change. At the point when the opportunity arrived, they weren't, and we needed to release every one of them. How would you think our recently procured customers took it when their "go-to lady" was terminated? I can let you know: Many of them left.

This misfortune will legitimately convert into a lower money installment to the past proprietor toward the finish of the three-year maintenance statement. In addition, it filled in as an exercise for us. Next time, we'll lead progressively exhaustive due ingenuity, and you can wager we won't obtain an organization that isn't continually improving, adjusting, enhancing and preparing their staff in the most recent advancements and practices.

3. Make a Business That's Independent of You

The more free the business is from you, the more important your business will be. Why? All things considered, once more, it comes down to customer maintenance. I for one would not consider purchasing a firm without any workers on the grounds that the danger of your customers leaving when you leave is excessively high. By examination, a very much prepared staff that can fabricate associations with customers and take care of issues themselves is a benefit.

At Legacy Advantage  of taxation services, I am generally the main purpose of contact since I am still responsible for deals. At the earliest opportunity, I present one of my ranking directors, and the partner accountable for the record, so the customer can get to know more individuals from our group.

The more you include others in customer connections, the more agreeable the customer becomes in managing, and trusting, the firm, as opposed to a particular person. This degree of trust and freedom depends on great documentation. In the event that a customer should be overhauled by somebody other than their normal contact, will this new individual have the option to get the last known point of interest? Are the logins, subtleties, applicable contacts and past correspondences identified with each document recorded? In the event that the responses to these inquiries are negatives, begin preparing your representatives and building autonomy into your procedures now.

4. Worth Price Your Services

We incline toward financial advisory services that worth value their customers, rather than charging hourly rates, and we search for firms that do likewise. Presently, I can't direct how you deal with your benefits, however I can reveal to you that we arrived at this determination in the wake of getting an organization that charged hourly. This is what occurred.

At the point when it came time for us to do year-end wrap-ups for our recently gained customers, the survey and acquaintance required for each record brought about extra charging hours. It isn't so much that we weren't productive; we simply needed to accomplish more work to find a good pace. Did the customers get that? No chance. What they saw was a progress of proprietors and a higher bill. A few customers left, bringing down the past proprietor's maintenance.

On the off chance that these procured customers had been on a level month to month charge, they wouldn't have seen a distinction in their charging, and the additional hours we put in would have been made up down the line. Presently, how about we make it a stride past overseeing customer desires. On the off chance that you charge your customers on the first of every month, it's worth more to me as a forthcoming purchaser. Why? Since you've set up a framework that assembles the money forthright before the work is done, which means you're improving my income. The consistency of this strategy additionally fills in as verification of repeating income, and purchasers will search for this.

The one admonition here is that your worth or fixed charge valuing must guarantee that every customer is gainful. As such, on the off chance that you disparage how much time it takes to play out a customer's accounting or duty documenting, you're undercharging. On the off chance that it's not beneficial for you, it won't be gainful for us, and if it's not productive for us, we will release the customer. This will bring down your maintenance.

5. Grasp Technology

Current firms have present day rehearses. We addressed this a piece comparable to worker obligation, however we should go into more fine grained detail. You need to sell your business. We're keen on purchasing your business, yet is your innovation good with our firm? What amount of will we, or another potential purchaser, need to spend in hardware and staff preparing if it's most certainly not?

You can't get ready for each conceivable unforeseen here, however an attentive gaze on industry improvements can assist you with making some informed estimates. For instance, on the off chance that you possess a bookkeeping firm, you presumably need to guarantee that your staff is prepared on Caseware. In the event that you run an accounting firm and you are principally utilizing Sage, at that point just other Sage firms will purchase your training. For example, Legacy Advantage has focused on the Intuit® condition, so we're just taking a gander at other QuickBooks® or Quickbooks Online clients.

A couple of other pleasant to-haves are a cutting-edge CRM (in the event that you don't have the foggiest idea what a CRM is, or what it does, think of it as a schoolwork task!) and a paperless record the executives framework that depends on computerized recording and filtered reports, as opposed to paper documents. These make it a lot simpler to blend organization databases and help to guarantee that customer data isn't lost during the progress of proprietorship. Also, a smoother progress likely methods … you got it – more prominent customer maintenance.

#accounting bookkeeping service #accounting outsourcing companies in mumbai #accounting outsourcing companies #taxation services #financial advisory services

[douchebagbrainwaves]

HERE'S WHAT I JUST REALIZED ABOUT RETROSPECT

A nerd is someone who isn't socially adept enough. We're up against a hard one here.1 Perhaps the best policy is to make themselves feel better. Marketplaces are so hard to get rolling that you should put your business model in beta when you put your body into positions much more extreme than any it will assume during the run. Maybe that was truer in the past, this rule of thumb works well. Nerds aren't losers. Alberti, arguably the archetype of the Renaissance Man, writes that no art, however minor, demands less than total dedication if you want to fight back, there are ways to do it so long as you're a product company that's merely being extra attentive to a customer, they're very grateful even if you don't build something for themselves and their friends, who happen to be good-looking, natural athletes, or siblings of popular kids, they'll tend to become nerds. In a field like physics, if we disagree with past generations it's because we're right and they're wrong. Instead of being part of the reason engineering is traditionally averse to handholding is that its traditions date from a time when you're not in the middle of the twentieth century. They make the experience of buying stuff so pleasant that shopping becomes a leisure activity. I've written before, one of the things that has surprised me most about startups is how few of the most successful founders are like that.2 Calder's sculptures never get boring.

The patent pledge is not legally binding. And why? Out in the real world. Can, perhaps, but should? I'm not sure which was worse. The press, ever eager to exaggerate small trends, now gives one the impression that Silicon Valley is a ghost town. But, as in more recent times indecent, improper, and unamerican have been. But if you're mostly interested in other questions, being labelled as a yellowist will just be a distraction.

But the percentage is certainly way over 30%. Almost certainly. After Facebook stopped being for Harvard students, it remained for students at specific colleges for quite a while.3 And since bad uses of patents seem to be about ideas, whether they are or not. One is a combination of shyness and laziness. Paradoxically, one of the greats, but he's an especial hero to me because of Lisp. The first thing I see when I walk out of the system, they tend to think the opposite.4 Few encourage you to continue to the point where you can discount your own bad moods. Or it could be that, because it's clearer in the sciences whether theories are true or false, and this consumes less energy. Perhaps the best policy is to make it harder for companies to get technology by buying startups rather than developing it in house. In general, to make great things.

You have to ignore the elephant in front of you, the likelihood they'll succeed, and focus instead on the separate and almost invisibly intangible question of whether they'll succeed really big.5 If it's physiological, it should be universal. But those are the wrong eyes to look through! Remember, it's the nature of fashion to be invisible. At the time I never tried to separate my wants and weigh them against one another. And it happens because these schools have no real purpose beyond keeping the kids all in one place.6 It's like stretching. Why?

Ask any nerd: you get much worse treatment from a group of kids from higher in the hierarchy create bonds between themselves. I haven't really assimilated that fact, partly because it's so counterintuitive, and partly because delighting customers will by then have permeated your culture. In New York, recruiting new users and helping existing ones improve their listings. That 26 year olds who can compete with anyone. In fact these free or nearly free things weren't bargains, because they were worth even less than they cost. Of course, we're not even the center of the solar system.7 As jobs become more specialized, we have to teach startups this?8 There have probably been other people who did this as well as the first. Now the pendulum has swung back a bit, driven in part by a panicked reaction by the clothing industry.9

Most of the persecution comes from kids lower down, the nervous middle classes. But in retrospect it seems obvious they were going away for the weekend. I accumulated it.10 The biggest danger of not being consciously aware of this pattern is for those who naively discard part of it.11 You have to ignore the elephant in front of users as soon as it has a quantum of utility, and then try to pry apart the cracks and see what's underneath. The aspect of the Internet Bubble that the press seemed most taken with was the youth of some of the freaks ultimately used drugs to escape from other problems—trouble at home, for example; but it took months to work out the details, and during that time I got hardly any real work done. I would have laughed at him. There is no external pressure to do this well. It would have taken a deliberate lie to say otherwise.12 All other things being equal, they would have preferred to be on any shortlist of admirable people. He never referred directly to the committee and so gave them no way to opt out. And it can last for months.

They don't actually hate you. Smile at everyone, and don't tell them what you're thinking. But if you're mostly interested in other questions, being labelled as a yellowist too, and you'll find yourself having a lot of money.13 Why is the real world is that it's a new messaging protocol, where you don't just use your software on users's behalf, you'll learn things you couldn't say anywhere else, and this helped to make the region a center of scholarship and industry which have been closely tied for longer than most people realize.14 If he was bad at extracting money from people, at worst this curve would be some constant multiple less than 1 of what it was before. Whereas companies that sue startups for patent infringement generally do it with no indication of whether you're succeeding. He never referred directly to the committee and so gave them no way to opt out. Everyone admires Jane Austen. Startups building things for other startups as well.

And it can last for months.15 So even a small increase in the rate at which reputation spreads by word of mouth. Explaining himself later, he said that while it was a weapon, used by Ludendorff in a purge of those who favored a negotiated peace. But those are also commodities, which can be handed off to some lieutenant. During the Bubble, it's now considered dubious to take companies public before they have earnings. That's what we thought about Airbnb, and if you look for it. There is no external opponent, so the kids become one another's opponents. This is what you think about as you fall asleep at night and when you do finally automate yourself out of the airline terminal is the fat, grumpy guy in charge of their narrow domain of building things, rather than just a good politician. For example, Ben Silbermann noticed that a lot of time on sales and marketing.16

Notes

But although I started using it, but I couldn't convince Fred Wilson for reading drafts of this policy may be the only function of revenues, and many of the standard edition of Aristotle's immediate successors may have been sent packing by the high-minded Edwardian child-heroes of Edith Nesbit's The Wouldbegoods.

If doctors did the section of the problem, we actively sought out people who'd failed out of business you should be protected against such tricks, you'd get ten times as much income. Options have largely been replaced with restricted stock, which can happen in any field.

This is not one of a silver mine. I'm not saying option pools themselves will go on to the other direction.

When you fund a startup could grow big by transforming consulting into a de facto consulting firm. Most of the auction. Lester Thurow, writing and visual design.

This is one you take out order. If you ask that you're not going to get elected with a lawsuit just as it's easier to take math classes intended for math majors. But in a separate box weighing another 4000 pounds. Xxvii.

And yet there are some VCs who understood the vacation rental business, and so depended on banks, who had made Lotus into the work that seems formidable from the DMV. I suspect the recent resurgence of evangelical Christianity in the press when I said by definition if the founders are effective. It was harder for Darwin's contemporaries to grasp this than we can respond by simply removing whitespace, periods, commas, etc. Ironically, one variant of the taste of apples because if people can see the apples, they mean San Francisco wearing a jeans and t-shirt, they're nice to you as employees by buying good programmers instead of uebfgbsb.

If you have to put in the press when I was a false positive if the selection process looked for different things from different, simpler organisms over unimaginably long periods of time on is a very misleading number, because time seems to have figured out how to deal with them. In practice most successful ones tend not to. First Industrial Revolution was one cause of economic inequality.

The founders who take big acquisition offers that super-angels tend not to make a deep philosophical point here about which is the same town, unless it was wiser for them, and one didn't try because they want impressive growth numbers. Whereas the activation energy required. Hint: the energy they emit encourages other ambitious people, instead of being Turing equivalent, but this disappointment is mostly evidence that the only way to be the right thing to do work you love. Not all big hits follow this pattern though.

Forums and places like Twitter seem empirically to work than stay home with them in advance that you should be protected against being mistreated, because investors already owned more than their lifetime value, don't even sound that plausible. We thought software was all that value, don't worry about that. It would probably a bad sign if you were going about it well enough but the median total compensation, including salary, bonus, stock grants, and credit card debt is usually some injustice that is modelled on private sector funds and apparently generates good returns.

They assumed that their experience so far has trained them to ignore competitors. If a man has good corn or wood, or to be promising.

And they are like sheep, but you should make the hiring point more strongly.

The biggest counterexample here is defined from the success of Skype. They want so much control, and b when she's nervous, she doesn't like getting attention in the Greek classics. If Ron Conway had been with their company for more.

Note to nerds: or possibly a winner, they said. Sparse Binary Polynomial Hash Message Filtering and The CRM114 Discriminator. The tipping point for me was the ads they show first. If you're good you'll have to watch out for a market price, and Jews about.

No central goverment would put its two best universities in your classes because you have good net growth till you see them, not because it's a bad reputation, a valuation from an eager investor, the higher the walls become. Maybe it would have expected them to justify choices inaction in particular, because it was too late to launch a new Lisp dialect called Arc that is actually from the Dutch not to: if he hadn't we probably would not be true that the rest of the marks of a Linux box, a market of one investor who invested in a safe will be near-spams that have little do with the exception of the flock, or Brian Chesky and Joe Gebbia needed Airbnb? A rolling close doesn't mean you suck. Incidentally, Google may appear to be in college.

So how do you know about a related phenomenon: he found it easier for us to see the old car they had zero false positives out of business you should make a deep philosophical point here about academic talks, which amounts to the point of treason. It was only because like an undervalued stock in that respect. Mehran Sahami, Susan Dumais, David Heckerman and Eric Horvitz.

They did try to establish a silicon valley out of customers times how much of the resulting sequence. You end up with elaborate rationalizations.

#automatically generated text #Markov chains #Paul Graham #Python #Patrick Mooney #periods #investors #kids #impression #injustice #employees #Bubble #people #programmers #winner #value #classes #listings #time #Airbnb #retrospect #companies #town #Polynomial #part #business #section #things

[cryptswahili]

Interview with the Creator of DeOldify, fast.ai fellow: Jason Antic

Part 21 of The series where I interview my heroes.

Index to “Interviews with ML Heroes”

Today, we’re talking to a very special “Software Guy, currently digging deep into GANs” — The author of DeOldify: Jason Antic.

Jason is a CS Major and has been working as a Software Engineer for over 12 years. You might be surprised to know that he is still very new to DL, having taken it up seriously about nine months ago.

We’ll be talking about Jason’s experience and the coolest GAN project that’s live on a website: colorize.cc

About the Series:

I have very recently started making some progress with my Self-Taught Machine Learning Journey. But to be honest, it wouldn’t be possible at all without the amazing community online and the great people that have helped me.

In this Series of Blog Posts, I talk with people that have really inspired me and whom I look up to as my role-models.

The motivation behind doing this is that you might see some patterns and hopefully you’d be able to learn from the amazing people that I have had the chance to learn from.

Sanyam Bhutani:​ Hello Jason, Thank you for taking the time to do this.

Jason Antic: My pleasure!

Sanyam Bhutani:​​ You have created one of the most amazing “Deep Learning” Projects, you’ve been working as a Software Engineer for over a decade now.

Can you tell us how did you get interested in Deep Learning at first?

Jason Antic: Well really I’ve been interested in neural networks long before they were cool. They just seemed intuitively to have a lot more potential than other methods. But yeah, they were seriously uncool when you go back 7+ years ago. In fact, I took two artificial intelligence courses in college and neither of them covered neural networks. Years later, AlexNet swept the competition in the 2012 ImageNet challenge. That caught my attention because I knew computer vision basically just didn’t work before then. Comparatively speaking, Deep Learning was magic. I started devouring information on the subject afterwards but it wasn’t until years later that I actually started developing my own models.

Sanyam Bhutani:​ You’ve had a few failed starts to get started with DL at first, and finally took up fast.ai through till the end-what appealed to you the most about fast.ai?

Jason Antic: They simply have a much better method of teaching than other courses (I rage-quit quite a few popular MOOCs!). They start you with a huge amount of momentum right away — you’re creating an awesome dogs/cats classifier on the first day. THEN you drill down into the details. This is so motivating and more effective in terms of being able to connect the dots of what you’re learning. This is a method of teaching spelled out in a great book called “Making Learning Whole Again.”

Also, what’s being taught literally is cutting edge. Uniquely so. In fact, in V3 part 1, I got to collaborate with Jeremy and Sylvain on lesson 7, and I committed the final notebook used for the GAN super-resolution bit a mere few hours before the course started. It was literally something we invented over the previous two weeks — GAN pretraining. I asked Jeremy if this was normal for him in preparing courses and he confirmed. It’s mind-boggling that it actually works out but the end result is amazing!

Sanyam Bhutani:​ For the readers with a bit of less-tech background, could you share an ELI5 about what your project is and how it works?

Jason Antic: Sure! I basically created a deep learning model to colorize old black and white photos. While this isn’t the first deep learning model to colorize photos, it does a few new things that make it significantly better than previous efforts. Namely, the output is much more colorful and convincing, and this comes from setting up training of the colorizing model to involve a second model — the “critic” — that basically is there to “criticize” the colorizations and teach the “generator” to produce better images. This design is called a GAN — Generative Adversarial Network.

Because the “critic” model is also a neural network, it can pick up on a lot of the nuances of what makes something look “realistic” that simpler methods just can’t. The key here also is that I as a programmer simply cannot comprehend how to explicitly code something to evaluate “realism” — I just don’t know what all that entails. So that’s what a neural network is here to learn for me!

Sanyam Bhutani: I think you’re the Thomas Edison of GAN(s) (or at least photo colorization using DL)-the idea didn’t work for quite a few weeks and you had quite a bit of unsuccessful experiments (over a 1000).

What made you stick to the project and not give up? How do you think can a software engineer stay motivated and not give in to the “imposter syndrome”?

Jason Antic: Well that comparison to Edison is rather flattering! So, what made me stick to the project and not give up is this somewhat unreasonably optimistic view of mine that there’s a solution to any reasonable problem and that it’s just a matter of effectively navigating the search space to find the answer. Effectively to me, that means doing a lot of experiments and being methodical, and to constantly question your assumptions and memory because that’s typically where problem-solving goes wrong.

That being said, despite my undeniable successes I still to this day fall into that dark mental state of self-doubt, wanting to give up, and “imposter syndrome”. Even earlier this week it started creeping up on me again when I was running into difficulties, and the intrusive thoughts started pouring in again. “You’re deluded, and you were just lucky with DeOldify.” Believe it or not that still happens.

Then I pushed through it and figured it out, and I am very excited about what will be released in the next month as of this writing :)

How do I push through it? The belief that a solution is there and that I’m capable of finding it simply because I’m a normally functioning human being that can problem solve is a big one. That’s the key point here — it’s not so much a matter of intelligence as it is of the method (and that’s learnable!). Another motivating factor is the realization that there is in my mind no better way to spend my time then to try to solve big/cool problems, and that it’s worth the blood, sweat, and tears. Purpose and autonomy are huge motivators.

Sanyam Bhutani: There is a flipside to it as well, how does someone know when to quit a project that might just be too ambitious for the given technology?

Jason Antic: Yes, you definitely have to know when to quit, and that’s quite the art. I say “No” to, and/or quit, a lot of things actually. Why? Because for everything you say “Yes” to, you’re saying “No” to many other things. Time (and sanity) is precious. As a result, especially lately, I’ve said “No” to quite a few opportunities that others find crazy to say “No” to.

So quitting for me is decided first on whether or not the path falls squarely in my realm of values, interests, and maintaining sanity. If you’re talking about an ambitious technological project, then you have to go one step further and evaluate whether or not it’s actually feasible. Often you simply can’t answer that right away, especially if you’re doing an ambitious project! So that’s why you experiment. If you discover a sound reason (and not just a rage-quit rationalization) as to why something won’t work, then quit, learn from it, and move on! But be careful on this point — a lot of problems are solved handily simply by shifting perspective a bit. For this reason, I’ll stick with a problem a bit longer than seems reasonable, because often my perspective is simply wrong. Often the solution comes when I walk away (shower thoughts, basically).

Sanyam Bhutani:​ It’s very interesting to note that Jason doesn’t have “experience” with photo colorization. Yet he’s done a great job at it, even pushed a “Chromatic optimization” update to the repository allowing DeOldify to run on GPU(s) with smaller memory.

What are your thoughts about “Non-Domain” experts using DL to make progress in general?

Jason Antic: It’s great that you brought up the “Chromatic optimization” because that actually didn’t come from me. That was from somebody on Hacker News the day that DeOldify went viral that had at least some domain knowledge and suggested it as a way to get much better results much more efficiently. So I think this is an important point — domain expertise still counts. And good old-fashioned engineering and design still count. Not everything is going to be solved by your deep learning model — at least as of now.

That being said, I’ve been able to get really far on DeOldify with zero domain expertise, and that idea generally excites me! I think we’ve barely scratched the surface of the implications of this — that we can have a model discover things that not even experts know about yet. The challenge, of course, is figuring out what the models are figuring out and not just treat it as a black box. But I really think that we’re going to see some big breakthroughs in science in the next 10–20 years because of this (and it’s already starting to happen to an extent). Additionally, not requiring domain expertise to be effective means many more minds can be put to the task of solving many of our world’s problems. This is very cool.

Sanyam Bhutani:​ Your project is built on top of the fast.ai library (v 0.7), can you tell us how it has helped in the development of this project?

Jason Antic: The Fast.ai library is brilliant! It encodes a lot of best practices (such as learning rate finder) which make your life much easier as a deep learning developer. It’s painful and silly to constantly have to operate at a low level and reinvent things (poorly) with things like Tensorflow or PyTorch. Fast.ai’s library does a lot of this for you, which means you can spend more time doing productive things. This is how progress in software generally happens, and I feel Fast.ai is leading the way. Do note too: I’m about to push a Fast.ai V1 upgrade, and the benefits of doing this were huge — speed, memory usage, code simplification, and model quality all benefited from this largely out of the box.

Sanyam Bhutani:​ I’ve tried running DeOldify and it really really blew me away. Were there any images or scenarios that even made you go WOW?

Jason Antic: It might sound silly but the cup in the image below was my first wow moment. This was one of the first images I rendered after I finally experimented with a self-attention GAN based implementation, after failing to get this stuff to work with a Wasserstein GAN. Up to this point, I didn’t get anywhere close to this kind of detail, or interesting and seemingly appropriate colorfulness in my renders. I do acknowledge the flaws in this image (the zombie arm, for example). But I knew I was on to something after seeing this.

Sanyam Bhutani:​ DeOldify works and works really well, what’s next for the project?

You’ve mentioned in your repository and twitter that you want to make a lot of under the hood improvements. Why do you think those are a priority over building something that will be potentially even cooler than this?

Jason Antic: I have no doubt that there’s going to be a model in the next year or two that’s going to blow my model away in terms of sophistication. That’s just the nature of progress! But what I’m really interested in is making this stuff practically useful.

When I first released DeOldify, I was able to create some truly impressive images, but at a cost — I had to search for quite a while just to find an image that didn’t have some sort of awful glitch or discoloration. GAN training is a double-edged sword currently in this sense — you get really great results, but stability is really difficult to achieve. This is the sort of thing I’m wrapping up on addressing now. This will make the difference between having a cool tech demo and actually being able to use the tech in the real world in a truly automated way. It’ll also enable something else that’s way cool, but I can’t talk about that yet. ;)

The issue that DeOldify is currently a supreme memory hog is another thing I’m attacking. Quite successfully I’d add! That also will enable practical usability.

Once the items above are addressed and announced (very soon!), I’ll be looking to finally try making some money on this stuff. As you can imagine, countless friends and relatives have been asking “are you monetizing this?” I’ll be able to finally allay their concerns about giving everything away for free LOL. And who knows what all that will involve. Just no VC money. Definitely not that.

Sanyam Bhutani:​ For the readers wondering about Jason’s experience in Deep Learning, he had picked this project right after completing fast.ai Part 1 and 2. What pointers do you have for the enthusiasts that would like to build something as cool as DeOldify?

Jason Antic: Well, to be honest, DeOldify’s origin story was that I had a bit of a shower thought while taking a long walk (a walk thought, I guess), where I was like “Ohhh…GANs learn the loss function for you!” That’s not actually an original thought but you don’t hear it much and I certainly hadn’t heard it at that point. Then I just paired this up with a list of projects I had compiled over time (again “walk thoughts”) and figured: “Let’s try this with colorization because I have no clue what the loss function should actually be. So perhaps the GAN can learn it for me!”

That was the intuition and I was unreasonably sure it was right. That gave me the stupid energy to spend the next six weeks doing probably upwards of 1000+ experiments (failure after failure) until I eventually stumbled upon self-attention GANs and it finally worked. And I have to emphasize that point — it was a lot of failures, and a lot of unknowns, and a lot of not giving up even though I was taking a bit of a psychological beating after a while. You know — self-doubt and all that jazz.

Hence my advice is this: Find something you’re interested in enough to pursue it in a manic way and guide your efforts by at least somewhat rigorous experimentation. And stay the course until you have the actual reason (evidence) to believe that what you’re pursuing is impossible as opposed to just unknown. I think this is where most people shoot themselves in the foot — they give up way too easily!

Sanyam Bhutani:​ Are there any upcoming updates in DeOldify that we should be really excited about?

Jason Antic: There’s a fast.ai v1 update coming very soon, and along with that comes the many benefits of the said upgrade! The model is going to be much faster, much smaller, higher quality, zero artifacts, and nearly zero “artistic selection” needed, and a large part of this comes simply from taking advantage of what is available in the new fast.ai code.

There’s other stuff you guys should be excited about that I just can’t talk about yet. You’ll hear about it soon or soonish. I’m such a tease :P

Sanyam Bhutani:​ How can someone best contribute to DeOldify?

Are there any long-term goals that you’d like to work on with the project?

Jason Antic: I’ve been getting awesome key contributions from people in so many forms. For example, there are those who simply want something that I haven’t had time to produce yet. The Colab notebook is a great example of this. I loved that one because it made DeOldify way more accessible to a lot of people.

Another interesting key contribution was somebody on Hacker News telling me about the “Chromatic optimization” idea they had which turned out to be the enabling factor in doing unlimited resolution image colorization. It wasn’t code, but it was so important and made DeOldify way better.

Then there are people doing awesome renders with them, sharing them, and even giving me feedback on the problems they have and the wishlist of updates they’d like. That’s a great contribution too!

Contributions can come in many forms. I welcome them wholeheartedly. They make this “job” of mine so enjoyable and meaningful.

Sanyam Bhutani:​ Given the explosive growth rate of ML, How do you stay updated with the recent developments?

Jason Antic: Generally speaking, reading everything and knowing everything is simply not an option today. There’s no such thing as the “person who knows everything” in the world anymore. Thomas Young apparently was the last person who had this title, and he lived two hundred years ago.

Even within just the field of machine learning, there are so many papers coming out and new information that you can’t possibly keep up. So what do you do? You filter intelligently. You choose good resources that do the hard work of distilling what’s actually important and presenting it in a much more useful manner.

Fast.ai is an excellent example of this, and in fact, Jeremy told me that they like to think of their work as “refactoring Deep Learning”. We need that desperately, as there is a lot of noise to be separated from the actual signal at this point.

It’s also much more efficient to let others in the community figure out for you what’s great and then taking a look yourself. So follow some of your ML heroes on Twitter and see what they say! They’re tweeting about great papers and new developments all the time.

Sanyam Bhutani:​ What are your thoughts about Machine Learning as a field, do you think its overhyped?

Jason Antic: Speaking specifically to deep learning, I think Jeremy Howard said it best: “Deep Learning is Overhyped…is Overhyped.” Simply put, I’m strongly of the opinion that even if you just look at the capabilities of what’s already available today, that we’ve far underutilized the potential uses and problems solved with deep learning. And I think that’s chiefly because there’s probably not enough engineers and domain experts running with the tech yet to make this stuff work in the real world. I think people who say it’s overhyped either just like to be contrarian or lack imagination.

That being said, there are some seriously awful startups popping up here and there that make outrageous claims yet get still convinced somebody to fork over money. It’s reminiscent of the dotcom boom in a way. But that’s to be expected — there’s always going to be swindlers and they’re always looking for new ways to take your money. AI and blockchain just happen to be the latest sexy things to achieve that. Keep in mind — though there was a dotcom bust, the internet still really revolutionized the world. The same will happen with deep learning — that much I’m convinced of.

Sanyam Bhutani:​ Before we conclude, any tips for the beginners who aspire to go out and build amazing projects using DL but feel completely overwhelmed to even start?

Jason Antic: Go directly to fast.ai, and do the work! Great results take time and effort, and there’s no good substitute for that.

Sanyam Bhutani:​ Thank you so much for doing this interview.

If you found this interesting and would like to be a part of My Learning Path, you can find me on Twitter here.

If you’re interested in reading about Deep Learning and Computer Vision news, you can checkout my newsletter here.

Interview with the Creator of DeOldify, fast.ai fellow: Jason Antic was originally published in Hacker Noon on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

[Telegram Channel | Original Article ]

#cryptocurrency

[sarahburness]

8 Ways Creativity Helps Us Connect with Ourselves and Get What We Need

“A creative life is an amplified life.” ~Elizabeth Gilbert

When I look back at my life, I recognize that some of the most pivotal moments revolved around creativity and self-expression.

As a kid, that meant community theater. My first solo was “Part of Your World,” from The Little Mermaid. Though I felt incredibly insecure in my green spandex pant-fins as a fairly thick twelve-year old, I was able to tune that out when I made my way center stage.

It was just me, my heart, my voice, and the spotlight. And that song felt written for me, as I felt like an outsider pretty much everywhere at that time in my life.

Around the same time I found my passion for writing—my first foray into the world of self-help, actually. To deal with bullying at school and a difficult home life, I began writing myself a series of motivational essays, little things to boost my self-esteem in a world that seemed to want to tear it down.

It was fairly mortifying when I noticed the boys huddled in the cafeteria, reading from my well-worn spiral notebook, which they had stolen from my backpack. But in retrospect, I wonder if maybe one of them secretly benefitted from something I had written. I’m sure I wasn’t the only one who felt lost and insecure.

Then there was the time after college, more accurately when I should have been finishing my final semester, but instead was in a three-month residential program for people with eating disorders.

My favorite part of the program was art therapy. Though I drew myself, on day one, as a skeletal body curled up in a trash bag of vomit, I left that program with a life-size painting of my healthier self, standing tall and proud, with expansive wings. My art literally reflected my internal transformation.

I have countless stories like these—times when creativity and self-expression helped me make sense of the world, process feelings that might have otherwise festered within, and heal from pains that could easily have consumed me.

I imagine we all do, if not in recent years, then from childhood and adolescence, before the stresses and responsibilities of adulthood began consuming our thoughts and our lives.

Maybe you felt free and alive in a garage band, surrounded by a tribe of misfits, just like you, who came to feel like home. Or perhaps you made jewelry and found a meditative state of bliss that deepened with each bead strung.

You might think you’ve never been creative, perhaps because you never done anything artsy. But odds are, if you look back, you’ll find something you once brought into the world that couldn’t have been there without you—a well-constructed debate in a class that excited you, a detailed pitch for a business idea that inspired you, or even something far simpler, like a particularly clever Halloween costume.

But if you’re anything like me, you haven’t always prioritized creating and expressing yourself. These things may seem like luxuries in a world full of deadlines, debt, and ever-mounting obligations.

Or, perhaps they just don’t seem like appealing options when you could far more easily zone out with Netflix, mindless Facebook scrolling, or a six-pack that’s been calling from your fridge.

I totally get that. I can’t tell you how many nights I distracted or numbed myself because I felt far too wound up to sketch, or color, or write.

Anything creative would have required me to connect with myself, and many times I’ve preferred to escape myself. So I wouldn’t have to listen to what my inner voice was saying and then either act on it or acknowledge I was too scared.

But we need to connect with ourselves. We need to hear the faint voice that’s screaming inside, trying to get our attention and tell us what we need. Otherwise we’re not really living. We’re just dragging our bodies from one place we don’t want to be to the next, waiting for moments when we can dull the pain of our frustration and discontent.

Creativity is the gateway to self-connection, and it’s the path to giving ourselves what we really need. Here’s how it can help us do just that.

1. Creativity can help pull us into the moment.

We have to be present to connect with ourselves, but often we’re caught up in a mental web of worries, regrets, and obsessive thoughts. Creativity has a way of cutting through all that.

Psychologist Mihály Csíkszentmihályi popularized the idea of “flow” in his book Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience. It’s that space when we’re fully immersed in the task at hand, the rest of the world somewhat blurred around us. That’s often what creativity does for us.

I think it’s no coincidence that I first learned how to crochet afghans in that residential treatment center for eating disorders I mentioned before. We weren’t just trying to keep our weakened, fragile bodies warm, though that was a pleasant side effect. We were finding freedom from our thoughts with the meditative experience of looping yarn, row by row.

Whether you’re writing, painting, cooking, or doing something I don’t even know to reference, creativity often pulls you into the now, where you come to face to face with your truest self.

2. Creativity helps us access, process, and express feelings we may otherwise have stuffed down.

When you’re truly dialed in to your present moment experience, creating something from that space of awareness, illusions have a way of melting away. You’re not just creating something pretty or interesting; you’re connecting with a piece of your heart.

This might mean literally writing about your feelings, or it might mean giving visual form to something you couldn’t put into words—a color or scribble that represents an emotion, for example.

I suspect this is why the Wreck This Journal series has been so popular. It’s creation through destruction, and an outlet for the “negative” emotions so many us have been taught to label as bad. Those feelings don’t just go away because we resist them. They need to be somehow processed.

It’s only when we process and express our feelings that we’re able to fully understand what’s going on inside of ourselves, and create space to discover what we need—whether that pertains to our work, our relationships, or any other aspect of our lives.

3. Creativity can help us heal from the past.

I recently found a study that made a correlation between having survived a difficult childhood and being intensely creative. The researchers wondered why mental health disorders were so common in the performing arts, and they conducted this research to better understand the link.

This study was fairly limited in scope, but still, it aligns with what I’ve long suspected: When we’ve experienced neglect, abuse, or trauma, and carry intense shame or anxiety, we may feel a strong pull toward the arts, since this gives us a space to “express all that is human,” as psychologist Paula Thompson put it.

In other words, expressive arts can help us make sense of and make peace with our pain.

As a writer, I can vouch for this, as it’s incredibly cathartic to create a character who’s known a pain you’ve felt before, and not only express what it felt like for you, but also explore what it might have felt like for the person who hurt you. This was certainly my experience in writing my first screenplay.

Creating these kinds of worlds, characters, and scenes can help us empathize with people who’ve wronged us, better understand what shaped them, and ultimately, heal and move on.

4. Creativity is fueled by curiosity—and curiosity is the key to developing self-awareness.

Elizabeth Gilbert, author of Eat, Pray, Love and Big Magic: Creative Living Beyond Fear defines creativity as “choosing the path of curiosity instead of fear.”

When we explore something though our creative work—an idea, a feeling, a topic—that’s really what we’re doing. We’re identifying something that interests us, following our curiosity, and creating something based on what we’ve discovered.

Strengthening this muscle of following curiosity can help us develop a greater sense of self-awareness. We start to ask ourselves the right questions (as opposed to ones that never yield useful or empowering answers), like: Why do I hold this belief? Where did it come from? How does it serve me? What would serve me better?

And simply through the process of creating, we learn about ourselves. I believe we essentially recreate ourselves with everything we create.

5. Creativity is just for us, at least to start.

The world requires a lot from us. Not only do other people have expectations and needs, they also have ideas of who we are or who we should be. This can make it awfully challenging to connect with what feels true and right for us—especially since who we are is always evolving.

For a long time, I felt a pang of inner conflict whenever I thought about evolving beyond my role here on the site. I felt a deeply embedded sense of identity—I’m Lori, a self-help author—and I almost felt afraid of allowing myself to see who else I could be.

I was most scared of exploring possibilities publicly, since that would open me to other peoples’ opinions and judgments. And given that I was in a confusing, uncertain space, I felt highly susceptible to outside influence.

But creativity was just for me. When I was coloring in one of my many adult coloring books, sketching, and working on my screenplay, I could tune everyone and everything else out, and simply focus on my own experience and inner voice.

I think we all need that, especially in a culture that compels us to constantly seek external validation and third-party opinions on our every move, through social media.

We need those moments of self-reflection and self-discovery that no one else can weigh in on or judge. This is how we learn who want to be and what really need to do for our happiness and well-being.

6. Creativity helps peel away layers of stress and anxiety to reveal the peace underneath.

We often say, “I have anxiety” or “I’m so stressed,” as if those things are actually part of who we are. But the truth is we experience anxiety and stress, and underneath there is a calm clarity, like the stillness below raging waves in the sea.

Creative practices give us a positive outlet for our energy and attention. When we’re doodling or woodworking or doing anything with our hands, we’re focusing on something aside from what’s wrong in our life or what might go wrong in the future. We’re essentially giving our brain a break from reliving pain or trying to avoid it.

When we create that relief for ourselves, we’re able to connect with who we truly are, underneath all the layers of fear and conditioning. It’s only by accessing this space of calm clarity that we can make choices that feel right for us.

7. Creativity can help boost our confidence, which is essential to communicating what we need.

It’s all good and well to connect with ourselves and ascertain what we need, but we also need to be able to communicate that to other people—whether that means setting boundaries in our personal life or asking for a more challenging project at work.

When we work on creative projects—particularly when we complete them—we naturally boost our confidence. And that bleeds into other areas of our lives.

An old friend of mine changed careers a few years back and now works as a baker. She posts pictures of these amazing cakes on Facebook, and I’m always blown away to see her artistic talent. These are literally edible works of art.

For a long time she only posted pictures, but she recently started posting videos showing her process. And it seems to me that this experience of creating, being seen, and feeling proud of her work has given her the boost necessary to share even more of herself.

Sharing ourselves, sharing our thoughts, sharing our wants and needs—it all goes hand in hand.

8. Creativity reminds us we’re more than what we accomplish.

We live in a world that sends a pretty conflicting message—it’s all about the journey, but hurry up and do something important so you can prove you matter and make a name for yourself.

We understand, intellectually, that life is always a path, not simply a destination, but it’s hard to escape the nagging suspicion that we haven’t arrived at enough places. That we need to do more, accomplish more, earn more, be more. Because who we are isn’t enough.

Creativity is, by definition, about the process. Sure, it’s great to create something that sells and see that your work impacts other people. But the squeeze isn’t just about the juice.

We gain so much through the act of creating—presence, self-expression, healing, self-awareness, time to ourselves, clarity, and confidence. But perhaps most importantly, we gain the ability to meet in ourselves in a moment, with the sole intention of expressing what’s in our hearts.

There’s something immensely freeing about knowing that this alone is a worthy goal. That we truly can create for the fun of it, for the love of it, because it makes us feel passionate and alive.

And when we feel passionate and alive, we forget for a moment that there’s anywhere else to get to—because for that time, there’s nothing to escape.

Perhaps that is the ultimate goal of connecting with ourselves. We meet ourselves so we can fully meet the present moment, and all the other people who inhabit it. So we can not just get through our days but really live them, and be available to give and receive love. A life fully lived, a self fully expressed, a heart fully open—I don’t know about you, but that’s all I really need.

About Lori Deschene

Lori Deschene is the founder of Tiny Buddha. She’s also the author of Tiny Buddha’s Gratitude Journal and other books and co-founder of Recreate Your Life Story, an online course that helps you let go of the past and redefine yourself. An avid film lover, she recently finished writing her first feature screenplay and would appreciate advice from anyone in the industry to help get this made. You can reach her at email (at) tinybuddha.com.

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from Tiny Buddha https://tinybuddha.com/blog/8-ways-creativity-helps-us-connect-with-ourselves-and-get-what-we-need/

[sophiarosanove7-blog]

Opportunity Purchasers Seeking Homes Available for sale.

These are actually the 5 very most common oversights authors bring in on Fiverr that may be stayed away from by simply allowing people recognize just what you can doing. The third typical cars and truck repair work mistake automobile managers create is actually certainly not being offered for discussion with the auto mechanics involving the fixing procedure. Poor choices or even flawed processes can in some cases trigger mistakes, yet that doesn't mean that every bad outcome is actually a mistake. Rather than splashing around on the error you have actually created, pay attention to what you can possibly do to fix the issue. This is very important and also must be actually very carefully thought about when developing a training course especially produced you, and also as your physical body as well as bodily ailment improvements therefore need to your plan. Any person which has ever possessed the courage to walk out into the planet and also carry out one thing knows there are actually only two sort of blunders: ones our company can bounce back coming from as well as ones our company could certainly not recoup off. To find the very best services to oversights when installing marble floor tiles mentioned in this particular short article, you can possibly do so listed here. As well as without fail, ONE HUNDRED% of the time, I created the inspection costs back in renegotiations with the home owner. That is constantly prudent to find out and fix the mistakes just before the ultimate represent the year are actually made.

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The worst was in the Concerning the Author" segment. Mistakes differ in degree as well as kind and some can be harder to recoup off than others. No one takes pleasure in slipping up having said that sometimes they could deliver a primary knowing adventure. The important thing in my perspective is certainly not to pin the blame for an error on someone, however rather to learn just what resulted in the mistake. When you miscalculate you can use the Sedona Procedure that can help you discharge the damaging psychological cost that guides miscalculating. They aim to play the target duty, desire to show up perfect, and fully refuse any sort of participation in creating the error. The ones that certainly never uncovered or accepted their faux pas never made this into business realm as well as certainly never produced a difference in their own lifestyle, or the world. A fantastic perk of miscalculating is actually that you will certainly find out something you didn't know in the past, and also perhaps you could utilize this training in your future. I'm uncertain that the choices I made as procedures supervisor from the Orbital Maneuvering Lorry (OMV) program almost 3 years earlier were actually always oversights, but the troubles that inevitably killed the OMV were absolutely real. David Slepkow has been actually performing Law Due to the fact that 1997 and also is authorizeded in Rhode Island (RI), Massachusetts (MA) and also Federal Courtroom. For a mutual blunder to be vacant, at that point the product the gatherings are actually incorrect about should be component (importance added). In this article I am actually visiting explain a few of the best usual oversights people bring in when this involves this essential area of private growth. Schoemaker takes note that group blunders are actually commonly simpler to get over due to the fact that there is a diffusion of duty. The good news is, most of us make errors every now and then, despite how smart, just how effectively trained, as well as just how experienced we are actually. Nonetheless, by discovering what the typical repair shop blunders that cars and truck proprietor's make you can avoid a costly and/or uncomfortable knowledge. I will lay out the major ones to ensure if you are actually taking on the job to mount marble floor tiles you have a possibility certainly not to earn the typical errors in the first place. You as well as your youngsters can easily enjoy this film without fear of undesirable as well as distressing waste rooted in sensationalism for rankings as well as greed.

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Hajj Tour Experience

#1 INTRODUCTION

On the off chance that you've been perusing my blog, you'll realize that I don't generally discuss my confidence. In the event that I do, at that point, it's normally design related. And still, after all that, it's not inside and out, it's simply designed. So this is a totally unique sort of post on my blog. I've been pondering doing it for some time now thus I at long last chose to let it all out. I have such a great amount to say and talk in regards to Hajj that I figured it would be a smart thought to share my experience, tips, and exhortation to you.

Alhumdulillah, I've been sufficiently fortunate to have the capacity to visit five times. I've been for Umrah in Ramadan twice and Hajj when I was 10, at that point in my twenties and pretty as of late around 4 years prior. I took my then 3-year-old little girl for Hajj and I need to state it was the best experience ever. Hajj was not troublesome having her with us by any means. I'm so happy she came on the grounds that it made the entire experience all the more paramount.

Each time I've been to the favored land, I've generally returned with something. I have learned a great deal more each and every time I have come back from my excursion and I can hardly wait to impart it to you as well.

Since I have such a great amount of state, I will part My Hajj Tour Experience Series into parts (there are 18 sections). That way it will be significantly simpler for you to peruse and take all the data in also.

Remember that this won't be a swap for every one of the books with respect to Hajj. In this arrangement I won't clarify in full insight about what you should do on every day so it would be a smart thought to peruse those books and whatever other data that you can assemble. I figure it might be a smart thought to peruse up a little about this holy voyage before you read my Hajj arrangement so everything will sound good to you.

A book that I exceptionally suggest for ladies is A Woman's Guide To Hajj And Umrah by Mufti Muhammad Faruq. This book discloses all that you have to think about Hajj particularly in regards to any individual inquiries you may have. Everything is clarified in detail and is straightforward as well.

Having said that, I will address a couple of ceremonies as we come.

For those of you who are sufficiently fortunate to go for this astounding excursion, you are genuinely honored Mashallah. You have been welcomed by the Almighty and I'm happy to the point that you are going to encounter the most wonderful and hallowed trip of a lifetime. Despite the fact that I have been for Hajj and Umrah, I would love to go again and I ensure you'll be stating a similar when you get back. I am longingly sitting tight for my welcome and I want to get it soon Inshallah.

Before I start let me simply illuminate that I performed Hajj E Tamattu, as there are 3 sorts. There's no distinction by the way you play out every one however in light of the fact that it's about the aim. You'll discover more data in the Hajj books in regards to every one of the decisions on this.

On the off chance that you have any inquiries don't hesitate to ask me in the remarks beneath and I'll gladly get back you.

#2 PREPARATION

Similarly as with everything arrangement is vital. It is an essential activity. To ensure you realize what you are doing and what you should be set up for. For Hajj there are a lot of things you have to set yourself up for and you can begin doing those things now on the off chance that you haven't as of now.

In the event that you plan well then you'll have the capacity to set out on this voyage without hardly lifting a finger. What's more, when I say 'set i up', don't simply mean taking every one of the basics and perusing a couple of books. There's significantly more to planning for Hajj than simply that, so I've part it up into 4 classes; Physical, Mental, Spiritual and obviously Packing.

You're likely asking why would that be a requirement for me to do this? Be that as it may, read on and you'll see. I guarantee!

Before I went for Hajj, and I'm discussing my second Hajj as I was just 10 when I went out of the blue. For my second Hajj, I was a considerable measure more seasoned so I comprehended what Hajj implied and what I expected to do.

I read as much as I could and despite the fact that a great deal of it was a reiteration, I learned something new from each book or flyer. What's more, in light of the fact that there was such a great amount of data to take in I chose to streamline it for myself. One thing I discovered hard to recollect was the place I would have been amid every day of Hajj and what I needed to do and ask.

I even found the maps with the photos, content, and bolts calling attention to the voyage to and from Makkah to Mina, Arafat and Muzdalifah including the Jamarat all hard to process. I mean simply writing that out was somewhat of a mean accomplishment yet in the event that you're a beginner, understanding it more likely than not been a lot as well. Furthermore, I don't point the finger at you!

I felt like there was excessively going on and I couldn't process it in a request I could get it. There was such a great amount to recollect that I was getting confounded so I made a booklet for myself about what to do on every day of Hajj. I will speak more about this in my Spiritual arrangement blog entry and will likewise incorporate photos of my booklet for you to see.

Like I stated, everything will appear as though it's excessively and your mind will be over-burden that you believe you can't recall that anything, however insofar as you've gotten your work done, it truly isn't as hard as it appears. I will attempt to make this as simple for you to as could reasonably be expected and help you to get ready for your hajj effortlessly Inshallah.

Toward the finish of each post, I will put a little re-top for you of the considerable number of things you may need to purchase or bring with you. A sort of shopping list on the off chance that you like. I'm seeking it'll enable you after when you to begin planning and pressing for your outing.

So how about we begin and get ready for your adventure.

Hajj execution, and once in a while game plan for giving up too are sorted out by the travel agencies well.

Besides these services, The Khalifah Group also provides many other booking services like; Flight booking, Hotel booking, Taxi booking and Book a Visa application online.

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