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dystopiandilfs · 3 years

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Dream's discord podcast. Basically him answering questions for 2.5 hours. This will sort of be in order but I fucked up my notes so it might not be in order completely. (From 13th May 2021)

For reference the photos at the end are: A prototype of fidget spinner merch as loads of people asked, a reference photo of his favourite merch and a photo he sent of his hair to prove he wasn't a brunette.

•He said his teeth are mostly straight but he's thought about getting Invisalign. He's never had braces. He has a tiny gap in the left side of his mouth and his canines are longer and sharper (vampire arc). He's never had teeth surgery so has his wisdom teeth still.

•He thinks pineapple on pizza is good.

•He likes seafood like lobster and crab. He had crab made in an air fryer last night. He like peas. He thinks quesadillas are good and likes most food.

•He hates Coffee and most drinks

•The Dream Shorts team is Ken who is his personal reminder (Ken's main job is to spam him with texts so he doesn't forget things as he's got a habit of reading texts and not replying) and also comes up with a list of sets for Dream shorts. The builder is a friend and munchymc builder "his talent gets wasted on Dream's shorts but we pay him so"

•His editors are currently Dizzy, Firesale and Mjcr. Willz doesn't edit for him anymore

•The mask animation isn't done but Mask should be released May 21st. He wants to release them together as "the whole song is a double meaning and the whole nuance will be lost without the animation" but no matter if the animation is done the song is getting released on the 21st.

•He and Sapnap eat together often.

•He and Sapnap prefer medium rare Steak

•He wants a home gym it's something he's willing to splurge on. They currently have a weight rack but they haven't even set it up.

•"Eat the rich? Shut up shut up" - Dream

•Talked about money basically saying "Most people don't understand how money works I don't have millions in my bank account it's in assets like merch, land and warehousing for that stuff" (He's not in his landlord arc)

•He's been debating Pride Merch because of Rainbow Capitalism. He doesn't want it too be seen as a money maker and if he does most proceeds would go to charity. He's currently super busy merch wise with Sapnap joining and George in the middle of joining. He did say "Only if the LGBTQ+ community in this community wants it" He thinks he's going to at least change the merch website to a pride one. Sapnap wants to make pride merch including a rainbow flame on his.

•He wants to create a charity that's centered around helping LGBTQ+ one day because he thinks that there's a lack of them. He mentioned that creating a charity was expensive and took a lot and was a complicated process including a board of directors but he wants to do it someday.

•He wanted to buy a bunch of houses in Florida which was a service to house mostly LGBTQ+ youth and people stuck in abusive households for free to get them out of bad home environments. But he didn't because he didn't want people thinking he was profiting of of abuse victims and LGBTQ+ community.

•He said he's terrible with time management and replying to people which is why Ken helps him (and also helps George and Sapnap). He mentioned how Sam messaged multiple times and Dream just forgot to answer but felt bad "I feel like people think I hate them..... Cause I'd be mad if people did that to me"

•He tries to reply to a few texts a day (community number). He also can't do birthday messages everyday because you can only reply at certain times so it's not abusing the system so if you get one it's special. He said he does try but it's got a weird time gap.

•Him and the manhunt winner are trying to come up with a good time to film

•He wants to stream this MCC on twitch and says his team is good.

•He talks about why he's not partnered with Twitch. Basically Twitch has a lock rate (in which you make money) and you legally can't stream on YouTube. So legally if Tommy wanted to stream on YouTube he couldn't. Someone then mentioned how Bad is a twitch partner but still streams on YouTube "Bad streams on YouTube but he has for a while and I don't think that he cares" - Dream

•He likes to reply to every donation he gets on stream and feels bad when he doesn't so he'll turn them off when he streams and wants a platform deal where he can be payed to stream (not twitch). If he gets a streaming partnership he will stream a couple of times a week. He looked in to Facebook but they don't have an alias system meaning you can see everyone's actual Facebook account and personal info, he doesn't like seeing real names on Facebook so it would require a lot of altering if he was to stream there so he's thinking it's probably going to be YouTube.

•He was asked about if his demographic was what he expected and he said he went in with no expectations, he didn't even know what stans were, wasn't really on social media so he wasn't aware of the fan culture. "You guys are a handful sometimes but it's worth it"

•He also mentioned how he and the DreamSMP changed the twitch audience demographic. It used to be male dominated in both streamers and audience and now it's almost split which is unheard on.

•He has 5 fidget spinners in his house. Two in his bedroom. Two in his office. One in the living room.

•He likes his Minecraft skin as he thinks the arm is cook and you never see the rest of his skin really. He says it's unique and different and "me". Dream: You can't even tell half the skins apart on MC.

•He's not lost the motivation to stream. Most of the times if he wants to stream he gets George or Sapnap to do it and he just turns up. It's more beneficial to them as they have donos and subs on. (Don't we fucking know it "can you say hi to")

•He has listened to Lovejoy. Says the ep was great and they're very talented and awesome. Doesn't know what his favourite song is but probably would pick One Day because the chorus slaps.

•RIP to acoustic Roadtrip. He said instead of acoustic Roadtrip we get Mask so no losses today for Dream stans.

•"With Roadtrip I went to Parker and I said Hey I have a story I want to tell through music. I have no experience with that can you help me" He said sure. He crafted the music and melodies and how things are formed where it's catchy. I have less comfort singing that. I love the song and it's my song, it's very representative of me and I'm sure I could sing it but it's a song I'd be kinds of scared to sing live, with Mask I basically did everything. I sat there the entire time and maybe an hour out if the 100 I wasn't in the call. Dream came up with the lyrics and main melody for Mask (First one he's ever come up with) "That was just notes in my fucking voice memos"

•The clip we heard of Mask was a prechorus not the actual chorus. He thinks he'd be more comfortable to do a mask acoustic and it's more melodic than Roadtrip. The chorus also has a lot of instruments similar to Roadtrip. Mask starts of slow and guitar with minimal reverb and is more raw.

• He doesn't want music to be his main thing. It's something fun to do and he's passionate about it as it's a way to express emotions. He wants to release mask then go from there. He wants to release at least one more song but has nothing on his mind currently. His two ideas were Roadtrip and Mask.

•He wouldn't quit his job to become a pizza delivery man.

•His favourite features on himself are eyes or freckles and he also confirmed that he does have eyebrows.

•He was told that Parkour warrior would be bought back some time in the near future and he got excited for it. "Even if I don't win, which I will, it'll be fun"

•Went on about his MCC team but I'm not going to put that in as we should be getting them today. He did say he wasn't on Pink but he did sound confused. (For reference he's always in Pink as it's the last team announced and keeps the hype up by announcing the biggest streamer last)

•Said he and his mum had the Mr Beast burger. He recommends because he likes the avacado. He mentioned how Mr Beast uses "Ghost Kitchens" which is basically where he gives restaurants permission to cook his food so it's restaurant quality food.

•His favourite piece of merch is the circle smile. (The pool photo on Instagram). He said the quality was bad (he worked with a different company and didn't have his own company) and it was elasticy feeling and he's planning on re-releasing it again but with good quality.

•He's started to send merch out in custom packaging. So his bags have the smile and will mostly be green. Sapnap's has the flame and is either black or white. He's also trying to make it so every order has the sticker packs for both him and Sapnap.

•He loves the coins as it's cheaper than a hoodie but still celebrates the milestones and will last a long time. He mentioned how the old coins are getting removed off the site and how if you have any of the coins your special because only a few thousand get made. He's kept around 100 of each coin that he wants to give away in person.

•He wanted to have a cool store where you could access computers that give you access to the DreamSMP in spectator mode. But it's too costly and would require too much time and isn't safe fight now. He doesn't think it'd be worth it financially.

•Most of the hoodie are black instead of multiple colours because of limited supply and covid. Getting the colours are harder because if the pandemic which hopefully won't be an issue soon.

•He wants to do a short meetup tour with Sapnap and George with a few locations in the US (and if others nearby want to join like Quackity or Karl they can). He also wants to visit Australia, UK, Canada, Mexico and Philippines and do something like that there but definitely at least visit with George and Sapnap.

•He's never been to the Philippines but his mum has. He wants to set up a place in the Philippines where he can ship merch in bulk and it would help to reduce shipping. However it would probably be big milestone merch.

•He's not got the vaccine yet but will get it when he needs to. He doesn't leave the house so he doesn't see the point.

•He's the ideas man. George's footcam video was Dream's idea. The T-shirt video was Dream's idea. Most if not all of the Dream Team's videos are Dream's ideas.

•Said he's got a similar/the same hair colour as Froy (Dream buddy at this point the only difference between you and Froy is that one of you is dating Richard Madden /lh)

#dreamsmp #dream smp #dreamwastaken #mcyt #georgenotfound #sapnap

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andromeda1023 · 3 years

Photo

Pic:

On the left, what Rubin expected to see: stars orbiting the outskirts of a galaxy moving slower than those near the center. On the right, what was observed: the stars on the outside moving at the same speed as the center.

Dark matter holds our universe together. No one knows what it is.

If you go outside on a dark night, in the darkest places on Earth, you can see as many as 9,000 stars. They appear as tiny points of light, but they are massive infernos. And while these stars seem astonishingly numerous to our eyes, they represent just the tiniest fraction of all the stars in our galaxy, let alone the universe.

The beautiful challenge of stargazing is keeping this all in mind: Every small thing we see in the night sky is immense, but what’s even more immense is the unseen, the unknown.

I’ve been thinking about this feeling — the awesome, terrifying feeling of smallness, of the extreme contrast of the big and small — while reporting on one of the greatest mysteries in science for Unexplainable, a new Vox podcast pilot you can listen to below.

It turns out all the stars in all the galaxies, in all the universe, barely even begin to account for all the stuff of the universe. Most of the matter in the universe is actually unseeable, untouchable, and, to this day, undiscovered.

Scientists call this unexplained stuff “dark matter,” and they believe there’s five times more of it in the universe than normal matter — the stuff that makes up you and me, stars, planets, black holes, and everything we can see in the night sky or touch here on Earth. It’s strange even calling all that “normal” matter, because in the grand scheme of the cosmos, normal matter is the rare stuff. But to this day, no one knows what dark matter actually is.

“I think it gives you intellectual and kind of epistemic humility — that we are simultaneously, super insignificant, a tiny, tiny speck of the universe,” Priya Natarajan, a Yale physicist and dark matter expert, said on a recent phone call. “But on the other hand, we have brains in our skulls that are like these tiny, gelatinous cantaloupes, and we have figured all of this out.”

The story of dark matter is a reminder that whatever we know, whatever truth about the universe we have acquired as individuals or as a society, is insignificant compared to what we have not yet explained.

It’s also a reminder that, often, in order to discover something true, the first thing we need to do is account for what we don’t know.

This accounting of the unknown is not often a thing that’s celebrated in science. It doesn’t win Nobel Prizes. But, at least, we can know the size of our ignorance. And that’s a start.

But how does it end? Though physicists have been trying for decades to figure out what dark matter is, the detectors they built to find it have gone silent year after year. It makes some wonder: Have they been chasing a ghost? Dark matter might not be real. Instead, there could be something more deeply flawed in physicists’ understanding of gravity that would explain it away. Still, the search, fueled by faith in scientific observations, continues, despite the possibility that dark matter may never be found.

To learn about dark matter is to grapple with, and embrace, the unknown.

Scientists are, to this day, searching for dark matter because they believe it is there to find. And they believe so largely because of Vera Rubin, an astronomer who died in 2016 at age 88.

Flash-forward to the late 1960s, and she’s at the Kitt Peak National Observatory near Tucson, Arizona, doing exactly what she did in that childhood bedroom: tracking the motion of stars.

This time, though, she has a cutting-edge telescope and is looking at stars in motion at the edge of the Andromeda Galaxy. Just 40 years prior, Edwin Hubble had determined, for the first time, that Andromeda was a galaxy outside of our own, and that galaxies outside our own even existed. With one observation, Hubble doubled the size of the known universe.

By 1960, scientists were still asking basic questions in the wake of this discovery. Like: How do galaxies move?

Rubin and her colleague Kent Ford were at the observatory doing this basic science, charting how stars are moving at the edge of Andromeda. “I guess I wanted to confirm Newton’s laws,” Rubin said in an archival interview with science historian David DeVorkin.

Per Newton’s equations, the stars in the galaxy ought to move like the planets in our solar system do. Mercury, the closest planet to the sun, orbits very quickly, propelled by the sun’s gravity to a speed of around 106,000 mph. Neptune, far from the sun, and less influenced by its gravity, moves much slower, at around 12,000 mph.

The same thing ought to happen in galaxies too: Stars near the dense, gravity-rich centers of galaxies ought to move faster than the stars along the edges.

But that wasn’t what Rubin and Ford observed. Instead, they saw that the stars along the edge of Andromeda were going the same speed as the stars in the interior. “I think it was kind of like a ‘what the fuck’ moment,” Yeager says. “It was just so different than what everyone had expected.”

The data pointed to an enormous problem: The stars couldn’t just be moving that fast on their own. At those speeds, the galaxy should be ripping itself apart like an accelerating merry-go-round with the brake turned off. To explain why this wasn’t happening, these stars needed some kind of extra gravity out there acting like an engine. There had to be a source of mass for all that extra gravity. (For a refresher: Physicists consider gravity to be a consequence of mass. The more mass in an area, the stronger the gravitational pull.)

The data suggested that there was a staggering amount of mass in the galaxy that astronomers simply couldn’t see. “As they’re looking out there, they just can’t seem to find any kind of evidence that it’s some normal type of matter,” Yeager says. It wasn’t black holes; it wasn’t dead stars. It was something else generating the gravity needed to both hold the galaxy together and propel those outer stars to such fast speeds.

“I mean, when you first see it, I think you’re afraid of being … you’re afraid of making a dumb mistake, you know, that there’s just some simple explanation,” Rubin later recounted. Other scientists might have immediately announced a dramatic conclusion based on this limited data. But not Rubin. She and her collaborators dug in and decided to do a systematic review of the star speeds in galaxies.

Rubin and Ford weren’t the first group to make an observation of stars moving fast at the edge of a galaxy. But what Rubin and her collaborators are famous for is verifying the finding across the universe. “She [studied] 20 galaxies, and then 40 and then 60, and they all show this bizarre behavior of stars out far in the galaxy, moving way, way too fast,” Yeager explains.

This is why people say Rubin ought to have won a Nobel Prize (the prizes are only awarded to living recipients, so she will never win one). She didn’t “discover” dark matter. But the data she collected over her career made it so the astronomy community had to reckon with the idea that most of the mass in the universe is unknown.

By 1985, Rubin was confident enough in her observations to declare something of an anti-eureka: announcing not a discovery, but a huge absence in our collective knowledge. “Nature has played a trick on astronomers,” she’s paraphrased as saying at an International Astronomical Union conference in 1985, “who thought we were studying the universe. We now know that we were studying only a small fraction of it.”

To this day, no one has “discovered” dark matter. But Rubin did something incredibly important: She told the scientific world about what they were missing.

In the decades since this anti-eureka, other scientists have been trying to fill in the void Rubin pointed to. Their work isn’t complete. But what they’ve been learning about dark matter is that it’s incredibly important to the very structure of our universe, and that it’s deeply, deeply weird.

Since Rubin’s WTF moment in the Arizona desert, more and more evidence has accumulated that dark matter is real, and weird, and accounts for most of the mass in the universe.

“Even though we can’t see it, we can still infer that dark matter is there,” Kathryn Zurek, a Caltech astrophysicist, explains. “Even if we couldn’t see the moon with our eyes, we would still know that it was there because it pulls the oceans in different directions — and it’s really very similar with dark matter.”

Scientists can’t see dark matter directly. But they can see its influence on the space and light around it. The biggest piece of indirect evidence: Dark matter, like all matter that accumulates in large quantities, has the ability to warp the very fabric of space.

“You can visualize dark matter as these lumps of matter that create little potholes in space-time,” Natarajan says. “All the matter in the universe is pockmarked with dark matter.”

When light falls into one of these potholes, it bends like light does in a lens. In this way, we can’t “see” dark matter, but we can “see” the distortions it produces in astronomers’ views of the cosmos. From this, we know dark matter forms a spherical cocoon around galaxies, lending them more mass, which allows their stars to move faster than what Newton’s laws would otherwise suggest.

Continue reading, pictures: https://www.vox.com/science-and-health/21537034/dark-matter-unexplainable-podcast

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lunarr-rrose · 3 years

Video

Brandon Moulton, Hard Money with Fernando Angelucci

https://u109893.h.reiblackbook.com/generic11/the-storage-stud/brandon-moulton-hard-money-with-fernando-angelucci/

On this episode of What is the Deal, the real estate podcast that gives answers, we’ll be covering what is the deal with hard money lending. One of the most common finance tools in fix and flip real estate is hard money.

Joining me to lend some knowledge on hard money is my good friend and colleague, Brandon Moulton

Who are you and what do you do?

For the people that don’t know, what is “hard money”?

What does a day in the life of a Senior Vice President of Lending in a hard money lending firm look like?

Why should a real estate investor use hard money?

What are the decisions someone will be faced when choosing a hard money lender?

How would you advise someone to choose the right hard money lender? What is the most common mistake you see real estate investors make when it comes to utilizing hard money?

On the flip side, what is the most common mistake you see lenders make?

What advice would you give a real estate investor looking to utilize hard money for the first time?

What advice would you give someone considering starting a hard money lending company?

What can a real estate investor do to make themselves the most attractive borrower possible to a hard money lender?

As a facilitator of wealth growth, Titan Wealth Group believes that success is not limited to the sum of our efforts and is infinite with what can be accomplished through partnership.

Facebook:

https://www.facebook.com/TheStorageStud

Instagram:

https://www.instagram.com/TheStorageStud/

Twitter:

https://twitter.com/TheStorageStud

LinkedIn:

https://www.linkedin.com/in/TheStorageStud/

https://www.biggerpockets.com/users/TheStorageStud

Listen to our Podcast:

https://thestoragestud.podbean.com/e/brandon-moulton-hard-money-with-fernando-angelucci/

#TheStorageStud #RealEstateInvesting #SelfStorage

----------------------------------------------------------

Fernando Angelucci (00:04): All right. Hello everyone. Welcome on this episode of What's The Deal, the real estate podcast that gives answers. We'll be covering What's The Deal with Hard Money Lending. One of the most common finance tools in fix and flip and buy and hold real estate is hard money. And joining me today to lend some knowledge on hard money lending is my friend and colleague Brandon Moulton.

Brandon Moulton (00:30): Thanks Fernando. Excited to be here. Was that pun intentional?

Fernando Angelucci (00:36): It was intentional.

Brandon Moulton (00:40): Love it. So yeah, excited to be here crazy times election is hanging in the balance right now as we speak on the fourth year, but you know, excited to talk deals.

Fernando Angelucci (00:53): Cool. So to start it off, why don't you tell the people watching, you know, who are you and what do you do?

Brandon Moulton (01:02): My name is Brandon Moulton senior vice president of lending here at Renovo Financial. What I do is I work with residential real estate investors to help them execute on their business plan, whether it's flips or buy and holds. And then are the asset classes we focus on are anything from a single family up to a 50 unit apartment building and everything in between.

Fernando Angelucci (01:32): Awesome. Okay. So you said that you guys help people out, both on the buy and hold side and on the fix and flip side. Can you go into that, explain to people maybe that might not know what hard money is, what is hard money and how's it different from other say traditional financing sources?

Brandon Moulton (01:52): Sure. So hard money is really just private money for the purposes of the acquisition of real estate. It's tends to be more focused on the asset. And there's more of an understanding we'll say that comes along with each borrower and each age project that maybe doesn't fit into the box that the traditional outlets like conventional lenders would like to see. So and then typically it's, short-term usually 9 to 18 months is the term that you're looking to turn the money in, and either re-fight or sell the property.

Fernando Angelucci (02:38): Okay. And during that nine to 18 months, is it amortize? Is it interest only?

Brandon Moulton (02:44): Typically interest only, but that can depend on each deal and what you cut with that group. Some guys like to see pay downs after, you know, some period of time, but typically interest only.

Fernando Angelucci (03:01): Okay. you said that hard money is usually utilize more when conventional financing sources aren't viable. What are some of those? Give me one or two situations where using hard money would be preferred over, say using a bank.

Brandon Moulton (03:18): Sure. So you know, for, from a hard money perspective, it's typically an asset that is in some state of disrepair. Meaning it needs to be turned around value add whether it's re-zoning or just construction. When it got out the building banks are, you know, and conventional outlets are lukewarm on it. Especially depending on the size of the dollars, they all love the million, million plus that's what gets them out of bed. But for those dollar amounts, less than a million it's a lot of work. It's not something they really gravitate towards. They want the deal with the bow on it at the end where it's stabilized, but the the heavy lifting within the construction period is something that can be a little bit challenging within the conventional world.

Fernando Angelucci (04:12): Yeah. Now with hard money, you said that it's a more of an asset based loan. When you say it's an asset based loan, what does that mean? As opposed to what?

Brandon Moulton (04:24): So asset-based meaning looking at the collateral, focus is initially on the project plan. And then there's, I would say there's some understanding around the personal background and maybe there's some bumps in credit in the past, but really the focus is on the actual hard asset.

Fernando Angelucci (04:45): Gotcha. Okay. Now, so you said that you're the senior vice president of lending at Renovo. What does a day in your life look like? What are you doing on a day to day basis? Maybe it changes a lot. Why don't you give us a little bit of detail into that

Brandon Moulton (05:01): You make it sound so grand, it just means I have more phone calls and text messages. But you know, it's a lot of conversations kind of like what we're discussing now in terms of, you know, how the loan works what the cost is loan to value, but that's kind of the initial onboarding conversations. And then once you know, we've got a history, it starts to become more about what your business plan is and how we can go to the next level. Right. and then also how we can potentially leverage my network of other professionals to help you get there.

Fernando Angelucci (05:43): Gotcha. So it's a lot of business development. You're talking to investors day in, day out, maybe it's helping them source contractors, attorneys, wholesalers. I know you've connected us with a lot of your clients in the past, and we've been able to help them out with sourcing properties as well. When it came to Renovo, give us kind of your history. How did you get there? How long have you been there?

Brandon Moulton (06:09): Yeah, so I initially started my career in finance with a bank, a local bank doing underwriting for construction deals and different real estate opportunities. I did that for about seven years and then I was doing some light rehabs myself and got my brokers license and really kind of saw this as maybe a potential path that I wanted to go on and as a developer, but I was introduced to the guys here at Lenovo and you know, really haven't looked back since I started as a loan officer and kind of worked my way up the totem pole here. So but yeah, I mean, it's been a great run. You know, the economy has been phenomenal and then there's also just been more confidence in the idea of private money or hard money lending here recently.

Fernando Angelucci (07:05): Yeah. One of the things that I've noticed is, you guys are very quick to close deals. I've heard from multiple of my buyers that when they use you guys, you guys can usually close in, you know, usually 14 to 21 days. In some cases you've done it even faster than that. I'm not not saying that every deal is like that, but usually when when a borrower has all their information buttoned up, they already are in your system. It seems like you guys can close pretty quickly. When should a real estate investor decide to use hard money. One of the reasons I'm alluded to right now is obviously speed. What might be another reason to use hard money?

Brandon Moulton (07:47): Yeah. So I would say there's really three primary reasons. One you just touch on, which was speed. Two is a dilution of partners. So within private money, we're willing to go higher advancing, advance higher into the capital stack so that you have to take on less partners. I think we talked to a lot of folks and it gets pretty old pretty quick. When you're the one finding the deal running around, chasing the contractors and then selling it and maybe your rich uncle put up all the money, but you split it half at the end that it kind of gets old after you do it a couple of times, given the amount of work and how hard it is to find these projects and then bring them to completion. And then the third I would say is real-world underwriting. So there's a more understanding around kind of maybe, some lumps in your credit or maybe your tax return you're self employed. So it doesn't look, you know as the way a bank would like it. So just having that general understanding and the ability to have the conversation, I think, is a big driver of why folks like to use private money.

Fernando Angelucci (09:00): Yeah. I know when we were flipping properties, one of the things that was always tough, especially in the beginning was when we went to a local bank, they wanted 25 to 35% down of the purchase price. And then anywhere from 50% or more of the rehab, we had to fund ourselves in some banks even quoting me that I had to put all the rehab dollars. And so that's a lot of cash out of pocket. Say, you have a prime plus borrower, everything looks good. He has decent credit, you know, good experience, you know, what can they usually look to be putting down on both the purchase side and on the rehab side?

Brandon Moulton (09:38): Yeah. So we look at the deal on a total cost scenario of what your acquisition cost is, and what your rehab cost is. And then we would be funding somewhere between 80 to 85% of that total cost. Meaning you'd have to come in with a 20 to 15% down now, pre COVID, we were going up to even 90. I'm sure we'll get back to those days at some point, but we're not there right now. So 15 to 20% of the total costs is what you can expect for somebody that's got some experience and some, a good track record.

Fernando Angelucci (10:18): And then as far as ratio to let's say total ARV, what's kind of your guys as stop limits as far as how far you'll go up on a deal?

Brandon Moulton (10:28): Yeah. It's a pretty straightforward between 60 to 70%.

Brandon Moulton (10:32): Okay. And that's.

Brandon Moulton (10:34): Make sure there's on the back end so that you can get out of it and move forward.

Fernando Angelucci (10:42): Yeah, absolutely. So, you know, a lot of people that are watching this video and a lot of people that we work with, they always like to utilize hard money lenders and there's, you know, the space has been getting crowded recently with the amount of cheap money out there, funding these hard money lenders, someone's going to select a hard money lender. What are the decisions they are going to be facing? What type of things should they be looking for from the hard money lender to just almost like verify or vet that lender?

Brandon Moulton (11:13): Yeah. So about five years ago, you touched on a point here that it's become a pretty crowded space. Goldman Sachs bought a group out of California Genesis, and that really legitimized kind of the industry, so to speak. And since then it's been like you said, a pretty crowded space and competitive, but you know, when choosing a hard money lender you really got the option of kind of national versus local, right? So the national guys are all backed by wall street. They're typically going to be a lower cost or lowest cost provider typically, but it's still very much check the box even for hard money. And you know, you're still gonna have to kind of meet their ratios and kind of check the boxes. I said and then you've got local guys that can provide some more flexibility, speed, know how due to their local knowledge expertise and probably just being a little bit more nimble and not as bureaucratic. And then you've probably got another kind of layer of it. That is probably just, you know, a guy that's got a few million bucks that can kind of write a check on site and take a mortgage on the property. So those are the kind of the three options I would say. So you've got to kind of balance out how your deal fits in into each bucket and what makes sense. And that timing also plays a role into it as well.

Fernando Angelucci (12:55): Yeah. And I want to touch on a few points you had there. So the first thing is with those national guys, what I've noticed is the underwriting is very similar to if you were to go to a bank. So the speed is not usually there compared to say a local guy. And the underwriting is pretty onerous compared to say somebody that knows a local market. The second thing I wanna to touch on is, again, the importance of going with a local lender that knows the investment areas here in Chicago, in the areas that are primarily sought after for investment purposes. A lot of those areas are almost block by block and someone that is not headquartered in the area that you're investing in may not know that, Hey, if you cross the street, all of a sudden the after-repaired values jump up a hundred thousand, or if you go on the other side of this park then all of a sudden you're in a completely different area, even though on a map, it looks like it's right next to it.

Fernando Angelucci (13:53): But if you actually know the local area, you'll start to see those changes. And that's huge for us investors because we're always trying to invest kind of on the borderlines, right? Where a class A area bleeds into a class B areas that you can buy at class B prices, rehab it, and then sell it at class A prices or C to B, what have you. So those are the two things that I noticed. And then the third thing is you touched on these what I call these mom and pop hard money lenders, right? It may be just some high net worth individual. It's just him sitting behind a desk and he's just turning his money over and over again. What I've noticed with those types of guys is they usually get tapped out pretty quick, and they could only have a couple loans going at any given time. So if you were relying on someone like that, you can get caught holding the bag with a contract that you're not gonna be able to fund. So talk to me about Renovo, give me an idea of like how you guys are funded and how much available funds you have. Every time I've talked to you, you've never had any issues with funding deals. You've never had any issues w with finding the money for a property.

Brandon Moulton (15:04): Yeah. We've taken a little bit of different approach to kind of the game here. And it's really taking the blend of local expertise and kind of having that community banker understanding and know-how, but kind of cross-pollinating it with an institutional platform and the capital structure behind it. So definitely a little bit unique in that regard that we have the flexibility and of the, of the local guys, but with the the backing of the institutional guys.

Fernando Angelucci (15:40): Yeah. So yeah, I'm glad you kind of covered some of those things. So let's switch gears here and now let's talk about the borrower themselves or the insurance themselves. So, you know, hard money is a great tool if you know how to use it well, but it can be a pretty disastrous tool, if you don't know what you're doing, you know, what are some of the most common mistakes you see real estate investors making when it comes to utilizing hard money?

Brandon Moulton (16:12): So there's a few I'll touch on here. I would say, starting very big and in terms of construction budgets, and then maybe municipalities that they're not familiar with. I mean, here in Chicago you go to Berwyn some of the other local municipalities, they have different requirements, and they can really jam you up on inspections and stop work orders, et cetera. And if you're not playing by the rules of the game you can really find yourself you know, tied up with a hard money loan or private money loan. That'll just really chew away your profits. So know your municipalities inside and out, I would say start with a smaller budget, especially out of the gates. And you know, those bigger budgets and those luxury class A stuff could be very dangerous. Cause if you don't make the market time, you could be sitting on that for quite some time and really just getting chewed up like I said, so. Budgets and municipalities are the two biggest pitfalls I see.

Fernando Angelucci (17:28): Yeah, absolutely. And one of the things that I've noticed especially on the municipality side is when investors are trying to game the system. So I've seen some pretty nasty deals where the investor tried to avoid pulling permits, the municipality found out, and then all of a sudden they get a stop work order. Now they can't do construction for, you know, six to nine months until they remedy this. And that's, you know, six to nine months of hard money. That's a lot of interest to be paying. Another thing that I've also seen is the timing of the market like you alluded too, you know, in Chicago, we have pretty severe winters and the real estate activity from buyers from end buyers, homeowners drop significantly during the wintertime. And so does prices usually see a 5 to a 10% drop in prices across the board during those times.

Fernando Angelucci (18:18): And I've seen some larger projects that the scope kind of exploded a little bit. The construction took a lot longer and all of a sudden now they're listing in winter as opposed to trying to list early fall, late summer, that has caused a lot of issues. So yeah, very, very important things to watch out for one of the nice things I like about working with you, Brandon, is you're not only a lender, but you're almost like a third-party advisor. You come and you help them with their scope. You tell them, Hey, I don't know if this timeline's really making sense. How can we tweak this to make sure that you're geared, you know, cause you're always looking to have your clients perform well, the last thing you want to do is take a property because Renovo's not in the business of owning property Renovo's in the business of lending capital to successful real estate investors. Right?

Brandon Moulton (19:06): Yeah.

Fernando Angelucci (19:07): So.

Brandon Moulton (19:07): So yeah, I mean, I work you know, having, you know, writing hundreds of these deals over my career kind of seeing, you know, how these these deals go and what to expect and you know, what budgets are appropriate given what their plan is. And also asking if they've rehabbed and places these different municipalities to make sure they're aware of all the requirements and which ones are particularly tough. So, like you said, we're looking to get in and out of these deals, want to have a successful track record with our guys and, and continue to turn the money and help them hit their goals, plain and simple.

Fernando Angelucci (19:50): Yeah. So one of the things that I've also noticed just because we have buyers that always ask for referrals and a lot of these buyers already coming from a previous hard money lender that made some kind of mistake and then have gone over to work with you guys and stayed with you. What are some of those common mistakes you've seen your competitors make, which has caused business to migrate from them over to you guys?

Brandon Moulton (20:18): I would say the, you know, the biggest one, you know, they can lend folks into a problem when they're really they don't have those conversations and if they fit the box, so to speak on paper you know, maybe it doesn't actually makes total sense and then they can get guys into a couple more projects than they should. And then that creates friction long term, and then an opportunity for us. I would say other piece is over promising and under delivering especially on timelines, that's a big one thinking they can get it done and they can't actually get it done and for any variety of reasons. And then the third is there's, you know, with the national guys, there's just things that happen on wall street or from these institutional players that back them that they might just say, Hey you know, if your budget is more than 50% of your ARV, we can't do it. Or if your purchase price is 50% less than your budget, that's just a hard no. So they start to run into those kind of hard no's in the box type lending scenarios.

Fernando Angelucci (21:36): Yeah. So we've seen you know, the market's been really great for real estate, especially even going into COVID. And I think the main reason for that is there's just low inventory. There's just no deals out there. Same thing on the flip side for the homeowners are I'm seeing ARV is going up because of the low inventory. I don't think that's going to last very long. But because of that, I have you know, a lot of newer investors jump into the space, start to look to leverage their money and start looking at utilizing hard money. So what's some advice you'd give to say a newer real estate investor looking to utilize hard money for the first time.

Brandon Moulton (22:19): Let's talk, let's have a conversation about why we're doing this, And really make sure we're in it for the right reasons. And it's not just a good thing to discuss at a cocktail party. But that you're actually really ready to live in breathe. You know, what this takes to get done, because fighting with contractors, finding properties, passing inspections, isn't for the faint of heart, by any stretch of the imagination. So you really gotta have a good team around you to get through it initially. And I think it starts with you know, a good real estate broker, a good contractor in particular that can make or break you. And then you know, from there, if you're willing to, you know, continue to take the next steps you know, we've got some to talk about, but a real solid team is what it takes to get you off the ground here.

Fernando Angelucci (23:15): Okay. So real solid team, that sounds like it's super important. What type of pre-work can an investor start doing to make themselves more attractive as a borrower to say, Renovo what things can they be doing with, you know, reserves with credit, with finances, those types of things.

Brandon Moulton (23:40): Well, for the new guys, know your numbers, it's a really disappointing conversation when somebody tells me, Hey, I want to get into real estate. And then you start to ask them, you know, what do you look like on paper? What, you know, what do you make annually? And they say, well, I don't know, what do you have in the bank? It depends on the day. Those types of answers are just not going to fly well. It really makes a call short in my opinion, because if you don't know your numbers, I'm not going to know them either. And you should be looking at us as the lender, as your biggest investor. We're going to be putting up over 80% of the money in some instances. So come prepared and have a good business plan.

Brandon Moulton (24:27): And you should also be seeking out mentors and folks in the industry that are actually doing these types of deals. And maybe you can start, you know, as an equity investor putting into their deals so you can shadow them and, and kind of see how things work. And then the second piece, I would say to start to you know, run a lot of the different scenarios on different deals and track your neighborhoods and what your business path could look like. And then start to talk with maybe friends and family on the first deal. So there's a little bit less pressure going into it. And your first deal. So friends and family is a good way to get started. I've also seen people, you know, buy a property and use a two or three K loan to get started as their first flip or buy conventionally and then fund the construction out of pocket. That's how I did my first flip. So there's a lot of ways to do this. If you've got the grit and really wanna kinda make it happen.

Fernando Angelucci (25:33): Yeah. So, okay. So it sounds like to summarize, get a good team around you.

Brandon Moulton (25:39): Yep.

Fernando Angelucci (25:39): Make sure you have a solid business plan and, you know, your markets have a little bit of experience before you come to a hard money lender and then make sure that your numbers are buttoned up on the financial side. What do you usually like to see as far as reserves? What do you like to see as far as, you know, tax returns, the adjusted gross income? What are those types of things look like?

Brandon Moulton (26:00): Yeah. So from a liquidity standpoint in cash or cash reserves, that's going to weigh pretty heavily in the conversation. Because inevitably during the process of rehabs and construction, there's always something that happens or comes up and, you know, you're going to be expected to step up and, and typically fund that difference. So we want to see a minimum on post after your down payment of a minimum of six months of reserves or 50 grand.

Fernando Angelucci (26:33): Is that interest reserves only, or is that what types of reserves?

Brandon Moulton (26:37): So when I say reserves six months of your like what shows up on your credit report as far as your monthly obligations.

Fernando Angelucci (26:45): Okay.

Brandon Moulton (26:48): So your house, your car, credit cards, whatever it might be, we want to see six months of that and minimum.

Fernando Angelucci (26:54): Okay. And then at least maybe $50,000.

Brandon Moulton (26:57): Yeah. You're going to need it. The worst thing I can do is lend you into a problem that you can't get out of. And then you're scrambling mid project to be able to cover any shortfalls, et cetera.

Fernando Angelucci (27:12): And these are a lot of the things that you cover when somebody first reaches out to you and starts getting started with the process with Renovo. Right?

Brandon Moulton (27:20): Absolutely.

Fernando Angelucci (27:22): Tell people then, you know, how can they reach you? And is there anything they should know before they try to contact you

Brandon Moulton (27:30): Pretty straight forward. I got my phone with me you know, 24/7.

Fernando Angelucci (27:36): I know it.

Brandon Moulton (27:38): You know it. But I can be reached at [email protected] or my cell phone, which I can give Fernando to post later and feel free to either shoot me an email or a text, and we'd be happy to get a call scheduled with you. And see how we can make it work.

Fernando Angelucci (27:58): Great. So [email protected] and they can also go to www.RenovoFinancial.com, Is there a way if they go to the website that they can say, Hey, I want to talk to Brandon.

Brandon Moulton (28:09): Yeah. So there's a, if you call in to our the phone number provided online. Jess would be the one that takes the calls in and she'd be able to direct you guys to me.

Fernando Angelucci (28:25): All right. Perfect. Well Hey, Brandon, I really appreciate you coming on, taking time out of your busy schedule.

Brandon Moulton (28:31): Same to you.

Fernando Angelucci (28:33): I know you have a little baby at home to taken a lot of your time, so I'm glad you had time.

Brandon Moulton (28:36): Oh yeah.

Fernando Angelucci (28:36): To make time here. So I appreciate everybody tuning in for this week's episode of What's The Deal, where we covered Hard Money Lending and got you the answers you need. Thank you very much, and I'll see you next week.

#real estate #real estate investing #the storage stud #storage stud #fernando angelucci #self storage #alternative funds

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mojowriterblog · 3 years

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Researching for Fiction Locations using VR

While I have used a type of virtual reality for years now, it’s always been on a screen in front of me. Things like Google Earth, Google Street View, and apps like Second Life have been familiar and useful to me when I want to get a unique feel for a place that I cannot actually visit in person.

Then, one day last year, my good friend and podcasting partner Joe started telling me about how much fun he and his wife have been having with their Oculus Quests, and that no, you don’t have to hook it to a $2500 gaming PC. It’s a self-contained $300 piece of tech.

Go on, I said. I’m listening.

The latest one, he told me — the Quest 2 — has even higher specs for an even lower price. The way he was talking, it made me think that perhaps VR hardware stood on the brink of being mainstream. The real kicker, though, was not about gaming — he told me that if I got a set, we could hang out in a virtual theater and watch videos on a screen that rivals the best of the best physical movie screens. They’re huge, he told me. It’s like being there.

In other words, Joe talked me into it.

Now, I did already have a headset, but it was one of those ones where you put a smartphone into it, and I had used it maybe three times before putting it back in its box and sticking it on a shelf — where it still sits today. I’ll just say it was an underwhelming experience.

But Joe emphatically told me the Quest 2 was different.

Now those who know me will tell you that when I get into something I find really interesting, I don’t just stick my toe into it. I get on a high dive and do a full cannonball right into the deep end. Not only did I buy myself one, but after trying it out, I immediately bought one for everyone in the family.

This, I thought, was real deal. A total game changer.

The next big thing.

Here’s the problem, though — it’s such a transformative experience that there’s no way to really relate it to someone who’s never done it. It’s kind of like losing your virginity. It’s crossing a major threashold into an entirely new level of experience.

I’m not so sure about earlier VR headsets — the cell phone based one I have only slightly hinted at this — but the Oculus Quest 2 put me into a whole other world. Your mind almost instantly accepts this new space you’re in as real. It’s the closest thing to actual teleportation I have ever experienced, and I know it’s not just me — my family members said the same thing. The weirdest part is not when you “go in” to the experience, it’s when you take the headset off and look around and realize, wow, I’m back. That for some reason is even more jarring — going from this big, Disneylandesq space, or the huge movie theater, or from beside a lake with a fishing pole in your hand, to suddenly being in the dimly lit little cluttered room in your house that you suddenly realize needs a good dusting and probably vacuuming.

One might at this point ask if we’re at the level of the movie Ready Player One.

Emphatically NO. But you can see it on the horizon. It’s there. Whether or not we want to go there is another question, and that is a whole other discussion.

When I told you I dive in like a cannonball, I’m not joking, because based on my Oculus Quest 2 experience I almost immediately did something I had already decided not to do — I bought the VR headset produced for my Playstation 4 Pro, because I wanted to see what it was like to actually immurse myself into the alien worlds I visit in the game No Man’s Sky.

I’m glad I went with the Oculus first, because it is far superior to the Playstation headset, with one exception — the Playstation headset is more comfortable to wear. Despite it’s lower image quality, I must admit it still gives me a very good feeling of what it’s like to walk the surface of alien worlds, with huge moons in the skies, and wondrous archways of planetary rings — and sunsets with sometimes two, or even three suns.

Which brings me to the actual subject of this artical. Research.

I’m the type of writer who likes to write what I know. I don’t like to guess. But until now, I have never been able to say I know what it’s like to walk on an (admittedly fictional) alien world.

I do now. And I’m using that experience in my writing.

But, also, in the Oculus Quest, I have a program that pulls in Google Street View, and allows me to take meandering walks in frozen time, down just about any street in the world. And it’s not like viewing it on a screen, it’s like standing right there on that street. I feel what it’s like to be there.

What an awesome tool!

That’s right. Tool. Not toy. This is an incredibly useful tool for researching locations for fiction. That app in the Oculus store only cost $9.99, and it is going to save me literally thousands upon thousands of dollars in travel expense — and probably prevent me from contracting a certain troublesome virus.

And you’d better believe I’m going to write all this off as an expense on my taxes.

Now, it’s not going to completely replace travel. When the pandemic subsides, there are a few places I really need to visit. And I will. But until then, I’ll be donning my headset and teleporting to places — here on Earth, and elsewhere in the galaxy.

If you ever needed an excuse to try one of these out, especially the stand-alone Oculus Quest 2, I say give it a go. You won’t really know what it’s like until you do it yourself.

#vr #fiction writing #writing #amwriting #writing community

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twoidiotwriters1 · 4 years

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Starcrossed Losers 2.II (Josh Wheeler xF!Reader)

A/N: I should’ve told you this earlier lmao but the first half of this season is heavily inspired on the show’s podcast, meaning that the plot follows the podcast’s occurrences of the last episode, if you haven’t you should listen to it, pls -Danny

Words: 2,646

Warnings: Swearing

Series’ Masterlist

Previous Chapter // Next Chapter

Listen to me!

It takes me about fifteen minutes to go back to the mall, my mood has improved and it only gets better once I see the main entrance. Josh made this graffiti of a sunrise on one of the stores' windows to represent our tribe: Daybreakers. I thought it'd be cool to make a bigger version of it and hang it outside the entrance; so that's where it's proudly hanging.

"Where were you?" Alex walks up to me. "We just got a whole box of medical stuff, we need to store them!"

"Glad I didn't miss it," I grin.

As I make my way through I get a glimpse of the small little groups that have settled on the mall and that you probably wanna know about. We'll get there, don't worry. We have time. Right now I have to hurry.

'I fell in love again All things go, all things go Drove to Chicago All things know, all things know'

Wesley passes by, he sees me and hollers.

"Our Doc is back! Any good news, Y/N?"

"Take a guess," I smile brightly. "I have to go and store some things, but I'll see you in a moment, okay?" Wesley raises a brow.

"I don't see why not," He smirks. "I have my own business to attend right now, anyway..."

"What business?" I ask.

"We had this idea for a race across the mall and it's about to start. I'm supposed to be the one who gives the green light so I gotta get moving."

When he says 'we' I know he means Angelica, Josh and him, they're always doing this fun and exciting competitions, and it's been barely a week! They're supposed to make us grow closer, we're about 80 people here, which is quite a lot. A mix of cheeramazons, gamers, former jocks, and og daybreakers. But I know pretty much everyone personally, I have to, I'm their healer after all.

'We had our mindset All things know, all things know You had to find it All things go, all things go'

"Who brought all of this?" I ask Alex while we put the little boxes on each shelf.

"Leila and Tyler, they were doing their rounds when they found this a few blocks away, they're mostly from abandoned houses..."

"Good job, Leila and Tyler," I say in amazement.

"So how did your meeting go?" Alex raises a brow.

"Oh my god, I feel like the weight of the world has been lifted from my shoulders," I sigh heavily. "Sam finally accepted our offer, but there's a few things I need to talk with the others. I still think everything's fine, though."

"I'm glad, the jocks were the only tribe that was acting up, it was about time..."

"You know it was all Maya's fault. I hate her."

"Don't we all?" He snorts. "She's still living her best life?"

"Sam still has her there with her in the Queen's office, so of course."

"Y/N!" Angelica runs into the pharmacy and hugs me briefly. "Took you long enough! How did it go?"

"A total success," I grin, hugging her back. "But you know, since you're here I'd like to talk to you about some things the jocks are trying to get. I know you'll say no, but I'm still obliged to say it."

"So tell me."

"They're asking if it's on us to provide food for their movie nights."

"Fuck no! They have a full fuctioning orchard and they want us to give them more food?" Angelica frowns.

"It was Maya's idea," Alex says over his shoulder.

"Yes," I roll my eyes, "but Sam wasn't exactly against it, so I had to ask. I did tell them it wasn't likely to happen, so it's okay, we can say no, they agreed to it anyway."

"Good, because we won't agree to that."

"Done!" Alex turns around with satisfaction. "You can go and take off those skates. God, your poor feet must hate you."

"They're used to it," I laugh. "I won't say no to a well-deserved nap, though..."

"Now that we have all of those deals with the tribes, what's next?"

I'm about to answer when I see Josh approaching with his signature grin. He gets over to where I'm standing and lifts me off the ground in a swift movement. I'm aware we're being sickengly cute, but we're still in our 'honeymoon' phase, we tend to be cheesy. I laugh and put my arms around his neck before he puts me back down.

"How's your day going?" He asks me, clearly expecting to hear about the Jocks.

"Well, dearest leader," I smirk, taking off my backpack and rummaging through the papers. "I'm pleased to announce they finally accepted. They're trying to force us to provide the snacks, though. But all you have to say is no and that'll be it. Sam will understand, she's the one growing food, she can't expect us to give away ours."

"You're serious?" Josh asks. "That's awesome, Y/N! I knew you could do it!"

He leans down to kiss me, but before we even touch Angelica yells at us.

"Hey, if you guys can keep it in your pants for a moment," I hear her beside us. "KJ's looking for you at the gamers station."

"Oh," I frown. "What for?"

"I don't know, I think there's some problem with the signal, the gamers' WIFI is slower than the one in the cave so they're whiny about it."

"That's not something I can fix," I roll my eyes. "I'll go and listen to them."

"I have to go back to the Cheeramazon station," Josh comments. "I just wanted to know how it went with the Jocks."

"And here I was thinking you were glad to see me," I tease, and he chuckles. I put the notebook in my backpack. "Oh! Before I forget..."

I tell them about the Tribes book and how they'll send a jock at some point during the week to ask about the subdivisions and all. Angelica thinks is a bit silly but she agrees to receive the jock anyway, Josh agrees with it a hundred percent, he thinks this is the final step to become a real tribe. I agree, it took us a long time to find a home, we're happy.

'I was in love with the place In my mind, in my mind I made a lot of mistakes In my mind, in my mind'

When I find KJ I see that there's an actual crisis happening. Aria and her are arguing and they only stop when I arrive, both coming up to me at the same time.

"The wifi is-"

"I think someone is trying to hack-"

"–We can barely play tetris on this shit-"

"Hold on," I huff. "Aria, you said someone is trying to hack into your computer?"

"Not my computer, the whole net," Aria continues, pleased to see it was her concern the one I decided to talk about. "It's weird, and we're having comunication problems with the other tribes, the signal falls every half an hour."

"I'm no expert at tech," I frown. "Why were you wanting to see me?"

"She says it's my fault," KJ replies. "I helped Angelica with the set-up for the gamers division and the solar panels on the movie theater, she thinks I fucked up the signal."

"It's because we didn't let you join back into our lines, just admit it," Aria rolls her eyes.

"I don't want to be in your stupid tribe! I'm fine here!"

"Enough!" I interrupt them, "Aria, as much as we want to be good hosts while you're our guests, I must ask you to not start fights with the members of my tribe, the daybreakers will always be my priority. KJ, maybe try not to react so aggressively with our guests? Listen, I'll talk to Angelica so we can find a solution, I bet there's something we're missing here and I doubt it has to do with KJ's abilities. Give me two days, alright?"

Both girls nod, KJ glares at Aria one last time before leaving.

"We appreciate your efforts, Y/N," Aria tells me out of the blue. "I wasn't trying to be rude, it's just... even if Triumph is no longer a thing, there might still be threats out there, it's better to remain informed, and for that we need a strong internet connection."

"Yeah well, I'll see what I can do," I give her an awkward smile. "You think the cave's renovation's will be done anytime soon? Not that I'm kicking you guys out, I just... my kids are getting nervous about the lack of food and..."

"One more week and we'll go, I promise," Aria tells me. "We're working no it."

An hour later during lunch, after I tell the whole story to Wesley and Turbo, both seem happy that my meeting was a success.

'Is everyone alright?' Turbo asks me.

The cheeramazons and Josh have been teaching sign language to all of us, so Turbo's life is improving now that he can speak to more people than before. He's also healing, and if I manage to do things correctly, he might be able to speak again in a few months.

"The jocks are just fine," I reply happily. "Don't worry, Sam is taking good care of your boys and girls."

He nods, though I can see he's a little sad about being thrown away from his former home, I know how that feels like. Sort of.

"You know, Doc, I'm really proud of you," Wesley raises a brow. "You went for it, took a place in the community and slayed your demons, now look at you! You're a higher power in our youth!"

I laugh at his observation.

"I'm doing the bare minimum," I shrug.

"It's more than I ever did during my time with the jocks as second in command," He sighed. "But still, you should be proud, sister."

"I'll be, eventually," I say simply.

Before we can continue our chat Josh sits down next to me and offers me water, which I accept with a soft 'Thank you'.

"So what now?" He asks me.

"What do you mean?" I tilt my head.

"You made deals with every tribe there is, now what's the next thing on your list?"

"Keep them going," I reply matter-of-factly. "Just because they said yes doesn't mean it'll stay like that forever, you know? We gotta mantain our relationships healthy and strong, perhaps we could organize events for all the tribes to join us... like New Year's Eve, or another Prom night..."

"Woah, hold on there, Miss President," Wesley scoffs. "We gotta focus on our tribe first. Our food is lacking, so are our living space and medical supplies."

"Well perhaps is because you won't stop organizing dangerous competitions where half of our kids get injured, our supplies would be fine otherwise," I point out.

"Don't take away their joy, Y/N," Wesley says. "Turbo's with me in this one, right?" He turns to his boyfriend and the boy nods.

'Kids need the distraction' Turbo explains. 'So they don't start fighting each other.'

"I know that," I sigh. "We'll find a solution, okay? I'll think of something..."

"You look exhausted," Josh says worringly, he stands up and then helps me to do the same. "C'mon, let's take you to bed."

"Just don't be too loud, it's the middle of the day," Wesley yells at us from his place once we're halfway gone. Josh and I turn to him in outrage.

"Is not- we're not-" I try to say, but the words tangle in my head.

"I'm just walking her to the mattress store!" Josh replies, blushing. "I wasn't going to put my hands down-"

"Don't you dare finish that sentence," I say.

We share a look but we quickly turn away.

The thing is, Josh and I haven't had sex. We made out a couple times when we were alone, but those times are gone, more so with eighty people walking around the mall at all times. Besides, I've never had sex in my life and I'm terrified of the possibility of getting pregnant during the apocalypse, I mean, that equals to be asking for a painful, slow death.

Josh understands that, and he said he'd wait. He even said that if I never want to have sex that's okay too. But who knows if that's the truth, Josh is an eighteen-year-old. He won't be understanding all the time.

Now that Wesley killed the mood we walk in silence until we reach the mattress store, Josh puts a hand on my shoulder and looks at me, struggling to speak.

"I... uh-" He shakes his head lightly. "I..."

"I know," I say with a reassuring smile. "Wesley's joking. He knows we're not... that I'm not ready."

"I know that too," He frowns. "I... You know I care about you, right?"

"Of course," I grin. "Don't worry about it. I really want to take a nap, so is it okay if I go?"

"Yeah, totally," He removes his hand from my shoulder and gives me a shy smile.

I nod and start my way towards the nearest bed, but an arm grabs me by the waist and turns me around. Before I understand what's going on Josh's lips are on mine and he's kissing me.

It's a good kiss, firm and loving enough to relieve all the tension from my shoulders. When we part I see the softness in his eyes looking for approval. I let out a short laugh.

"What was that for?" I ask in amusement.

"Was it okay?"

"It was great."

"Good," Josh nods, still looking quite insecure. "Just making sure."

"Okay, you freak," I giggle. "See you in a while..."

When I wake up from my nap it's around 7 pm and I still feel a bit groggy. My phone rings and I pull it out to see a notification from Spotify. It's from the podcast the AV club has been doing for a while. I eagerly unlock the phone, it's a reminder that I haven't listened to the last two episodes and that last episode I heard ended in quite a confusing moment. I was afraid they'd been hurt, I'm glad to see that's not the case.

I like those kids, last time they did an episode to honor Eli's death. They also talked a bit about Hoyles but no one really ever liked Hoyles. Eli's part was sweet.

As I start listening to this episode Melissa says they're hiding from some kids in suits? And not many things make sense, why would they be following them? They also talked about their strange poly relationship but that wasn't the point.

The point is that the AV club was about to die, and there was no one listening.

I fearfully click on the next episode, waiting to hear they escape.

'I made a lot of mistakes I made a lot of mistakes I made a lot of mistakes I made a lot of mistakes'

"This isn't about spying like the germans gathering all kinds of intimate information," Melissa aka Harvard continues in a panicked voice, "and we are most definitely not being forced to do this by a tribe that has tak-"

The audio cuts there for a moment, but that's all the confirmation I need.

We have to save the AV Club.

"Josh!" I run out of the mattress store, looking everywhere. "JOSH!"

'You had to find it (I made a lot of mistakes) All things go, all things go (I made a lot of mistakes)'

"Wheeler!"

"Woah! Hey!" Josh's body crashes against me and stops with an amused smirk. "What's going on? Did you have a bad dre-?"

"We need to gather our kids now," I say quickly.

"What? Why?" He replies, stepping back from me.

I gulp, panic raising through my body and cutting my breathe.

"We're being watched."

Taglist.

@letsbe-queer @slythermyg @loving-u-3000 @one-loud-mind

#twoidiots writing #daybreak fanfic #daybreak #josh wheeler #josh wheeler xreader #wesley fists #angelica green #kj karen jane #turbo bro jock

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onisiondrama · 4 years

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(Note: I’m not repeating stories he’s told before and just putting them in parenthesis. I have a lot more videos to go until I’m caught up so that would save me a lot of time. If he gives details I never heard from him before, I will type those.)

“Onision and Tekashi 6ix9ine“ September 27, 2020 Speaks

- Says he’s halfway through listening to Logan Paul’s podcast with Tekashi 6ix9ine and it reminds him of himself months ago. Says he seems like he wants to fight. - Says Tekashi‘s face art is distracting. Says he has tattoos and they’re cool at first, but over time he stops caring about them. Says unless it was incredibly symbolic, like for a dead grandma, it just becomes a doodle. [Oof to the 3 tattoos he got for Kai.] He asks if you have face tattoos and you’re 90 if you’ll still think it’s awesome? He asks if you’re 70 do you want a 16-year-old’s mind on your skin? - Says 69 is complaining about apple music, spotify, and people not giving him a fair shake, yet he’s already successful. Says he cracked the human code: we can’t be happy until we realize why we are unhappy. We’re unhappy because we’re problem solvers. We focus on things that are wrong, threats, and things that need to be fixed. - Says 69 is a millionaire and successful yet he’s still complaining because he sees a problem. He’s as unhappy as a dude who has no money and lives on food stamps. - Says after he did the stripping naked thing in the air force, a lieutenant colonel gave him advice. He told him his wife left because he was too negative. He’d take all his work problems home. (naked in his boss’s office story) Says he’s not sure why that guy told him that, but tells his audience if they only talk about things that they hate then people won’t want to listen. - Says his solution to this problem is donating it to the universe. Focus on what you love instead. - Says he created conflict in some of his fans lives because they told him their friends or partners hated him. He says he should have told them “when you create conflict in your own life, you create conflict in the lives of your fans as well.” He asks why are you beefing if you really care about your audience? It’s not about just making content, it’s about doing the right thing. Make sure you’re someone people look up to and not someone who puts everyone else down. - Says people who have near death experiences appreciate life more. Says he has a hip and knee injury that gives him dull pain on his right side pretty much all the time. He says if he walks too long he starts limping because it hurts too much. He could let it consume him or he could be happy he has a leg and can walk. - He says it’s beautiful to be grateful for life. He says it’s weird he’s talking about this. He still stands by if there’s a button he could press to not exist and it wouldn’t hurt anyone he would. He says that’s different than being appreciative. - [He talks directly to 69 a lot during this video, repeating himself. Basically telling him to be positive and stop beefing for his fans.] - He tell 69 to see who is featured at the top of apple music and collaborate with them. Says he can’t collaborate with people because he’s so hated, he’ll drag them down with him. He doesn’t want them to suffer. He has to build his life brick by brick. It might take years and he might never succeed, but he still has legs. - Not too long ago, tragedy happened in his family. When it happened nothing else mattered. He was a broken man when he witnessed what he witnessed. He was working here in the garage and a child fell out of a window. He heard tapping on the garage wall and a deep grumbling. It sounded like his other kid and he was wondering what they were doing outside at 7:00. There’s bears outside. He went outside and it was his daughter. When he saw her, he was in horror. He didn’t recognize what he was looking at at first. After a few seconds he realized it was his daughter and she fell out of a window. He yelled for Kai to call an ambulance. He didn’t touch her because he knew you aren’t supposed to. He wished he could help her, but he couldn't. All he could do was stand there and wait for people to show up and help his daughter. They showed up real fast. They put her on a board, put her in an ambulance, and took her to the hospital. Investigators and medical professionals came to their house and looked a everything. They asked why he did a pan down from the window down to her. He says so medical professionals knew exactly how she fell. He felt it was really important. If someone is hurt, it’s important to record exactly how the injury took place so they know how high it was, how intense the impact was, how they were laying, where the screen was. Says it’s like going through anything in life when you go through a significant change. You want to record things so people understand them. You want to make sure everything is known how it should be so there’s no distraction from your kid getting better. - He says he was caught on Ring footage reacting to his daughter. His other kid and Kai were also caught on the footage. They were all horrified. He says they get a lot of hate because Kai was cooking dinner, his son was playing a video game, and he was working and the other kid was pushing on a window screen. Now they have cameras all over so they know what is happening at all times. The windows are now impossible to mess with. They trusted their windows to lock and be efficient. Everyone who was a professional concluded the same thing. They even spoke to his son. He was playing video games, he saw his sister, then he went back inside. Who knows what he has to deal with the rest of his life because he has to remember his sister falling out of a window. - He says he went through something similar to his daughter. He was playing on his step dad’s boat because he was an Alaskan fisherman. 15 to 20 feet in their air over cement. He was crawling around the front of the boat and his hand slipped on a chain. He went over. As a kid he had an abnormally large head. He landed in the right spot on his head to where he survived and he walked away from it after landing on cement. He was 7 and he thinks his scull was able to handle the impact. He just had a bump on his head. - Around the time his daughter was injured, there was another girl who was injured. She was 7. Kai was checking up on her to see if she was ok because her head injury was around the same time as their kid’s. This girl was basically paralyzed because she fell out of a golf cart. It’s because people weren’t quick to respond. It took 15 minutes for the ambulance to get there. He says it was a gift from god or something that he heard that tapping. Imagine if he was listening to music or editing a video with headphones? He asks what the tapping was. He says his daughter was 1 or 2 feet away from the garage door and she was barely moving. His entire life was irrelevant because someone needed their dad. - Says he knows suffering very well. Life is fragile, yet 69 complains about not being features on the main page of apple music when he’s a millionaire?

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nellied-reviews · 4 years

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Succulent Rat-Killing Tar Re-listen

Hey! So, I’m new here, but I’ve recently been re-listening to the podcast Wolf 359, and I'm obsessed again, so I kinda wanted, in true Self-Indulgent fashion, to record my thoughts about it, see what stands out now I know how the series plays out. I don’t know if anyone will actually want to read this, but I enjoyed writing it, at least!

If any of you don’t know Wolf 359, but are still, for whatever reason, reading this, a) you should go listen! It’s a sci-fi podcast with some awesome characters, and a really great balance of creepiness, wackiness and actual plot. But also, b) I will be posting spoilers here, sorry. It’s been a while, so I think they’re pretty much fair game now? But just so you’re not caught out: here be spoilers.

With that cleared up, then:

Succulent Rat-Killing Tar

In which we meet the disaster that is Douglas Eiffel, Hilbert blows things up, and the Hephaestus receive a strange transmission from deep space.

In some ways, re-listening to this episode was an odd experience, because the characters don’t quite feel solid yet. It’s the same in a few early episodes - tonally, they’re just really different to a lot of what comes later - and I don't think that’s bad, per se, especially since there are things, on a re-listen, that connect this to later episodes. But this episode is particularly weird, I think, even for the early episodes.

Gabriel Urbina actually talked about this in the writing notes he posted to his Tumblr, how he conceived of Wolf 359 as a one-man show, and what we get here is basically the Doug Eiffel! Show, with what are essentially cameo appearances from the others. As a consequence of this, Minkowski, Hera and Hilbert don’t get much characterisation, and even things like their voices seem ... odd? Hera, especially, feels more like Space Siri than the snarky AI we know and love, while Minkowski... eh, I don’t know why I don't like her here, but I remember not liking her when I first listened to it either. I think she sounds kind of flat, like she's not quite a real person?

It’s probably good, then, that Eiffel comes onto the scene fully formed and really freakin' funny. Zach Valenti is a funny man, and he kills it here, from the very first lines. I particularly love how much information he gets into his opening monologue. He takes what looks, superficially, like a lazily-written infodump - because seriously, who would start their log like that on day 448? Does Eiffel open every single log like this?! - and just runs with it. It's such a ludicrous thing to do, and the whole reason I buy that yes, Eiffel totally does just sit there every single night talking to himself, is Zach Valenti’s performance. It's so good, guys, seriously!

On a side-note, I am also endlessly amused at the way in which Eiffel’s utterly bonkers decision to narrate his boring chores like an exposition-heavy radio show gives the Dear Listeners ammo later on. Like, if Eiffel were not such a fundamentally ridiculous character, they would not have his voice to contact the crew. So much of the plot just hinges on Eiffel being a dumbass, and I can respect that.

Besides the fact that he’s this weird, lovable dumbass, we do also get some nice character moments for Eiffel. For one, it’s buried under a lot of funny stuff, but we get our first hints at him having an addictive personality - his love of cigarettes certainly hits differently when you know about his past with alcohol.

There are also, sticking to things I picked up the first time round, hints that Eiffel is perhaps more competent than he lets on? Certainly, he kicks into a different gear when the transmissions come through - the goofing around stops straight away, and he genuinely seems keen to make contact. I like that, I think.

That said, he blows his moment of competence by ignoring the signal and getting coffee. For such a pop culture-savvy guy, he sure falls hard into the "I’m sure it was nothing" trap here. Ugh, Eiffel. Come on. You’re better than this.

I’m not complaining, though, because it does give us time to listen to Alan Rodi's beautiful music. Words cannot convey how much I love it. I don’t know if it's just nostalgia from last time I listened to Wolf 359, but hearing the music again here nearly made me cry, genuinely. I especially love the acoustic piano. I think it'd be easy to go with a technological, electronic sound for a podcast set in space, so the choice to use a more traditional, old-fashioned instrument like a piano is a pleasant surprise, grounding the show in something older and more Earth-bound, and providing the same kind of connection to Earth history and culture that the old music does at the end. You've got electronic bleeping going on, sure, which adds a layer of space-y weirdness to it all. But it's still, underneath the noises, something lovely and comforting and nice. So congrats, Alan Rodi. You made a 30 second coffee break into something really beautiful.

Then we're back and Minkowski has Eiffel reading Pryce and Carter - another mainstay of the show being introduced right there - and then Hilbert's lab is on fire. This whole section is solidly funny, and I especially love the tone of the Pryce and Carter entries. From the muzak in the background, to the disturbing, sort-of-aphoristic style of the entries, which kind of feel like something from Welcome to Night Vale, to the fact that this book seems to have no structure and is just one giant, non-user-friendly list, everything about this is hilarious to me. I also noticed the reference to the idea that somebody might be in space for disciplinary reasons. Which totally won’t be relevant later. Nope. Definitely not.

Hilbert, although his voice is much less growly than I’m used to, feels closer to his later self, character-wise, than the others. He’s maybe a bit too dotty, but then again, literally everything he does during this season is a front anyway, so I'm willing to give that one a pass. Stuff blowing up is always fun, either way, and it also introduces another idea that will stick around: the idea that everything on the Hephaestus is either broken or is about to break. Mentions of a power outage last week, in particular, suggest that this ship is already... less than shipshape.

And the we get the episode's climax, the arrival of the alien message which turns out to be... an old transmission of The Entertainer, by Scott Joplin?

And look, I think this was what sold me on Wolf 359. Sure, it took a while to find it's feet. But this moment was what convinced me that hey, I'll hang around a bit longer. Because it’s such a smart choice.

Already, by having an audio drama series whose main character is a communications officer, and whose plot centres round him using radios and making audio logs, you have the ingredients for an intensely self-reflective, metatextually interesting show. It makes us think about radio and broadcasting and how sounds are transmitted through space.

But by using a real recording of The Entertainer, something from the very earliest age of radio, with its gramophone-y crackle, you’re widening the scope, linking us all the way back to the birth of recorded sound. And Eiffel's joy at it all, his glee at finding a connection back to Earth, is a reminder of the power recorded sound can have. Eiffel, listening to Scott Joplin, is transported somewhere new and intriguing. Meanwhile we, listening to some podcast about stars and toothpaste and spacefaring dumbasses, are also transported away from our lives and our world. It’s a lovely idea.

Of course, I could be reading too much into this. It could just be that the piece is out of copyright, and hits the right balance of strange vs. familiar.

Either way, it makes for an ending that’s beautiful, wholesome and surprisingly sweet. I’m charmed, particularly, by how earnest Eiffel seems when he’s talking about how the music makes him feel. After spending a whole episode goofing around, it’s a refreshing change of pace, and it made me smile the first time I listened to it. This time round, it feels a bit more bittersweet, I think. We know that Eiffel won't be going home for a good, long time, after all.

In any case, it's a solid end to an episode that, while it has its issues, still mostly holds up. A surprising amount of plot-relevant stuff is established. Eiffel, at least, is properly introduced. And I get weirdly emotional about radio shows. Nice job, Wolf 359.

Miscellaneous thoughts:

Eiffel not understanding Hilbert when Zach Valenti voices them both is peak comedy and you can fight me on this

Eiffel joking about everyone on the ship have “series trust issues”. You ain’t seen nothing yet, hun.

The noises they made for Eiffel slurping coffee are so gross and childish I love them

Ooh, when he’s mocking Minkowski, Eiffel pronounces her name right!

Eiffel calling Hera “sweetheart” ^-^

Hilbert passing the explosion off as a hairdryer omg

#wolf 359 #wolf359 #w359 #wolf 359 relisten #succulent rat killing tar #nellied reviews #aka nellied rambles extensively about radio #because damnit i have feelings about this show

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andersunmenschlich · 4 years

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Episode 13: Alone

All right! Finally I've managed to make time for another episode.

The title is promising. But... uh. We're getting another person talking now. Yeah, I'm not entirely comfortable with this. Bad enough there were all those background characters hanging around the archive, now we're hearing other people direct? And on an episode with a title like this, too!

I'm annoyed. This isn't what I was looking forward to. And Naomi Herne doesn't strike me as particularly polite, either. What, may I ask, is wrong with tape recorders? I quite liked recording things on tape when I was growing up.

...Ooh, interesting.

Looks like they started off trying to do the recording on something a bit more up to date than a tape recorder, and it didn't work.

I like that. I like that very much.

And it's fascinating that the head archivist is taking her statement himself! "I can have it transcribed later"? How very odd. Why not just have her write it down? Isn't that what they've been doing for decades? And even now: the statement-givers write things down, the assistants research and verify, the archivist makes an audio recording and files everything neatly. At least, I got the impression that that's how it's supposed to be done. So what is this? Surely nothing could possibly have been confirmed yet—the statement hasn't even been given!

It's untidy. I don't like it. Naomi Herne shouldn't be talking to Jonathan Sims, it doesn't make sense. Shouldn't she be talking to the receptionist, what's the name... Rosie? Isn't Rosie the one who takes the statements in usually?

I feel like we're missing a buffer, and it's both unsettling and extremely interesting.

So.

Naomi Herne is here to tell the Magnus Institute about something that happened after her husband's funeral. And aha! Finally!

It's about time we learned when this podcast is happening. That's been niggling at me for twelve whole episodes now. "The date is the thirteenth of January, 2016." Awesome. So the first statement was transferred to tape at the end of 2015 or the beginning of 2016. I wonder how many they do a day, and whether they work weekends. It'd be pleasantly tidy if they recorded one statement to tape a day, every day. I'd like that.

Naomi Herne says the thing that happened was weird and inexplicable given her current knowledge of the world she lives in, and that she probably imagined the whole thing. Somehow I suspect she doesn't believe that at all, but would like to make herself believe it if she can.

...And Mr. Sims interrupts.

You know, I really don't like having more than one person here. It's an innovation I’m not particularly enjoying.

In any case, Jonathan Sims tries to leave, Naomi Herne wants him to stay... I don't understand either person here. Is there really a point to giving someone privacy while they make a statement that's going to be listened to and copied down and researched and so on by a whole team of people? What's the reasoning behind that thought? And, on the other hand, why would you not want to be alone?

Maybe it's growing up in a house with thirteen other people (nine siblings, two parents, two grandparents), but it seems to me that being alone is a rare and wonderful thing. You know I didn't even have my own bedroom until my late teens?

If someone is willing to leave you alone, in my opinion, you should be delighted.

Jonathan agrees to stay while Naomi gives her statement. Hopefully this won't lead to more conversation. I suppose we'll see.

Apparently Naomi Herne, like me, works at being a bit of a blender. Average, unnoticeable, overlooked—like the paint on a wall, something nobody really looks at or thinks about. A good choice if you want to get things done without being constantly interrupted by people wanting to chat or hang out or party or know what you're doing in a restricted area or who knows what all else.

Unlike me, however, she says she "did get a bit lonely sometimes," which I can't say I ever have. While it might seem useful to have friends as a sort of social camouflage, they're such a demanding form of camouflage that in practice it isn't actually worth it.

She says a Pastor David seemed worried about her comfort with her own company. Well, at least he was the only one.

Honestly, who worries about a thing like that?

[sarcastically] Ooh, it's not natural for people to live in isolation, humans are creatures of community by nature. Next I'll be hearing how I'm not human and don't really count as a person (again). Perhaps the definition of "human" ought to be expanded, hmm? Include some of those sentient, human-shaped beings who aren't, by nature, what people like Pastor David insist all humans are.

Well. Pastor David, according to Naomi Herne, was worried she might "get lost," whatever that means. Naomi says she thinks she knows what he meant by it—but for some reason she doesn't tell us! Inconsiderate. Eh, perhaps she'll do it later.

Naomi graduated from Leeds in 2013 with the highest possible honors degree in Chemistry.

I like chemistry. Seems like the closest you can get to alchemy in real life.

Anyway, she got a job as a science technician in Woking, near London, which is where she was applying for a better job—lab assistant in a biochemistry department at University College London—when she met someone named Evan, who was also applying for that job. Apparently she clicked with him. Got along with him so well, in fact, that she was happy to see him waiting for her outside the building after their interviews.

Of course, it couldn't stay this good. No. They had to start dating, and then living together, and then they got married, because everyone knows that's the natural progression when you actually get along with someone. No other flavors of relationship are valid (maybe not even possible).

Annoyance aside, Naomi Herne doesn't usually do relationships of this type. She says her past boyfriends left when they realized she wasn't all that thrilled about having them around, which seems like the polite thing to do, really.

This Evan, though, is basically her soulmate.

Despite the fact that he has a battalion of friends, and this ends up pulling her into having "what could perhaps be called a social life."

Doesn't sound particularly pleasant, but she says she didn't hate it, which I suppose I can almost see; it is easier to be around people when you have a trusted human buffer. And after Evan dies from a congenital heart problem, she stops hanging out with his friends and goes back to comfortably familiar solitude, which makes sense to me.

She did attend the funeral, though. It seems Evans had a very rich family, with their own personal mausoleum out at their mansion, Moorland House.

It was a very quiet funeral, and not a particularly friendly one.

Naomi says everyone there was wearing the same expression. Even the corpse. She doesn't say what expression specifically, though—just that it's hard and possibly angry. Oh, and finally we get a last name for her husband: he's Evan Lucas.

Huh.

They send her away to do the burial. That doesn't seem usual.

So she drives off in the pouring rain in the middle of a storm, which doesn't seem safe, and naturally enough she crashes.

It's not a melodramatic crash, though. She just plows off the road into a field and then sits there with her engine smoking and definitely not running, and realizes it's been five hours since she arrived at the Lucas place... oh, and she has no cell service (or GPS functionality) out there.

This means she has to walk. In the storm.

She gets so wet it wrecks her phone, which she finds infuriating, so she throws the useless thing onto the ground, where it breaks further, then bounces off the road and buries itself completely in the mud. She walks and walks and walks, crying and soaked through and very cold, until finally she collapses, at which point she notices that the rain has stopped and now she's surrounded by fog.

...Fog that seems to be following her. And gives her the feeling that it's malicious. And wants something from her. Well, now. That's interesting.

Uh.

And then she makes a point of saying there's no presence to it. Yeah, that makes no sense at all. Malice and desire aren't properties of nothingness! There has to be something present in order for it to want something from you.

"It made me feel utterly forsaken," she says, and in my experience it's always people who do that.

In any case, she gets up and starts to run down the road, hoping to reach the end. Instead she loses the path. It takes her a little while to notice that she's running on dirt and grass instead of tarmac. Once she does, she tries to backtrack, but can't find the road at all. So for some reason she decides to kneel down and check out the dirt, which is mist-damp but not rain-wet.

Ahaha, she went sideways, didn't she? This is delightful.

Whatever new dimension she's found herself in, it sounds most agreeable to me. No stars, no moon, no artificial lights, a night so dark you shouldn't be able to see—but you can. A shifting, slate-grey fog, skeletal trees, grass, dirt, old, abandoned gravestones....

If there were a sign saying "Stay, Wander Awhile," it couldn't be more welcoming than this.

In the center of the graveyard is a small chapel. According to Naomi Herne's description, "The top of its steeple was lost in the gloom and the windows were dark. There was stained glass in the windows, but without any light from inside I couldn't make out the design. Wrapped around the handles of the entrance was a sturdy iron chain."

At this point, for some reason, she starts shouting and screaming for help. I was prepared to be annoyed by this, but (wonder of wonders!) it's a sound-muffling fog. Oh, I like this place so much.

Naomi Herne, on the other hand....

This obnoxious individual continues yelling even after it's clear no one can hear her but herself, just to hear the noise. And then she goes looking for something to break a church window with because, inexplicably, she's decided being inside the church will keep the fog away from her. "Anything to get out of the fog"? Pardon me, Ms. Herne, but you're breaking a window, correct? It's just going to follow you in!

She also says "I was sure that eventually someone would find me," which isn't at all the impression I'm receiving from this dimension a step or two sideways from our own. Surely a place like this would keep you safe from everyone forever?

Whatever the case, she goes for a piece of stone that's fallen from one of the grave markers.

As she bends over to pick it up, though, she notices that the grave is empty.

"The hole was neat, square and deep, as though ready for a burial. At the bottom was a coffin. It was open, and there was nothing inside. I backed away and almost fell into another open grave behind me. I started to look around the cemetery with increasing panic. Every grave was open, and they were all empty."

Ha. Well, it looks like someone missed the Rapture.

You know, if it weren't for the danger of being buried by sliding earth, I'd be tempted to climb into one of those empty coffins and take a bit of a nap.

—Oh. How prescient of me.

The fog starts pulling Naomi Herne, our statement giver, into that first grave. She says it began to weigh her down: "It coiled about me, its formless damp clung to me and began to drag me gently, slowly, towards the waiting pit."

Backing away, she slips on the damp ground and falls. Sliding towards the grave, she uses that heavy piece of stone as an anchor to keep herself out.

Hey, and she gets away! Well done, Naomi Herne.

Struggling to her feet, she suddenly notices that the chapel's doors are open now. The chain's just lying on the steps. Huh. Well, who or what did that? Hmm. Whatever the case, this looks like an invitation to me. But how inviting is the inside of this church? I practically grew up in churches, so they're as familiar to me as libraries (oh, all right: even more so). In my opinion, the least inviting church tends to be the one with the most worshipers in it.

Oh, but this church is very welcoming! It looks as though she's being invited to go deeper, further sideways, farther away from the world we know.

"Through that door, where the inside of the chapel should be, was a field. It was bathed in sickly moonlight, and the fog rolled close to the ground. It seemed to stretch for miles, and I knew that I could wander there for years, and never meet another."

Ahh, that's beautiful.

This is the kind of thing I take my midnight walks for. Hours alone in the mountains under the moon, while the wolves howl in the distance and the lights of the city fade....

Naomi Herne, however, doesn't seem drawn to it.

She turns away from the door—and nearly cries when she sees that beyond the graveyard's edge is that same field. You know, some people have all the luck and just don't appreciate it at all. Of course, I could be mistaken about this place. But I have the feeling a person wouldn't need to eat or sleep here; that physical needs would be optional. I could use that. I'm always acting as though I think they are, and then my body stops working properly. It's annoying.

Anyway, our statement-giver runs away from the field beyond the door and into the field beyond the cemetery.

It beats me why she's running.

Apparently this place doesn't see why she should run, either. "The fog seemed to be getting thicker, and moving through it was getting harder. It was like I was running against the wind, except the air was completely still. I could hardly breathe as I inhaled it."

Yes; that's because you're running. Slow down and everything should be perfectly fine.

Oh. How unexpected.

As Naomi Herne is running through this endless field in a world two steps to the side of our own, her dead husband's voice calls to her. "Turn left," he says. And she does.

Turning sharply to the left, she keeps on running. She runs out into the middle of a road in our world, and wham! gets hit by a car. "I remember a second of headlights, and then nothing until I woke up in the hospital."

...Wait. "I would suggest you leave the stone with us so we can study it"?

What stone?

Don't tell me she was running around carrying that heavy piece of headstone? Surely not. And then, what, whoever hit her decided to take the rock to the hospital as well? That doesn't make a great deal of sense. But I'm pretty sure that's the only stone that's been mentioned this entire statement which she could possibly have brought to the institute, so....

Mr. Sims suggests that Ms. Herne see a psychologist. Ms. Herne is offended. The tape recorder gets turned off.

See? There's a definite click when that happens. We'd know if Mr. Sims took a break to do research. ...Not that I've ever heard him recite any incantations either, though. Maybe it's his research assistants who can do the beholding spell.

They certainly seem uncannily good at getting their hands on information.

Whatever the case, Mr. Sims says research was done while the tape recorder was stopped. Evan Lucas died from heart failure 3-22-15 and his family handled the burial.

"All requests to the Lucas family for information or interviews have been very firmly rebuffed," which is impressive given how much data these archival assistants have been able to dig out of everybody else in the past twelve episodes. It's rare for people to refuse to talk to them, which I could put down to the use of some sort of magic—but won't, because I'm fairly certain I'm not magical and yet people are always telling me things about themselves even when I didn't ask.

Not that I'm not interested!

I'm always interested when a stranger comes up to me and strikes up a somewhat one-sided conversation which evolves into them telling me about their childhood, or fear of Alzheimer's so desperate they'd rather die than have their mind slip away from them, or why they decided to become whatever they are, or some such thing.

If I have to interact with people, well—I think listening to their deeply personal information is one of the best flavors of human interaction.

...Though I will admit that having people talk to me like this all the time has kind of confused my understanding of what things are supposed to be private.

In any case.

Naomi Herne got hit by a car at about one am March 31. The funeral was a week after the death, so that means Ms. Herne slipped sideways on the 29th, which means she was in that otherworld for a full day and change?

The person who hit her was named Michael Getty, and the place was "Wormshill in the Kent Downs," wherever that is. Her car was in a field five miles away.

She was concussed and dehydrated, but there's no mention of her having not eaten for a full day and then some, so either they're ignoring that or food really isn't necessary in fairyland. Though apparently liquids are, which is strange since she was surrounded by fog the whole time! Hmm. You don't think the moisture was coming from her own body, do you? Amplified, yes, enhanced somehow, but... the non-presence in the fog... it could have been her.

That would make a kind of sense.

You can't have things like malice or desire without something present to be malicious or desirous, yet she said "it wasn't as though there was another person there...." Yes, yes, that makes sense!

I hypothesize that, somehow, the part of Naomi Herne that likes being alone manifested semi-separately from the rest of her, sucking moisture from her body to surround her as a thick fog and guide her off at an other-dimensional angle into a world where she could be alone forever. The part of her that doesn't want to be alone was terrified by this, and that's why she ran.

That doesn't explain her dead husband's voice, though. What kind of solitary fairyland has the ghosts of other people in it?

Also, her husband had plenty of friends and was apparently just fine with people—I somehow doubt his heaven would look like that. So what the hey. I can't make sense of that at all.

Well. Back to Jonathan Sims.

Mr. Sims would like to dismiss the whole thing as a hallucination, but unfortunately for him, Naomi Herne was clutching a chunk of carved granite when Michael Getty hit her, and the unfortunate near-perpetrator of vehicular manslaughter apparently decided the woman and the rock were a set, so she was able to bring it to the Magnus Institute and show it to him.

It's got an engraved cross design, looks like it came off a headstone, and has one word on it that's probably from the marker: "Forgotten."

Jonathan Sims says it's going to artifact storage. You know, the Magnus Institute's artifact storage must be an interesting place full of some very weird things. I wouldn't half mind taking a look.

And the recording ends.

This is probably the last episode I'll be listening to for a while, since once I've got this piece of commentary saved in my Tumblr queue I'll need to box my laptop up and ship it across the country to myself. I've never moved my entire life quite this far before. It's proving to be a bit of an undertaking. Once I'm settled in, though, I want to come back to this.

The Magnus Archives is an excellent podcast. I very much want to hear more.

#The Magnus Archives #episode 13 #commentary #late to the party #5-28-20

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best-enemies · 3 years

Note

For the fandom ask meme thing can I request the whole damn alphabet or is that not very cash money of me? I’m nosy lmao I wanna know all of them!

AHDKAJSDKJAHSKDA JACK YOU’RE THE BEST

A - Your current OTP(s)/OT3(s)/OTX(s)

I’ve had my current OTP for like almost 8 years and it’s, obviously, Thoschei (Doctor/Master). My other current obsession is the Gallifrey OT4 hehehe

B - A pairing you initially didn’t consider but someone changed your mind

It’s funny because I didn’t ship Hannigram at first... I’d thought the idea of a cannibal having a relationship was terrifying because what if they had sex and Hannibal got hungry in the middle of the act? Lmaoooo

But yeah they’re my endgame now. I watched the show when it first aired and I was about 14/15 years old so now you see why I thought that. Although I’m still afraid I’m gonna be reading a fic and Hannibal will suddendly bite Will’s dick off or smth AKJHSAKJSAHSASKAJ

C - A ship you have never liked and probably never will (be nice)

Uhhh Doctor/Clara. Mainly because I don’t like to ship the Doctor with companions (there may be one or two exceptions but I don’t ship them enough to actually say I ship them lol) and I don’t know I just never vibed with it

D - A pairing you wish you liked but just can’t (again: be nice)

Doctor/River. I mean, I did like it for a while years ago but now it’s just... eh. I think she has a waaay better chemistry with the 12th Doctor, but still don’t ship it. I might give it a try once I listen to the River audios but so far meh. I’m not much of a multishipper anyway.

E - Have you added anything cracky/hilarious to your fandom, if so, what

God. I’ve written a couple of Academy Era (focused on the Deca) crack fanfics and I still have to translate them to English. They’re pure garbage but I love them. I have a lot of fun writing crack fics because they’re easier and I can ignore whatever piece of canon I want just for the laughs

F - What’s the longest you’ve ever been in a fandom

Guess it’s Doctor Who, been here (in and out of the fandom) for over 8/9 years

G - Do you remember your first OTP, if so who was in it

Uhhhh I think it was Han Solo and Leia, since I was a kid really. I wanted to marry both of them lol

H - What is your favorite source text for fandom stuff (e.g., tv shows, movies, books, anime, Western animation, etc.)

I had to google what a source text is and still don’t know

I - Has tumblr caused you to stop liking any fandoms, if so, which and why

I don’t think so, but Twitter definitively has. I remember a couple years ago I was curious to see what voltron was about and watched a few episodes, it was ok, fun and cute but the fandom was so annoying I stopped watching it for good and don’t care about it enough to pick it up again

J - Name a fandom you didn’t care/think about until you saw it all over tumblr

I had definitively forgotten about supernatural until I saw it all over my dashboard in the year of our lord 2020 lmao like in my wholock days I tried to watch the show because everyone on my dash (is it still called dashboard?) was talking about it and I watched about 8 episodes before dropping it. But seeing it again on the dash was actually a happy surprise because the memes are too funny hahaha

K -Say something nice about someone in any of your fandoms

I’m extremely shy irl and on the internet as well but I wanna say that @janeturenne is one of the best authors ever and her fanfics are a blessing in my life; also @thebraxiatelcollection who brings awesome content to my dash and is also one of the best authors. And of course, you, Jack, also one of the best authors god I’m so BLESSED

L - Say something genuinely nice about a character who isn’t one of your faves (chars you’re neutral on are fair game, as are chars you dislike)

Uhhh I guess I’m neutral about the current companions. They’re not my favorites but I don’t really dislike them - they had a lot of potential and chibs came up with some good storylines but did not develop them well in my opinion. I think Graham is a fun grandpa whom I’m going to miss when he leaves; Ryan is cool and could’ve done a lot more if the writers had kept a few things, it’d be awesome if he vlogged all of their adventures. He’s like the one I was curious to see more but sadly didn’t feel a connection; and Yaz, I hope she’ll keep growing and that her friendship with the Doctor will finally be developed to a level we can connect to her.

It sounds weird because with the fam it’s always ‘what I wish could have been’ because I never felt really connected to them :(

M - Say something genuinely nice about a ship that you don’t ship (or its shippers, or anything related to you)

Ok... I don’t really ship Rey/Finn but I think it’s one of the sweetest ships ever, and if they ended up together I’d be happy. They love each other and are there for each other always so, yeah :D

N - Name three things you wish you saw more or in your main fandom (or a fandom of choice)

I don’t know if I got the question right but it’s three things I wish I saw more in my main fandom? Well, if it’s that, then, 3 things about the Doctor Who fandom: 1) people having more civilized or light-hearted discussions about things. Like, I genuinely disliked an 8th doctor audio I listened once that my friends loved, and they made fun of me and we joked about it. Also once we were in a live twitch video playing among us and discussing doctor who, and then we got into a ship “discourse” as a joke and nobody really cared and just laughed because everyone knew it’s fictional shit so why get mad over it? 2) Doctor Who has a titanic amount of content, it’s all canon but at the same time it’s not, so who cares? If you want to listen to Big Finish audios and if you can afford it, then lisiten; if you can’t, it’s okay, no one has the right to tell you you’re less of a fan. Just tell them to fuck off; 3) The best way to keep fandom alive is by creating content. Here in my local fandom we have several podcasts dedicated to all areas of the whoniverse (the show, the expanded universe, the audios, etc), those old fandom websites who do serious work to bring news to the fans, people who make subtitles for the classic series (we don’t have it available here so they do their best to make it accessible to other fans), accounts dedicated to promoting dr who fans who create content, and we even have people making their own audiodramas with dw characters and writing book-lenght fanfiction to help explain the show to people who’ve never watched it, and a great variety of things. I’ve seen a few of these things in the international fandom, mostly by older fans, so I wish younger fans about my age who have the means to make this kind of stuff would make it too. Maybe there’d be less twitter drama out there lol

O - Choose a song at random, which ship or character does it remind you of

“the killing moon” by echo & the bunnymen reminds me of thoschei. yep it was totally random

P - Invent a random AU for any fandom (we always need more ideas)

The fact that we don’t have a pride and prejudice AU for brax/romana yet is driving me insane

Q - A ship you’ve abandoned and why

I’ve mentioned it before but doctor/river, don’t really remember why idk I just don’t vibe with it anymore. But also because thoschei has so many different pairings in 1 ship that I don’t really feel the need to ship them with anyone else lol

R - A pairing you ship that you don’t think anyone else ships

GOD I NEED TO TALK ABOUT IT BECAUSE IT’S SO SPECIFIC ok fellow academy era stans gather around if you have read Divided Loyalties there’s a scene where it SHOWS that Magnus had a crush on Ushas. And NO ONE HAS EVER TALKED ABOUT THEM and the power couple they would’ve made. I write them into all my fanfics in hopes of making other people ship them but I’ve had no success so far

S - Show us an example of your personal headcanon (prompts optional but encouraged)

The Master is a big fan of musicals and in the 77 years he spent on earth he watched every single one ever. I’m gonna be bold and say that when he was young, still Koschei, he was an artist, and thought about dropping everything to become an actor on Gallifrey. Time Lords do appreciate art, and have their own plays, but it’s just the same old and boring ones the young people don’t care about. The Master then created a shocking performance that was way ahead of its time and the older Time Lords were so appalled they banned him from writing and presenting plays and that’s his villain origin story

T - Do you have any hard and fast headcanons that you will die defending, about anything at all (gender identity, sexual or romantic orientation, extended family, sexual preferences like top/bottom/switch, relationship with poetry, seriously anything)

1) The Doctor and the Master married on Gallifrey and the entire show is just them having the most litigious divorce in the universe (still isn’t final because the Master has killed all the judges); 2) Ushas/The Rani is ace; 3) The Deca was a 10 people polyamorous relationship; 4) Romana and Livia were girlfriends at the Academy and they hate each other now because the break up was baad; 5) Romana writes fanfiction; 6) Romana/Leela had a thing in Davidia I KNOW it; 7) Leela pegs Narvin; 8) Brax has a life-size painting of Romana at his collection or a statue or smth; 9) Brax’s dream in Reborn is actually REAL and he’s married to Romana, Leela and Narvin all at the same time

U - 5 favorite characters from 5 different fandoms

I don’t even think I’m in 5 fandoms but

Doctor Who: The Master, The Doctor, Romana, Leela, Sarah Jane, Bill (this was the hardest thing ever)

The X-Files: Mulder, Scully, Monica, and can I add The Lone Gunmen too?

Star Wars: Leia, Obi-Wan, Finn, Poe Dameron and honorable mention to Din Djarin and Grogu

Hannibal: Hannibal, Will, Bev, Alana, Chiyoh

V - 3 OTPs from 3 different fandoms

That’s hard

Doctor Who: thoschei ofc, gallifrey ot4.......... uuhh as you can see i don’t ship many pairings in the show

The X-Files: Mulder and Scully. And whatever Scully and Monica had going on because they definitively flirted

Star Wars: Poe/Finn, Han/Leia, whatever Han/Lando had going on too

W - 5 favorite ships and 5 kinks you like best for said ships

WHATVASHAJSKAJSA ok this is a little embarassing but I don’t have a lot of kinks for many ships... I guess I have some for thoschei like, choking, whipping, blindfolds/gagging, bondage, begging, biting, sem-public, phone sex, dirty talk, body worship, praise kink, etc. Alright alright I know it’s a lot but in my defense they've shown half of these on the show

X - top 5-10 characters who are yoUR PRECIOUS BABIES AND YOU WILL DIE DEFENDING THEM

The Master, Romana, Leela, Brax, Narvin, Bill Potts, Martha Jones, Sarah Jane, Donna Noble, Lucie Miller. No particular order for most of them but the Master is my precious baby and I will die for this mf

Y - What are your secondhand fandoms (fandoms you aren’t in personally but are tangentially familiar with because your friends/people on your dash are in them)

Not many, usually the people I follow are in the same fandoms as I am but I’ve seen some mutuals reblog some Hadestown stuff which is a play that I’ve never seen but definitively would because the protagonists look hot

Z - Just ramble about something fan-related, go go go (prompts optional but encouraged)

I DON’T KNOW WHAT DOES IT MEAN

it took me three hours to do this but it was fun!! thank you bb <3

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lingthusiasm · 4 years

Text

Transcript Episode 41: This time it gets tense - The grammar of time

This is a transcript for Lingthusiasm Episode 41: This time it gets tense - The grammar of time. It’s been lightly edited for readability. Listen to the episode here or wherever you get your podcasts. Links to studies mentioned and further reading can be found on the Episode 41 show notes page.

[Music]

Gretchen: Welcome to Lingthusiasm, the podcast that’s enthusiastic about linguistics! I’m Gretchen McCulloch.

Lauren: I’m Lauren Gawne. Today, we’re getting enthusiastic about tense and how different languages talk about time. But first, we are very excited to announce the launch of the Lingthusiasm LingComm Grant.

Gretchen: Yes. When we started this podcast, we were fortunate to be in a position where we could put some of our own money into the project to get us off the ground until our lovely patrons started coming in.

Lauren: Now we’re in a position where we want to pay it forward, and we want to help the next generation of awesome pop linguistics projects find their feet. We’re giving out a $500 US grant to a project that helps communicate linguistics to a new audience.

Gretchen: With your help, if we reach 800 patrons by May 1st, we can give out three of these grants. We’re really looking forward to seeing the applications come in. Applications are due June 1st. You can see more details about the LingComm grant and how to apply on our website. We’ll link to it from the show notes. It’s lingcomm.org – two Ms in “comm.”

Lauren: We know that some of you may be really passionate about the idea of there being more linguistics communication projects out in the world but don’t have the time or the expertise. If you really want to help support us in the LingComm grants, we’ve created a new tier at the Patreon called “Phil-ling-thropist.” For every person who supports us at $50.00 or more at that level, we’ll drop the number of patrons that we need to meet the three-grant goal down by 10. You will be as effective at 10 other patrons.

Gretchen: Don’t feel like you need to do this, but if you’re somebody who has a real job and this isn’t a lot of money to you, then this is an interesting thing to do with it. We’ll also send you a Lingthusiast mug after three months at this tier, so you can share your lingthusiasm that way.

Lauren: Of course, patrons at any level will help us meet the 800-patron goal to give out three grants.

Gretchen: If you’re also excited about showing off that you’re a lingthusiast, we also have a new sticker that says, “Lingthusiast, a person that’s enthusiastic about linguistics,” which we’ve added to the $15.00 level on Patreon. Go check out the Patreon. We have new stuff there!

Lauren: Speaking of the stuff at the Patreon, we now have a Discord server for all our Ling-thusiast and above tiers, which is the first Discord server I’ve ever been on. I’m learning a lot.

Gretchen: It’s been really fun to see people join so quickly because there’re actually a lot of people who are already joined and are chatting about things like interesting linguistics links that you come across, conlanging, learning languages, linguistics memes – we even have a channel where you can talk to each other in the International Phonetic Alphabet, which was a fun challenge – and other interesting linguistics things that you come across around the internet.

Lauren: Lots of different channels. All very lingthusiastic – typing, chat. I feel like it definitely has an old-days-of-the-internet-user-group vibe that makes me really happy.

Gretchen: It’s been really fun to start hanging out there. I think people are really enjoying that. Join us in the Discord!

Lauren: Our current bonus for patrons is bonus content from our interview with Janelle Shane in which we walk through creating a Lingthusiasm bot that generates Lingthusiasm transcripts. We walked through that in detail, and then we read some of our favourites.

Gretchen: If you would like to hear what Lingthusiasm would sound like if it were written by a neural net who is very enthusiastic but doesn’t really know that much about actual linguistics but finds some keywords sometimes, you can check that out. Definitely stay tuned for the part towards the end where we prompt the neural net with both Lingthusiasm and Harry Potter fan fiction. You get the most magical Lingthusiasm episode ever.

Lauren: This and 35 other bonus episodes at patreon.com/lingthusiasm.

[Music]

Lauren: Okay, Gretchen, I’m gonna do some real-life sentence elicitation so we can look at some examples of how tense works with time. Are you ready if I give you a bit of a prompt?

Gretchen: Sure. Let’s go.

Lauren: Tell me about something that happened yesterday in the past.

Gretchen: I’m walking down the street yesterday, and I see this bird, right? This bird starts coming towards me.

Lauren: Okay. I am definitely gonna ask you about the rest of that story later, but for now, can I have an example of something that’s happening or could be happening right now in the present?

Gretchen: Well, let’s pretend that I’m not just literally recording this podcast with you because that’s a little bit too meta. Let’s say I’m just sitting at home right now, and I’m eating a delicious cake, and you’re drinking a cup of tea.

Lauren: Mmm. Right. I might need to go get a cup of tea. Before I do that, let’s have an example of something that is going to happen later in the future.

Gretchen: I’m going to the airport tomorrow, fly out to Rome at 10:00. We arrive the next morning, and then –

Lauren: Are you going to Rome tomorrow?

Gretchen: No. No, I’m not. It’s just the first place that I thought of. I’m not going anywhere.

Lauren: But, man, now I want a cup of tea and pizza.

Gretchen: One of the things that I think is really interesting about these examples is that because I’m a bit of your confederate in this experiment, shall I say.

Lauren: Yeah. This is not naturalistic data at all.

Gretchen: Because I’ve been briefed. One of the things that I was able to do is I was able to talk about something that happened yesterday and something that’s happening right now and something that is gonna happen tomorrow, but I was actually able to use the same forms of the verb for all of them. Let’s do a little rewind.

Lauren: Right. In the past, you used the verb –

Gretchen: “I’m walking down the street. I see this bird.”

Lauren: Present.

Gretchen: “I’m sitting at home. I’m eating a delicious cake.”

Lauren: Future.

Gretchen: “I’m going to the airport. We fly out to Rome.”

Lauren: I think the answer is that the relationship between tense and time is not as straightforward as we might think it is. We don’t have a past tense that is always used with past events.

Gretchen: Right. Normally, if you’re in a Ling 101 class and we’re talking about tense – or you’re in a language class and you’re talking about tense – and the definition that everyone gives about tense is, “Well, it means time.” It kind of does, but it also kind of doesn’t. This is the complexity that we’re gonna be trying to unravel for the rest of this episode.

Lauren: We have something that’s happening with grammar. We’re gonna call that tense. We have something that is happening with the flow of time that’s in the real world – where there is language being spoken or not – time is still ticking on. I mean, we’ve talked about how to conceptualise time in an earlier episode, but just thinking about the flow of time and then tense as a grammatical construct that relates to it but doesn’t perfectly map onto it.

Gretchen: What I was able to do in this experiment is I was able to use the English present tense to talk about actions in the past, and in the present, and in the future. What’s interesting is that – so English has another tense, which is the past tense, and I can’t quite do all three of these things with the past tense.

Lauren: Give me an example of the future with the past tense.

Gretchen: “I sat at home right now” is problematic. That has some tension there. It gets really tricky if I wanna say, “I went to the airport tomorrow.” That – hmm, no.

Lauren: I definitely don’t have that as a valid utterance in this real world, no time travelling sense of how language works.

Gretchen: Putting time travel aside, this is not how English works. Many linguists talk about English as having two tenses – past and non-past. What this means is that the non-past tense is the one that I can use to talk about any time space and the past tense I can only use to talk about the past. That’s why I’m able to say, “I walked down the street yesterday,” but not, “I sat at home right now” or “I went to the airport tomorrow” because the past tense is really restricted but the non-past tense can be in any of these times.

Lauren: It also speaks to something that I think sometimes people find a bit confronting about studying linguistics, which is that the way that they’re taught the idea of grammar in English language classes or in grammar classes is that we have a past, present, and future. But from a linguistic analysis, English is treated as a language with a past and non-past distinction. The non-past includes present and future constructions.

Gretchen: And sometimes this weird version of the past that’s used for storytelling purposes. Many kinds of past in English you do actually wanna use the past tense, but there’s this one very specific storytelling thing where you can use the present – or more accurately, the non-past – even in something that happened in the past to make it seem more vivid and more relevant to a particular current time. You’d have a harder time saying something like, “The Norman conquest of English happens in 1066.” That would be a harder sell for English. You’d really wanna say, “happened,” there. You could say, I guess, “William the Conqueror comes across the English Channel, right? And he’s got this big ship.” There, you’re using the present to make it very vivid.

Lauren: I feel so much more compelled when you use that present in past.

Gretchen: That makes it seem very vernacular, very storytelling-y. I’m doing this casual thing where you’re not gonna see that in a traditional history textbook, but you might see it in a fun, vivid history podcast type thing.

Lauren: I was kind of surprised when I took an English grammar linguistics subject just how many different grammatical constructions around tense there are in the English because I had this very simple idea that there was a past, present, future – done, done, done – and it’s like, “Ah, this is why the Cambridge Grammar of the English Language is such a massive book” because I hadn’t really thought about the fact that the tense that you use in that narrative past using the present form is – the time is in the past but the tense is not just using a past tense.

Gretchen: This is why it’s useful to have – why not just call it “time” if tense just means “time”? Why not just say “time”? Well, it’s because there’s actually this difference in that the tense refers to specifically a thing that is done in the shape of a language can be somewhat independent from what’s actually going on in the world that you’re referring to, as in the case where you use the present to talk about the past. It doesn’t somehow make it the past. What about the future? Because, Lauren, it seems like English, we can definitely talk about the future.

Lauren: There are forms that I can talk about like, “I will go” – well, I won’t go to Rome – but “I will go to Rome tomorrow” or “I’m going to go to Rome tomorrow.” I can do that for “tomorrow” in a way that I can’t do it for “yesterday.” There’s something happening there.

Gretchen: The analysis of this in English is that “will” and “gonna” are treated like other types of things where you can add these sort of semi-verbs. If I wanted to say, “I can go to Rome,” “I might go to Rome,” “I wanna go to Rome,” “I have to go to Rome,” “I will go to Rome,” “I’m gonna go to Rome” – all of these are the category of “modals,” but we’re not gonna get into the terminology here – all of this category of, “Here’s this additional word that you can add that adds this additional information.” Sometimes, that’s a time-related piece of information. But sometimes that has to do with desires or possibilities or other types of additional meaning. That’s not how English talks about tense. English tense generally is something that’s part of the verb itself, whereas this is this additional word that gets added. It’s less obligatory in the future because it’s a lot more legit to say, “I fly to Rome tomorrow,” and “I will fly to Rome tomorrow,” and “I’m gonna fly to Rome tomorrow.” All of these are pretty good. Whereas, this case of “I’m walking down the street yesterday” is really this very one limited context. With “I fly to Rome tomorrow,” there’s a lot more places where you can use that. You don’t have to do this thing with “will.” You have these other options like “gonna” or just using the non-past form of the verb.

Lauren: There’s something about obligatoriness when it comes to tense.

Gretchen: It kind of reminds me of – remember the episode where we talked about evidentiality and how some languages you have to indicate the source of evidence that you have for something and other languages you can indicate the source of evidence, but you don’t have to?

Lauren: Yeah.

Gretchen: There’s this similar thing going on with tense where, in some contexts, you have to indicate this piece of time information – or in some languages – and in other contexts you don’t have to indicate this time information.

Lauren: For English, it’s a language where evidentiality is completely optional. You can add some words to express a phenomenon. Then tense, especially with the past/present distinction, is obligatory.

Gretchen: Mostly obligatory. I think everything is a continuum, right?

Lauren: Yeah. I definitely am always wary of anyone who has discrete and absolute categories for things because every time you’re like, “It’s obligatory,” you’ll find a context in English like that narrative present where you’re like, “Oh, no! It’s broken my brain.” Whereas, if you take a “Let’s just look at what the language is doing and build up our analysis,” it causes a lot less existential anxiety.

Gretchen: That’s the other thing about looking at what a language is doing is that it’s often useful to look at it internally based on whatever this language does in really unambiguous cases where it’s tense. That’s what we can use as our diagnostic for these more ambiguous cases. If English didn’t have past tense either, then maybe we would say that “will” was a future tense. But because English does this thing with suffixes generally or irregular forms of the verb to be past, then we can say, “Well, ‘will’ is clearly doing that’s different from that and it seems like it makes more sense if we group ‘will’ in with ‘can’ and ‘might’ and ‘should,’ rather than grouping ‘will’ in with the past ‘-ed’ ending.

Lauren: I think that’s fair enough to start with the examples of what we have that are people are very strongly expressing their reliable feelings about the grammar – and work up from there. There’s a quote that says this really pithily, which is, “Languages differ essentially in what they must convey and not in what they may convey,” which is from Roman Jakobson in a 1959 book.

Gretchen: That’s really pithy because it lets us say, “Well, languages can all talk about time or they can all talk about sources of evidence but that doesn’t necessarily mean that they all have tense or they all have evidentiality because those are the grammatical reflexes of those things in the real world.”

Lauren: Just as we talked about English not having grammatical evidentiality, we have languages that don’t have grammatical marking of tense. The thing I find interesting about these examples is when we don’t have something – English speakers are like, “Well, of course we can get by without evidentiality,” and then it’s a bit more of a leap for someone who’s used to speaking a language with grammatical tense imagining speaking a language without one. But if a language must convey something with tense, that’s gonna be very different to being able to talk about time more generally – without it being part of the grammar.

Gretchen: Because even if a language doesn’t have specific things that only do tense stuff, they’re gonna have words like “yesterday” or “tomorrow” or “in the future” or “in the past” or something like that. That’s still gonna let you convey that. It’s similar, again, to doing number on words. We have “dog” and “dogs” in English but we could also just have “one dog” and “two dog” and “many dog” and we would still be able to convey that information even though we wouldn’t have the specific, additional grammatical thing that’s conveying that information.

Lauren: Languages like Vietnamese and Thai and Mandarin and Burmese all don’t have these grammatically obligatory markers. People will, if they need to in context, use words in much the same way in English we talk about tomorrow or later or whatever. They don’t have that same obligatory verb marking.

Gretchen: I think that there’s a Latin-based prejudice that a lot of – especially the European tradition of approaching language which is like, “Well, if it’s not a prefix or a suffix, it’s not grammar.” That’s not what we’re saying because you could have a short little word – Mandarin, for example, has a question particle that you just put in sentences to make them a question. That’s a grammatical feature. English doesn’t have an obligatory extra word to add to questions just to make them questions. That’s a case where you do have something that’s obligatorily grammatical. So, it’s not saying that there aren’t other obligatory grammatical features that you can do even if your language is a bunch of short words rather than fewer, longer words, but it’s, “Is this obligatory?” “Is this something that you have to add to something?”

Lauren: If we had to say “now” in English any time we talked about the present, then that’s as much a choice of grammar because of its obligatoriness not just because it’s something that sticks on the end of a verb.

Gretchen: One interesting example that came up for me recently when it came to languages having tense is Scottish Gaelic, which is a language that I studied briefly when I was in middle school and then I’ve been returning to because they added Scottish Gaelic to Duolingo and, you know, it’s a language. Something that’s interesting about Scottish Gaelic is that it kind of doesn’t really for the most part have a present tense.

Lauren: Ah, interesting. So, you can obviously, once you start thinking about each language has a different way of approaching segmenting time up into grammatical tenses, it can be interesting to look across languages as to how they segment them. Vietnamese doesn’t segment time up into any specific grammatical tenses. And then a language like Scottish Gaelic has – it has a future and a past? Is that what happens?

Gretchen: Well, the thing that makes me hedge it a lot and say, “kind of doesn’t really,” is because the only verb that has a present tense form is “to be.”

Lauren: Okay. That’s a big one.

Gretchen: Right. It’s a really important verb and it does a whole lot of stuff. Then, all of the other verbs have future forms and past forms, and then they also have – and this is where you get a little bit tricky – they also have forms like the sort of de-verbal noun form. If you have a verb like “see,” there’s no just “I see.” That’s not a thing you can say in Scottish Gaelic. Irish, I think, works differently. So, I’m not talking about Irish. I don’t know how Irish works.

Lauren: I’m trying really hard to not respond with “Hm, I see.”

Gretchen: You can say things like, “I am,” in Gaelic but you can’t just say, “I see.” What you want to say instead if you’re talking about the present is “I am seeing.”

Lauren: Because you are using the “be” verb to do the present heavy lifting.

Gretchen: Exactly. You can say, “I am seeing,” “I was seeing,” “I will be seeing,” and this all uses the same form of “seeing,” which is the noun-y form – the same one that you could use for something like “Seeing is great.” Then, you also have separate forms of the verb “to see,” which mean “will see” and “saw.” In the future, you can say, “I will be seeing” or “I will see.” And in the past, you can say, “I saw,” or “I was seeing.” But in the present, all you have is “I’m seeing.” There’s no just “I see.”

Lauren: It’s a bit like the English future in terms of obligatoriness being a slightly squishy concept.

Gretchen: Right. Obligatoriness is slightly different, and this is why. It kind of has a present because “to be” conjugates everywhere in all of the different forms. It’s also weird because “have,” which you might think is also a pretty basic verb, is expressed in Gaelic by saying something is “at” someone. If I say, “I have a cat,” I would say something like, “A cat is at me.” That’s how I say “have.” Again, you can just use “be” to convey “have” because it’s got this idiomatic construction. This was something that confused me when I was first learning Gaelic in middle school because they only taught us the verb “to be.” They taught it to us in a whole bunch of tenses and stuff, and they taught us these forms like “will be seeing” and “was seeing” and “am seeing” – all with the same one form. It was like, “Guys, I just – are you gonna teach us any other verbs at some point rather than just this one ‘seeing’ form? Surely there are more verbs in this language.”

Lauren: You were going into it with your English speaker category expectations.

Gretchen: Right. On the one hand, being an English speaker gave me an advantage because English also does this in a lot of contexts, right? English often says something like, “I am seeing” or “I am eating” or “I am walking down the street,” rather than “I walk down the street” or “I eat” or “I see.” English does this more than a lot of European languages. Some people have proposed that English does this thing because of influence from Scottish Gaelic, and this link has not been proven, so it is probably not actually true. It would be a fun hypothesis if it was true, but it’s not. English does do something similar just not quite as robustly. It was really confusing to me because I was coming from having learned French, where I was given all of these verb forms, and then they were trying to keep it easy for the Gaelic learners and just give us the minimum stuff you need because you really can get very far with only “to be.”

Lauren: We’ve seen some languages with a couple of tense distinctions like English or Scots Gaelic. We’ve seen languages with no tense distinctions. If we go the other way, we can look at languages that have multiple tense distinctions beyond what we see in languages like English. They segment that passage of time up into much smaller categories.

Gretchen: Yes! I love more tenses.

Lauren: Once you see this, you’re like, “We are really underperforming in the tense category department.”

Gretchen: It’s always really exciting to see something you don’t have and you’re like, “Ooo!”

Lauren: The examples I’ve always heard of have come from the area of Papua New Guinea, which just has wonderful levels of language diversity.

Gretchen: Papua New Guinea has, like, a sixth of the languages in the world, right?

Lauren: Yeah.

Gretchen: Like, 1000 languages.

Lauren: Islands and mountains all do great things for linguistic diversity. Tifal is a language of Papua New Guinea in the Ok family. It has at least six tense distinctions. There is a present tense. Then, there is a “yesterday” past, a distant past, and a very remote past. Then, going the other way, there is a near future and a distant future.

Gretchen: Very nice. I like it.

Lauren: These are all distinct suffixes that are added to the verb to indicate the time relative to now of something that you’re talking about.

Gretchen: Again, it’s one of those things where there are ways of saying this in English but they’re not as obligatory or as directly encoded in some sort of obligatory thing. You can always say, “A long, long time ago in a galaxy far, far away.” Or sometimes people make this distinction between “will” and “gonna.” But you don’t have this robust way of distinguishing between these different – you know, remote past and just simple past.

Lauren: If I talk about when I was in school, I’m probably using the distant past rather than the “yesterday” past. Context does a lot of heavy lifting and we often don’t give it enough credit when it comes to things like marking time.

Gretchen: Well, yeah, because you might, in some contexts, talk about when I was in school as the recent past because you’re contrasting that with something that happened 1000 years ago. Then, in other contexts, you might talk about it as the remote past if you’re talking with somebody who graduated last year.

Lauren: A language may have particular grammatical categories but sometimes, when you look at how they’re used, there’re particular conventions. I don’t know specifically for Tifal, but it may be that the very remote past is only used for origins and legends and myths and those kind of things. They’re not for the time that humanity has been living like they are now. There’s multiple things happening here. There’s the tense marking – it’s how it fits with actual time. Then, there are also genre conventions like we talked about with the English narrative past that uses the present.

Gretchen: Right. Again, even if you have a language where there’s a tense that indicates this myth and legend type past, it’s like how in English you use “once upon a time” to signal that something’s a fairy tale, but you can also use “once upon a time” to signal that you’re talking about something as if it’s a fairy tale. When you say, “Once upon a time, these two linguists got together and started a podcast,” this doesn’t mean that it’s a myth, but it’s we’re talking about Lingthusiasm’s origin story as if it were a myth using the myth frame even though, yes, very clearly this happened in a fathomable past where we were actually there and it’s not like Cinderella where it’s a fairy tale story.

Lauren: Context and genre are really important when we’re thinking about how language is used as well as the abstracted structure of it.

Gretchen: I think it’s neat to emphasise how these different types of tenses can be subverted so that there’s a canonical use and then there’s a playful use where you could put something as if it’s in that space as well. We talk about tense as “It’s time,” but it’s not always, strictly speaking, “time.” Another thing that comes up a lot when you talk about tense is other relationships that people could have to time. Sometimes, you talk about something as being an ongoing thing, or you talk about something as happening at one discrete point, or you talk about certain attitudes that you have towards whether something is happening or not. Those are generally lumped into different categories like mood and aspect, which can relate to tense but aren’t exactly the same thing as tense. I think we have to save those for another episode.

Lauren: We’ve already talked about evidentiality, which is often lumped into those categories. We’re talking about tense now. We’ve still got aspect and modality to look forward to.

Gretchen: Stay tuned for more things about how we think about time. But this one is just about where it is with respect to the personal timeline.

Lauren: Once you start looking at the variation, and you’re like, “Oh, I would like three past tense distinctions.” Another thing that would be very nifty is a grammatical tense that is specifically for the current day. If we want to give it a Latinate category, the hodiernal tense, from Latin for “today.” It’s always so much fancier when you say it in Latin, for real.

Gretchen: I know! It’s really fun. I always try to not get too bugged down on the terminology, but then sometimes learning that there’s actually a fancy terminological word for something is the most delightful part. You can have a hodiernal tense.

Lauren: Hodiernal tense is in Mwera, which is a Bantu language of Tanzania. And apparently, Gretchen, the passé composé in French in the 17th Century was possibly used as hodiernal.

Gretchen: Oh, that’s neat. So, passé composé in French, if you were to literally translate into English, it’s like putting “have” before all of your past verbs. Things like, “I have written,” “I have gone,” “I have seen,” “I have walked,” except it’s used in French as a general past. You would say something like, “I have walked,” when in English you would say, “I walked.” There is this other form in French that’s equivalent to “I walked” which is only used in literature now. It’s not used in ordinary conversations or even in casual writing. It’s one of those cases where something starts out as this restricted, casual, only “today” or something tense, and then it gets gradually expanded into being used as a default, unmarked past tense. Then, the other one becomes literary.

Lauren: Also a good reminder that the role of tenses aren’t fixed and static forever. Language is always changing, and evolving, and maybe one day English will have something we can call a definite grammatical future just in the way that French, for a brief period in the 17th Century, may have had hodiernal tense for a while.

Gretchen: That is neat. Certain words that start out as being very concrete can achieve this level of grammaticalisation. This is a thing that I really enjoy about grammaticalisation because when words become used grammatically, they often also get shorter. The original form, the concrete one, can’t necessarily shorten the same way as the grammatical one. Here’s an example – you can’t say, “I’m gonna the airport.”

Lauren: No. That does not sit with me.

Gretchen: You can say, “I’m gonna go to the airport.”

Lauren: Yes. That’s fine.

Gretchen: You think of “going to” and “gonna” as being equivalent to each other. They kind of are, but not in the literal sense. If I’m like, “I’m gonna the airport,” uhhhh... something’s broken – doesn’t work. Whereas, you can say, “I’m gonna go to the airport,” “I’m gonna fly to Rome,” or something like this, but you can’t do it in that bit. The same with “will,” which starts out meaning something like “want” or “wish” before it went to future.

Lauren: As in, like, a legal will?

Gretchen: Yeah. Exactly.

Lauren: Like, a thing that you write. Yeah.

Gretchen: But when it refers to the future, it can get shorted into “-ll,” as in “I’ll” or “you’ll” or something like this. But you can’t have “my last’ll and testament.”

Lauren: I think my brain got broken by trying to think of – that does not work, no.

Gretchen: No. It just doesn’t work. Even though “will” starts out as meaning “want” or “wish,” this “-ll” bit, that can only be used in a tense sort of way. Maybe that’s where – if we develop a future tense in English – that’s where it will develop. That would be interesting because that would be putting future tense on “I” and “you” and other pronouns rather than putting it on the verb like we currently do.

Lauren: There is definitely cases where we have tense being on things other than the verb in other languages. English wouldn’t be the first language to do this. But when you’re used to thinking about tense as being a feature of the verb and being marked somewhere very close to the verb, it is definitely – English wouldn’t be the first language to do this. One example of a language that can do this is Kaiadilt, which is an Australian language. If you wanted to have a difference between the sentence, “I will go to the beach” and “I went to the beach,” you mark it with a suffix on the noun “beach.”

Gretchen: So, “I go to the present beach,” “I go to the future beach,” “I go to the former beach”?

Lauren: Yes.

Gretchen: I mean, I guess you can do this in some restricted contexts in English. You can say, “My former teacher” or “the late Mr. So-and-So,” or “This is an ex-parrot,” and that can refer to something that is no longer whatever the thing is.

Lauren: These are suffixes that go onto the noun in the way that we think of tense suffixes going onto a verb.

Gretchen: Right. But these are specifically talking about – it’s not that it’s not a beach anymore.

Lauren: No. It is still very much an existing, ongoingly, beach.

Gretchen: That’s interesting. It’s just that I’m not there anymore. Okay. Sometimes, we talk about language being constrained by the biological laws of human anatomy. There’re certain sounds we can make, there’re certain sounds we can’t make. There’re certain ways we can configure our hands. There’re certain ways we can’t configure our hands. Sometimes, we talk about language as being constrained by the fact basically all of its speakers of human languages are on this pale blue dot that’s revolving around the sun, and we have words for days and years because we all share this as part of the human experience. I think maybe another element of this is talking about languages being constrained by physics. We don’t have any natural human languages that have words for the tenses involved in time travel because time travel, so far, is not a thing, so none of the languages have had to develop them. But, in theory, this could happen.

Lauren: This would be very difficult to approach as an English speaker because, as we’ve demonstrated in this episode, one of the ways we test the obligatoriness and the grammaticality of tense as opposed to talking about time is to check people’s intuitions because if something’s obligatory, then removing it or changing it should change people’s intuitions. If you’re talking about using past tense, we expect that events that are bounded by the past can’t be interacted with in the same way as events that will happen in the future. We use that as part of our intuition building. Can you imagine, Gretchen, how much linguistic theory would be broken if suddenly a whole bunch of sentences could be valid because people could time travel?

Gretchen: Right. So, saying something like, “I was there tomorrow” or “I will be there yesterday” – suddenly, maybe you need to be able to do this because you’ve time travelled.

Lauren: The Cambridge Grammar of English is already big enough, and this is my main argument against time travel.

Gretchen: It’s already, like, 2000 pages, and if it’s time travel, we’d need to double the size of the tense chapter.

Lauren: It’s gonna be a lot of work. It could be fun though.

Gretchen: I think it could keep linguists employed for a long time figuring out how to do this.

[Music]

Lauren: For more Lingthusiasm, and links to all the things mentioned in this episode, go to lingthusiasm.com. You can listen to us on Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Spotify, SoundCloud, or wherever else you get your podcasts. You can follow @lingthusiasm on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, and Tumblr. You can get IPA scarves, IPA ties, and other Lingthusiasm merch at lingthusiasm.com/merch. I tweet and blog as Superlinguo.

Gretchen: I can be found as @GretchenAMcC on Twitter, my blog is AllThingsLinguistic.com, and my book about internet language is called Because Internet. To listen to bonus episodes, join our Discord chatroom, and help keep the show ad-free, go to patreon.com/lingthusiasm or follow the links from our website. Recent bonus topics include a special neural net generated episode of Lingthusiasm – where we read out the results of the neural net – the future of English, and onomatopoeia. Can’t afford to pledge? That’s okay, too. We also really appreciate it if you can recommend Lingthusiasm to anyone who needs a little more linguistics in their life.

Lauren: Lingthusiasm is created and produced by Gretchen McCulloch and Lauren Gawne. Our senior producer is Claire Gawne, our editorial producer is Sarah Dopierala, and our music is Ancient City by The Triangles.

Gretchen: Stay lingthusiastic!

[Music]

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

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genius11rare · 4 years

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Figured id try this. AH Chit chat livestream notes / QnA 7-10-20

because i'm weird i like “documenting” videos and (in this case) Live Streams. figured why keep this to myself so here. maybe one day ill just post a google docs link for a viewing copy but idk. So heres what i got for today seeing as the chitchat part will likely be cut off for the “real” video i may as well memorialize it. not perfect and may be kinda nonsensical but its what i could come up with.

Matt has a window…. With a balcony blocking above , pointless window. Red Web (trevors podcast) “where he gets in over his head on the internet” “think if i just show them the episode of Technical Difficulties where i made garden lights into solar chargers i can get that tax kickback?” , Jacks neighbor with the tesla solar roof , having to train people to know how to install it . Ryan: “what are the odds he cant look outside at any given hour of the day and see atleast one human with a big piece of paper scratching their head” Elon Musk Starlink satellites for internet worldwide, Ryan “not saying that's _clearly_ a supervillain plot but if it was it wouldnt surprise me” , Ubisoft Far Cry teaser… oh its live action movie teaser clip- oh shit that's rendered!!! , teaser pick of a young Vaas with scars…. Ryan “Did he get them in the womb!?!?!? Wanna know how i got these scars? Born with them don't know…” “What is your fave type of cake?” Ryan: Chocolate (Lava)… don't put a sprinkle on it OR ILL SLAY YOU Jack: I mean is birthday a type of cake… Funfettis great Jeremy: both are stereotypical , Boston Creme cakes and Rum Cakes. Matt: Yellow cake with fudge frosting. “Pets and significant others are safe , what item do you grab in a house fire” Jack: Animation cel of the Dino DNA scene in Jurrassic Park (think i got it) Ryan: i mean my life looks alot like this corner , if i could burn this shit down to start with a new empty house i might even be happy. (chat Ryan your insurance is listening) Jeremy: don't have much i really care about , just “well that sucks it burnt up” . Matt: first ever smash trophy i won , only one i still have. Chat answers “Photo albums , Ryans DeadPool Suit” “what games hope to be announced on microsoft stream?” Matt : Fable 4 (Ryan ”surprised theyd try to bring it back past the press that is peter molyneu” Matt ” well now nothing holding them back , not those trees!”) Jack: not so much games but LockHeart the mini streaming Xbox. (Ryan: all those types of things have failed idk why they think - well they also made mixer and that went tits up so sure why not) Jeremy: microsoft doesnt really blow me away , arent really anything that im like “i HOPE they announce a sequel” Matt: know this isnt the right crowd but Banjo Kazzoie? Just added in smash , Crash Bandicoots got a new game it makes sense nows the time… i mean the time was already before this but fuck it do it anyway. Steffie says we are at almost 10 mil views on Achievement Knievel (9.95 mil) Ryan “which one was that” (Jack and Jeremy) “that's Im Still In The Air” Ryan “oooohhh… now i know why i blocked it out… thought we titled it like “the greatest stunt ever” or atleast that's what we called it while making it” “rather fight 100 duck sized ChilledChaos (yey my boy chilled!) or 1 ChilledChaos sized duck?” Ryan “feel like the duck cuz atleast it still doesnt have thumbs” - Jeremy “or teeth , what is it gonna do it can bill and flipper you” Matt “i mean a bunch of tiny Chilleds can work together to kill you” Jeremy “right they will figure something out” Ryan “tiny chilled more dangerous he can infiltrate spaces i wouldnt expect to find him” “tv show / movie you could watch again for the first time what would it be?” Jack: Breaking bad and Endgame … but only if its with a crowd who is ALSO seeing it for the first time. Matt : The Office Ryan: Full Metal Alchemist (oh anime time) , everyone talks about Brotherhood but i really liked the original. Matt: Brotherhoods a bit better but original is still good on its own (paraphrased). Ryan : had that twist at the end of “dafuq did this show just go?” made a movie based off it… skippable though. Jeremy: Futurama , *or erase all my knowledge of Whose Line* “Fave piece of Merch put out?” Jeremy: Geoff tanktop with the tribal skull. Ryan: *puts on classic gray achievement hunter hat* Jack: Extralife Posters if those count , like the Xmen AH one behind Ryan that Jon (Risinger i assume) and Pat (IDFK) made. Matt: Tiki Mugs. Jeremy “do you use those , make pina coladas?” Matt “often! When i get caught in the rain (GDI Matt) “ Chat alot saying FrontBack , one said Jacks Varsity Jacket. “Trapped in quarantine with a fictional character , who?” Jack: Macgyver maybe idk (Ryan: How about Dr Manhattan he could just fix it) yeah like Q from star trek. Matt: GlaDOS but in potato form. Jeremy “theres a lot of anime girls id be ok being stuck with but idk their name” (i love jeremy) a Matt: you want Lust from Full Metal Alchemist - Jeremy: That sounds great , (Ryan *Nods*) i can picture that i like it or if we keeping the Futurama train then Bender… think wed have A LOT of fun , and he wouldnt get me the virus! Ryan: no he would , hed deliberately try to get you sick. Jeremy: hed bring people in “what occupation / person where you most surprised to find out was an AH fan?” Jack: Fun story im looking to learn how to Sauder , someone messaged me saying they're a fan if you need help , *hes the guy welding StarShip* Matt: well… anyone smart really… Jack (and Ryan) : the Dr Who Set/Prop designer (Ben) hes done some stuff us (think he snuck in a name plate on a show of Jack and Ryan name or something , saw a tweet about that before) Ryan: not really any that's surprising… there was the time Macauly Culkin wore our shirt (press my awesome button) “our” being RT Jeremy: Cool meeting Xavier Woods but like we know hes a gaming fan and watches a lot of content like ours… still on Whose Line Johnathon Mangum is a AH fan , even messaging me at one point. Trevor in chat “what if president trump rode up in a Salad Chalice shirt” , Jack: one guy who bought it , like “im hip with the kids” Ryan: can you imagine someone less likely to be seen near a salad? Matt: I mean ryan he thinks he has to drink them so…. Jeremy: also been having a lot of solicitors recently for some reason… really annoying and during a pandemic. Ordered a sign thats basically “fuckoff im not answering the door LEAVE” , have a ring doorbell (some kind of doorbell app where you can talk to people at the door i guess?) but when im recording cant be like “hang on a second - FUCKOFF” Ryan: i DO feel like you have the kind of job you could do that , if anything youd put them in the video like “hey you're live right now what you need” … Jack managed to crash 7D2D on my local system already that's a good sign (brief technical difficulties music playing as it cut to ryans screen in the game)

#AH #Chit chat #livestream #Ryan Haywood #Jeremy Dooley #july 2020 #text #text post #backed up #for later #me #achievement hunter #long post #QnA #chat

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aspiestvmusings · 4 years

Text

ZEP ANALYSIS 2

MUSIC AS A NARRATIVE

WHAT THE HEART SONGS HAVE REVEALED/TOLD US:

We start the show with Zoey’s MRI & the song that plays as it all begins is REM’s: "It's the End of the World as We Know It" from the Awesome MRI Remix. The lyrics are: “That's great, it starts with an earthquake..."...and this is where we learn that the lyrics of the songs playing are part of the storyline...they tell us what is happening or going to happen... cause as the song plays...there’s an earthquake

Max has never really, truly, been in love before = "I've never felt this way" 1x01 "I think I love you"

Max did not plan to tell Zoey about his feelings for her (and he didn't...til the flash mob) "I just decided to myself I'd hide it to myself and never talk about it and did not go and shout it when you walked into the room" - 1x01 "I think I love you"

Max likes/appreciates all the little things that no one else really sees or knows about her = "I'm a sucker for all the subliminal things no one knows about you " = 1x02 "Sucker"

Max & Zoey know basically everything about each other, because they've been best friends for 5 years & they've talked about...everything = "'Cause I know you and you know everything about me" = 1x02 "Sucker"

Max finds Zoey physically attractive/hot = "I'm feeling heat in December when you're 'round me" = 1x02 "Sucker"

Zoey finds Max physically attractive/hot & she's falling/fallen in love with him - "I tried to be chill but you're so hot that I melted I fell right through the cracks" = 1x08 "I'm Yours"

Zoey loves Max... as a friend, but also romantically. She has love for him in her heart. And knows he has love in his heart for her. = "Look into your heart and you'll find love love love love" = 1x08 "I'm Yours"

Simon has considered taking the same route his dad did 6+months ago. The man is not just grieving, he's depressed. = "The dreams in which I'm dying are the best I've ever had" = 1x01/1x10 "Mad World"

Zoey acknoweldges that she's witnessed Simon's "sadness" - she's seen him crying & being sad & alone & realizes he needs help (from her) = "Didn't I, didn't I, didn't I see you cryin'. Feelin' all alone without a friend you know you feel like dyin’ " = 1x08 "IWYTWM"

BACK TO THE BEGINNING...

Remember how it all started? With Zoey's MRI in Pilot...going all wrong...because of an eathquake. She went to check on her health because she had concerns..because of her fathers condition. We saw her "take the test". But... we never heard how it ended. Did the earthquake interfere with the results & she'd have to get another MRI to find out the results? Did she get the results, but never mentioned them?

After the MRI we see her talking to her mom, but it's never mentioned how the test went. The results...or lack of them...is never mentioned... until episode 11. Instead...after the experience she's "going crazy" - hearing everyone sing their inner feelings. But not once does she mention the MRI in any other context than it being the result she got her superpower. And we've only heard her mention it to her family, Mo & Max, no one else even knows she got an MRI.

A lot of things in the series are hinting at Zoey having the same disease as her dad has. And the singing might be her first, early, strange "symptom". Because she has the same condition is probably why she hears people singing, too. Even the ASL storyline supports it. Not to mention some other scenes & lines from songs in the show. Like her mom/family singing "We’ve Gotta Get Out of This Place" in 1x11. And since we know that the lyrics of the heart songs tell the truth and are part of the narrative/story, then they have a real meaning.

A stranger at the caskett room sings during Maggie's song: "Now my girl you're so young and pretty, and one thing I know is true: You'll be dead before your time is due, I know" & later Maggie sings the same lines, and then the camera moves to Zoey...witnessing the song, and it doesn' really feel like it's cause we see it all from her POV..but cause the line is a "clue" for her...

CHIRP vs ZOEY-ALITY PARALLELS

Invading privacy. How come no-one has mentioned this? Especially Max. We've seen him be concerned about "mind reading", and then they're all working on "mind reading code"

I do think that all this was done intentionally & they chose to use a piece of technology that is similar to Zoeys ability...to make a point..in the future. And I've found it quite interesting that no-one has...yet (by the end of episode 11) questioned how ethical the tech is, or how it could invade peoples privacy.

If they'd had a character mention it, I would've expected it to be Max. I mean... in episode 1x01 when Zoey asks him what he thinks about te ability to read other peoples minds, he says that he'd get his feelings hurt a lot..more. And he has voiced concern about Zoey being able to "read his mind"...several times. His main concern has been that she can read his mind/see into his heart (via heart songs...while he can't see into hers...). And he was also very uncomfortable when he found out that everyone could "read him" (that everyone knew he has had a crush on Zoey...forever). He's the one character whose expressed most concern about people knowing his secret feelings & thoughts. Hence I have been surprised he hasn't commented on CHIRP yet (until ep 11).

Though anyone on the team might bring it up..at one point. And another good possibility is Simon. Because since he's still in the dark about her superpower, that would be one way to take it back to the beginning. Cause as we remember from the PIlot, he was "impressed" by Zoey's ability to "read his mind"..only he thought that that must mean they have a "natural" connection, so when he finds out she had help (from her superpower...which is basically like getting help from a CHIRP technology), he's gonna have a whole new look on their connection and everything. And he's most likely gonna be "betrayed" and "disappointed", because he’ll realize that their connection wasn't actually real, and she "cheated in the game".

And CHIRP is most definitely a "plot device". The parallels to/with Zoey's abilities are just...too obvious.

ZOEY & MAX: CHARACTER STORIES

My question before the Finale: Will we learn something about Max and/or Zoey...in the last episode that changes things? That changes how we see...certain things & our perception of them? That changes the meaning of some things from past episodes? A kind of a surprise "reveal" (twist)? Will the show go there? I would not put it past them... honestly.

There are bits & pieces of lines/dialogue (certain scenes) both in past episodes & in the Finale promo that kinda hint at a possible twist like that.

ETA: Nope, none of that was in the s1 finale, really. There were enough plot threads that needed to be tied up... so not much room for new big ones...yet.

PARALLELS

Zoey & Max as new Team Managers #twoofakind

In 1x02 when Zoey gives her first introductory speech as the new Team Manager on the 4th Floor, she prepares flash cards for the speech..with the first one being her name (Hi, Im Zoey). In 1x10 when Max becomes the new Team Manager on the 6th Floor, he prepares flash cards for his speech..with the first one being his name (Hi, I'm Max).

In 1x02 Zoey makes an awkard joke at the beginning of her speech "Please don’t say anything stupid" (one of her notes to herself). In 1x10 Max makes awkard joke at the beginning of his speech (Please hold your applause til the end" (one of his notes to himself)

In 1x02 Zoey tells Joan that she prepared for the new job by reading multiple books & listening to several popular podcasts on how to be an effective leader. In 1x10 Max tells his new team that he prepared for the new job by reading about a 7-step leadership program..online....

...TO NAME A FEW...

TEAM MAX

Translating Max's behaviour:

If we pay attention to what Max says, then they have informed us via his lines what it is that he's not okay with. And it's not what some seem to think - that Zoey dosn't love him back/return his feelings & won't want to start dating now. It's not that he chose to take the 6th Floor job as a "punishment" cause she didn't plead him to stay and tell him he loves him. It's not that he was mad at her & in his anger sang "Bye Bye Bye". It's not that he was unnecessarily cold & rude towards her...after 1x08..when he moved to 6th Floor... only because what some fans think ...that he's an example of "good guy trope"

What Max has an issue with is Zoey changing & changing their friendship. It's that she's dishonest with him, her best friend. It's that he doesn't like that she can read his mind...both because he prefers to keep his private thoughts & feelings private, and because he doesn't want to "push" her with a sudden heart song...which he now knows he could do unintentionally. Before she got her power, he could just keep his feelings towards her a secret & not push her, but now he has to watch himself...and avoid feeling feels around her. Because he knows she can hear his deep feelings.

He's not comfortable with her knowing how he feels about her (1x07/1x08). He's not comcortable with everyone knowing how he feels about her (1x11).

After 1x08 he knows the details of her secret power. And...interestingly... he does not sing any love songs to her anymore...for a while. The tone of the songs changes. We only ever hear him since twice after he learns her secret. First a "duet" of the song "Here I go again" in 1x10 as he moves to the 6th floor, and second is "Bye Bye Bye" in 1x11. He doesn't really mind her hearing the song in 1x10...as it's just what decribing what he's doing. And then there's the karaoke bar, where his inner song & outer song don't really match. He might sing "Bye Bye Bye" as a response to Zoey asking her to stop Leif singing that sad song, but you can see that he's not really feeling it.

This is supported by his comment to Leif that he's not (sure he's) over Zoey. And by his "mood" and the way he "secretly" glances over at leaving Zoey. Which means that in her presence he's trying to disguise his real feelings.... so that she would not be able to read his real thoughts. He migth sing a song to her that makes her think he's mad at her & moved on, but we, the viewers, are let in on the truth, cause his real feelings shine through during the scene. Yes he's heartbroken and a bit "mad at her", but he really let's those feels shine on this moment..to "fool her". And this is confirmed at the end of the episode, when all it takes for him to stop pretending to be upset with her is for her to take the first step. And re-confirmed in the Finale, when we see that he can make himself think & feel...what he wants her to hear...

Yes, of course he was ALSO heartbroken & a bit disappointed, because he had hoped she would return his feeling...now, but that's what he hoped, not expected/demanded to be the only option. He even said it several times - he needed some sort of response, some sort of answer from her. And though a part of his decision to keep his distance was cause he felt hurt and heartbroken (she did brake his heart a bit...cause from his POV he chose the other man... cause it was not as she said - she can't choose cause she's got so much on her plate cause of her dad & her superpower...so it's understandable he was a bit sad) most of his post-superpower-reveal behaviour was fueled by her unclarity & her dishonesty. She'd promised him honesty & truth, and she revealed the truth...via her heart song, but then she tried to claim the truth is not the truth (not say that perhaps there are more possibilities than his interpretation of the song, but claiming it’s not at all what the song meant, when they both know what the song meant.) That's what upset him.

And that’s why he needed to put some distance between them. And again, they’ve explained his motivation & reasons via dialogue in other scenes. And... interestingly enough...what started as him trying to experience things outside their tiny two-person-bubble-world ended up becoming so much more. When he started the season with no desire to climb the career ladder or get out of the “best friend zone” then by the end of the season things had changed... and he actually liked the opportunity he got via his promotion, and he even learned he’s good at it (even Leif complimented his leadership skills). And the distance did both them good...as we all predicted... cause they really needed to grow individually & figure things out...separately... before there could ever be a possibility of them as a duo.

I've touched this in my past posts. And will again in future posts.

#ZEP #SPOILER #ZEP SPOILERS #ZOEY'S EXTRAORDINARY PLAYLIST #ZOEYS EXTRAORDINARY PLAYLIST #Clarkeman #Zomax #Zax #Zoey Clarke #Max Richman #Max x Zoey #Zoey x Max #TEXT POST #LONG POST #ANALYSIS #ANALYZIS #TEAM MAX

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lanaisnotwool · 4 years

Video

youtube

420 Living Your Life By Design as an Investor - Interview with Chase Maher

https://moneyripples.com/2020/09/08/420-living-your-life-by-design-as-an-investor-interview-with-chase-maher/

Today, Chris Miles talks with Chase Maher. He started real estate investing in 2008, which is the time that everyone was running away from it. Chase ran towards it instead and was born out of the fire.

Chase also does wholesale, house flipping, he is an entrepreneur, and he is an investor.

So today, what we want to know is how can someone like Chase Maher who is into all these businesses, still have a life outside of it as well? And that’s the important part.

Listen to our Podcast here:

https://www.blogtalkradio.com/moneyripples/2020/07/24/420--living-your-life-by-design-as-an-investor--interview-with-chase-maher

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Chris Miles (00:07): Hello, my fellow Ripplers! This is Chris Miles. Your Cash Flow Expert and Anti-Financial Advisor. Welcome you out for a wonderful show. Show that’s for you and about you. Those of you that work so stinking hard for your money, and you’re ready for your money to start working harder for you. Now! You want that freedom. That cash flow. That prosperity. Today! Not 30 or 40 bazillion years from now, but right now. So you can have that life that you love doing what you love being with those that you love. But guys, it’s not just be able to get out of the rat race yourself, right. And have that lifestyle that you dreamed of, which is definitely awesome. But it’s so much more than that because as a Rippler, you can create a Ripple effect in the lives of others. You can bless more lives when you are free. And so guys, I’m proud to be a part of this group. To be a Rippler with you because man, I love what you guys are up to. I love hearing about the good that you’re up to. The results you’re creating, but I love also the fact that you guys are bingeing and sharing the show too. So I appreciate that so much.

Chris Miles (01:03): As a quick reminder, check out our website, MoneyRipples.com. You’ve got the ebook on there, Beyond Rice and Beans. You can download for free today. And by the way, if you hate reading, don’t worry. It’s like 28 pages because I put page breaks and pictures in there. So you’re welcome. It’ll take you like 15 minutes, but check that out as well as the other blogs that are being uploaded as well.

Chris Miles (01:22): Alright! Today, I’ve got a special guest here. Chase Maher. Now, Chase, you know, interesting thing with him, is that not only he is a podcast host, which I definitely recommend you guys go check out his show, but the thing that’s so cool about Chase is that he’s a real estate investor doing the very things. And he was born at a fire. Like he started investing in 2008, when everybody was saying run, he was running towards the fire. Right? So, I mean, Chase started doing real estate investing. He does things with San Diego. In Tucson. And even out East as well. And so he does wholesaling, fixing, flipping. He’s an entrepreneur and investor all together wrapped in one. And that’s primarily why I wanted to bring him on here today because you know what, how is it that someone can actually have a business. Like what he does, but still have a lifestyle. Just like we talked about in the show, right? It’s not just about making a lot of money. It’s about having a life too. And that’s the main thing I want to talk about to Chase about today. So, Chase, welcome to our show!

Chase Maher (02:17): Chris man. Thanks for having me. I’m excited. Just had you on my show. So a little swap here, man, and you dropped a lot of value, so hopefully I can return the favor.

Chris Miles (02:26): I guarantee it, man. Like I can already tell just from our conversation, that’s going to be easy, you know.

Chase Maher (02:30): For sure.

Chris Miles (02:31): So give us some background, like what even led you down that path. I mean, of all the things you could have done, why would you want to go and be crazy Investing real estate when everybody else said run, right?

Chase Maher (02:40): Yeah. Well, you know, I wish I waited two years and started in 2010, but Hey, I started in 2008. I’ll tell you the story. It’s actually pretty good. So I’m 30 years old now. I live in San Diego. And I grew up in Virginia Beach, Virginia and I grew up in the car dealership. My parents owned a couple car dealerships. I grew up, I learned the sales, used to pick-up cigarette butts, then wash the cars. Then I went to the auctions and eventually just kind of ran the show, working full time through college. And I always had discipline with money. I always had that entrepreneurial mindset where, you know, my dad taught me, put it away, put it away. I started buying gold when I was like 14 years old and, I had that mindset, but I never knew anything about real estate. My parents weren’t real estate investors. And when I was 18 moving out of my freshmen dorm and I saw like a lot of my buddies were going to go kinda split a house rental near our college, old dominion university, shout out to the monarchs. And I was like, man, I got like 25 grand in the bank. Why don’t I just like take 20K of that and go buy a house?

Chase Maher (03:45): And so I called up a real estate agent that I knew and I went and bought a house and I had no idea what I was doing. I did not know that we needed to check the market. I didn’t know the world was on fire with mortgages. I bought it June, 2008 and I basically house hacked it with buddies before house hacking was even like a buzzword. I rented out each bedrooms, four bedroom house. I rented out each bedroom for 500 bucks. Rented out the garage for 600 bucks. Covered my mortgage. Covered all my utilities and all throughout college, I lived rent-free, but you know, by July or by June, 2009, the house lost like 35% in value. But Hey, it recovered. I still have it to this day. And it’s a really good cash flow machine for me. And you know, after a couple of years I said, why don’t I do it again? And again, and again, and fast forward to now I live in San Diego. I fix and flip. I wholesale. I do some Realty stuff here and there. And I’m still invested in properties.

Chris Miles (04:37): Well, yeah, I think the cool thing that you did, whether you knew it or not, is that you still focused on the cash flow part, right? That’s the mistake I made during the last recession. I was buying property. So I thought, well, man, like if I can buy a hundred thousand property and appreciates 10%, that’s 10,000 bucks. But if you buy a 500,000 property, 10%, that’s 50,000. So let’s go big or go home. Right. And then I was like, no, I’m going home. You know, it was pretty bad, but I mean, you still, at least had roommates go into there. Or even after you probably moved out, you probably saw students in there paying rent. So even if it lost value, you were still getting paid.

Chase Maher (05:12): Yeah, absolutely. You know, the only appreciation that I bank on is forced appreciation. So, I don’t factor in any of my underwriting. Hey, hopefully the property value goes up 3% or 5% or here in San Diego sometimes 10% in the year, 2015, we went up like 20% in one year. So what I mean by that is forced appreciation. So actively figuring out ways that when I buy it, how can I increase the value of it by 10% 20% 30% within a 12 month period? Refinancing, getting my money back, redeploying it.

Chris Miles (05:42): I like that because you want to play it safe. Cause you’re not trying to bank on appreciation. You’re trying to bank on we’re going to do that actually, control the variables, right? Control the values versus just hoping that the values hold or whatever it might be.

Chase Maher (05:53): Yeah. I take the risk with my business and I play it safe with my investments. That’s kind of my philosophy.

Chris Miles (05:59): That’s great! I love it! So tell us more about that. Like, I mean you’re only 30, right?

Chase Maher (06:04): Yeah. I’m thirty.

Chris Miles (06:04): I mean, most people.

Chase Maher (06:06): Thanks for using the only!

Chris Miles (06:09): Yeah. I know. Coming from a guy who’s almost 13 years older than you. Yeah. So, you know, like for me it’s like, that’s incredible because when I was 30, I was trying to dig myself out of a hole. Right. Like I was going through the recession, you know, but I mean, you, I mean, you’ve actually been doing this, like you said, since you were 18 years old, you know, and again, it’s not something you just started doing a couple like three years ago. Like I always laugh with people that come by. They’re like, Oh yeah, I’m successful. I’ve been doing this for three years. And like, you haven’t seen anything yet. You know? So I mean, that being said, like, what do you feel is like been kind of a secret of success for you both, whether it be for your business and or even with your investing too?

Chase Maher (06:44): Yeah, man! I think discipline is like the most important thing. And just figuring out what’s your longterm goal, your longterm strategy and sort of reverse engineering it from there and it doesn’t have to be perfect. So if anybody’s out there and they’re listening, you’re trying to out like, what’s your life goals? What do you want to do? It doesn’t have to be perfect. Imperfect action is better than taking no action. So when I was 18, I bought that property. I thought to myself, man, you know, I’m going to school with some kids that are trust fund babies. They’re inheriting a bunch of money and they’re kind of blowing it and they’re blowing it because they don’t know what to do with it.

Chase Maher (07:18): And they don’t have any sort of education around it. So I started studying money and I didn’t inherit any crazy amount of money. I didn’t inherit anything. And I told myself, I want to be educated with money. I want to make sure that this mistake of a house that I just bought that, you know, fast forward, it’s not a mistake now, but at the time, imagine 12 months after you buy it. And the value is down 30%. You’re like, crap. What did I do? So that caused me to study markets that caused me to study, you know, market philosophy and what’s kinda going on. And like I said, I didn’t inherit any money. I wanted to be able to pass down money generations below me. I wanted to be that first one that when I have a great, great grandchild, they look at me and they think that’s the one that changed the path for our family forever.

Chase Maher (08:04): But I wanted to do it in a way that they were educated and they knew how to handle the funds that I passed down to them, the assets that I pass down to them so that they stay in families forever. You think about some of the wealthiest people in the world, the Rothschilds and a few others. It’s a family. And they run that family like a business. And I wanted to instill that. So I started studying the markets, studying books, listening to podcasts and just making the right decisions along the way. And like anything, those decisions compounded over time.

Chris Miles (08:31): That’s right. That’s like what? My, one of my old buddies, well, my old partners wrote the book. What would the Rockefellers do? Right. And it’s a big point, you know, it’s what can you actually pass on? And it goes beyond it really you’re creating your own ripple effect, right? Yeah. Not just for the people that you come in contact with, but really, I think one of the biggest ripple effects you could ever create is through your own family, creating that legacy.

Chase Maher (08:52): I couldn’t agree more.

Chris Miles (08:53): And the cool thing is too. I can already tell from what you said. You said it’s not just passing down the money, is it?

Chase Maher (08:59): No, it’s passing down the assets. So my philosophy is active income versus passive income. And so I like being an entrepreneur. I love being an entrepreneur. I haven’t had a job since high school. I really enjoy it. I’ve done a bunch of different things. So anybody that’s listening, if you think, Oh, here’s this 30 year old guy and he’s got it all figured out from 18 years old, that’s not true. From, you know, 18 to 22. I was selling cars and buying houses. And then from 22 to 26, I was kinda lost and just kind of living off my income from my assets. Blowing through my savings, traveling Southern California, you know, snowboarding, surfing all over the world. Kind of figuring out what I wanted to do. And then I ramped up the active income part again in my late twenties.

Chase Maher (09:43): And that instilled this like philosophy in me that if we can eliminate distractions and we can stay disciplined, we can have some strong, active income sources. We put it away, properly and passive income. And we live a lifestyle that is enjoyable to us. So I can do it for the long haul and not get burnt out. I saw my dad get burnt out when I was young and I saw him get overweight and get on healthy. And it, it made me think I don’t want that to happen to me. So I wrote down on paper, what’s important to me between health, wealth and relationships. And I just kind of live by that philosophy that if I’m not happy and I’m not able to do the things that I want to do, what the heck am I working this hard for anyways? So it’s really important to me. And I definitely, you know, I enjoy sharing that.

Chris Miles (10:29): There is a lot right there, man! Everybody, that’s a part you should probably go back and rewind a couple of times and re-listen to because there’s so many different tangents we could take with us. Right.

Chase Maher (10:39): Yeah. I know. Sometimes I’m valuable a little bit.

Chris Miles (10:39): Yeah. We can create like three shows that last comment you just made and we agreed create all these tangents from it. I think the thing that’s more valuable if I’m thinking from listener’s perspective here too is, youth aspects, right? I mean, one, I think will make a big point that you already said is, I love the clarity that you were having. Right? Like you’re writing this down. You’re saying, what is my life really about? And I think we even made this mentioned another time, you know, before we went on the air. Where that question of, you know, if money were no issue, what would you spend your time doing, right? Like kind of like, what do you want to be when you grow up? I know that there’s 60 and 70 year olds out there that have not asked this question with. What would I want to spend my time doing? Right? Like what would you do if you hit your financial goals? And what would that life look like? And it sounds like you really have to kind of create an architecture behind that life, didn’t you with that design?

Chase Maher (11:30): Absolutely. And it comes from repetition of constantly thinking over and over. And it, for anybody listening out there, if you like constantly have the same thought over and over, you should probably follow that instinct. And what I mean by if you’re constantly thinking I want to be in real estate, or if you’re constantly thinking, man, I want to be able to take a snowboard trip every year. Or if you’re constantly thinking, you know, I want live in this city, you should start crafting your lifestyle around, being able to do that. There’s a calling that you’re having that you should go after that. And I truly feel that the most depressed people in the world, they’re the ones that aren’t listening to that calling. They’re the ones that keep that thought in the back of their mind rather than in the front of their minds. So what that looks like to me is like purging out the things that, I’ll put it to you this way. There’s a lot of things that matter, but focus on the things that matter a lot.

Chase Maher (12:19): And what I mean by that is like, I would love to, you know, be a great golfer or a great tennis player or, you know, still play basketball twice a week. Like, you know, all these things. But what I love more is surfing. I love more is snowboarding. So I don’t waste any time, like trying to learn anything new. I just stay with what I know. I try to stay a fish when it comes to food. I’d love to learn how to cook this, this and this, but I just stay efficient because that mental space is better focused elsewhere. I’d rather go all in on the things that I know make me happy rather than trying to go discover a bunch of other thing. And the same applies with money. So that one core active income source and then pick a few streams of passive income for me, it’s hard assets and just stay focused and try not to lose sight of, you know, what you’ve written down and what you want to focus on because it will compound over time. You’ll get better and better and better.

Chris Miles (13:14): So true. Yeah. I want to go to both of those points. Man, you’re making this so hard on me, man. Cause you have, you’re testing my focus right now of how I can do this. But you know, when you mentioned about like the designing that life, right? Like really, you know, figuring out what is it you want? It took me back to four years ago when I asked my wife to marry me, you know, I said, Hey, I want to marry you. She says, all right, two conditions, one, no more kids. Cause eight is enough. Right. So we’re not having anymore. And then two, you need to make sure that every winter, she was like, I don’t care if you come or not. But every winter I got to leave, like I cannot do another Utah winter anymore. Like I’m done. I’m from the tropics. I can’t do it.

Chris Miles (13:57): And I said, all right, well, let’s do this. You know? And in my mind that was something that was impossible. Right. That seemed impossible. But when we really like mapped it out, like figured out how much would it really cost to do that? And you know, obviously, you know, of course with my business being virtual, I can do it anywhere anyways, but it was a whole mindset shift. And now I realize it’s freaking easy. It’s easy to do that. Like the hardest thing is now just, you know, trying to make it all work with children. You know, that’s the hardest part, but everything else is great, you know? And so I love that you did that. You can design that life. And once, you know, it’s easier to create.

Chase Maher (14:31): Chris, Gary Keller talks a lot about living a life by design. And if we don’t build a plan and then work towards that plan, we’re kind of just like living endlessly and just kind of wandering. And that’s a lifestyle that I didn’t really want for me. So I made that decision to live a life by design.

Chris Miles (14:49): I love it. So tell us, you mentioned about the income streams too, right? So you say you have one main income stream and you create other income streams. Tell us more about your philosophy on that.

Chase Maher (14:58): So active income figure out what’s that sweet spot that you can live off, you know, 50% or less of that active income and then invest the rest. And so for me, I figured out, you know, what’s that sweet spot and then I want to invest everything else. And so the active income that I like kind of sets up my passive income stream. So I realized that I wanted to have rental properties. I wanted to have buildings and assets. And so how can I build an active income that kind of sets that up? Well, it was lead generation for distressed properties, and then I can take those properties. I can fix and flip them. I can wholesale them. I can list them as an agent or I can refer them to a realtor. So those are four different streams of active income that are all built off of one marketing channel.

Chris Miles (15:44): Just one activity, yeah.

Chase Maher (15:45): One activity. We’re just, how do I simplify and dumb it down? Here’s another thing that I learned from Gary Keller when I was an agent is, what’s the one thing that you can do that makes everything simple or unnecessary? And so I focus on lead generation and then how can I maximize my use of that property? And then also what that does is I’m able to cherry pick the best ones for my portfolio. It kind of all builds off of that. And then from there, you know, some other income streams, passive that were sort of built off that and you know, just focusing on what that sweet spot is. So me personally, now I live off 30% of it and I invest the rest. And, you know, based off your investment philosophies, I learned from you and your show, we kind of have a lot of alignment there as well.

Chris Miles (16:33): Yeah. I love that! I love that! That basic philosophy of saying, all right, how do I get myself to have a lifestyle where I’m only at 50% of my income? That’s, for some people that’s a stretch, right. But it is kind of a core challenge.

Chase Maher (16:46): Yeah. You just got to make more than, you know, if your lifestyle is, is 10 grand, you need to figure out a way to make 20 grand. And actually you need to work, figure out a way to make like 30 grand cause of the taxes. So another reason why I love being an entrepreneur is, you know, tax saving strategies. So I’ve figured out how can I pay the least amount of taxes legally? And that’s by setting up, you know, an escorp paying myself a salary, profit distributions, owning assets that I can write off the interest. And so that sweet spot for me, I’m able to like focus in on it more and more and not have to go too high above that because I’m saving money on the taxes as well.

Chris Miles (17:25): That’s true. I get a lot of clients where, you know, like I get some of that. We can get them retire like this year, right. Others might take within five to seven years, 10 years. And I get some of those clients they’ll say, alright, like we got a couple deals, but they didn’t have a whole lot of cash. Like maybe they have 50 to a hundred grand. We’re like, alright, we’re making 500,000 passive a month, but we need 10,000 a month. Right. And it seems like there’s a big Hill to climb. We’re like, well, how do we do it faster, Chris? I’m like, well, other than just reinvesting the money you’re making, I’m like the best thing you can do is just find other ways to create more income or reduce your expenses and allow yourself to invest more faster. That is really the amplifier. Right? That’s the thing that multiplies it all is if you go from saying, Oh, I only got a thousand a month to build a, to put towards buying passive investments versus, Hey, I’ve now got 5,000 or 10,000 a month. I can put towards that. It’s a complete game changer. Like the numbers has become exponentially better. When you do that.

Chase Maher (18:24): Yeah. If you can think of a way to like productize yourself. And what that looks like is either sell it for more, make more money or reduce your costs, reduce your expenses. It’s pretty simple. I usually opt for, I like just trying to make more money because I still like, I like that 30% or 50% I focus on the 30%. I like to live a good lifestyle though. You know, like I’m not some Rice and Beans kind of guy. I do a lot of trips, a lot of traveling. I figure out what’s that sweet spot. So do you need that? You know, tier two or tier three above the current car you’re driving right now? Do you need that fifth surfboard? Do you need, you know, certain things like, do you really need them and you know, live your life a little bit above the needs so that you’re still happy and you’re still enjoying yourself, but ask yourself on your purchases. Like, are there certain things like, do I really need that? And then, you know, if you do buy it, try to match that towards an investment. So anything that’s a want, I buy it and it’s 500 bucks, all right. Then I need to commit to 500 bucks towards an investment. And so kind of simplified it like that.

Chris Miles (19:32): I think that’s the key is that, I mean, just like you said earlier, like when you can really know what you want, right? What’s really the priority. Yeah. You can still have a life that you love, but you can say, you know, all those rest of the stuff is distraction. It’s just extra clutter in my life. I don’t need it. Simplify on what I really want. Keep that simple life and create freedom from it. I love that.

Chase Maher (19:52): Yeah, man.

Chris Miles (19:53): Cool, man. Well, Hey, if people want to get to know your stuff or follow you or whatever, what’s the best way they can do that, Chase?

Chase Maher (19:59): So the best way is my podcast. The Life Worth Chasing Podcasts. We talk about real estate, money, wealth, business strategies, and pretty much every guest that I bring on like yourself, you were just on. I really want to make sure that they live, you know, a life by design that, you know, they’re not working until their eyes bleed. And so it’s the kind of show that you’re going to learn a lot, but you’re also going to be inspired. And then if you want to get ahold of me directly, the best place is probably on Twitter and it’s @iamchasemaher and yeah, I’m on Twitter a lot dropping knowledge. That’s how I communicate with a lot of people and can join me on there. And there’s a lot of good, useful information on that.

Chris Miles (20:35): Awesome! Chase, I really appreciate it. Like I said, there were so many nuggets on here. We could go like an hour long episode and have some fun with this, but man, the stuff you’ve given, I recommend people listen to show more than once just to pick up on these nuggets you’ve given us. So I really appreciate that.

Chase Maher (20:50): Hey, my pleasure, man. I appreciate you having me on.

Chris Miles (20:53): You bet! Everybody else, you know, we’ll put in the show notes, you know, Chase’s podcast as well as his Twitter handle. So check them out, check out his stuff. Great show. As you already know, like, well, our life is so much more than just money, right? It’s so much about the kind of life that we can create. So make sure you follow his show because that’s what it’s all about. And definitely reach out to Chase. If you feel like that little ping of, Oh, that resonated that I needed that. So check him out. Everybody, I hope you make it a wonderful and prosperous week. We’ll see you later.

#Anti-financial Advisor #Cash flow #Cash flow Expert #Debts #Entrepreneur #Financial Freedom #Money Ripples #Chris Miles

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content-to-convert · 4 years

Text

VIDEO DIDN’T KILL THE RADIO STAR...

VIDEO DIDN’T KILL THE RADIO STAR it just made him dress nicer

By Pat Mellon

Speaking of your brand evolving, PODCASTS are now a wise bullet to have in the arsenal of promotional weapons. In the early 2000's, for instance, you didn't have the option to record and distribute a PODCAST. The technology didn't exist to even IDENTIFY, much less create one- if you typed PODCAST into an email in 2002, it would have been flagged as a misspelling.

But now, thanks to Audioblogging, re-branded as PODCASTING thanks to the iPOD, you can reach a targeted captive audience in a car on a long commute, with content that they've actually sought out. It's essentially a radio infomercial for the lifestyle of your product, without the PAID-PROGRAMMING aftertaste. Plenty of people have been slow to warm to the idea of such self-promotion and have waited to see if the technology and its effectiveness sustained or if it waned, the way QR codes did, or video discs did until the invention of the DVD. It can be an amazingly powerful part of your brand.

Many rejected podcasting, as I did initially, as a waste of energy. In fairness, early on when there were no networks for podcasting and its business model was less focused than now, it smacked of self-congratulatory volunteer work. I saw it as an infringement on my profession. I have 15 years of radio hosting experience. I saw podcasts as competition. In my short-sighted view then, I didn't see the full potential of a podcast. I just saw it as people wanting my job. But as time went on, I began to see the ways, at least in terms of in-car entertainment, that podcasting was the future. And like the cryptic fortune cookie says, "Kill Your Darlings". Or maybe go with the less-confusing, "Reinvent Your Business Constantly. The End Goal May Be The Same But The Tools and Methods Evolve Constantly" which is a Ken Tucker quote I saw on a Snapple Cap. Or even the more direct, "You Have To Reinvent To Stay Fresh and In The Game" which Madonna said once.

But early on, I saw it as the enemy - the way news journalists must have felt when FREELANCERS started getting a lot of the work in the late 90's. I thought, "If all you need to broadcast is a computer and an opinion, why the hell did I major in Broadcasting? It's like everyone becoming a Youtuber or a Social Media Influencer (seriously, that is NOT a good name. It's just saying what you're doing. It lacks creativity, like naming the glass thing you drink out of a "glass". Or the room with the bed a "bedroom". Or the thing you swing on a "swing". Or the... Sorry-I'll move on.) Anybody can become a Social Media Influencer these days, (and if they're under 14 and haven't been trying for half their lives then you might want to make sure they're breathing) and that means fame, sometimes money, but more important: LIKES. I overheard my 8 year-old playing with her friends and they were pretending there was a genie or something granting wishes and one girl asked for a pony, and another asked for a house of chocolate, and my daughter asked for a million LIKES on her video. LIKES are currency for pre-teen popularity. And LIKES or even merely PAGE VIEWS can be currency in the grown-up world of business. My point is that anyone with a computer and a camera can make money on Youtube if they hustle. It's simply the new normal. It's great, if not dangerous. We've yet to see the fallout of a generation raised on Youtubing, unless, of course, you count cautionary tales like Logan Paul or Jo Jo Siwa, both of whom are rich. It's simply another entertainment option for kids. I kinda thought podcasting was that, but for adults who only wanted quasi-fame; to show-off. But it's bigger than that.

If you're a plumber, for instance, and you want to maximize business, you probably want a decent social media footprint, some solid YELP reviews, and maybe even a podcast. Toilet clogged? Click here for an interview with master plumbers from all over. It's not the ONLY thing you should do. It's ONE of the things you should do.

On the consumer side, you have to realize that traffic, especially the bumper-to-bumper kind, is GOLD to a radio talk show host. People listen the most in their cars, so DJ's in New York and Los Angeles, the #1 and #2 radio markets depending on who you ask*, for instance, who entertain on the radio, are always on their toes to stay funny and relevant because it's so easy to push a button and change the station.

Then suddenly there was a new game in town. People were bypassing the radio altogether and plugging external sources into car sound systems, removing the commercials and unwanted Morning Zoo shenanigans, and rendering my entire college education and training void. My only hope was wishing death to the podcast movement, which I think I did a couple of times on the radio accompanied by a sound effect of a toilet flushing (Take THAT, Podcasting!). It didn't work. I kept hearing the word. Podcast. (eerie voice) PODD CAAAST! My head was in the sand. People would say to me, "you should do a podcast" and I'd cringe and wildly swing fists at imaginary ghosts who were accusing me of "Resting on your laurels" and "Holding on too tight.”

It took a while, but I get the appeal and, more importantly, the power of the Podcast. It's like a book-on-tape for the 21st century- 10 times as cool, though, because it's technologically relevant, and can be different every time you listen. So we agree that podcasts are real. And we acknowledge that there is room for many things on the dashboard of a car, be them outlets, or additional buttons. And we agree that the the way we do business is always changing and we have to adapt to some degree. So why all the hub bub? Because we can't have an intelligent conversation about the delicate existence of Podcasts without talking about Shane Gillis, the comedian who was hired and fired by Saturday Night Live in the same week last year. We need to understand the power of what it was that torpedoed his streetcar (tune into Mixed Metaphors with Pat Mellon Tuesdays on The Podd Couple, right after Poddamnit at 8, and Pod of Thunder with Gene Simmons at 8:17) He and a buddy do this show, this podcast, it's like a radio show but you don't listen to it on your grandpa's Victrola, you tether your MP3 player to the radio inside grandpa's Camry, and there's bad language, which there never is on traditional, boring old dumb talk radio, so right away, it's awesome (honestly, the only difference between Howard Stern on radio and Howard Stern on satellite is the F word) and the internet allows curses and take that, Mr. Suit and Tie, and this is going to be amazing. And on one particular show from 2018, Gillis said "chink" when describing someone in Chinatown. Not a huge scandal, but I guess you'd have to ask Roseanne Barr if the internet can get you into to any kind of trouble. She was exiled from the the entire US for a social media post that mentioned race and monkeys. And the same new normal that allows John Q. Anybody to do a podcast ALSO watches everything you do online and will sink you if it sees something it does not like. America can be confusing that way. Freedom of speech and freedom of complaining about freedom of speech are always at each other's throats, it seems. And you can't have it both ways. The guy who alerted the world to Bill Cosby's dating rituals online is loved by many but is also shunned by others, but that guy knows what he did and he knows not to complain about the ones who, well, complain. It's the price you pay.

The point is, you need to constantly be hustling and using all of technology’s modern tools to get your product out (they’re not burning DVD’s anymore) and maybe one of those avenues is a podcast with salty language, and maybe that podcast exists among your body of work that clients can enjoy whenever they want.

But we live in a new age of retroactive outrage. Eddie Murphy was on SNL and is arguably the most talented person the show has produced. He did a stand-up special in which he explores “What if Mr. T were a Faggot?” It was inflammatory and it was insensitive and it was homophobic (though that buzzword was still a decade from conception) because the premise of the joke- the attribution of homosexual behavior to a big, strong, black man being marginalized as solely predatory sodomy - crossed the line. When I spell it out like that it looks horrible. But it’s a simple comedic device: assigning unlikely behavior to someone for comedic purposes. It’s the fish-out-of-water gag. It’s why we had Mork, and Alf, and Balkie from Perfect Strangers. It’s Freaky Friday. It’s why The Rock playing a babysitter or a tooth fairy is funny. Murphy did this AFTER he was on SNL. But if has been released before he auditioned, do you think he’d have been hired?

Of course he would have. Because the Mr. T thing was a small part of that special (though, I recall, an extremely quotable part) and the people who didn’t like or appreciate the language didn’t have the bionic megaphone of the internet so they could get their outrage all over your conscience. The point is that your podcast is a reflection of your brand. You have to weigh your desire to speak freely and loosely with your desire to keep the Cancel Culture at bay. At a MINIMUM, though, you should keep things clean for your clients, listeners, and most importantly, your potential customers. Shane Gillis missed out of being on SNL and fame, instead on infamy because he broke one of society's biggest rules:he said something controversial out loud. Granted, it was in bad taste, but if that were a crime half of us would be in jail. It's just important to remember that your language on a work-based podcast should be professional, which I realize cannot be defined easily, but maybe stay away from slang and cursing. Just because you CAN doesn't mean you SHOULD.

#podcast comedy hilarious

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