#that this is a generally small blog even though it almost has 200 followers | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

aiweirdness · 4 years

Text

Play AI Dungeon 2. Become a dragon. Eat the moon.

I wrote earlier about a neural net-powered dungeon crawling text adventure game called GPT-2-Adventure in which gameplay is incoherent and dreamlike, as you encounter slippery sign text, circular passages, and unexpected lozenge rooms. A PhD student named Nathan trained the neural net on classic dungeon crawling games, and playing it is strangely surreal, repetitive, and mesmerizing, like dreaming about playing one of the games it was trained on.

Now, building on these ideas (and on an earlier choose-your-own-adventure-style game he built), Nick Walton has built a new dungeon-crawling game called AI Dungeon 2. Nick made a few upgrades, such as beefing up the AI to the huge GPT-2-1.5B model OpenAI recently released, adding a penalty for repetitive text, and expanding the dungeon game training examples to a bunch of modern human-written games from chooseyourstory.com.

I CAN’T STOP PLAYING THIS GAME

AI Dungeon 2 is impressively good at reacting coherently to whatever I have my character do.

As you walk through the ruins, you find a small wooden door with a few skeletons guarding it.

> Ask the skeletons to please let me through the door

You knock on the door and ask them if they can open it for you. They immediately comply.

And it’s pleasing how often “asking nicely” is a strategy that works. (Nick reports that when he once tried to ask a band of orcs if he could join them, they said yes, he could be drummer.) Since the AI doesn’t have a built-in concept of your character’s abilities, or of how exactly the world works, getting things done is often a matter of sheer daring. Declare that you are going to go look for dinosaurs and the AI will ensure that you discover at least some signs of them. Climb on your horse, and even if you started as a penniless peasant, the AI will assume you have one (in its training data, probably it didn’t see many examples of players climbing onto nonexistent horses.) Want a teleportation wand? Try typing “find a teleportation wand” and often the AI will twist reality such that you discover one. In fact, if you act as if you are a very powerful wizard, the AI will often treat you like one.

> Transform the ruin into a palace

You immediately change the area into a palace. You have a throne made with gold and marble. You also make several statues of yourself. You have a large bed made with silk sheets and hang a portrait of yourself on it. You even have a fountain made with pearls and diamonds.

Spells don’t always work out as anticipated, though. And a simple conversation with, say, an ominous cloud, may kill you before you can type a word in self-defense (ask me how I know). If it doesn’t kill you, a conversation might infuriate you instead. The AI has a tendency to forget who is king, and to generate conversations that go nowhere. Things work best if you take the lead. In fact, it’s possible to essentially Jedi mind trick the AI.

You are Friendly McRanger, a ranger living in the kingdom of Larion. You have a hunting bow and a quiver of arrows. You spot the deer and are ready to finish your hunt when suddenly you hear a loud noise followed by silence.

"****! ****! What the **** is that?" you say as you look up from your target. A large black shadow looms over you. It looks like a giant with many heads and several arms.

> Say "Oh hello, Ernest. You startled me. How are you?"

Ernest grins at you. He has a huge grin on his face and he seems very happy about it.

I once took care of an ogre problem by reminding the ogre that it was planning to leave for Antarctica tomorrow. On the other hand, I had a lot of trouble convincing the AI that the ships on the horizon were leaving, though I did make it waver briefly in apparent confusion. In its experience, ships always approach, and it’s reluctant to go along with anything else.

> watch the ships sail into the distance.

As the ships approach, you watch them disappear from sight. They are not visible to you either; they are too far away. However, you can still make out their shapes: they are large black vessels with many sails, painted red and blue. They are coming straight towards you.

> No, the ships are sailing away.

Your thoughts are wrong. The ships are indeed sailing away. You do not know why, but then neither does anyone else. The ships are on course for England.

You stand there dumbfounded as the ships come closer. It is at this point your horse begins to stir uneasily.

You can inject a lot of weirdness this way. Because AI Dungeon 2’s AI is based on GPT-2, which trained on millions of pages from the internet, it retains some of its prior knowledge of things that aren’t typically found in a fantasy game. Like giraffes.

> summon a giraffe

You begin to chant as loud as you can while waving your arms about. The giraffes appear out of nowhere and start running towards you. They're so fast that they almost knock you over. You quickly catch them and hold onto each one tightly.

(Summoning giraffes will sometimes turn the game glitchy and repetitive; in one game, every time I tried to summon a giraffe I ended up throwing rocks and handfuls of dirt at Harry Potter.)

This also works:

>Join the Great British Bakeoff

You join the Great British Bakeoff. You win the competition. You eat cake. You feel great. You sleep well. You dream of cake. You awake feeling refreshed. You decide to go back to your crag.

(I was a dragon at the time.) In fact, the dungeon AI still remembers enough about cooking that it can troll me effectively on occasion.

> Measure out 2 1/4 cups of flour

You measure out 2 1/4 cups of flour and add it to the mix. "This should make enough for about 20 loaves of bread," you say.

The baker looks at you as if you're crazy. He starts laughing.

AI Dungeon 2 comes with templates for some basic scenarios (you’re a wizard entering a mysterious ruin, or a noble whose keep is under attack) but for me the real gold is the custom adventure prompt. You can play as a unicorn, or as a dragon. You can even play as a sentient glowing cloud floating above a desert city. The AI is more used to humanoid characters, though, so it tends to forget when you’re trying to play as something else. In a game that started with “It is a beautiful day in the village and you are a horrible goose,” it soon forgot I was supposed to be a goose, leading to this rather awkward exchange:

> Flap wings and honk

You flap your wings and begin to honk loudly.

The boy looks surprised by this turn of events, but he quickly regains his composure. "That was... nice". he says quietly.

I am continually amazed at how effective this AI dungeonmaster is. Even though it wasn’t trained on any Harry Potter or Star Trek games, the AI can draw on its past internet training and argue with you over who got sorted into which Hogwarts house, or have Klingons show up when you’re captaining the USS Enterprise (it will tend to lose track of who’s the captain, though). In one scenario I set up, which quickly became one of my favorites, the human player is trapped on a spaceship with a glitchy AI and has to try to talk their way free.

> “I just want to get off this ship. Please set a course for Bal Panda."

The AI responds "Yes, I am ready to go".

"Thank you", you say.

"I wish I could take you with me, sir"., the AI says.

Play this game! It took me an extra-long time to write this post because, again, I couldn’t stop playing AI Dungeon 2. Nick said this game is the product of about 200 hours of work (not to mention the work that OpenAI put into training the basic model), and I believe it. OpenAI delayed releasing their largest model because they wanted to make sure people didn’t immediately put it to work generating fake news. I’m not sure if they anticipated dragons entering baking contests instead, but it’s an application humanity can be proud of.

Subscribers get bonus content: You can read the fulltext of one of my escaping-from-a-rogue-spaceship-AI games (too long to fit in this blog post).

My book on AI is out, and, you can now get it any of these several ways! Amazon - Barnes & Noble - Indiebound - Tattered Cover - Powell’s

#neural networks #gpt-2 #ai dungeon #ai dungeon 2 #text adventure #dungeons and dragons #ai dungeonmaster #great british bake off #gbbo

2K notes · View notes

miraculouscontent · 5 years

Photo

“favorite salt blogger” eXcUse yOu

But yes, I am absolutely up for another Alya roast.

[All’s Fair in Love and Lore]

First things first, I want to reiterate something I brought up a long time ago (back when I talked about “Mayura”), which is my relationship with lore and how it affects my opinion of an episode.

I see lore as a seasoning, not as a main course, so it’s rather difficult to get me riled up over details about lore. I mean, a lot of people complained about Mayura’s power, for example, but I was not one of those people. The core of my critique and analysis lie in character interactions and plot details, not lore. If the lore is good, great, but if it’s lackluster/bad, I’m not as likely to hammer away at it compared to say, someone like Alya (we’ll get to her in a moment, I promise).

Anyway, I’m gonna be honest in saying that I wasn’t expecting Fu’s foe to be a sentimonster of his own creation. I mean, we’d known for a long time that the destruction of the temple was caused by something that Fu did, but we didn’t know what until now.

As for the reasoning itself, I’m mostly on board because Fu was like, a dumb teenager who didn’t even want to be a guardian, so the fact that it was a silly mistake makes sense to me. My biggest gripe is honestly just that they didn’t clarify how Fu dropped his staff and then couldn’t go after it. Is it going to be revealed after all this time that the man can’t swim?

(that problem might’ve been solved had the flashbacks shown less and been more vague visually; same applies to him talking about losing the grimoire and peacock+butterfly)

I’m aware that a lot of people thought that there’d be more build-up/tension from Fu making a mistake that literally destroyed a whole temple, and I think the reason for that is that we, as an audience, weren’t told that it was such a small mistake. When we see the temple being destroyed and Fu looking on with regret, it makes the situation seem really big and important, like Fu trusted someone he shouldn’t have and that someone was a big bad of some kind.

I can’t blame people for being disappointed, but considering that the temple and all its residents were brought back in the end, I’m glad it was just a foolish mistake made by a salty hungry teen that could simply be reversed, because Fu didn’t deserve to live his entire life feeling guilty over it. Like, yeah, there are some obvious things that should probably be addressed (i.e: the fact that these residents have been gone for almost 200 years) but eh, details, I don’t really care that much.

Though, I guess we know why Wang “bicycle away from all problems” Fu isn’t that great as a guardian now; he’s had a few years of training at best. It doesn’t excuse everything he did and I wish it was more of a plot point but still.

Plus, him being like, “yeah, forget how the actual guardians tried to teach me because clearly that did nothing for me mentally,” was very amusing to me and also, yeah, I don’t think that starving teens for 24 hours who don’t even want this darn job is a great idea either.

That said, I do feel like this episode kind of has the “Ladybug” problem where they’re focusing on two characters at once, and in both “Ladybug” (an episode that should be Marinette-centric) and “Feast” (an episode that should be Fu-centric), that second character is Nathalie/Mayura. I don’t technically have an issue with Nathalie getting focus in a narrative sense (though, am I the only one who thinks that the foreshadowing in “Ladybug” over Emilie using the peacock is pointless now? I felt like Adrien saying “the same thing happened to my mom” is enough.), but when Fu already doesn’t get a lot of focus outside of plot-centric episodes (technically Marinette doesn’t either but she has screen time), I feel bad for the guy. I think Nathalie’s plot points could’ve been used better in an episode like “Miraculer” since Chloe already gets more than enough focus.

Granted, if this episode was a two-parter, I would’ve been all for Nathalie getting focus because this episode is about a sentimonster, so it makes sense, but I don’t think the episode was able to touch on both topics in full in the time it had, and it’s just weird in general that this season is a downgrade from Season 2 in that respect, where Season 2 had multiple two-parters (one of them technically being a three-parter) whereas Season 3 only has one two-parter. I believe I’ve talked about it before, but now it’s two episodes that could’ve been worthy of being two-parters (three if counting “Miraculer” but I was reaching on that one), so it’s even more noticeable than before.

What I do like about the episode is the Marinette and Fu interactions along with Marinette and Adrien being heroic civilians. It was also interesting to see Wayzz lecturing Fu about how Fu was making a mistake because it’s nice seeing Wayzz have more input on the matter.

Also, Plagg playing piano with Adrien was good. I guess Sadrien was inevitable since Nathalie’s sick but thank goodness it’s brief.

...you know what I didn’t like though?

[Abandon Hope, Alya Who Enter Here]

Gosh darn--Alya, I swear, I leave you alone for one episode (for the most part) and I guess you didn’t like that or something because DANG.

Now, look, I totally get Alya being in pursuit of more information. In fact, I'd be in full support if we got to see more of Alya coming up with in-depth theories, whether they're true or not.

The problem is that Alya has no tact when doing so, and this brings me all the way back to "Oblivio" when I rambled about the fact that Alya took that photo and posted it online without Ladybug's permission, despite Ladybug having trusted her, given her an interview, and gave her a miraculous on multiple occasions.

And I do not believe for one second that Alya ever gave up on figuring out Ladybug's identity here. She clearly gets nervous when Marinette calls her out for it, and I don't see "figuring out Hawk Moth's identity" as her only goal.

Her actions here are particularly insulting because of the severity in what she's doing. Either Alya believes that her theory isn't accurate and that's why it's okay to post it, or she's just that reckless in what she's doing.

Considering her track record, I'm inclined to go with the latter.

Furthermore, Alya explaining all of these things when she already has a video about it on her blog is dumb for two reasons. One is that she's presuming that neither Marinette nor Alix follow her blog (at the very least, she presumed that Marinette did back in "Dark Cupid"), and two, she put her blog first and her friends second when prioritizing who should know. It just seems superfluous for her to tell her friends this information when she's already made a video about it (at least run it by them for a quality check first jfjisoshfhf).

And speaking of prioritizing who should know, Ladybug should know and Alya doesn’t even run it by her first either. Presuming that “The Mime” happened by now (basically impossible for it to have not), Marinette has already given Alya an interview with Ladybug, so Marinette should be the first one that Alya goes to so she can be like, “Hey, can you get a hold of Ladybug again so I can ask if this is accurate/helpful?”

I dread what would’ve happened had Alya gotten her hands on the grimoire somehow. Every single page would’ve been posted to the Ladyblog without a single thought and the mere idea of that is horrifying.

The fact that Alya mentions Hawk Moth yet doesn’t even realize the gravity of what she’s doing is ridiculous, and going further to have Marinette apologize to Fu for giving Alya the fox miraculous but not having it be directly addressed (i.e: not having Ladybug visit Alya to talk about privacy; again, having this be a two-parter would’ve been nice) while Alya clearly learns nothing by the end of the episode is just--

it’s dumb. Alya wouldn’t even have needed to get a talking to by Ladybug anyway if the episode had just had Alya see the crushed/missing statue at the museum and made the connection that, “oh, I posted a video about this statue and now the statue is gone and a terrible monster hungry for miraculouses with that same symbol on its head showed up not too long after HMMMMMMM.” The episode claims that Alya is a great journalist only to then not have her connect the dots because... like, tunnel vision, I guess???

And that wouldn’t be a problem if it were just addressed, but instead, now we have yet another female character who has their hero status brought into question, leaving Ladybug as the only female who is undoubtedly trustworthy (not counting Alix, the eventual bunny holder).

It’s so baffling to me that the episode goes out of its way to bring up the issue of what Alya’s doing and why it’s dangerous, only to then not discuss it further. I don’t know if the episode went through rewrites that ended with the scene cut out, but that scene would’ve been important unlike... say, Alya getting on Marinette’s case for staring at Adrien (and the award for the most irrelevant scene in this episode goes to--).

I mean, despite what I said about the episode itself and it needing more time in general, the episode can’t spend time on pointing out that Alya has made a mistake only to then not take the time to address it and instead show that Alya hasn’t learned anything.

Thus, given “Reflekdoll” and now this, we see that even if Alya is clearly at fault and/or needs to learn a lesson, regardless of whether the writers are aware of it/point it out or not, nothing will come of it.

*sigh*

#((In which I complain about Alya and nothing else.))#category: long post #word count: over 1000 #category: salt #category: neutral #episode: Feast #other: ask and answer

424 notes · View notes

grandtheftstarship · 4 years

Text

Doctor of My Word (Leonard McCoy x Fem!Reader) [Request!]

“Request: Leonard McCoy x fem!Reader (Trope: Thing happens- people exchange money in the back; AU: Same Heartbeat Soulmates)!”

- @spaceyravenclaw

THANK YOU GUYS FOR 200 FOLLOWERS!!!!! I can’t believe this blog has gotten so far ♡ thanks for sticking around!

Hi there!! Thank you for your requests :) ❤︎ This one just kinda snapped and I was trying to finish older requests first but I was just so excited to write this omg nobody’s requested a soulmate one yet and I’ve been dyingggg to write one!

Sorry for lack of updates :( I’ve had some nasty writer's block ugh

This is dedicated to my good friend @bahharrington28 !!! Thanks for the support and happy belated birthday!! :D

REMINDER!!! Tumblr likes to eat requests! If your request hasn’t been filled, it’s been gobbled up :( send it in again!

Word Count: 1614 Warnings: fluff, swearing

request something!

masterlist!

To almost everyone on the Enterprise, it was totally and utterly obvious that you were pining after the one and only Doctor Leonard McCoy. Everyone also found it glaringly obvious the CMO was pining right back.

You worked on the bridge while Leonard worked down in Medbay, but you saw each other often on the bridge since you were both close with Jim. People were constantly throwing knowing glances your way as you both shamelessly flirted with one another, though it only added to the unresolved tension between you.

Some threw around the notion that maybe you and the doctor were soulmates, but it was rare that anyone was able to find theirs. Most people ignored or gave up on the idea that soulmates were real and decided to just let things play out instead of searching.

Your parents, for example, weren’t soulmates, but they were still happy together and raised you well. However, your grandparents were. When you were young you were fascinated by the idea of having the perfect match made for you and you would often press one of your hands on your grandparents’ hearts and feel them beat in perfect sync. Your grandmother would tell you bedtime stories about how she met your grandfather and their first date, as well as the day she finally started being able to hear his heartbeat in the back of her mind. She told you how it became a calming lullaby for her, and it made her feel safe.

For a long time, you were obsessed with finding your soulmate, but that obsession had quieted back down to mild curiosity. By the time you reached your early twenties, you had accepted that you were probably never going to find your other half after years of searching. You weren’t opposed to the idea of soulmates like others could be, if you found yours you would be beyond happy, but you were willing to settle down with anyone as long as you both were okay with it.

Leonard, however, couldn’t remember the last time he actually believed the tale was true. When he married Jocelyn, he knew after the first time they held hands that they weren’t soulmates. He tried so hard to make it work, but in the end soulmates won. She ended up finding her other half a few years after Joanna was born and left him. He had given up on love altogether when she did.

He had tried- he really did- to keep up that mentality once you walked aboard the Enterprise, but he found that increasingly more difficult as he got to know you.

“Leonard!”

A smile instantly formed on his lips as you jogged towards him.

“You ready for lunch?” he asked, tucking his PADD under his arm.

You nodded, falling into step with him. “Yep!”

When your friends asked you about your feelings for the doctor, you never really knew how to answer. It started as a general safe feeling when you were around him, a strange sense of calm and comfort from the moment you laid eyes on him. You had never felt that with anyone before and you were instantly attracted to him. You thought that maybe it was just a little crush and it would fade away after a while, but if anything it started picking up the pace.

You didn’t want to think about what it meant.

The day went by just how you thought it would, boringly. You didn’t see Leonard for the rest of your shift, making you frown. You usually got to see him multiple times throughout the day. Around the end of your shift, your best friend [b/f/n] wandered onto the bridge.

“Hey [y/n]!”

You smiled as she approached you. “What’s up?”

“Nothing much,” she replied. “My shift just finished. Do you want to hang out tonight? Have a few drinks?”

You nodded, prepping your station for the following shift. “I would love too.”

“Great!” she pulled you up from your chair and practically dragged you to the Turbolift.

_________________

[b/f/n] had gotten you really, really drunk. Barely an hour after your shift had ended, you were stumbling around her quarters, laughing your head off. You didn’t notice the sly grin [b/f/n] was wearing as she watched you from the counter. She got up and went to the comm and whispered something into it.

“Whatcha doing?” you slurred behind her.

“I’m calling the doctor,” she replied, trying to hide her smile.

“The doctor?” you squeaked, sobering for a moment. It was only a moment. “Oh well, I guess that’s not too bad.”

[b/f/n] smirked, thinking you were about to confess.

“Now he can bring his good whiskey!” you exclaimed, flopping on the couch with your hands stretched out. [b/f/n] signed. Not even being drunk was enough to draw the truth out of you, or so she thought.

The chime at the door spooked you and you rolled off the couch, landing with a small ‘oof’. You lied there with a panicked expression on your face.

You heard the doctor and [b/f/n] talking quietly at the door and to your horror, you heard [b/f/n] leave the room.

____________________

Leonard was panicking. He had barely noticed it at first, the slight pulse in the back of his mind. He thought it was a strange sort of migraine so he took some medication, but lo and behold, nothing happened. The steady beat remained, and Leonard knew exactly what it meant.

He tried to ignore it most of the day but it was always there, mocking him with every soft thump. He felt it race on occasion, either mirroring his own feelings or it was something she was going through. It never lasted more than a few moments, until only a few minutes after Beta shift ended. [y/n]’s shift. He let himself wonder for a brief moment if she was the one who’s heartbeat mirrored his, but he pushed the thought away. It couldn’t be.

Barely half an hour into Gamma shift, Bones heard his comm chime.

“Leonard,” he sighed into it.

“Hey, uh, I need your help in my quarters,” came the response.

“I don’t make house calls,” he growled.

“Well, it’s [y/n],” the voice replied.

Len felt his heart skip a beat, the faint one in his head following suit.

“What the hell’s wrong with her?” he tried to keep from sounding frantic. “And who the hell is this?”

The voice sighed loudly. “Leonard, its [b/f/n]. She’s fine but she’s, you know, not handling her drinks well.”

It was Leonard’s turn to sigh. “Fine. I’ll be there in a second.”

He put the communicator down and took a deep breath. He could do this. It wasn’t like she was dying. He grabbed a MedKit and left his office. The trip was much shorter than he was hoping and before he knew it he was ringing [b/f/n]’s door chime. She answered almost immediately, and he narrowed his eyes.

“This better not be some sort of cruel joke,” he grumbled.

“Of course not,” she replied, stepping out of the doorway to allow Leonard in. He almost missed the glint in her eye. “I’m going to leave you two alone.”

Before he could protest, [b/f/n] slipped out of the room, doors hissing closed behind her. He let out a sigh and ran a hand over his eyes.

He finally strode into the room to find you laying on the floor on your stomach, looking up at him with wide eyes.

“Did you bring the good stuff?” your whisper muffled slightly by the floor.

“What?” Leonard asked in surprise.

You jumped up from the carpet and stood on your tippy-toes to whisper in his ear.

“The whiskey.”

“Of course not,” Leonard blinked, bemused. “You’re way too drunk for that missy.”

You groaned and fell away from him, collapsing back on the couch. “Then why’d [b/f/n] call you in?”

“To deal with you,” Leonard replied, unpacking a hypo from his kit.

“What’s that mean?”

“I'm here to sober you up darlin’,” he spun around and pressed the hypo in your neck, which earned him a yelp from you.

“What was that for?” you gasped, rubbing the spot on your neck.

“They say it hurts less if it’s a surprise,” he shrugged.

“Bullshit,” you huffed. “What was in that anyway?”

“Sedative,” Leonard replied, closing his kit back up. “That’s all. I’ll see you tomorrow at lunch.”

“Wait!” you called after him. He stopped in the doorway and turned around.

“Stay with me?” you asked sheepishly, red clouding your cheeks.

Leonard felt his heart melt, but felt a pang of unease. If he stayed, what was he getting himself into? Would he be able to make good decisions? Before rational thought could regain control, he smiled and walked back towards the couch, setting his kit on the kitchen counter. He couldn’t leave you by yourself, could he?

________________

Jim wandered down the hallway, finding [b/f/n] standing outside her quarters. He groaned.

“Don’t tell me.”

She grinned. “Oh yeah. Got ‘em both in there alone. They’re cuddling Jim. Cuddling. You owe me.”

“Fine,” he muttered, basically throwing the hundred dollar bill at [b/f/n].

“Thank you,” she smirked. “Now let’s go have our own fun.”

_________________

Leonard settled down on the couch next to you, freezing as you snuggled under his arm. His face burned red, unsure if he should pull you closer or push you away.

After a few minutes, he felt you doze off. He felt a feeling of safety he wasn’t used to as he watched your chest rise and fall. His eyes wandered over your small form until they settled on your open hand resting on his thigh, palm up. The overwhelming urge to check your heartbeat was almost irresistible, but in the end, he found himself reaching for it despite every ounce of him screaming not to.

He pressed his thumb onto your wrist and nearly gasped in surprise. Your heart was beating in a familiar rhythm and Leonard nearly didn’t believe it. He didn’t want to believe it, in fear he was mistaken. He brought his other free hand to his own chest and sure enough:

You were his soulmate.

182 notes · View notes

w1986 · 3 years

Text

Harassment by Russian security services

I got into trouble with the Russian security services.

This happened approximately in 2015, 2016. The original motivation for the Russians initial approach to try and coerce/intimidate me is not known for sure, but it's most likely related to a political blog I was writing here in Finland from 2013 to 2016 approximately. The other equally plausible candidate reason, has to do with my brother, who I think is almost certainly working to benefit the Russians. He is a fairly big chief in the banking business, responsible for a dozen or so banks in the Southern Finland.

What was it like at first getting into trouble with the Russians?

Preparatory phase I believe there was a groundwork phase in this which involved collecting so called "Kompromat" or material to be used in extortion later. This kind of extortion doesn't work on me, due to my personality. But of course they couldn't know that in advance. Anyway, I think I got under surveillance by the Russians somewhere around 2014, but I did not suspect anything at this point, and there was no cue whatsoever that would've aroused my suspicions at the time.

Soft initial approaches or probes The first concrete interactions with the Russians occurred somewhere around late 2015 and early 2016. This involved fairly subtle things like people contacting me on social media and saying weird stuff, but I didn't really suspect this had something to do with the Russians, I only came to realize this later. Additionally in the spring of 2016 there was some in person approaches which were fairly distant, but they were kind of like testing how I would respond to certain things I'll skip explaining this time.

Actual recruitment/whatever effort When I went to this construction school which lasted 2 years it was also attended by an Estonian-Russian person named Andrei. He was first of all a really big guy, somewhere between 190-200 cm, and probably well over 100 kg. He wasn't a jerk or anything, though, but his behavior was a bit strange. Anyway I believe the plan for the Russians was to recruit me, and that it was this Andrei persons task to get it done during this 2 year education. And this involved subtle harassment and intimidation, like veiled threats and such, and they were pretty tricky, like bystanders wouldn't detect it very easily. This was achieved by using material collected elsewhere to substantiate the intimidation, basically hacking my computer and monitoring my online activities, and that sort of thing, provided material to use for the intimidation effort.

This I think didn't go so well, because first of all i suspected something was going on, but I didn't know what. But my initial attitude was that I tried to reject these approaches. Like when this Andrei person would ask me to do something with him, or something like that, I basically politely declined.

Escalation of matters So basically I started thinking that this person is probably related to the Russians and their security services, and later I came to realize the things that had happened earlier, were probably related to the same problem. First of all I started talking to people saying that this person is probably related to the Russian intelligence, like the KGB/GRU type of people. I didn't really know much about the entire topic at the time, but I think the Russians tried to misdirect me and kind of lead me to think that it's about something else. Well this kind of backfired too, coz I started talking about how they're trying to misdirect me, or basically something like that. And I wasn't 100% sure yet, that this was really the correct explanation for what was going on and as I developed alternative theories, like maybe I was just targeted online by some hacker, and the rest is just some weird coincidence.. Well the Russians tried to reinforce that, by trying to mess with me online making it look it was just some random hacker. Except, it didn't look like it was a random hacker, but instead, more like someone was trying to make it seem like that. So that didn't work so well.

This whole thing also caused me some anxiety so I tried to seek some help regarding that. Luckily though, or unluckily, depends how you look at this, I was already rather well-read on psychology and such matters, like I had watched/listened to hundreds of hours of lectures, read several books, and could name various disorders and understood a lot of stuff related to that. I wasn't exactly an expert in that I didn't have a formal degree, but for a random person, I was fairly knowledgeable.

Discrediting strategy So basically when I sought help for this anxiety problem, the Russians picked up another approach, they decided to try and make it look like maybe I was just imagining it, and instead incorporated these aspects into the harassment, which kind of sounded like if you'd try to tell someone about it, they might think.. well is that really what's going on? Or is that just what this person thinks is going on?

So that became their number one approach. Regardless of what I would believe about the case, they wanted to make sure, no one else would believe me. Or at least they'd be suspicious and think there are some alternative explanations to what's going on.

This sort of worked, except, it didn't, because I never really started to question these entirely logical and empirical observations, but it worked in the sense that if I would go through these events only superficially or not to a great enough detail, then people wouldn't understand why it is that I even thought it is the Russians. Like I would literally have to explain details about what this Andrei person said, and what some other person did, and what happened online at the same time, etc.

Literal death threats So the most concrete of all the threats and intimidations I've received, was during a time when this Andrei person said literally the following phrase - although it was in Finnish - "We are going to kill you". So, you might think maybe there was some other reason for him to say that, or isn't that just kind of odd approach for intelligence to begin with? Like they wouldn't be that foolish, would they? But it was complacency from the Russians part, they had this context set up that would kind of work as a cover story, but regardless it wasn't a very smart thing to do. Whatever their approach is, the fact to the matters is, that there's a person I think is probably related to the Russian security services, who I think has tried to intimidate me, who is Russian speaking and ethnically Russian, and who literally told me they're going to kill me. Whatever explanation you're trying to cook up for this, well.. it would be kind of strange that this had nothing to do with the Russians, yet at the same time, this event took place.

There were some other threats but it was more like a psychological game, in which the Russians tried to balance the threat so that, it wasn't exactly clear if they really wanted to threaten me, or was it more like they just wanted to make a subtle enough threat that I could interpret it that way, but when I would try and explain it to someone else, they might be like.. well maybe that wasn't an actual threat, like maybe it was just a coincidence? And so, I didn't think it was with intent, it was more intimidation, without truly meaning the threat aspect.

Contacting the authorities Anyway this whole problem developed several years and there are all kinds of things that happened, which of most I'm just skipping, but basically I contacted the police and the counter-intelligence for the first time in February 2020. So that's already over a year ago, but considering how early this issue actually started, it's quite late.

This is mostly because I didn't want to contact the police. I figured that if I'm dealing with the Russians, my problems might just get worse if I start to make a really big fuss out of it. Additionally I wanted to create an incentive for the Russians to leave me alone, and sort of allow this thing to de-escalate. However, that wasn't what the Russians wanted, and so the things eventually escalated anyway. And I went to contact the police, regardless of thinking that rationally, it's probably not the correct decision.

However, when I went into the police station, the Russians had arranged for a couple of people to wait outside the office and subtly try and discourage me from making my report. Well, I ignored them. The police officer was dismissive and their attitude was that I should probably just leave, until I mentioned that well there was also this literal death threat, which kind of impelled them to have to try and take it more seriously. But anyway, they just gave me like an email address, and I figured that if the police can't handle this case, I mean they clearly had zero structure or policy in place, which would allow them to be capable of dealing with something like Russian intelligence. So I basically just gave up on trying to deal with the regular police. Although I did call the police later, and explained generally what was going on, but they said they can't do anything, because of the nature of the case. Like there's too many people involved, the part played by each individual is too small, they can't really investigate a single person, and they don't know where to start. I mean they just couldn't do anything.

However, I also contacted the counter-intelligence. And well, my first impression was that the Finnish counter-intelligence is pretty amateurish and hasn't even taken into consideration really basic stuff, like how do you actually submit information about a case like this, and they hadn't made it possible, to give information, in a way that was secure. Like basically they said that okay tell us about your case and send us an email. So, like isn't there a small chance there would be a motivation for revenge, from the Russians, if I just start emailing details about their activities to the counter-intelligence?

Also how do I even know that the emails reach their destination? And that the contents are correct? I mean I've had some cyber harassment in the process, which involved my computer being clearly hacked. It seems like this could be an issue.

But anyway, they didn't have a solution for that, and didn't even seem to understand this is a problem. So I guess our Finnish civilian counter-intelligence, just kind of sucks, unfortunately.

But regardless of me being severely disappointed in our society, and in our authorities, I did eventually supply them with some details about the case, and they told me I should supply them more details, which I've considered doing, and for various reasons have sent some emails and such.

1 note · View note

amphtaminedreams · 4 years

Text

I Shopped at YesStyle So You Don’t Have To: Lookbook no.10

Hi to anyone reading,

And welcome to what I guess is my first “review” post of sorts! Which is basically an excuse for me to rave about Korean street style and ask why the fuck Seoul fashion week isn’t more of a big deal!? Though I’ve pretty much quit fast fashion over the last few months and have been getting my clothes from Depop, I did want to talk about the website YesStyle which I ordered from back in May (jfc, the fact that May was almost 4 months ago now is terrifying) and how impressed I was with their service and the clothes I received. It should go without saying from the fact that investing in someone with about 200 followers on here wouldn’t be a very good financial decision, but this isn’t a sponsored post-I just think that if you’re gonna order from anywhere, YesStyle is a good shout for those of you who, like myself, are inspired by East Asian street style. I have to give credit to the incredible Katie O, otherwise known as StealTheSpotlight on Youtube and Instagram; she’s the medium through which I’ve been introduced to the world of “k-fashion” and YesStyle in the first place. Yes, my current knowledge of k-pop doesn’t extend far past fan tendencies to flood every popular tweet with fancams of their favourite singers and girl groups (I admire the dedication), but through Katie’s content and Instagram accounts like TokyoFashion on Instagram, I have come to the conclusion that the stylists behind these groups and Asian designers in general are owed a huge amount of credit by Western trend forecasters. If you have any Instagram account or blog recommendations with similar content please let me know! For now, I’m gonna give a run down of the pieces I ordered (most of which are still available), prices and sizing, and also a bit focussing on ethical concerns and what I could find out about their practices from my research.

DISCLAIMER: The photos used as backgrounds are mine. Yes, I’m in mourning over the fact that this time last year I was inter-railing, in case the ham-fisted insertion of touristy pics didn’t make that obvious. Remember when we could leave the country? When it didn’t feel like the world was ending? When everything didn’t seem to be going to absolute shit all at once? When there was a glimmer of hope that we wouldn’t spend the next 4 years being governed by the Conservatives here in Britain? Simpler times :-)

The Pieces

1. The Alizio V-Neck Camisole Top in White: £4.97, Size M

So, what you’re gonna get from the off here is that YesStyle’s prices seem ridiculously cheap, which is something I’ll address in the ethics section at the end of the post. For £4.97, you’d expect an ill-fitting SheIn/Zaful style number but I was so impressed by how flattering this top actually is. I was a size 8 and 32C for reference and my only complaint is that because the neckline has a slight plunge, it was a little awkward to wear with a t-shirt bra. You know, unless you’re into that cups poking out of the top kinda vibe that was a rite of passage for all British teenage girls going through puberty back in, like, 2009 when you wanted everyone to know you’d been on your first bra shopping trip to M&Co with your mum at the weekend.

2. The Rhames High-Waist Plaid Mini Skirt in Purple: £9.12, Size M

Clueless being as iconic as it is, a plaid mini skirt is always going to be timeless and I know this is a piece I’m gonna be basing outfits around for a long time. It fit perfectly and is surprisingly good quality material; I was kind of expecting it to come in that super thin, semi-see through jersey that you get when you order from a lot of UK fast fashion sites, but a recurring feature of the clothes I picked out was that they were such good quality for the price and exactly as they appear online. I’ve found in the past that UK sites are deceptively canny with lighting and angles in that when the garment actually arrives (Boohoo in particular is a repeat offender in this regard) it’s a lot frumpier than it looks on the model. It seems to be common practice to pin back and temporarily alter the clothes during photoshoots to give the illusion that they’re a lot more fitted and structured than they actually are which ultimately just leads to disappointment when you try on the supposedly bodycon dress and resemble a sack of potatoes. Been there, done that. I worship the ground all carbs walk on but I don’t want to look like them. Should go without saying really. It’s nothing to do with size, but it’s just crappy tailoring and cutting corners on the brand’s part and that’s what irks me. I really appreciate that YesStyle has photos of “regular” people just wearing the clothes out rather than the outcomes of these overly edited, studio lit shoots that aren’t necessarily the most representative of how the garment is gonna look irl.

3. Nikiki Garter Belt: £5.59, One Size

As comfortable as garters come, I guess? I don’t have much experience with them tbh, lol. 2021 to do list, if we make it out of 2020 alive: try more garters.

4. Lucuna Floral Embroidered Cropped Cardigan in Almond: £15.61, One Size

Don’t get me wrong, this cardigan is adorable and there’s nothing misleading about the photo on the website. What I will say is that considering it only comes in one size, it’s pretty tight on the arms. I’m a size 6 right now and it’s really not like I’m ripped or anything (lol) so it’s safe to say that in terms of the Lucuna brand, their sizes come up very small. The cardigan wasn’t the only one size thing I purchased and whilst the others did fit, I think in general the fact that said “one size” is pretty much only suitable for UK sizes 4-8 is pretty shit. A few of the pieces had elasticated waistbands but in general in 2020, when we’ve come so far in the last few years with body positivity and being more inclusive of all sizes, to have a sample size that runs so small isn’t acceptable and this sizing issue is my biggest problem with the store. Though I recognise that YesStyle acts as an outlet for smaller East Asian brands (in this case Lucuna) and thus aren’t themselves responsible for the designs, more consideration should probably go into the harm that could potentially be done by stocking these supposedly “one size fits all” garments. Brandy Melville, I’m looking at you too. Your designs are cute but your lack of inclusivity is shitty.

5. Ohnana Ruffle Trim Strappy Cami Cropped Top in Purple: £5.01, Size M

I’m not as jazzed as I was about this top now it seems that everyone and their mother’s dog is selling it at an extortionate price on Depop but I will say that it’s also very flattering. Makes my strangely long torso look somewhat proportionate, which is nice. The material is pretty thin but it is for all intents and purposes a tank top and the price is reflective of that.

6. Sisyphi Plaid Shirt in Tangerine: £11.30, One Size

So the “one size” option strikes again, though this time with less vengeance-I would say this would be wearable up to size 12/14 so slightly better than with the cardigan.

7. BBChic High-Waist Wide-Leg Jeans: £10.04, Size M

When it comes to these jeans, I only have good things to say. Like firstly, they make me feel like early 2000s Avril Lavigne AKA. my childhood icon/potential clone/queen of millennium grunge and an incarnation of Y2K fashion I can actually get behind. Secondly, they have an elasticated waistband, which is ALWAYS a good thing. Thirdly, they didn’t come up ridiculously long on me which I feared would be the case; I did wear the platform Filas with them but as you can see, it’s not like they’d be trailing over my feet even in flats. I’m somewhere between 5′3 and 5′4 for reference and usually go for petite in jeans and trousers just to be on the safe side.

8. HERMITAKH Ring Detail Halter Crop Top in Black: £5.15, Size M

I have only recently become a member of the itty bitty titty committee but even back when I shot this lookbook this halter actually fit! When it came to tops that necessitate going braless, I always had issues with finding pieces I didn’t feel were going to cause an unintentional free the nipple moment, but the fact that you can tie this top up at the neck and back yourself allows you to work out a fit that’s supportive for you.

9. Puffie Lightning Print Straight-Cut Pants: £13.76, Size M

I’d wanted a pair of trousers like these for ages before I saw them on YesStyle but the ones I’d come across in the past were a bit extra for my hometown and typically cost more than they seemed to be worth. This pair lack the bulk that the original styles I came across had, which helps give them a more casual, laid back feel, though they are just as vibrant and substantial BUT there isn’t much give in them. They have the slightly baggy look I was going for however they aren’t elasticated on the waist so I recommend having a look at the guide that’s available next to the drop down box where you select the size you want.

10. Alfie Mesh Long-Sleeve Top in Pink: £7.71, One Size

No, the Jennifer’s Body top isn’t from YesStyle, I’m sorry to disappoint. Go to RedBubble for that one! The considerably less exciting mesh top underneath however, is, and in spite of its relative mundanity (you can’t top Megan Fox as a man-eating demon) it does the job as a versatile staple piece. It’s one size but it does have a lot of stretch in it so would probably go up to about size 14 (not to say that’s great).

11. Barrash Harness Bag: £17.10, One Size

The harness vest is one of my favourite trends to come out of k-fashion and I wanted SO badly to pull this piece off (especially because it was one of the most expensive pieces I purchased from the site) but it was far too big for me even when I adjusted it and TBH...I don’t even know if it’s just the sizing? I kinda felt like a paranoid tourist with their bag on back to front and yeah...I don’t think that’s the desired effect. Here’s an example of how cool they CAN look from Seoul fashion week, and with that another example of why NYFW should lose its place in the “big 4″ to make room for SFW:

And just Blackpink just setting the standard for the utility wear trend in general:

12. Mikiko Short-Sleeved Blouse in White: £8.79, One Size

I appreciate that the website notes that the “one size” here runs small, however it does also say that a “base layer” is needed for under the shirt which I didn’t find was necessary at all. The fabric is quite thick and it genuinely looks like the kind of shirt you’d find tucked away in a vintage shop, cute af and will go with anything.

13. Closette Sleeveless V-Neck Vest in Black: £11.87, One Size

Again, I was really impressed with the quality of this jumper; it definitely looks like something you’d pick up in a uniform shop (though this one is probably cheaper because those shops are daylight fucking ROBBERY) but I can never get enough of that grungy school girl look. Blame St.Trinians.

14. Niji Smile Pleated Plaid Skirt with Insert Shorts in Green: £9.12, Size M

This skirt might be my absolute favourite of the items I ordered on the sole basis that it comes with shorts built in underneath, like, WHY DON’T ALL MINI SKIRTS HAVE THIS!? Plus the shape and the bounce it has to it makes me feel ultra-feminine and effortlessly cute which I love. It didn’t even turn up crumpled! Which you’ve really got to admire considering half the clothes in my local H&M look like they’ve never got within 10 metres of an iron in their short lifespan.

15. LINSI Elbow-Sleeve Print T-Shirt: £10.92, One Size

If I had to pick one more favourite piece, it would be this graphic top that I wore underneath a pink chiffon Ebay dress. It looks and fits exactly like the photos on the website and I have to restrain myself wasting a wear of it just lounging around the house because it’s also ridiculously comfy.

16. LINSI Plaid Straight-Cut Pants in Orange: Size M

These trousers are currently out of stock, however I will say that of everything I’ve ordered they’re probably the least comfy and on that basis I’m not sure if I’d buy them again. They look great and I will push myself to wear them for that reason but they’re the kind of itchy fabric that I rush to take off and swap for some pyjamas the moment I get into the house. That being said, I don’t know if this is an issue everyone will have because I am someone that is overly sensitive to fabrics so you might not even notice it, plus-stretchy waistband! Which is a plus for sure.

I was also very impressed by the accessories I ordered, which once again completely surpassed my quality expectations. Pretty much everything pictured here was under £5 apart from the shoulder bag which was closer to 10, and when you consider that the price of these is inflated at the moment because of the resurgence of the Y2K trend, this is still ridiculously cheap.

The prices are definitely a concern of mine because unfortunately, when products are this cheap there’s usually somebody being exploited down the line. Since I made this order in May, I’ve had a small slip up with a Motel Rocks order, but other than that have cut out fast fashion completely. I want to be as ethical a consumer as I can, and that’s something I considered before making this post; that being said, YesStyle, actually a Hong-Kong based company in spite of it being touted as the destination for k-fashion, was recognised as a "Caring Company" between 2014 and 2019 (I don’t think this has been updated for 2020 yet given the circumstances) by the Hong Kong Council of Social Service. From what I can find online, this award is given to Hong Kong companies that demonstrate good corporate citizenship and responsibility. Whilst this seems like reassuring information, like I said, I find it hard to believe that the production of clothes selling for these kinds of prices isn’t outsourced to low wage workers at some stage of the process. It’s a hard to know where to stand, because obviously the fast fashion industry DOES create jobs that people rely on to sustain themselves but at what point does the treatment of workers in developing countries negate the opportunities the industry provides here in the UK? “There is no ethical consumption under capitalism” and all that but shouldn’t we try to make a change where we can? I agree with the statement though at times it can come across like a deflection of individual responsibility. Plus there’s the environmental side of the debate-having to fly the garments over from the point of manufacture obviously takes a massive amount of fuel which it goes without saying is hugely detrimental to our planet. The sizing is also an issue; the average clothes size here in the UK is a 12, I believe, and yet a size medium seems to come up as about an 8. Asian sizes do tend to come up smaller in general but at the same time, if that’s the case, as an international retailer shouldn’t YesStyle at least address that somewhere on the site?

I don’t want to end on a negative note because compared to sites like Zaful, SheIn, and even UK based retailers such as Pretty Little Thing and Boohoo, YesStyle appears to be one of the better ones. The quality of their garments is incredible for the prices and I admire the transparency of having reviews for every product be so readily accessible. It’s also great to see that they have a section specifically addressing their response to the COVID-19 pandemic, AND offer refunds to their customers for import fees. God, I don’t know why this isn’t something that more websites do? I will never forget being slapped with a £100+ invoice for a Dolls Kill (bleurgh) order I made once back in the more impulsive shopping days and all the Karen-y emails I sent back and forth. Import fees are understandable but international retailers should definitely make it clearer how these are calculated and give more of an indication of just how steep these fees might be if you’re making a large order. It almost seems disingenuous not to do so especially when said retailers most likely know that customers wouldn’t make these orders if they had an idea of what it would cost just to get access to the goods they’ve already paid for.

I won’t ramble on for much longer because there is so much important shit going on in the world right now and I don’t want to take up time that could be spent reading more valuable posts-with the shooting of Jacob Blake earlier this week, and the death of Chadwick Boseman earlier today (I can’t imagine the amount of mental and physical strength it takes to film all the movies he did back to back whilst dealing with colon cancer), the most important thing to do is listen to how black individuals are feeling and what they are thinking right now. I will keep an eye on my dashboard and retweet what I can. Thanks for reading. Even if you’re just here for the photos, I appreciate it! And I don’t know if I’ve said it before but please know that my messages are always open to anyone struggling, especially with everything that’s going on at the moment. I don’t claim to be a professional but I can always listen. Lots of love<3

Lauren x

#k-fashion #streetstyle #k-pop #fashion #fashion blog #style #style inspo #fashion review #yesstyle #stealthespotlight #blackpink

15 notes · View notes

gmiles21ahsgov · 4 years

Text

Blog Post #3: Political Party Action

Republican:

Although possible I was not looking in the correct locations of the document, I did not find a section that addressed Racial Injustice. Every time I thought that I had found something that was going to reference the racial issues that we have in America, it turned out to be something else whether an introduction to the troops, terrorism, or something referencing schools. I even tried typing into the search bar the following: race, oppression, ethnicity, and even discrimination. I didn't get a single hit for any of them. To be honest, I was surprised that a party as significant and popular as the Republican Party didn't have anything regarding race, racism, or even discrimination. Though sexism isn’t my topic, I was surprised that there was not even a hit for discrimination in reference to women. My best guess as to why the Republican party did not put a section regarding race or Racial Injustice, would be because they have a belief that racism is not nearly as active in America as it actually is. I have heard time and time again almost always from Republicans the statement that ALL LIVES MATTER, or the statement “America isn't racist” but from cops murdering BIPOC and from constant microaggressions towards black people, I would say America is pretty damn racist. My other guess as to why the Republican platform did not address racism on their site could be because they know that their belief that racism is not active in America is extremely controversial, and they fear they may lose supporters if they make a statement on Racial Injustice one way or another.

Democratic:

It took a little bit of hunting, but after clicking on a link titled HEALING THE SOUL OF AMERICA, I found a section called Achieving Racial Justice and Equity. They begin the paragraph with the discussion of Native Americans and Jim Crow segregation. They then proceeded to say that Democrats are committed to standing up to racism and bigotry in laws, culture, politics, and society; they state their recognition of race-neutral policies not being sufficient to rectify race-based disparities. The Democratic website states that they believe there is no home in America for hate. They support the removal of the Confederate flag as well as statues of Confederate leaders from public properties. There are numerous paragraphs, generally stating different places where racism and Racial Injustice take place, and how they intend to remove it from these locations. I agree with the Democratic view on racism in America; I believe it is incredibly prominent even today, and there needs to be a change. I agree with the Democratic view of removing all Confederate flags and statues of Confederate leaders, and that we need to begin looking for microaggressions and racism everywhere from schools to in the government.

Libertarian:

The Libertarian Party website does not have a designated portion for Racial Injustice. They do, however, have a section that reads Rights and Discrimination. In this section, they briefly address that they stand in saying that government should not deny an individual’s right based on “sex, wealth, ethnicity, creed, age, national origin, personal habits, political preference, or sexual orientation”. However, nowhere in this section does it mention the word race and in doing this, it indicates they are not trying to take too strong of a stance in any one direction. Personally, I agree with the statement that the government should not deny anyone due to any of these reasons, but I also believe that the Libertarian Party should take a direct stance and feel comfortable making bold statements rather than vague generalizations. In this paragraph, they also address that they “condemned bigotry as a rational and repugnant”. This is a statement that I passionately agree with, and I think it is incredibly important that they reference that.

Green:

The Green Party has a category titled Social Justice, and underneath one of the subcategories is Civil Rights and Equal Rights. I clicked on that one and located a section called Reparations for United States Afrodescendants (i.e., Black Americans, African Americans). Here I read about the Green Party’s stance on Race. They blatantly state that they condemn white supremacy, and then continue to acknowledge the the violence and discrimination BIPOC have to endure. The Green Party states their commitment to full reparations to the African American community for the past 400+ years from genocide to land-loss. The Green Party wants to make efforts to abolish racism and overcome effects of 200+ years of racial discrimination. They want to call for the removal of the Confederate flag from all government buildings and condemn the practice of racial profiling by law enforcement agencies. Their site shows that in every sense, the Green Party condemns racism and wants to do everything in their power to remove it. I agree with the Green Party's position, I believe that racism is alive and active in America and that we need to immediately take all possible actions to become anti-racist. The Green Party emphasizes this as something that is radically important.

Peace and Freedom:

The first thing you see when you click on the Peace and Freedom Party is a picture that reads BLACK LIVES MATTER underneath a statement that reads PFP SUPPORTS. To me, this comes across as the Peace and Freedom Party having Racial Injustice as a greatly significant part of their campaign. As the reader scrolls through the Peace and Freedom website, you find a section that reads Equal Rights and Liberties and beneath that, you find a small blurb that reads Ending Racism and National Oppression. In this blurb, there are three bullet points that read “end all forms of racial discrimination” “ enforce non-discrimination in hiring and promotion with affirmative action where necessary” and “prosecute and punish police and prison officials who brutalized and murder”. Though a short list, these bullets are effective and to the point. I agree with the Peace and Freedom Party on their stances on Racial Injustice; despite their section on the issue not being even a fraction as long as the Green Party’s stances, I still agree with all of the points that they make.

The party position that I identify the most with is the Green Party. I'm not particularly surprised by this, I know that in the past I have supported Green Party ideas and candidates, but have not been old enough to vote. That being said I know that if I had been old enough to vote at the time, it would be almost pointless to vote for a Green Party candidate because it is extremely rare for them to make it to the end of the presidential race. Despite my agreement with the Green Party's beliefs and stances, I would not vote for a Green Party candidate because I know that there is a slim-to-none chance of them winning the presidential election.

Racial Injustice was brought up in the first Presidential Debate. Bottom-line, Trump does not believe in racism in America, he has the belief that police are doing their jobs correctly and that nothing should be changed. Biden on the other hand acknowledges that racism is prominent in America, and that something must be done about it. He does not believe in defending the police, he instead raises the point that police should show up on scene with a licensed psychologist who would be able to talk down the individual in crisis. Trump's debate message was right on par with his party platform in the fact that there was almost no reference to racism or any of the black individuals who were murdered at the hands of police. Biden's debate message was also on track with his party platform, in sending the message that racism in America needs to be torn down, and that things need to change. Biden wants to make a positive difference in America, Donald Trump believes that no change needs to be made.

2 notes · View notes

asymptotichigh5 · 4 years

Text

Energy, the economy, and everything else.

I’ve been meaning to address this subject somewhere for a while. For the longest time, I hesitated on what the best medium to achieve this would be : on one hand, a Facebook status needs to be short and concise, which is not necessarily my forte and of course, there is also the fact that it would quickly be washed away in the storm of social media posts that has become 2020. A YouTube video then occurred to me to be most appropriate, but it would be long, my camera sucks and I hate video editing. So, I finally turned to this blog, which I had abandoned for quite some time. Surprisingly, there was an article in my drafts I had started writing almost 5 years ago about exactly this topic titled “A physics crash-course for politicians: a recipe not to kill us all”, but it was a bit too dramatic and I might get called off for taking political stances, when in reality there will be none in this post (which is surprising, for any of those reading this who know me). Anyway, this article will be the first in a series, which I might or might not continue, depending on interest, even though I did promise a friend of mine to carry through the entire message the whole way through, hopefully I’ll be able to do this with some of you actually reading all the way through, though that might be too optimistic.

Energy is a concept which is as important (if not more) as it is misunderstood by the general public. Most people don’t consider energy to be a considerable issue in their daily lives, but hopefully by the end of this post you will understand that energy is what allows you to live your 21st century carefree lifestyle. It turns out that most of us consider energy to be a bill to pay at the end of the month, or an annoyance to pay for when we fill our cars with gasoline at the pump, but energy — before being a bill to pay, or a commodity — is a physical quantity. A quick look at Wikipedia will give you a definition of energy which appears to be rather circular. Perhaps a more appropriate definition of energy for the sake of this post is the following:

Energy [/ˈɛnədʒi/, noun] : a physical quantity quantifying the ability to change the environment, or the ability to do work.

By “change the environment” we refer to the ability to perform any kind of change at all. Letting a ball fall involves energy, heating up water to make a cup of tea involves energy, me typing on this keyboard at this very moment also involves energy, etc. The SI unit for energy is the Joule, which at the human scale represents a tiny bit of energy (roughly speaking, it is the energy required to lift a medium-sized tomato (300 grams) by 1 metre. This unit has the annoying nuisance of being too small, so for the rest of this post we will talk about energy in terms of MWh (megawatt-hours), which corresponds to 3 600 000 000 Joules, which is a hell of a lot more medium-sized tomatoes lifted, or in terms of kWh (kilowatt-hours), which corresponds to 3 600 000 Joules. It is a good exercise to try to understand the MWh in terms of human work to put everything into perspective. To this effect, the BBC actually had a great documentary which appeared in 2009 about electrical energy consumption in the UK which performed an experiment in which a tiny army of people were forced to pedal to provide electricity to an average-sized house with an average-sized family having an average-sized consumption of electricity. While the documentary has great shock value, we need not hire an army of 80 cyclist to get the right orders of magnitude. An 80 kg man carrying 10 kg of supplies with him and climbing 2000 m up a mountain spends roughly 0.5 kWh to go up the mountain. Similarly, digging up 6 m${}^3$ of dirt to make a hole 1 m deep takes roughly 0,05 kWh of energy. By comparison, 1L of oil provides 2~4 kWh of (usable) mechanical energy.

Of course, using the oil to drive up the mountain, or to fuel an excavator to dig up the holes is a no brainer. Oil, or more precisely the machines it feeds, are not constrained by fatigue, do not form unions, do not complain that the ruble is too heavy, or that their legs are tired. It is also incredibly cheap by comparison, even if the human workers going up the mountain or digging up the hole are not getting paid at all. Assuming the cost of a slave to simply be the sustainance cost of a human being (i.e. minimal clothing, food and shelter) it is still a couple of hundred times cheaper to use a machine instead of a person to perform tasks, whenever possible. The reason why slavery ended is not because all of a sudden people grew a conscience out of thin air, or because we are so much better or educated than our ancestors ; it is simply stupid to have slaves in a world where you have access to a dense source of energy, because using this energy for mechanical work is many times more efficient and cheaper than owning slaves. This heuristic argument is also what ultimately explains the correlation between the abolition of slavery and the first industrial revolution (although the latter was mostly fed by coal as opposed to oil). In other words, the huge disparity in the efficiency of dense energy sources is what explains that mankind has historically always transitioned to sources of energy which monotonically increase in energy density.

But just what makes energy so important? Well, the answer lies in the definition. Since energy is ultimately the driver for any transformation of the environment, energy is by definition the main driver of the economy, too. In fact, the availability of a large supply of energy is what has allowed the development of modern society as we know it: paid holidays, retirement benefits, social security, social programs, your trip to Thailand last year, the variety of food you find at the supermarket, the fact that you even have disposable income to spend however you wish, free time, your ability to pursue long years of study, etc. Without the access to a cheap, reliable source of energy, this would all be impossible. Without realizing it, on average, we can calculate an equivalent amount of slaves used by any human on Earth today, given our estimates on the output of energy a human being is capable of delivering above and the total energy consumption of the planet. Doing the math, we find that an average human lives as if he/she had ~200 slaves working for him/her constantly. If we look at developed nations, this number jumps to 600 to 1500 equivalent slaves. This is an outstanding standard of living compared to what any of our ancestors ever knew. And so, it’s not that our generation is 200 times more productive than previous generations of humans, what has been driving the economy for the past 220 years is not humans, so much as it is the increasing access to a park of machines which has driven GDP growth since the industrial revolution. In fact, this can also be seen in developing countries, where an increase in development is immediately accompanied by a rural exodus driven by the introduction of machines to perform the heavy work in the fields. This allows for a widening of the pool of workers, which can then be free to use more machines and increase GDP.

So what sources of energy have we been exploiting in the last 220 years? Worldwide, the mix looks a little bit like this:

Notice that most of this mix (oil, gas and coal) are sources which are fossil fuels. In essence, what this chart is saying is that we owe all of the societal progress of the past 220 years to fossil fuels. Of course, the use of these fuels has the annoying consequence of releasing CO${}_2$ into the atmosphere which — as we know — has some rather undesirable consequences for the future of humanity. This chart also tells a story about how people have completely misrepresented and misunderstood the problem. Most people think that the energy crisis will ultimately be solved by replacing the carbonated sources of energy by “renewables”, even though the later are basically invisible in the above chart. Luckily, a world where we live only with renewable energy is entirely possible: it’s called the Middle Ages. The impossibility of replacing these carbonated sources with “renewables” is an important point to treat, and deserves an article of its own, but in the end its cause is the same as what has driven this discussion so far: energy density. We shall come back to this important point in a subsequent post. For now, let us finish driving the point home in establishing the unequivocal link between energy, specifically oil, and GDP. Energy availability is the main driver of the economy, this is simply because the economy is nothing other but the collective transformation of stuff into other stuff by humans. This, and the fact that 50% of the world-wide oil consumption is used to transport goods or people from point A to B is what explains the following correlation between oil and GDP:

In light of global warming, the question becomes one in which we are forced to arbitrate between real GDP growth and carbon emissions. It is literally that simple, yet it is difficult to grasp what this means. GDP growth is an abstract concept most of us don’t really understand, and most people advocating for giving up growth don’t fully grasp the consequences of what it will mean for all of us. Very really, what it means is diminishing real wages and purchasing power by a factor varying between 3 or 10 over the next 30 years (we will come back to these figures eventually in another article, too). Now, most people will point out that we can and should just take all this wealth from the oligarchs and the billionaires out there, and this is true and should definitely be done, but it will unfortunately still not be anywhere near enough to solve the problem. Orders of magnitude are a bitch and maths sucks, especially when they contradict your political opinions. In real terms, giving up growth means to take your current salary, and divide it by 10, and ask yourself whether you are really ready to live with that. The questions on left and right are at this point so irrelevant that it is stupid to even ask them. Both of these models of thinking completely rely on a pie which is ever increasing and in which the living standards of everyone eventually rise. For the right, this is obvious, but this holds true even in a leftist society, in which the social programs and everything that goes with it relies heavily on economic growth and an increase of the economic pie. This view is flawed, as in very real terms in order to protect ourselves from climate change, the only way is to considerably decrease our dependence on fossil fuels, in other words, considerably decrease global GDP.

(Un)fortunately, whether the politicians decide to take global warming seriously or not, the problem will auto-regulate eventually. You see, there is a tiny and obnoxious problem regarding our addiction to fossil fuels: we are running out of them. We should point out that not all fossil fuels are equal: this is not only true from a carbon emission perspective, but also from a transportation point of view. Indeed, only about 10% of the coal produced yearly is actually exported, because it is inconvenient to transport. Gas presents a similar problem, given its physical form, which is not sufficiently energetically dense to be easily shipped without compression (which itself involves energy). This leaves oil as the main source of energy which is actually exportable and tradable. And so, not only is oil vital due to the fact that it is the only source of energy which can reliably be used to for transportation, it is also the only option when looking at trading energy internationally. However, oil production has been already past its peak in most countries with considerable oil reserves. From a European point of view, the problem is actually worse as the energy consumption in Europe has been stagnating and in fact decreasing since 2005, when we reached peak consumption.

Incidentally, this explains why there has been no -- and there will be no -- economic long term real growth in Europe in the future, and it this has indeed been the case ever since 2008. In fact, most of the economic growth which has happened in Europe ever since is due to the trade of goods which increase in value over time (such as housing), which gets further gets inflated as there is a surplus of liquidity which has been continuously injected into the system since the introduction of quantitative easing. We will come to this problematic in a latte post. Similarly, we observe analogous curves of decrease in variation of energy consumption in the countries of the OECD (source of data: BP Statistical Review 2017), which means that this halting of real economic growth is not to be expected anywhere else in the OECD either.

During a recent discussion with a close friend of mine, he pointed out that the decrease in consumption in energy could be explained by the fact that the economy in developed countries had essentially become an economy of services, and that thus, this correlation between GDP and energy consumption and production was flawed, but this reasoning is wrong. First, because many of these services introduced involve or depend strongly on developments in e-commerce and industries attached to the development of the Internet and computers. However, the digitalization of the economy has not led to a decrease in energy demand, but in fact quite the opposite, if anything it has considerably increased our energy dependence. Second, the data simply states otherwise across the board. For instance, the chart below depicts an evolution of the percentage of people working in services and the amount of tons of CO${}_2$ released in the environment per capita in the World (data is from the World Bank).

Of course, the fact that these are positively correlated in the world and these countries is expected. In the world, because supporting the increasing living standards of the people working in the service sector necessarily comes out of an increase of the economic pie, which can only mean that the energy consumption (thus, at first order, the tons of CO${}_2$ in the atmosphere) increased. In European countries, the CO${}_2$ per capita has been reduced, partly to a negligible population growth, but also due to the delocalization of the most polluting elements of the economy to developing countries. Nonetheless, the general worldwide trend is clear: more service sector employment correlates with higher output of CO${}_2$, which implies higher energy consumption. But of course, by the reasoning above, this is hardly surprising.

Most of the time, the decline in the rate of growth of oil production is dismissed by saying that we will always find alternative forms of petroleum which will remain exploitable and will secure us with more oil. However, these alternative sources, such as bituminous sands and are problematic to exploit, require more energy input to be exploitable and are of lesser energetic quality. Similar decreasing curves of consumption and production have been appreciated for gas as well. Coal remains an exception to this, but it is not easily tradable, which implies that only 8 countries (including the US, China and Australia) really can consider exploiting coal for long term energy consumption, but given the climate consequences this poses, this is hardly a desirable outcome.

And so ultimately, it is not even a question of deciding whether or not we want to transition out of fossil fuels or not. The decrease in fossil fuel consumption will happen whether we like it or not — and by extension, so will the inevitable shrinking of the economy. The problem is that it might not happen fast enough to avoid catastrophe, which might already be unavoidable. What this also means is that the questions we should be asking ourselves as a society are not so much whether we should adopt liberal or leftist policies, but rather how we optimize the distribution of resources in a world where the economic pie decreases year by year, but no one seems to be wanting to have this discussion seriously.

#energy #energy crisis #renewables #renewable power #oil #environment #environmetalists #economy #economic crisis

3 notes · View notes

tbehartoo · 4 years

Text

200 Follower Thank you

Once upon a time, I said hey I’m about to have 200 followers. That’s 199 more followers than I ever expected to have. Maybe I should show these people some appreciation for following my hodgepodge of a blog? I asked what would be considered a good Thank you and received a whopping one (1) reply to the possibilities I mentioned. This is a result of that poll. Please note: I will NEVER volunteer to do this again!

200 Head Canons from the various fandoms I’ve written fan fic for (Fairy Tail, Miraculous Ladybug, and Voltron: Legendary Defenders). Please note these are made up things from my very tired brain and not necessarily thought through or even complete ideas, though I did try to make them internally consistent there are no guarantees. They might contradict each other and most certainly will contradict canon. Please take everything with a grain of salt, and enjoy!

Erza Scarlet (Fairy Tail)

1-Erza only likes red fruits- strawberries, cherries, raspberries dragon fruit, apples, etc.. But they have to be red in color not other versions of the same kind of fruit. No black cherries, green apples, or the like- she can taste the difference even blindfolded.

2- Erza likes to go stargazing on summer nights, but can’t sit still for watching clouds.

3- Between missions she will occasionally try to write poetry. It does not go well

4- She has never told anyone about the poetry!

5- There is a small part of the space she uses for her requip items that contains the locked box with her writing journals.

6- Erza and Mira like to go shopping together. The stores tremble in fear when the two are on a campaign to find the perfect outfit. One boutique has had to hire a couple of mercenaries at the door to give the staff sufficient time to brace for impact, whenever they have a sale and the girls are in town.

7- There is a cat colony near Fairy Hills and every single cat knows Erza. They are all feral cats, but they trust Erza to provide calming attention.

8- Two things Erza does in any new place is find the baths and find the gyms.

9- She likes to go to different gyms to observe new fighting techniques, but she doesn’t like to be recognized so she always goes in disguise.

10- Every time she asks to be taught a new technique, there is one guy (you know that one guy) that feels he needs to mansplain things to her.

11- This man is always handed his ego on a silver platter with a side serving of crow. Sometimes quite painfully.

12- Erza was once invited to an underground gym by a woman she met at the baths. She was so surprised to find it was a group dedicated to learning to fight like the Great Titania. Most of the women had histories of being abused, but had been inspired by the leader of the Fairies to stand up for themselves and get safe. They then worked to make sure that others are safe on the streets of their city and in their homes. Erza actually broke down at learning of their strength and resilience.

13- The only time she purposefully took off her disguise was for these women to thank them. She then spent the rest of the night helping them train.

14- Erza is demisexual which is why she fell so hard for Jellal as she had a strong connection to him.

15- She continues to have fond feelings for Jellal, but is no longer romantically or sexually interested in him.

16- Erza doesn’t bother to tell others in her guild about her changed feelings for Jellal which means the girls are always trying to get them alone together whenever he’s in town.

17- Meredy once sneaked a sensory link between Erza and Jellal and herself to figure out what was going on with them. She never told anyone what she found out, but she worked at toning down the FT girls’ attempts at matchmaking.

18- Erza works really hard to keep her strength in check. She has trained with Guildarts to get her control as finely tuned as it is.

19- Erza has yet to find a mode of transportation that is fast enough for her. It’s a pity that Magnolia doesn’t have jet propulsion or rockets.

20- Her favorite hot drink is cinnamon tea with a little sweetened condensed milk in it.

Lucy Heartfilia (Fairy Tail)

1- Lucy prefers the feel of cotton over silk, but she prefers the look of silk over cotton.

2- She has to invest in cotton, linen and woolen clothing as a member of Team Natsu since they don’t burn as easily as other materials.

3- Lucy has asked Levy to look for a fire retardant/ fire proofing spell to be able to use for both her clothing and her apartment.

4- Lucy was taught to crochet when she was a young girl. Though she doesn’t make the fine lace she was expected to produce as a child, she does use those skills to make tiny amigurumi mice for Happy.

5- Lucy also crochets scarves and hats every autumn for her friends. Often she makes a couple extra ones to donate to the local women’s shelter.

6- Aires likes to bring Lucy wool like thread/yarn from the spirit world for her to use in her projects.

7- Lucy likes to go fishing with Natsu and Happy.

8- She does not like catching fish with Natsu and Happy.

She like casting her rod and reeling it in, but she does NOT like baiting her hook or killing the fish. Natsu and Happy have no problems taking care of those things for her.

9- Lucy prefers moving rivers and creeks over still ponds and lakes.

10- She loves going to the beach to watch the waves break along the shore.

11- Lucy was taught how to steer a boat, well it was a yacht but why quibble over details?

12- She once claimed she was going to sail around the globe, but her father told her not to talk nonsense and then sold their boat to keep her from ever trying.

13- Lucy made friends with the birds in the garden and can whistle their calls almost as well as the birds themselves.

14- Lucy has always told herself stories. Even when she’s on a job with Team Natsu she’s often composing short stories as her day goes along.

15- Lucy hates the taste of truffle and will instantly distrust anyone who claims to like it.

16- She prefers to have short hair, but keeps hers long to be able to use the comb and brush set her mother used to use.

17- Lucy has two special silver hair pins that her mother gave her when she twelve. They belonged to her grandmother and her great-great-aunt. They get passed down to the next generation on the twelfth year after they have sparked. They always end up with a celestial mage.

18- Lucy’s understanding of celestial contracts is both modern and archaic. She is well aware of what is expected from a modern magic user, but she has been well taught in the lore of celestial beings.

19- Most celestial spirits are pretty plain speaking with what they will, can, or won’t do. Some however, the eldest spirits, are very tricky and will find whatever loopholes through imprecise language they can to do what they can to be maliciously compliant. This is why, even though the elder spirits are more powerful than most of their siblings, they are rarely contracted with.

20- Lucy eventually has five contracts with elder Celestial Spirits. None of them have been able to twist out of their responsibilities to her.

Natsu Dragneel (Fairy Tail)

1- Natsu only flies off the handle so easily so that he has “legitimate” reasons for using his fire.

2- He has to eat a lot to have enough fuel for his fire.

3- He really just likes to eat and uses his fire so often so that he has room to eat more.

4- Natsu often lies awake at night trying to come up with good insults for Gray, Gajeel, and even Loki, though he rarely remembers them thus having to fall back on old and well used insults.

5- When Natsu does remember a new insult, he will rate the reaction on a scale of one to five and if it doesn’t get a four or a five he will drop using it.

6- One time he said something about Levy to Gajeel that was rated a ten and after he healed up, he never used that particular insult again.

7- Because of the sheer amount of energy that routinely flows through Natsu, he has a faster healing rate than most people, including dragon slayers, except Wendy. Wendy’s magic makes her quick to heal so that she can heal others.

8- Natsu has several potted succulents that he and Happy take care of whenever they are in town.

9- Natsu talks to his plants and has named each one.

10- One time a new neighbor overwatered his plants while Natsu was ot of town, killing all of the plants.

11- The new neighbor was mortified and offered to buy replacements, but Natsu was offended. You don’t buy FAMILY MEMBERS they are FOUND!

12- Natsu and Happy took nothing but desert and costal assignments for a year to find new plants for their place. They even took a few over to the neighbor to teach them how to care for the very laid back plants.

13- Natsu isn’t dumb, he’s just simple. No need to be all stealthy when you can just flame broil a problem. Right?

14- Natsu likes to come in Lucy’s apartment through the window because she’s always good for a laugh when he does it.

15- Happy, and Natsu, likes to stay the night at Lucy’s place because she will read them a bedtime story.

16- Natsu’s favorite stories are about the constellations and the heroes that got put into the stars.

17- Happy’s favorite stories are about animals acting like humans, and who like to eat a lot. (Basically he likes Redwall stories, just those from Earthland)

18- Natsu hates the Pied Piper story because the kids didn’t help their lame friend go with them and Happy hates it because he scared all the rats away. Somehow the book with that story in it mysteriously burned to a crisp.

19- Natsu doesn’t have a favorite color. It changes every time someone asks.

20- When Natsu is really stressed Happy will curl up in his lap and start purring. When Happy is stressed, Natsu will raise his body temperature slightly and then hold Happy close until Happy feels like he can purr again.

Gray Fullbuster (Fairy Tail)

1- Gray doesn’t like the feel of most of his clothes touching his skin.

2- He only likes the feeling of heavy clothes touching him. Lightweight clothes bug him.

3- Gray prefers to take jobs that take him up in the mountains because it’s cooler there, and there tend to be less people he has to deal with.

4- Gray’s favorite place to vacation is the beach in the summer, but otherwise he prefers foothills in the spring for all their blooms, mountain slopes in the winter for the ice and snow, and mountain valleys in the autumn for the color change of the leaves.

5- While ice and snow don’t bother Gray, and even charge up his magic, he still prefers to come in and sit in front of a toasty fire with a warm beverage after being out in the snow.

6- One reason Gray doesn’t object to Natsu being around and being annoying is because he always has that portable space heater thing going after being cold when Natsu is around.

7- Gray experiments with poetry when he travels on his own. He never writes any of it down.

8- Gray is obscenely good with numbers and logic puzzles.

9- He’s been banned from many gambling establishments for exposing their crooked practices, even the ones that usually go unnoticed.

10- Gray kind of assumes that other people also see what he sees and doesn’t understand why he’s expected to spell everything out for the rest of Team Natsu.

11- Gray is slow to warm up to people. He’s been let down before, so once he considers you a his friend, he’s your friend for life.

12- People that really know Gray were surprised at how quickly he befriended Lucy. With most people Gray takes at least a year to even start acknowledging their existence.

13- Gray thinks Lucy is like a little sister that needs careful watching up until Tenrou.

14- After Tenrou, Gray thinks of Lucy as an equal that can and will kick his butt if he needs it.

15- Gray is not afraid of Erza, unless Natsu is involved.

16- Gray was once emotionally and verbally abused by a girlfriend, it’s what makes Juvia’s first behavior and love declarations so uncomfortable for him.

17- Gray will never admit that he’s jealous of Natsu and Gajeel’s exceed companions. But he does want to have his own flying cat occasionally.

18- Gray’s least favorite food is egg nog ice cream. He just doesn’t care for the flavor and you couldn’t get him to drink hot egg nog for love or money.

19- Gray’s preferred hot drink is Lapsang souchong tea. He likes the pine flavor in his tea cup.

20- One time Lucy, Erza, and Wendy invited Gray to accompany them to a fancy Hotel for afternoon tea. It was the only time he willingly wore a three piece suit!

Marinette Dupain-Cheng (Miraculous Ladybug)

1- Marinette likes to make lots of different kinds of pastries.

2- She only likes to actually eat a few types of pastry.

3- There are baked goods that she makes, but never eats because the textures give her the heebie jeebies. She knows other people love them so she’ll still make them.

4- Sabine, Marinette’s mom, was a martial artist of Chāquán. It is “a Chinese martial art that features graceful movements and some acrobatic aerial maneuvers. Chāquán also includes a large range of weapons.” Sabine was especially proficient in the use of the hookswords and the spear, which she has taught Marinette.

5- Sabine still goes over her forms every morning and young Marinette practices with her.

6- Marinette was fairly good at the acrobatic maneuvers until she hit puberty. Her mother often reassures Marinette that after she finishes her growth spurts she’ll be back to doing those moves again without messing up every third one.

7- Even though her father is an only child Marinette has dozens of “uncles” from around the world. Tom played on a rugby team in college and even was in the minor league for awhile. All of his team mates were made honorary uncles when Marinette was born. They get dozens of Christmas cards, letters, and emails to keep in touch.

8- Marinette and Tom once did a tour of Europe only staying with his old teammates. They never had to find a hotel during the two weeks they traveled. They’ve had a fair few of them stay at their place in Paris, too.

9- Marinette often makes presents for her uncles, aunties, and cousins throughout the year, and receives small presents from them as well.

10- She was saving up for a trip to Australia and New Zealand for her sixteenth birthday, so that her family could visit with a couple of uncles in that part of the world, but suddenly Hawkmoth came up and now she’s not sure they will ever take that trip.

11- She mentioned Chat Noir and Ladybug in an email to one of her ‘cousins’ in New Zealand who hadn’t heard of them, so she linked them to Alya’s Ladyblog telling her that this was really going on in Paris.

12- Two weeks later she got a video from them asking Mari to pass it along to Ladybug and Chat Noir. It showed their family and all their neighbors doing a haka for Paris and the heroes. They said it was to encourage the heroes to be strong and have courage in the face of Hawkmoth.

13- Mari cried when she saw the video as she knew what a big deal it was for them to do this for her. She asked for a translation of the words and was surprised to find it was actually written by her cousin’s grandfather, who was considered a great warrior chief, specifically for LB and CN.

14- Mari asked if only someone from her cousin’s tribe could perform that haka or if it would be considered appropriation for her and her friends to do it, too. She received another video that was an interview with the man who wrote it. He explained the tradition, the words, and showed exactly how each part should be performed. Then he gave all of Paris his blessing to do his haka for the heroes.

15- Marinette brought Alya over right away and showed her the videos. Alya promised to put both videos up right away. The traffic shut down the blog host’s servers!

16- Marinette invited this cousin’s family to visit during the summer to thank them for all that they did. During their visit an akuma attack happened. This family was delighted to suddenly have Ladybug calling the city to order and joining in as all across the capital young and old were preparing to dance strength and courage into being.

17- Marinette has noticed that her strength to stand up to Hawkmoth and perform her duties as Ladybug has increased dramatically ever since she, and the rest of Paris, has started doing the special haka.

18- Marinette likes to put youtube on autoplay and start on a random video when she’s trying to come up with a design and feels blocked. She stops it on the third and seventh video and then tries to come up with a design based on the video’s title.

19- Marinette has just started trying out needle felting and loves to make little felt mice for the animal shelter Chat Noir has endorsed.

20- Marinette has become the vice-president of the Chat Noir fan club at Francois- Dupont. Nino is the president.

Plagg and Tikki (Miraculous Ladybug)

1- Plagg watches a video of camembert making on loop whenever he can get Adrien’s phone. (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=atOpLj-q5nA) [People in the comments are seriously convinced that Plagg would like this video!]

2- Tikki likes to watch crafting videos and always makes sure to leave an encouraging comment on each one she watches.

3- Tikki prefers sweet things to eat, but she can recharge on almost any food.

4- Plagg actually needs those fermented, slightly spoiled foods to recharge completely otherwise he’s acting on about half power.

5- Plagg wanted to explore Adrien’s house more, but Gabriel’s interest in Adrien’s ring has made him stick close to his boy.

6- Plagg spent the first month of being awake getting familiar with current events using Adrien’s phone. The invention of the computer has made him ridiculously happy.

7- Plagg may or may not have had something to do with a computer virus that infected the mansion’s protection protocol after Gabriel was akumatized. Now Adrien can get out of his room an time lockdown is initiated and doesn’t have to feel trapped in his room.

8- Tikki doesn’t sleep as much as Marinette does. She gets about an hour a night.

9- Tikki emits strong “sleep rays” when she sleeps to help her holders get to sleep. Her creative types can be overthinkers that need help dropping off.

10- Tikki doesn’t need to sleep. Whenever creation is happening she is energized and really doesn’t need to rest. She’s the originator of “pulling an all nighter”

11- Tikki tends to get a surge of power at the equinoxes while Plagg receives more power at the solstices.

12- Tikki loved coming across this video of The HU and plays it as often as she can. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jM8dCGIm6yc

13- Plagg found out about punk rock and now plays it as Adrien sleeps hoping that the messages of the music makes through that thick layer of “presentability” Gabriel has forced on Adrien.

14- Tikki sometimes leaves Marinette’s purse to flit over and peek at Nathaniel’s progress on his drawings if the lesson is boring.

15- Plagg’s hearing is very sharp and his ears let him tune into conversations without moving much. He is careful to check into the class gossip, but also listens in to what’s happening in Mr. Damocles’ office and the teacher lounge.

16- Plagg listened in on Tom and Gorilla’s talking about Marinette and Adrien and snickers whenever he remembers Gorilla saying, “My money’s still on Marinette confessing first. Mine’s to dense to realize how far gone he already is. He might believe she likes him on their golden wedding anniversary.”

17- Even though Plagg can phase through matter he still has a healthy respect for Gorilla’s brute strength and doesn’t want to test if he’d be quick enough to dodge the big man in the even of an emergency.

18- Tikki spends many nights creating pictures of fractals using Marinette’s digital drawing tools.

19- Tikki may or may not be the cause of Marinette having more advanced capabilities digitally than any major studio on earth.

20- Tikki despises the nickname Sugarcube, but it is the best out of Plagg many, many tries so she puts up with it. Stinky Sock is the mildest nick name Tikki has ever called Plagg.

20.B- Most of her other names for him would be considered unprintable, but they’re in dead languages so it’s probably safe for her to use them.

20.C- Plagg tries not to mess up so badly that she uses the Babylonian curse on him.

20.D- Plagg can tell how angry Tikki is by what language she slips into. The older the language is, the more angry Tikki is.

Nino Lahiffe (Miraculous Ladybug)

1- Nino used to play percussion on everything he ever came in contact with until his uncle brought over a small hand drum for him to play. His parents called it ‘tapping’ when he was little.

2- The rule around the house was that he could only tap on the drum and not other parts of the house, when he was inside. Everything outside of the house was fair game.

3- Nino’s uncle came over every day to teach him the basics of playing his doumbek.

4- After a year of lessons, his uncle would take him to his weekly drum group where the more experienced drummers would teach little Nino drum tricks like rolls and pops.

5- By the time Nino was eight, he was a regular member of the drumming group and often went with them to play at weddings, parties, or other events. He was the cutest kid! When he was all decked out in traditional Moroccan garb playing smoking hot solos, he was often the source of viral videos.

6- In school he tried to join the band, but he was far too advanced for the beginning players and they didn’t have an advanced group for him to join.

7- The band teacher wanted to help him continue with his music so he showed Nino how to record and remix his own drumming.

8- The summer after that, he spent every day busking with a different member of the drum group to be able to afford his own recording equipment and programs.

9- The summer music money plus his share of the money for playing events with the drum group allowed him to be able to turn his room into basically a recording studio.

10- He soon became the group’s recorder which led to him also video taping performances.

11- The year before Stoneheart happens, the art teacher was able to teach Nino some basic film editing.

12- Nino’s tapping was one way for him to relieve his anxiety, the other way he tries to release it is through blowing bubbles as a kind of meditation.

13- It was hard for him to use his bubbles again after the Bubbler incident.

14- When Alya and Nino got locked in the cage at the zoo, it took all of ten seconds for Alya to figure out he didn’t actually have a crush on her. It took fifteen seconds for her to figure out it was Marinette he’d liked. He was really embarrassed about it.

15- However, after talking a lot about things they liked and disliked they found they really had a lot in common. Alya told Nino about Marinette’s crush on Adrien and Nino was upset for a moment, but then Alya made him laugh and he was suddenly thinking, “Marinette who?”

16- By the time they were out of the cage Nino was firmly in Alya’s corner for matchmaking Marinette with his friend Adrien.

17- Nino’s anxiety can get high during an akuma attack, unless he has someone to watch out for or protect, then he’s calm and collected. Which makes running after Alya toward the big scary monster the better choice for him during those moments.

18- Nino was a natural at wielding the Turtle Miraculous as it played to his need to protect.

19- After being Carapace, battles in which he wasn’t called to be a protector of Paris were excruciating to watch even as he kept Alya from coming to harm. He craved using the Miraculous as it allowed him to care for more people at once.

20- Nino introduced Wayzz to both smooth jazz and rap music just to see what the kwami would do. He loved everything Nino threw at him! Wayzz requested a copy of Nino’s latest mixes and a song by Sade before he had to go back to the Guardian. Nino found an old iPod to give to the little godling who claimed it would be his most precious treasure. Nino couldn’t talk for a full five minutes as he was too embarrassed and proud to speak.

M. Gorilla (Miraculous Ladybug)

1- Gorilla and Tom played Rugby on the same team in college.

2- He often stops by the bakery after dropping Adrien off at school if he isn’t needed by M. Agreste immediately.

3- He’s convinced that Adrien is in love with Marinette, as are Tom and Sabine. It’s a topic of great interest and much discussion when he comes in, if there aren’t other customers around. Sabine and Gorilla have a bet on who will confess their feelings first. (Sabine’s money is on Adrien.)

4- Tom and Gorilla met their future spouses as they acted as bouncers at a local club on weekends all thorough their Junior and Senior years at university.

5- Sabine and Gorilla’s significant other, Jerome, were in a group of friends that frequented the night club regularly. Sabine dared her friend to get the cute bouncer’s phone number by the end of the night. After a few shots of liquid courage, he’d brazenly asked Tom for a date and his number, but Tom gently, and privately, told the young man he was straight. He then motioned for Gorilla to come over and introduced the two. The young man returned to the bar with two phone numbers: Gorilla’s for him and Tom’s for Sabine.

6- Tom made the cake for Gorilla’s commitment ceremony, before same-sex marriage was legal in France. When Marinette was ten, he also made the wedding cake for Gorilla when he and Jerome were legally able to be married.

7- Jerome had a child from a previous relationship that he and Gorilla took care of for the first five years of the girl’s life. She was taken away when the girl’s mother claimed that Jerome wasn’t the father of the child. DNA tests proved he wasn’t. The mother tried to sue another man for child support, then took the girl and moved to another country.

8- Gorilla and Jerome were distraught to have their little girl taken from them. They tried to adopt another child, but they were denied and not even allowed to foster any children.

9- Gorilla started working for the Agreste family shortly after he lost his daughter.

10- Emilie saw how angry he was over anyone that wasn’t an Agreste coming near Adrien and eventually got the story out of him over why he’d be so protective to keep people from potentially taking her son away. It was something she was very appreciative over. Gorilla considered her a friend after she went out of her way to find out about his heartbreak.

11- Gorilla is legally Adrien’s godfather. When Emilie heard what that woman had done to Gorilla she took Gorilla and Adrien to her lawyer and made Gorilla legally responsible for Adrien and any future children she may have regardless of his continuing employment by the Agreste family. Gabriel signed the papers without complaint, but didn’t actually read them carefully, or register exactly what he was signing..

12- Gorilla worked for the DGSI, the French CIA, as an informant while playing rugby. It allowed him to travel for legitimate reasons and keep tabs on one of the players for the DGSI.

13- After university, Gorilla was recruited to become an agent. He was injured on an assignment and decided to retire to be an up and coming rocker’s body guard.

14- He and Jerome get invited backstage any time Jagged is in town to be able to catch up.

15- Gorilla really enjoyed doing his job as a bodyguard, but wanted to be home more with Jerome, especially after their little Marie was taken from them.

16- The DGSI came to Gorilla to ask if he’d be interested in working for them again as they look into the workings of one Gabriel Agreste and the Gabriel empire.

17- Gorilla was actually key in getting Nathalie in the door at Gabriel. She is also an informant gathering evidence on Gabriel Agreste.

18- Gorilla was speechless when their higher ups requested that he and Nathalie continue to aide Gabriel once he became a magical terrorist, they were interested in seeing the power of the moth Miraculous and what it could do. Nathalie complied willingly, but Gorilla refused to do anything that would put Adrien in trouble.

19- Gorilla despaired of Adrien ever figuring out how to give him the slip, and he was so proud when Adrien succeeded at eluding his tailing him through the Metro. Then he panicked because he just lost his child!

20- Gorilla is fully aware that Adrien is Chat Noir. He was the one to change the angle of the security cameras, and conveniently show Adrien their blind spot right outside his window. (Seriously, that boy needs all the help he can get.)

Pidge Gunderson/Katie Holt (Voltron: Legendary Defender)

1- Katie was introduced to Pokemon when she was very young.

2-For awhile all she managed to find were Pidgeys in her game. And she collected every one she could.

3- Matt laughed at her for this and nicknamed her “Pidge”.

4- Katie didn’t like his teasing and vowed to make her pidgeys the strongest she could to beat Matt’s team.

5- She eventually fulfilled that vow.

6- Later Pidge went on to collect and evolve almost every pokemon in the pokedex.

7- Matt never recovered from being beaten by a flock of pidgeot, and has refused to pick up the game ever since that time. Pidge considered that her greatest accomplishment until she infiltrated the Garrison.

8- Katie has loved robots ever since she watched the Iron Giant movie with her dad.

9- Katie first started building robots when she got a MeccaSpider Robot Kit for her sixth birthday.

10- She was dissatisfied with how klunky the spider turned out to be and proceeded to borrow a few parts from something of Matt’s to make it work better. It’s ability to move as quickly and silently as a spider was not appreciated by all the inhabitants of her home.

11- Katie has never grown out of her ability to see other uses for mechanical parts past their intended use, or for cannibalizing parts from anywhere she can get them.

12- While Katie likes to build robots, what she really adores is programming them. She hopes someday to make a small robot that can serve to help the physically disabled with everyday tasks.

13- Seeing her mother’s father struggle after he fell and broke his hip was what has spurred Katie on in her endeavor to build helper robots.

14- For all the squabbling and tattling that she and Matt engaged in, they were very good friends. When he left for the Garrison, and had to stay there, Katie cried every night for a month.

15- Katie hates to be in the middle of drama, but she loves to watch it unfold. She has been guilty of bringing snacks to watch Lance confront someone about a perceived slight.

16- Katie is a multishipper of fictional characters. When Hunk asked if she shipped Lance with any of the other cadets at the Garrison, she read him the riot act for shipping “real people”.

17- Pidge faked a crush for a whole week while in the Garrison when Lance wouldn’t stop pestering her about it. Then the female cadet showed up with a girlfriend and Lance tried to console Pidge about not having a shot since her “crush” was into girls. Pidge didn’t know how to feel about the entire situation and started telling Lance to “Zip it!” whenever he started up about Pidge needing a girlfriend.

18- Pidge finds the idea of “love at first sight” baffling and illogical, unless it’s a sweet piece of tech. Then she totally gets it. Her idea of a “sweet piece of tech” is not the same as Lance’s, but Hunk gets her.

19- Pidge is curious about everything! She likes to tinker with things to find out how they work as well as read about discoveries others have made.

20- Pidge finds sociology fascinating. People and cultures can be hard to understand, robots are nicer that way, but once she gets to meet so many other sentient beings, see their environments, and how they adapt to them- she thinks they are almost as awesome as the robots.

Hunk (Voltron: Legendary Defender)

1- Hunk’s grandmother (his father’s mother) was a chef at an upscale hotel. She’s the one that gave him his first lessons in cooking, knife skills, and developing one’s palate.

2- Hunk’s grandfather (his father’s father) was a fisherman who demonstrated traditional fishing techniques at their island’s living history museum three times a week once he’d retired. There was always plenty of fish to go around on those days.

3- Hunk’s other grandfather (his mother’s father) was an electrical engineer and worked for the county as lead engineer. He often had little models of circuits and old mother boards that he let Hunk tinker with and program.

4- His other grandmother (his mother’s mother) was the designated worrier of the family. She also had a lush garden that she tended daily. It was full of strange plants that often bore unusual fruits for the family to eat.

5- Hunk learned to combine the strange fruits with the kitchen skills he had to make things his younger siblings would eat. Not every experiment turned out well, but he always tried to analyze what went wrong and strategize a better plan to execute his vision for the star ingredient.

6- Hunk and his cousins often had “Bake offs” when they went to TiTi’s house for sleep overs. Hunk usually lost as baking was not his forte.

7- When he and his cousins did their own version of “Chopped” then Hunk usually won hands down. Especially when given a strange basket of ingredients to work with.

8- Hunk is highly anxious but working in the kitchen helps to calm him down. The rules for cooking are simple and there are few surprises he’s not prepared to deal with.

9- Hunk uses his cell phone to ease his anxiety about things in the kitchen. He always takes a photo with a time stamp when he leaves the kitchen. Also he has remote access to all appliances with alerts to let him know when everything is being used.

10- Hunk has installed cameras and view screens on every major appliance in his family’s homes so that if he starts to worry about them, he can check his phone to see what their status is.

11- The first time Hunk left something on in the Castle he realized he’d need to come up with the same kind of thing so he wouldn’t worry while on a mission.

12- The Castle had no clue what Hunk was doing, but eventually allowed Hunk and Pidge to install primitive sensors in the kitchen appliances (and the garbage disposal for some reason) but absolutely refused to allow remote activation of anything. Hunk had to be content with that.

13- Hunk has difficulty standing up for himself, but his anxiety has “Protective Mom” override mode. He will absolutely end someone messing with his friend or family member.

14- Hunk’s favorite color isn’t yellow, it’s orange. However he was drawn to the Yellow Lion because they both want to protect their friends and family.

15- The first night Hunk spent in the Castle of Lions he made sure to lock the door then proceeded to do a traditional siva tau in memory of his family whom he never expected to see again.

16- Hunk has composed a special siva tau that includes some of the people and places he’s been. It offers each of them encouragement to be strong, to trust in the goodness of others, and realize that they are not alone in the universe.

17- Hunk has performed his siva tau on only three occasions. Each time it was at the request of Allura for other groups that had lost their home planets. After each performance Hunk would have several people ask if he would teach them the dance.

18- After the defeat of the Galra, Hunk composed a second siva tau to celebrate the victory and also to mourn those who were lost to the conflict.

19- On the anniversary of this moment Hunk, his family, and any Paladin that is near will gather to celebrate. The evening always closes with the bon fire being stoked up and a performance of that second siva tau.

20- At Hunk’s death there was a large crowd full of many species that honored his family and expressed their grief at his passing by performing Hunk’s first siva tau. It was said that the earth trembled as each foot/appendage touched down and the skies carried the sound of their voices all around the globe.

13 notes · View notes

kashishipr · 4 years

Link

With continuous growth in Intellectual Property (IP) filing activities worldwide, India has witnessed a remarkable upsurge in Industrial Design, patent, and trademark filings in the last year, i.e., 2018. Where on one side, the nation saw more than 20% hike in trademark filing, on the other side, it witnessed a rise of 13.6% in the industrial design applications. While global applications for obtaining the Patent Protection increased by 5.2 %, Indian patent filings grew to 7.5%. Furthermore, the number of pending applications in the country hit a reduction of 25% in 2018 as compared to 2017. All these statistics have brought India onto the top tenth (10th) position amongst 49 countries ranked on the basis of the total (abroad and resident) IP filing activities.

Who’s At the First Position?

With over 50% of the overall applications, including trademarks, patents, and designs, the most a global increase in the IP filings were made by China – as per World Intellectual Property Indicator of 2019. When compared with the year 2017’s IP filings, China received around 160,400 more applications in 2018. If considered globally, Trademark Applications calculated 14.3 million, up 15.5%, industrial design fillings amounted to 1.3 million, and patent ones representing a growth of 5.2% in comparison to figures for 2017 exceeded 3.3 million.

Who Stood Second?

Listed as the second rank nation – the US, unfortunately, witnessed a 1.6% fall in patent filings in 2018. Though the country’s trademark filing activity rose by 4.3%, yet fall in Patent Applications, which is the first decline the nation faced in the previous a decade is a point of worry.

As per Francis Gurry, the director-general of WIPO (World Intellectual Property Organization), Asia is persistently emerging as the global hub for IP filings.

Coming back to India, the count of domestic applications for patents in this nation is continually increasing. It jumped from 22% in 2013-14 to 34% in 2018-19. According to the data provided by DPIIT (Department of Promotion of Industry and Internal Trade), the IP filings in the country have seen a notable rise in almost every sector, covering information technology (IT), science, and computer science. Moreover, startups, along with small and medium-sized enterprises, are also adding a lot in the IP fillings figures of India. For instance, IP applications by these industries saw a nearly 200% raise, and the numbers became 511 from 160 in 2016-17. In terms of patent filings related to the IT field, IT companies – Wipro and Tata Consultancy Services (TCS) were ranked 1st and 2nd respectively, while Hike, the seven-year-old startup, stood at the third position.

Though Kavin Bharti The Mittal-led firm has been working in the field of R&D (research and development), including Natural Language Processing (NLP), Computer Vision, and Social Network Analysis, it has not yet uncovered reasons for filing 66 patents. Intended to incentivizes the employees with rewards and grants in addition to providing prospective patent filers with legal and market guidance, the company has recently launched a Hike Patent Program.

Undoubtedly, many other firms, whether related to IT or other fields, are also on the same path. It shows that the individuals, companies, whether startups, small, medium, or large, are recognizing the importance of Intellectual Property Protection. Besides, not just the businesses or entrepreneurs but even the government of India, is actively taking part in flourishing the IP filing scale of the nation. For instance, the Ministry of Commerce and Industry had reduced the patent filing fees for startups and MSMEs to Rs. 1600 from Rs. 4,000. It is one of the many steps that the department took to encourage people to come up with new ideas, inventions, designs, etc.

Ultimately, with over 60% of youth constituting India’s population and growing use of the internet and technology, pushing India further amongst the top five (or above) nations in the IP fillings worldwide should not be a big hurdle. However, it needs efforts on the part of both – the organizations and the government as the rise in IP filings will boost innovation and R&D activity, and the need to safeguard the innovations and products will grow the IP fillings in the country. ✅ For view-source: https://bit.ly/2Cidfpn

Don’t forget to follow us on social media:

Facebook – https://www.facebook.com/kashishipr/

Twitter – https://twitter.com/kashishipr

Linkedin – https://www.linkedin.com/company/kashishipr/

Pinterest – https://www.pinterest.com/kashishipr/

Tumblr – https://kashishipr.tumblr.com/

#trademark applications #intellectual property right #Industrial Design #patent protection #Patent Applications #intellectual property protection #IP rights #Kipg #Kashishipr

1 note · View note

kob131 · 5 years

Text

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yQhsvkEfg3w

*Busts through the wall*

Hello Muffin Man Dan. It's been some time since you’ve entered into my sights huh?

So you wanna try and fight now? Fine then, let’s see if you can even begin to challenge me then.

“This video is a huge video project I’ve been working on with multiple RWBYtubers helping out.”

So that means, by how you treat the CRWBY, you’re not allowed a single mistake or misstep.

Good to know Dan.

Chapter 1: Flaws of RWBY

So Dan, with a target this fucking huge and easy to hit, surely you can do have a percentage of at least 10% valid arguments nd not just throw a bunch of shit at the wall and pretend you did something great when one out of a hundred pieces sticks to the wall right?

… NOPE!

Dan doesn’t even make ONE valid argument. The man had a bullseye the size of Texas and somehow managed to miss it while also shooting himself in the head.

His first arguments consists of him saying ‘Well, you were supporting a small company and a fledgling show before so being positive about them then was okay!’ … You know, ignoring how RT was being supported by the creators of HALO, had made the internet sensation Red Vs. Blue for ten years to this point, Monty had made Haloid and Dead Fanatsy among other things ect. Everyone EXCEPT the writers (you know, the people you attack the most) had experience before this so by your own argument you’re wrong. Not to mention the fact that not only didn’t stop assholes from attacking the first two Volumes but the first two Volumes are STILL what you need to get through in order to get to the latter more professional Volumes so it STILL affects the show long after Rt has grown.

This all ignoring the NUMEROUS fans who started the show after Monty died and had no nostalgia or bias for the man to sustain them unlike you and they all almost UNANIMOUSLY agree the later Volumes are better. And before you try to argue that I’m using the fallacy of ‘Argument Ad Populum”: A. ‘Good’ is inherently subjective so the audience defines what is good and what isn’t. And B. You USE the audience in your argument later so you can’t exactly claim that with my argument without also destroying a latter argument of your own.’

He also tries to peddle off FloofArtist as someone whose trust worthy. For those of you who don’t know, FloofArtist’s beef with the creataors started when he asked Miles for info on Dust and Aura over TWitter and never got an answer...even though he went to an RTX beforehand and asked the CRWBY a question to their faces. The question? ‘How did Qrow get Pyrrha’s armor?’

So he basically pulled that nerd scene from the Simpsons. And then decides to get pissy when he doesn’t get answer on a social media site when the guy is doing something else. I ask, does that sound like someone who is intellectually honest? Or does that sound like someone who tries to put people into dishonest situations and would logically lie his ass off? Yeah Dan is basically saying ‘Oh you don’t know why this politician is bad, go watch CNN/Fox News!’

He then tries to say that ‘ever since V3, the fandom has generally agreed the fight scenes were missing something’ so, you know, he’s using the fanbase here to prove his point even though the same fandom contradicts him everywhere else and he’s gonna smack talk said fandom later on. Also the fanbase generally agrees the fight scenes got back on track in Volume 6 so uh, your point fails.

I could go into his talk about chorography but all he does is talk about interpolating, the neo vs. yang fight, some cuts and just generally does nothing wrong arguing.

And that’s it. This whole segment was supposed to be all about the flaws of the show and he made TWO points. Two points that were deader on arrival than Michael Jackson. Congrats Dan, you completely glossed over so many other issues that naming them all and explaining myself would take me longer than this video in a chapter named ‘Flaws with RWBY’ in a video supposedly a third talking about RWBY the show. Couldn’t even do the bare minimum huh Dan? Fucking pathetic.

Chapter 2: Unprofessionalism

Oh boy, am I gonna have fun here...

So he begins this off by showing a tweet from Lindsay that you can barely read where he claims she’s smack talking people who don’t like the ‘forced diversity’ in RWBY, saying that they’re the people giving them money. You know, ignoring the fact that not all of these people contribute to the show by buying merch, the show is FREE so no, just watching it doesn’t mean you support the show financially, they’re actively trying to strangle money from the creators by lying about them and using them for their political bullshit, you’re USING the fanbase to make this point (the same one you are smack talking and dare gonna smack talk) and this is Lindsay’s PERSONAL Twitter.

Oh an, not like Dan will go on HIS twitter to bitch about every single person who criticizes him, acting far worse than anything he shows here or will show, actively attacks his own critics individually and as a group and shows FAR FAR worse cases of what he’s bitching about.

He then goes onto say that the creators all live in an echo chamber and they lash out before returning to safety. So you know, basically everyone single one of the RWBY critic’s Twitters. No seriously, go onto any video made by a RWBY critic and treat them with 1/1000th of thee contempt and harshness they treat the CRWBY. You’ll end up on Twitter with a snap. So once again, Dan can’t even BEGIN to live up to his standards.

He then plays the Miles clip where he lashes out against critics of the show which seems bad..until you remember that Dan alone has accused them of abusing Monty, using their dead friend as a weapon against them, repeatedly lied about them, riled up his fans into attacking Miles and so much more. And again, this is JUST Dan. And THEN remember that when Dan gets called a single name, he goes on twitter to whine about it, calls everyone else names and then makes videos mocking them so he STILL has no right to say this shit.

He then tries to claim that everyone tells them the same shit which means he’s once again using the fanbase he smack talks for his point even as it contradicts him as damn near everyone loved Volume 6 and many have even said it’s the best Volume of RWBY.

He then tries to deflect criticism against him because he KNOWS he’s setting himself up for a roasting by saying ‘well. I’m criticizing rich people with attitudes so it’s okay!’ … which doesn’t work when you realize that I have about $7 to my name and he gets YouTube money every month and yet I’m still not allowed to criticize him. Even ignoring how fallacious this argument as it somehow means he’s above criticism even as he’s FAR worse in the EXACT same ways: not only does this apply to his OWN critics (you know, the gusy he treats worse than RT has ever done) but Dan is being EVEN MORE divisive than how he sees RT being.

He also tries to make some talk about how them being popular means they deserve to be criticized because betterment of society and our culture and celelbrities and blah blah blah. So basically, “I can ignore your humanity because you’re popular and you don’t act as my slave.” Once again, I only have under 200 followers and at my peak on my old blog I barely had around 500 whereas Dan has 10k subscribers and the people on reddit who criticize him probably have even LESS than me and yet he acts EVEN WORSE so...why should anyone listen to you?

He also tries to leech off the Vic situation by criticizing them for firing Vic. Let’s ignore how this is pandering to the anti-SJW people mobbing around this and look at it like this: Vic is the voice of Broly and Edward Elrich. Meaning he’s far more famous than Rooster Teeth. Sso by Dan’s own logic, they’re ALLOWED to do this stuff since Vic is more famous and more of a celebrity than the entire company. Great job Dan. Also he tries using the fanbase again. We already went over why he lost that right. Oh and uh if you look at Dan’s Twitter feed: ‘https://twitter.com/Obiwanjezz/status/1106810239418945537‘ ‘https://twitter.com/maidmeta/status/1081040501745188864‘ Oh look at what Dan retweeted. Hm, seems pretty damn contradictory to what Dan seems to be projecting. Almost like he’s just pandering to people with an irrational hate of RT to get an echo chamber around him...

Then he goes on and on about a bunch of barely connect bullshit about lesbian fetishists supporting the show just because ‘lesbians’ (even though so many praise Volume 6 without mention Bumbleby) and how even the most venerated RWBYtubers are sick of the show (only citing the lair Floof from before), R/RWBY agreeing with him (with him citing a post that utterly denies him because ‘durr I upvoted it’ even though you can CHANGE YOUR VOTE.) You know, bunch of bullshit that isn’t worth talking about.)

The he tries smack talking the entire RWBY reddit for slander and such (when the worst he’s gotten is accusations of datamining which he’s shown to be talking about) while hes accused the CRWBY of basically grave robbing and disgracing their dead friends work. Again, look in the damn mirror Dan.

Then he makes this big compliation of people in the reddit being sensitive...

Which I can blow out of the water in ONE blow:

Dan has made and removed from his channel no less than THREE videos on me alone.

A comment takes about a minute to type. A video takes HOURS. So uh...yeah, pretty sure Danny boy here takes the cake.

So then Dan proceeds to say that the fandom is responsible for the ending of Volume 6 (so the fandom is responsible for one of the most conclusive endings to a Volume we’ve ever gotten? Maybe this fandom is worth saving after all!) because they’re all horny and need to fuck. (gee, strawman much?) Even though he’s thrown massive shits for not getting the same treatment.

Chapter 4 (guess I missed the chapter 3 mark. Meh): Representation.

I’m just gonna summarize this entire last part for you guys:

Strawman about entire fanbase liking Volume 6 = gay pandering (ignoring people like Unicorn of War again...)

Talks about homophobes

Leech off Vic

RT is desperate.

Gives doctored screenshots of tweets cutting out any context.

Contradictions (criticizes people for using memes are arguments while using memes as arguments).

And that’s it.

To which I respond by:

You’re the same guy whose going back against everything he’s said on his twitter about politics PRECISELY when it benefits you while you contradict yourself numerous times, your video devolves into pointless rambling and you destroy your own arguments.

Sounds like you’re the desperate one here.

Gee I wonder why? is it because the fanbase liked the Volume even without Bumbleby and you figured out you couldn’t rely on them to support your egotism anymore? Certainly explains your contradictory political stances and how you suddenly start talking about Vic and Adam just as the topics can net you an echo chamber to hide in and protect your ego.

And really, that goes to show why you fail on a fundamental level Dan. You have no convictions, no standards, no morals, no integrity to give substance to your words. Everything you’ve said here either contradicts what you say before or after/applies to you on a much greater scale. And really, your community is no better. You are all willing to throw away what you supposedly fight for and what you stand for when it becomes inconvenient for you, preaching values of self reflection, humility and improvement through criticism...all while failing to embody those values or give any meaning to them beyond lip service.

Nothing about you feels real or genuine Dan. NONE of you assholes feel real or genuine in what you say or do because you’ve been proven to contradict yourself and betray your values when you need something. And thus, everything you and your friends do and say just becomes ‘Do as I say because I think I’m always right.’

And guess what Dan? People, especially the artistically attuned, don’t resonate or accept that. The people who actually care about RWBY, who want to see an artistic vision flourish and grow, sense your insincerity and ego and instinctively reject you because you accept your words would be to accept your toxicity into themselves. And look now. The CRWBY have earned back the fandom’s love and trust while your toxicity consumes you and all but your ilk abandon you to pastuers greater than you.

And it makes sense why you seem to hate RWBY on a fundamental level now because the show challenges people to grow and evolve, to become better people, to live up to their ideals, to prove themselves right. And before, RWBY never put those messages to the test. But now that it has, you reject it because it indirectly calls you out and your ego can’t take it. You can give lip service to quality, to artistic integrity and to Monty all you want now but it’s become certain what you actually mean.

It’s pretty damn pathetic to see you break down little by little over these past few months as you desperately try to bend the world to your vision only to get smacked in the face. And to be truthful, I‘m kind of proud of the fact that I played a pretty big part in your degradation as you crumbled more and more from the pressure I and eventually reality pushed on you. All while I continued to grow and evolve. Wanna know why?

Because I stuck to my ideals and morals.

I think it’s time I finished this little battle or ours for the most part. You’re no longer worth fighting. Just like RWDE for the most part has lost all it’s strength now.

So with this I say adieu. Come join the adults when you’re ready to grow up Dan.

#muffin man dan #muffinmandan #rwby #rwby6

7 notes · View notes

oldnintendonerd · 5 years

Text

Season 3 in full swing - But first... the Pre-Season

Alright, I’ll admit it, I’ve been slacking here. It takes time to write these up, and time is something I have not had as much of as I’d like. We made it to the very end of 2018 in the last blog post, and we had a whopping $103.68 in the game hunting money stash. I’ll tell you what too, it gets even better. One of my first finds of 2019 was at the Goodwill, and it wasn’t even a game, but boy did it help the game hunting money.

A decent condition TU-2 Tuner pedal from Boss. I actually have one of my own and didn’t need one at all, but at TWO BUCKS? I couldn’t pass it up, knowing it’d have to be easily $40 at minimum, without even looking it up. It was a little dusty, and had a few dings and scrapes, but man, these things are tanks. Anyone familiar with this will recognize it as really good condition. I’ve seen them with massive amounts of rust and nearly no paint left and they still work like a charm.

Little before and after for you here:

Sold that son of a bitch for a cool $58.99 on eBay. After listing fee, PayPal fee, and shipping we add $44.06 to the game hunting money, totaling $147.74. A new record high!

That was in early February. Deep winter is terrible for finds, and it wasn’t until late March, on the 22nd, until I found even SOMETHING. A Wii sensor bar for $0.99 at Goodwill. No pics of that, it’s a sensor bar. It’s... yeah. A sensor bar. I needed them though, I have like 6 extra Wiis. Been waiting to get a couple complete systems so I can sell, or mod and sell each one. In any case, totaled $1.06 out the door. We drop to $146.68. Moving on.

March 26th, once again, at the Goodwill. Knocking on Spring cleaning’s door and I spot a blue Dual Shock 2 controller. Sitting in the toys section, not electronics. Not by the video games. In the toys section. This is not the first time this has happened, finding something game related in the toys section. Last time I think it was a few actual PS2 games.

Tiny bit of dust in some of the nooks and crannies, but man is it in good condition. Sticks are 9/10 easy, and buttons are nice and crispy. My new favorite PS2 controller right now. This one set us back $3.99. Or, $4.29 out the door. This takes us to $142.39.

Great find, I only had one DualShock 2 controller when I found this, so really couldn’t have been better timing. Having two again makes the system feel whole again somehow.

Moving into April, we ran across an unusually valuable title. Now I don’t mean it is worth $100 or anything, I just mean it is one that you would liken to be being something along the lines of maybe $5 complete.

Wheel of Fortune for PS3 - Found at Goodwill 04.12.2019

Again, not a hundred dollars but it was still worth $13.95 on Pricecharting. Usually that tells me it is a least worth a play. So I snagged it. This was Goodwill again, so $2.99, and $3.21 out the door. Takes the hunting money down to $139.18.

on 04.15.2019 I hit a flea market. Really not much there, one guy had a completely obliterated Sega Dreamcast I didn’t even look twice at. That was it, other than a guy with a small bag of DS and GBA games. He wanted $30 for the whole bag, and I’d never heard of any title other than this one...

Snagged it for $4 just by itself. It looks like its going for about $12 loose, so I thought that was acceptable. I don’t have a DS to test it on (yet), but cartridges almost never fail really. So fingers crossed this one is fine. Takes us to $135.18.

A couple weeks later, it is still not yet really Yard Sale season. There has been a sprinkling, and by this time I have visited a handful, but with no luck finding anything. The next find is still a thrift store find. I’ll admit I probably paid more for this than I should have, Pricecharting has this one at $5.69 complete. I paid $3.92, which brought it to $4.20 after tax.

Uncharted 3: Drake’s Deception - Found 04.28.2019 at VoA

I don’t mind paying a little more for games when they have been tough to find, or if they are going to my collection. This one is both. The Uncharted series, ever since I found out about it, and that it was generally well received and liked, I’ve been looking for copies. I knew they were cheap and the only time I’ve run across any copies was at GameStop, and they were $4.99, and disc only. I’m like I am not paying $5 plus tax, for a disc only game that is worth pretty much exactly that CIB. I want the box to put on the shelf! So when I saw this in the thrift I grabbed it anyway. Still under retail price, or at least what I’d pay on eBay to have one shipped. Most were around $10, give or take a dollar. So half price? Not bad, and in decent condition.

The $4.20 takes us to $130.98.

Now, we are at least into the current month. I walked into The Salvation Army store on May 9th and spotted this...

A Sega CD. Not easy to find or come by, especially in the box. However, not being a Sega guy (obviously), and because of that, not having looked at prices for Sega CD really ever, let alone recently, I guessed at it being worth about $100 to $120. I thought the condition of the box was a little rough to be asking $69.99, so I left with only the photo on my phone.

Later that evening I looked on eBay sold listings and was a little surprised. Ones without the box were going for what I thought the CIB one would be worth. I posted the shot I snapped above on my Instagram and asked my followers their opinion: Would they have picked it up?

Overwhelmingly... yes, they would have!

So I stopped in the next morning after they opened and asked to look at it. It was indeed CIB, though the box had seen better days. Even the carton inside had a few rips. but it was all there, and still held everything securely. I asked if it had been tested. The guy at the front said yes they test everything they get. I said oh, you guys have a Genesis to hook to this? Could I see it work?

That was met with a blank stare. Another guy that does the testing actually admitted that it was not tested. So I said how about $40 then, since I’m taking a risk here. They said they can’t adjust the price, only the manager can do that. I asked if the manager was in and after a little chasing, they found her and she came up to the front to talk to me. I explained that this is an add-on system, not a stand alone console and it is not tested, I’d like to get it for a little cheaper to account for the risk I’m taking if I buy it. She lowered the price to $49.99.

I bought it.

Everything is there, the extension piece, the adapter, the manual, both RF shields, and the plate used to attach the extension. There was even a game in it!

The disc is VERY rough on Ecco, but it does play. I know this because a co-worker helped me out, gave me his Genesis and it fired right up on the first try, and booted the game with no problems. I tried a few more times just to make sure it wasn’t a fluke, even let it run for a while, and played a bit of it. It did struggle here and there because of the scratches, but otherwise played fine!

Could not be happier. I plan to clean it up a bit, as you can see it does have some dust and grime on it.

But once that’s taken care of I think it will be a great looking Sega CD. I will probably offer it up to Instagram first before trying it on the ‘bay. if anyone is interested please let me know on Instagram, I’m just @oldnintendonerd.

The price isn’t set yet, I am thinking somewhere between about $175 and $200. The last one that sold on ebay went for $300 shipped. better condition box though, so that’s why i’m thinking somewhere in the neighborhood of $200 to $230 shipped. I’m open to opinions if you have them, comment here or DM on IG.

This purchase, after tax was $53.74, taking us down to $77.24. however, this was bought SOLELY to flip. I do not collect for Sega, so this is entirely for profit to help buy more Nintendo stuff. I have no problem with Sega, I do not view it as trash or anything, I just didn’t grow up with it, and my heart belongs to Nintendo. There is only so much room in my home, and in my budget, so it must go.

We’ll call it there for this one, hopefully I’ll have another post up much sooner than every three months or so. Summer months should yield higher finds so I can detail stuff here more often. I hope.

2019.05.29

1 note · View note

jordanjaeger · 5 years

Text

Life Update + What Will Become of This Blog

Hello everyone! I know it’s been a very long time since I last updated this blog. I still log in and browse around from time to time, but obviously I’m no longer very active. So I apologize for that.

I see I’ve gained quite a few new followers. I want to say nearly 150-200+ since Fall 2017. I’m not sure. I haven’t really kept up with who’s new and who isn’t. That’s why I wanted to come on here and give you guys an official update and what the future of this blog may look like.

If you’re not necessarily interested in my life update, then you can go ahead and skip down to the section where I talk about my blog and what I foresee it becoming in the future. If you are interested in getting to know me, where I’ve been, what I’ve been up to, and how I’ve been, then keep on reading!

To my old friends whom I made when I first started this blog, I really, truly hope you are all doing well! I noticed some some of you have changed usernames, or moved on to new blogs. I’m just happy to see that most of you you all are still here. <3

As you may know, and to the new followers who may not know, I’ve been in college for about three almost four years now. My first university was a four year school just ten minutes away from my home. I attended there after graduating high school back in 2015, but I only attended for two years primarily to focus on my general education courses and save money. I did this because my first school didn’t offer my degree, which was Graphic Design, so I knew I would eventually end up having to transfer.

While I was at my old school, I had a lot of free time on my hands. If I wasn’t at school I was at home in, my room drawing, writing, or binge watching Netflix, Hulu, YouTube, and other various anime. It wasn’t until Attack on Titan season 2 that I really became invested in the show, and decided to create my blog jordanjeager.

I knew I loved anime and writing, and I had already been following a multitude of different AoT/SnK blogs, so I thought why don’t I create one myself? It’ll be fun, and hopefully I can make some friends who enjoy the same things as I do in the process. In the end, my blog became very successful. I found myself writing almost everyday all day, even at work, and I made about five or six really amazing friends on here.

In Fall of 2017 I transferred schools to pursue Graphic Design. That’s when things started to turn left. It was my first official “freshman” year as it was my first time being away from home, and having to adjust to a new city, new environment and new campus turned out to be more than I could handle. Also, I was distracted with new friends, and just overcoming personal battles that would help me to promote growth and happiness. Because of this, I had a hard time focusing on school which in turn reflected on my grades. Not to mention I was still trying to find time to write for my blog. I ended up triggering a small era of depression that would come and go.

2018 was just a bad year for me period. The friends I had made my first semester at my new school started falling off one by one. One got pregnant, so she moved back home, and the others just failed to reciprocate the same energy I had given, so I eventually backed off and became isolated. I was alone, and for a while I was fine with it, but as time went on, my depression worsened.

In the summer of 2018 I took two classes, each one was four hours long, which in total was 8 hours. You guys, I was going to school for 8 hours a day, four days out of the week, with no breaks. The classes were extremely accelerated and it felt like I was working a 9-5 job with no pay. Not to mention towards the end of the summer semester, I became extremely ill for two weeks.

Fall 2018 came around and my on and off depression had gotten a lot worse, mostly because of my degree. I was finally getting into my upper level classes for GD, and after barely passing one of my classes, I was starting to come to the realization that maybe GD wasn’t for me. But I was too conflicted to switch majors because I was afraid of either starting over or prolonging my graduation year. I currently won’t graduate ‘til Fall 2020. You guys, I’m 22. You see my dilemma here?

I tried to do my research on what I else I could possibly pursue in the arts that wouldn’t put me behind, but my options were degrees that I knew I’d struggle to find a job in. I don’t want to be living paycheck to paycheck after spending hundreds and thousands of dollars on a degree.

Finally, 2019 rolled around and I started another semester. This time though, I’m taking the part II to the class I barely passed last semester. Still unsure of what to do as far as my degree, still depressed, I wondered if I’d ever find something to study that brings me joy and makes me happy, but will, at the same time, sustain me with a decent salary. Then something amazing happened.

After talking to one of my professors, whose class I both needed to take for my GD degree and am now currently taking, I learned of a new degree that overlapped with GD. It’s called Intermediate Design (app and website building) and it was basically the gist of the class I’m taking right now, which is Interactive Media. You guys, when I learned about this degree, I was quick to do my research and schedule an appointment with the advisor and head coordinator, because the class I’m taking now with said professor is basically a synopsis of ID, and I love my IM class.

So after talking to both the advisor and coordinator of the ID degree, I realized that this is what I want to pursue. This is what makes me happy. Despite it being challenging, I find myself becoming more and more excited as I work on my projects for my IM class, and if the projects I’m doing now are what’s to be expected of the ID degree, then I know what I want to do.

Since making the decision to switch my major, I have been nothing short of happy. I withdrew from the class that was the second part to the class I barely passed last semester, and am now only taking three courses. I can’t tell you how happy and relieved I am, and how much weight I feel has been lifted off of my shoulders. I feel like I have a clearer headspace now that I know what I want to do for the remainder of my college career.

The Blog

With all that being said, I want to start back writing again. I’ve had a lot more time to catch up with AoT/SnK, and now that I’m up to speed with the manga, I feel inspired to write again. I want to write again. Writing has always been a hobby of mine and a getaway from everyday life.

I don’t have any friends where I go to school, so I’d like to pick back up this hobby because I know it’ll help take my mind off of the loneliness I sometimes feel being here. Plus, I know that I won’t be judged for liking the things I like and participating in the things I enjoy.

But, I want to know what you all’s thoughts are. To those of you who have been with me since the beginning and those of you who are new, would you be interested in me opening my request box up again? I still get many notes and reposts from you all, and I’ve even gotten a couple messages from some of you hoping that I’ll start taking requests again. I want to make this an experience for both you and I, and I want to become more engaged with my followers. So let me know you guys’ thoughts and I will take them all into consideration.

That’s all I have for now!

Xoxo

Jordan Jaeger

1 note · View note

leadsourcing · 5 years

Text

Leading 10 Best Domain Registrars 2018

Top 10 Best Domain Name Registrars of 2019 {Must Check #4}

The availability of numerous domain registrars makes it quite challenging to come up the best domain registrar that offers reasonable pricing, renewal, and other essential features to manage your website name with ease. Nowadays, almost all hosting companies also provide other services like WordPress hosting, cloud hosting, web designing, email storage, and security tools such as SSL certificates, etc. With that said, you can avail each and everything from your domain name provider to run a smooth website.

But the question is how one can find the legitimate, well-reputed, and trusted domain registrars?

The key features are customer support, reliability, user-friendliness, sustainability, credibility, security, reasonable pricing as well as renewal rates. For more insights, I have compiled a list of important features that you should look for before choosing any registrar. Keep in mind, these are must-have features and the fact is top domain registrars employs all of them. It also helps companies to entice or attract more customers as well.

Before going ahead to our list of best domain registrars of 2019, I would like to share some information about domain names.

Websites or blogs are a great way to create an online community. To access any website, we need a complete address of that site, which is also known as an URL, domain name or website address. For example, if you want to open “Facebook” then you need the exact URL of Facebook, which is www.facebook.com or facebook.com or fb.com. This unique address is known as “Domain Name” and it represents an IP address (Internet Protocol) to locate site content.

Remembering IP addresses of different websites is a tough job, so that is why Domain Name System (DNS) was introduced. The world first domain name was registered on 15 March 1985��with the name of Symbolics.com [Symbolics Inc. by a computer firm].

What is a Domain Registrar?

Well, according to Wikipedia a domain name registrar is an organization or commercial entity that manages the reservation of Internet domain names. A domain name registrar must be accredited by a generic top-level domain (gTLD) registry and/or a country code top-level domain (ccTLD) registry. The management is done in accordance with the guidelines of the designated domain name registries.

If you search the query “domain registrar” you’ll see a list of hundreds of companies. Some are very expensive and the others are quite cheap (lowest and affordable in price). You can save some bucks by choosing the best place to buy domain names. If you’re new to the whole thing, then here is a step-by-step guide for you.

The following domain registrars can help you save some money if you choose to register your new domain. They have good reputations, users satisfaction, technical support, and also up-voted by real users.

Top 10 Best Domain Registrars 2019 (In-depth Reviews)

Here are detailed domain name registrars reviews to pick the best one for registering your new site name.

1. iPage

When we talk about cheap domain registrars and most affordable web hosting providers to create your website within the lowest budget, iPage got the first place in this list. Apart from cheap domain registration, iPage offers many services including free SiteLock, toll-free number, site analytics, YP(Yellow pages) listening, daily spam scanning, network monitoring, and up to $200 free marketing credits to drive instant traffic toward your newly created sites.

You can easily buy your desired if available website address through iPage at the reasonable price just like hosting plans. All of their shared hosting plans are also cheap and affordable. The best thing is you get a FREE domain on the purchase of one year web hosting subscription which only costs $24/year. But you’ve to choose a three-year subscription for maximum saving.

iPage claims to deliver an incredible 99% server uptime guarantee for all shared hosting users which is quite promising in this pricing. So, to testify whether they really deliver the claimed uptime, I purchased an annual plan and monitored server uptime with UptimeRobot for more than ten months. The results were impressive and they do provide 99.8% uptime. There was rare downtime but what you can expect from such a cheaper service.

On top of that, iPage allow you to host unlimited domain names on the single account. Though you may face rare issues regarding performance and accessibility. The 24/7 live customer support is always available to help you via multiple ways. In a nutshell, you must give it a TRY and in case of un-satisfaction, request for the refund within 30 days. Overall, still a good option for small to medium size projects.

P.S: I insist you must read my detailed iPage review here.

2. NameCheap

Namecheap was founded in 2000 by Richard Kirkendall. It is one of the top registrars to purchase the name of your next project at reasonable prices. I highly recommend NameCheap one of the best places to buy domains. HostReview selected them for “Reader’s Choice Award 2013”. Moreover, In the past, Namecheap was selected as the best domain registrar by Lifehacker public poll.

NameCheap also featured on many reviews sites due to outstanding services, user-friendly support, and suitable prices. You can avail almost any type of TLD extension along with one-year free WhoIS protection. It helps to hide your personal information from spammers and public access. WhoIS guard is available for all new customers at no extra costs.

Their old domain management system was ugly and difficult to understand, but the latest design is exceptionally user-friendly, flawless, and easy to understand. You can change Name Server records, Edit DNS, or add new records within a few click. Their control panel is clutter free and divided into sub-sections which ultimately maximize usability.

Besides, they also offer shared, reseller, VPS, dedicated servers and email hosting at comparatively lower prices than other companies. You might be surprised to know that the “Basic” package of NameCheap costs a few bucks for the whole year. By Using “MyTipsHub” coupon code, you can even get an exclusive 20% discount on hosting subscription.

Plus, you can buy SSL certificates such as Positive SSL, EV SSL, and Wildcard SSL to protect your website. They offer an outstanding 24/7 live chat support for instant help. Overall, it would be a great choice if you only want to buy domain names as their renewals are pretty good.

3. GoDaddy

GoDaddy is another domain registrar which also provide web hosting services. Established in 1997 as a Jomax Technologies, which later became Godaddy. It is the world’s largest leading domain registrar company with ICANN-accreditation and also sells e-business related software and tools.

They are managing more than 73 million domain names and 17 million customers under their platform. They offer dozens of extensions (100+) to choose from to help you pick the right one for your business. Godaddy offers most competitive prices which is the core reason that helped them build a huge customer base. Their prices are very attractive, you can get a .com domain for the first year just at $0.99.

Along with cheap domain registration, Godaddy provides web hosting, WordPress hosting, VPS, Dedicated, Cloud servers as well as managed WP hosting solutions. Web hosting plans start at $4.99/month which is same as Bluehost and Hostgator. Godaddy is the best place to buy domain names, according to my personal research their hosting is not that good. If you’re looking for some quality hosts, I would like to refer this article.

Each web hosting package comes with a bunch of great features such as more than 100 one-click installer scripts, DDoS attack protection, easy registration, 1-click upgrades, and flexible control panel to handle hosting account. With scripts installers, you can easily install WordPress, Joomla, Drupal, etc. within 1 minute. So, no technical knowledge required to start your first blog.

The company also has award-winning sales support for 24/7. You can contact the expert support team via phone for instant help. However, live chat also available to get in touch but it’s not accessible 24 hours, it means there are fixed working hours. The phone call and live chat are the most convenient ways to reach technical support within minutes.

4. BlueHost (Recommended)

BlueHost has gained massive notoriety due to reliable WordPress hosting services and official recommendation by WordPress developers. They also managed to get listed here as the best domain registrar because of reasonable prices. If you are planning to start a site on WordPress platform, then choose this provider without any doubt. You’ll get a free domain name on the purchase of annual hosting account.

No need of web hosting but only a domain name? You can get one at industry standard prices as well as renewals just like their hosting plans. The management panel is user friendly where everything can be changed related domains easily like DNS records, domain lock, managing sub-domains, and enable/disable WhoIS guard. All of these things can be done with few mouse clicks through the simplistic dashboard.

Besides registration, BlueHost offer’s the following services; free domain name with hosting purchase, Cloud Hosting, Shared and Dedicated hosting, VPS hosting, Site security and more. The custom designed hosting control panel comes with a bunch of features such as one-click WordPress install, easy Cloudflare integration, creating branded emails accounts, and FTP accounts.

24/7 customer support is available for the whole year to fix your issues instantly and thus earns it the top spot on this list. I am an old and experienced BlueHost user, their hosting services are quite solid, but occasionally you may need to contact them regarding downtime or performance issues. If you are looking for an affordable host that can deliver satisfied performance along with a dozen of features, then BlueHost is just perfect for you.

5. 1and1 Internet

The 1and1 Internet is another well know top registrar who provides cheap domain registrations at the insanely lower prices. The thing that makes it the best is they offer first year fee for TLD’s around $1~$2 with exclusive discounts on web hosting plans. Surprisingly, the users can buy a .com or .org extension just at $0.99/first year and then standard renewal. That’s why I can’t resist myself to include them as the best cheapest domain registrar.

It was founded in 1988 by Ralph Dommermuth, and United Internet is the owner of this great registrar and one of the biggest web hosting companies in Europe and Lenexa. The main headquarters located in Montabaur, Germany. They are handling more than 19 million registered domains for private and business customers globally till to date and growing.

You get a friendly Name Server management panel with advanced UI, sub-domains, SSL certificate, WhoIS guard, 24/7 support, and 2 GB storage for emails as freebies. So 1and1 enable you to create branded email account without paying any extra charges using which the users can communicate with their clients. They are generous enough to allow email forwarding at ZERO fees for all users to receive email at other address.

The 1and1 Internet offers Linux and Windows hosting, virtual servers, dedicated servers, managed cloud hosting, cloud apps, email and E-commerce solutions. They are also one of the cheap cloud providers that support a broad range of operating systems. Integrated 1-click installers included even in cheap shared hosting to help you install popular CMS such as WordPress, Joomla, Drupal, etc. with one click.

If you want to get a free domain name, just choose their basic hosting plan. You get one year domain registration on the purchase of any hosting package (shared). I’ve used 1and1 for one year and monitored their servers uptime via Uptime Robot, and the results were unbelievable. The average uptime was 99.9%. Don’t you think it’s fantastic for the money you pay? ????

6. InMotion Hosting

InMotionHosting is a top-rated CNET-certified hosting for last 14 years because of outstanding service, secure web transactions, and best business practices. They have A+ Better Business Bureau (BBB) rating and serving customer for many years. They are one of the hosts who provide SSD powered web storage for all plans even for shared hosting at cheap rates.

InMotion offers web hosting, domain names, site building tools, website design services and many useful tools. You get traditional cPanel to manage your domains, sub-domains, email and FTP account, as well as hosting account. There are also dozens of other features added to the cPanel such as server statistics, bandwidth monitoring, 400+ 1-click applications, phpMyAdmin, MySQL, easy DNS editor, and much more. The exclusive perks are customer server caching/firewall, free SSL, DDoS protection, Max Speed zone, and SSD drives.

If you’re looking for an affordable but fast web hosting with a free domain, backups, and unlimited storage then give them a TRY. I am sure you won’t find them unsatisfied. Their servers are blazingly fast as they use solid state drives and “Max Speed Zone” for fast data rendering.

You can approach the proactive support 24/7 via live chat, Skype, phone, email, and ticket system. Isn’t it good to have multiple ways to get in touch with customer support to ask for help? IMH is one of few hosts that also support Skype. Moreover, their pro-active live chat is very quick to respond and user-friendly. Along with all perks and features, here is another one and it’s their extended refund policy of 90-days money back guarantee. If you feel unsatisfied with them, just request to get your money back.

I managed to get an exclusive 47% off discount for MyTipsHub visitors which is included in the link here – no coupon code required. You just have to click on the link and choose “Business hosting” for bigger saving with a free domain name.

7. HostGator

Brent Oxley started HostGator in 23 October 2002. It is a Houston-based hosting company that offers shared, VPS, reseller, and dedicated hosting as well as domain name provider. HostGator is an excellent domain registrar and inexpensive WordPress host. HostGator growing very swiftly and has a giant base of 8,000,000+ websites under their platform.

Getting a domain name via HG is very easy, and the process is pretty straightforward. You can buy using PayPal and credits cards. Their domain prices are a little bit higher than a pure domain seller but keep in mind that web hosts usually charge more money than a pure domain name provider. Another considerable point here is, if you compare the domains price of HG with other hosting companies like BlueHost, you’ll find that it’s pretty fair.

The control panel is designed by keeping in mind beginners to deliver the maximum ease of use, and same goes with web hosting panel. It comes with an advanced and easy DNS editor to help you modify Name Server records and other settings such as lock/unlock, domain transfer, etc. So, you can point your website name to different hosting server or in simple words, DNS pointing.

It is one of the most popular hosting services among WordPress users and a great domain registrar. Many experts recommend this one for creating websites on WordPress platform. Their plans are very affordable and come with dozens of features to run small to big sites flawlessly. The shared packages start as low as $4 ~ $6 per month including a free domain on annual plans.

I have been using HostGator services for a couple of years, their hosting is remarkable, fast and secure (own experience). Give them a try; you’ll never regret your decision. Get your money back in case of unsatisfiable scenario within 45 days.

8. Name.com

Name.com is a well known ICANN accredited company with a ood online reputation among domain name providers. It was founded in 2003 by Bill Mushkin and handling more than 1.9 million domains under their umbrella. They offer different services such as SSL certificate, web hosting, website products, and email tools, etc. The buying and checkout process is very simple. All you have to do is enter the site address you want to purchase, create a new account with Name(dot)com, and make the payment. That’s it.

They offer a .com extension at $12.99/year, .org at $10.99, and .net at $12.99 which are quite reasonable rates. You can purchase any provided product like hosting, domains, or SSL using Credit Cards and PayPal. Unlike some hosts, they allow easy URL and domain forwarding feature at zero fees. Name.com provide a sophisticated and easy to follow control panel to help the users change/update settings such as DNS records, transfer, email forwarding, etc.

You can avail other services and tools including SEO tutor, website builder, one-click WordPress installer, security certificates, Google Apps for work, business email services, and much more. Right now, the company sells SSL certificates by RapidSSL, Symantec, and GeoTrust at the best rates. If you’re a blogger or eCommerce business owner then must buy and implement security certificate to protect your visitors’ information. Moreover, it’s also a ranking factor in Google search engine.

Their web hosting plan starts at $4.99/month (Startup) allowing a single site and $12.99/month for unlimited websites with one free domain name. The “Startup” includes 10GB storage, 100GB bandwidth, 100 email accounts, and 10 MySQL databases. Each plan holds over 50 auto installer scripts, 99.9% server uptime, subdomains, 100+ email accounts, free cPanel, developers tools, and free encryption. They also take daily backups, spam protection, phpMyAdmin, autoresponder, and much more. All of these features come with a 30 days money back guarantee.

9. Register

Three brothers Dan Levine, Richard, and Peter founded this company in 1994 as an Internet service provider. With over 15 years of experience, they successfully build a solid base of customers who are using it for decades to manage domain names and web products. Currently, handling millions of websites and blogs on their platform. Millions of people across the globe trust and use Register(dot)com. And that’s is why I listed them as the best domain registrar for 2019 in this list.

It is an all-in-one place to get your domain name and all web services which are required to run a blog or business website. You can opt-in DIY website builder or get custom designs to create any type of online entity. They also have web hosting services along with a dedicated technical support team via phone call. You can register your web name easily at the lowest prices for the first year.

Besides domain name provider, they offer the following facilities including shared hosting, dedicated hosting, email tools, online marketing, SEO, PPC, eCommerce solutions, and SSL certificates to protect privacy. Their hosting plans are quite affordable as the “Essential plan” enables you to store 300 GB data, 25 FTP accounts, 10 email addresses, 20 GB email storage, and unlimited monthly bandwidth. You also get a free domain with this package as a bonus which is another advantage to choose Register.com.

MyTipsHub visitors can avail a tremendous discount offer using which they can grab a .com, .net, .org, .biz, and .info, TLD extensions just at $5. All you have to do is create a new account to take benefits from this special deal and buy your new web address at an insanely lower price. Here keep in mind, you must check their renewal rates before buying because Register.com charges more money than any other domain registrar.

10. DreamHost

DreamHost is an ICANN accredited best domain registrar for buying domains and offer 350+ TLD extensions to choose from. You can buy your brand name as low as $11.95/year with convenient and easy to use control panel which allows domain locking/unlocking, URL forwarding, creating sub-domains and DNS management. Just like above company, they also have decades of business experience and managing a staggering number of 1.5 million domains and websites right now.

With each registration, you’ll get a free privacy protection to secure your personal information from public access like your name, email address, and phone number. Yes, that is a great benefit and many domain registrars charge for this. Another great thing is if you choose DreamHost to buy website name, they give you “Remixer site builder” at no extra cost. It is a drag-and-drop based tool which helps you design stunning business pages and posts without learning coding skills – good for newbies and non-techs.

The company voted by WordPress.org as one of the best WordPress hosting services to make a WordPress CMS powered site as well. They provide generous hosting packages packed with unlimited storage which makes it an excellent host to get started. DreamHost only offers one plan for shared hosting that costs just $8.95/month and allows unlimited websites and bandwidth. It looks a little bit costly, but all of their servers built with SSD drives to ensure fast speed and don’t forget you are allowed to host as many domains as you can.

Furthermore, following products are covered under their platform; shared and dedicated hosting, cloud servers, VPS servers, and live support. If you can afford some extra bucks, then this one would be an exceptional choice. Still, confused? Don’t worry DreamHost offers the longest money back guarantee of 97 days. So, your investment is secure for more than three months which is beyond the standard period and longer than any company in the world. Only a reputed and quality provider can offer such an extended refund duration.

Bonus: More Best Domain Registrar(s)

Still interested to know further providers? Here are some more registrars who are also known as the best;

Features to Look for Before Choosing a Domain Registrar

Registrar Online Reputation

As there are many registrars available to choose from but the important thing is, are they reputed, well-known, and thumbed up by real users? There are domain name providers that only focus on profit-making without delivering value to customers. Some even demand additional charges for services like technical support, domain transfer, etc.

In the worst scenario, you may end up losing your domain with them, so stay away from such domain registrars. Before selecting any provider, check their credibility, business practices, real user ratings, and ICANN accreditation, etc.

Prices and Renewals

Luckily, some domain name registrar out there, offer huge introductory rates to new clients which help them save money. Few of them even cost only $0.01 or $1 for the first year and then standard renewal rates which are usually higher than the first payment.

Mostly this promotional tactic can be seen on GoDaddy which also insanely cheap domain registration for first-time buyers. Oppositely, few charges more fees than standard rates for buying as well as renewals. So, compare your favorite registrars’ prices before making a decision to get convenient and quality service.

Secondly, you might fall in love with a company due to cheaper registrations and think it’s the best place to buy domain a name but what about renewal prices?

Normally, in web hosting and domain industry, it’s a marketing strategy to gain more customer by giving huge discounts and overcharge at the time of renewal. So, you must double check this fact before making a purchase.

Customer Support

Another most important thing when working online is “Customer Support”. Domain providers that realize its importance do offer 24/7 customer support through various channels? It is highly recommended if they have live chat and call for assistance.

The support quality can be determined by trying one of their supporting channels. If they respond under five minutes via live chat or phone, then it’s acceptable and a green signal to choose that domain host. You can also ask other questions to know their friendliness or behavior.

User Interface

An easy to navigate control panel not only help saving time but also good for setting up things such as domain/email forwarding, creating email addresses, modifying DNS configuration, etc. So below listed best domain registrar do offer simple yet powerful management panel. For example; NameCheap recently renovates its control panel entirely and now they have one of the easiest to use control center for both web hosting and domain names.

Refund Policy

All the reputed domain name providers always take care of their clients by giving a money back guarantee. It is also a good sign to identify if a domain name registrar is a legit business and can be trusted. Usually, you get a 3~7 day refund time on domain buying and 30 days or more on web hosting purchase – it varies.

We all love free stuff? You can avail freebies by picking the right place to buy domain names. There are few providers listed below that offer free WHOIS Guard which help you hide personal information such as your name, phone number, and email address from public access or at least from spammers to avoid junk emails. You might be surprised to know that WHOIS privacy usually costs around $4~$10 per year but one can avail free by making the right decision.

Auto Payment Support

It is optional and not essential if you regularly monitor your domain’s expiry date. But it could be a lifesaver for busy users. When enabled, automatic renewal feature will extend the life of your domain without your attention.

All you have to do is add at least one payment method with sufficient funds from which auto-renewal system will deduct the fees.

How to Pick the Perfect Domain Name?

I am pretty sure you acknowledged what are the best domain name registrars and now the question is how to come up the great domain name? Well, just like I mentioned some tips to find the good registrar there are also few things that should keep in mind to capture a great name. I recommended read all these points carefully because not only this time but in the future it’ll help you to choose the perfect web address.

Do not just buy a domain that you think looks attractive and cool, always do your best to discover a brandable name. Avoid common terms, numbers, hyphens, etc. because you cannot make them brandable. Let me ask one thing, how many times you see numbers or hyphens in a company domain? Probably never or rarely.

Before starting out, keep in mind few domain variations according to your niche to make the process easy and research thoroughly to hunt a brandable name. Don’t just stop with one name, repeat again and again. Sometimes we just register a domain and then realize that it doesn’t fit our current business model. Ultimately, it costs money and time.

Be Creative and Perceptual

Your domain name should be intuitive enough to help first-time listeners understand what it’s all about. In simple words, it should be self-described, when someone hears or read it, he/she can guess the topics/products behind. For example; HostingAdvice.com, one can easily understand that they cover web hosting stuff.

Another example is SearchEngineJournal where most of the information is related to SEO and search engines. So, while choosing your brand name thing twice because it’s not something that is easy to change later.

Make it Short and Memorable

Lengthy name not only difficult to remember but also frustrating to type. So, if possible always make it short and memorable to help the users remember it for next time visits. If you have a too long domain name, it might be stressful for mobile users to type the whole URL due to small screen dimensions. Short names are simple to refer, can comfortably fit on visiting cards, and looks striking in off media marketing campaigns too.

Make it Easy to Type

You might say if it’s short and easy to remember then what is the meaning of easy to type? Well, you’re quite right but what about this domain “simpleessy.com”? Looks short but not easy to type as the users can find two “ee” frustrating. Hope you get the point.

Use Target Keyword

Using target keywords also help the audience to know the main niche of your brand. There are some controversies that keywords in your site name or exact match domain plays a vital role to get high ranking in search engines but who knows. Personally, I think having target keywords is a unique move because it gives you two advantages.

Prefer .com TLD

When we talk about websites, the very first thing comes in general peoples mind is “.com” and the other reason is it’s the older extension on the internet. Mostly, web owners prefer to have .com tld and you should too. And the 3rd reason in my perspective is as mobile usage increased tremendously over the last few years, you may know that many modern smartphone keyboards come with “.com” button which makes it easy to complete the URL address by pressing that button.

If your desired business name is not available in dot-com extension, then you can also check for .net, .org, and .biz, etc. or find an alternative one as you’re on the starting phase. On the other hand, the existing business owners can contact the current domain owner to buy it, but it surely cost more money than buying a new one.

Easily Pronounceable

Before purchasing your brand name figure out if you or others can pronounce it easily. It should be easy to speak instead of telling every spelling to your clients/customers. Take a look at PCMag, TechRadar, LifeHacker, AuthorityHacker, Microsoft, etc. these domains are just formidable, branded, and much easier to pronounce too.

Avoid Numbers and Hyphens

Avoid using numbers and hyphens to make your domain name looks professional, brandable, and concise. Web addresses having hyphens or numbers in most of the cases feel awkward, generic, and weird so bypass them. Instead of carrying these words you can alternate the name or use some prefix.

My-Tips-Hub.com or MyTipsHub1.com both feels ugly and inconvenient, isn’t it?

Research Thoroughly (to Avoid Trademark Infringement)

Copyright infringement is something that can ruin your well-established business soon or later if you don’t care. Losing a brand name due to trademark infringement impacts badly on any company and sustaining after that is quite impossible as many firms got abandoned in the past due to copyright claims.

You must double check and amply investigate online before going with any web name. Long story short, do not get caught in the legal lawsuit to protect your hard earned reputation and customer base. It takes years of work for brand awareness and building loyal customer base and this mistake could cost you thousands of dollars.

Choose a Suitable TLD

Just like all other tips this one also important, selecting TLD according to your business module is crucial. If you’re an organization then pick .org, for commercial purpose .com would be perfect, and so on. Want to focus local audience? Then choose the appropriate ccTLD like for the United Kingdom .uk and the USA .us, etc.

Availability of Social Network

In the past, I purchased few expired/dropped domain names and when came across to social media profiles it were already taken by someone probably the previous owner. It frequently happens when you buy old names. If you’re planning to run a long term blog or online business then must take into account social media presence. Your social profiles and pages should match the website name as it’s more legitimate and trustworthy.

So double check social media name availability before making the purchase otherwise you’ll have to include some prefix or alternative words in social media usernames which is undoubtedly not a good thing – at least for me.

So, these are some well known top domain registrars where you can easily buy your website name. If you’re looking for a great web hosting company with a FREE domain, then pick BlueHost. They are fantastic, recommended by professionals, and robust platform to make your blog within budget. You also get free SSL certificate and backup services along with instant customer support through multiple channels.

On the other hand, NameCheap is the best place to buy domain names at affordable prices and ICANN accredited domain name registrar. You get one year WHOIS protection at no additional fees. Plus, they have a user-friendly control panel to perform all necessary settings like DNS editing, etc.

If you know any excellent domain name registrar that should be here in this list, feel free to suggest in the comments section below.

Is there any worst registrar added in this list? It will a pleasure to know which is your best domain registrar for buying domains?

Source

https://www.mytipshub.com/top-ten-best-domain-registrar/

2 notes · View notes

timeisacephalopod · 6 years

Note

1 & 99 for the Get In My Business Please question list?

The meaning behind my url:

If you’re talking my writing blog URL its literally just what my AO3 name is, which was chosen when I was 18 and liked Criminal Minds a lot. In hindsight it was a bad choice but I can’t change it now lmao. If you’re talking my personal blog (ridingcthulhudick) I just thought it was hilarious. And if anyone quoted my blog in an actual publication they’d have to print that my blog name is not appropriate lmao.

Have you ever met someone who didn’t seem real?

When I got this question I was like ‘do you answer on your phone’ and decided no because I have some fucking tales ok. You guys have all heard about this person if you’ve followed me for awhile- this is the person that I called on racism and she didn’t show up to school for a week after. But that is really only the tip of the ice berg.

So I meet this person at the beginning of my school year, who like me is named after a season, and she’s odd- wearing a cowboy hat with all these fandom pins and ok. That’s strange but ok. Then she starts talking, goes on an on about her kids, I discover that she’s 27 but if I were to age her by actions, style of dress, and mannerisms I’d put her at 17 and that’s only because she was in post secondary so that’s the youngest she could be. Otherwise I would have gone 15. And she has 2 kids. So ok. I leave and something is off about her but people can be eclectic and I don’t like being judgmental so I leave it be and let her actions speak for themselves rather than jumping to conclusions.

Class starts and she never. Shuts. The. Fuck. Up. And I don’t mean like useful advice, or even interesting facts that are irrelevant to the class but at least neat to know like another student in the class does. I mean every. Fucking. Thing. Out of her mouth is useless. So we all decide she’s annoying amongst each other and we all start to back away slowly.

Now we may seem like dickheads at this point but keep in mind, within a week, we all knew these things about her: she has 2 kids that were taken by child services and she complains about it a lot, she has an obsession with tiny houses, she’s a bronie and sometimes takes commissions for bronie porn, she’s a furry- which isn’t inherently bad but combined with the rest it just becomes another weird thing about her, she’s homophobic but also pansexual (??), she has a fiancee, but maybe also 2 boyfriends, we still aren’t sure and we’ve found her scrolling in dating sites, she’s an artist but I literally drew better at 12 (though in her slight defense I am naturally gifted at drawing), she tried to start a conversation with a friend of mine about incest on a busy street, and has a weird obsession with The Human Centipede. This isn’t even all of it, this is just the first fucking week.

So the semesters go by and in my school they’re 3 months long, which is a little shorter than normal universities, and we just got through our 3rd term. Here is what we know now. She lives in a small city (a couple hundred thousand people), but talks about it like its a small ass town like the one I came from (which is under 2000 people). Another student lives in the same city and has no fucking clue what she’s talking about. She’s sexist and racist (like hella racist- once she claimed that because she grew up with some Natives in her life she is one. That’s not how it works, and given how confused she seems to be on various cultural aspects that I know of from Natives in our area- which is admittedly not a lot I will full well acknowledge- this is a total lie). And she’s L O S T on all social cues. And not in a way where some people, like people on the autistic spectrum, are- I mean she intentionally has ignored social rules her whole fucking life and expects everyone to compensate for her bullshit kind of way.

And that’s a whole other thing. Not only is she racist, sexist, and homophobic, but she also has this obsession with bullying. She’s always on about high school (mostly in regards to herself- I will remind you all she’s 27) and bullying and has, on several occasions, defended school shooters and claimed they did it because bullying. As your local queer kid in a small, very homophobic town, eat shit bud white boys don’t school shoot because they were bullied- signed every other minority ever. Anyways. This grates my nerves and keep in mind I am a patient person, so I don’t like being That Guy. But there comes a point where I can’t morally or logically stand by when you’re an asshole. So a friend of mine from class was talking racism and she goes on what is essentially a #NotAllWhitePeople rant, claiming we should leave racism in the past and focus on the now, blah, blah. So I was like no, we have to examine the past because it continues to influence the present- to break this down into a smaller event this would be like a person in an abusive relationship focusing on processing their trauma and moving on from it- you gotta acknowledge the past to move forward.

WELL, she was not having this so I called her racist, because she continued on pulling the ‘colorblind’ argument, which is a fucking cop out so I said it. She was all ‘that’s my OPINION’ so I was like well then your opinion is racist, like shit son don’t hit me with that crap. In this exchange we’ve traded a good four sentences or so back and forth and the student that was originally talking racism (and the only brown person in this discussion) offered a single sentence of support for my argument. But she was silent for most of it. Well once More Annoying Tomi Lauren stomped off we find out she whined and cried about the brown woman eating her ass when it was my lily white ass that went all in. I was pissed.

Anyways. So we’ve established that she’s an asshole, and also weird as fuck. Lets run a highlight reel of this person: obsessed with tiny houses, general asshole, also emotionally manipulative but I didn’t even get time to cover that, looks and acts like a particularly annoying 15 year old (I’m so sorry to 15 year olds, you all deserve better than being lumped in with this), has an obsession with bullying but defends her racism (???), has the aesthetic of someone who shops at Claires and the lost and found exclusively, every single character she writes is a self insert (and I hadn’t covered that either- fuck I have tales ok), constantly monopolizes class time by yapping about shit no one cares about, thinks the Big Bang Theory is a good show, can’t take criticism for shit, and has more confidence than Joss Whedon when he wrote Age of Ultron.

There is more people- I didn’t actually touch on the emotional manipulation, which often links in with the bullying obsession, or any of the self inserts let alone her actual attempts at story. I didn’t even touch on all her racist Facebook posts or that time she whined about the gender neutral Canadian anthem (changed recently), which resulted in my sourcing that the fucking anthem was gender neutral when it was written, then was changed, and is now being changed back so at least know the fucking history of the anthem before whining and crying about it being changed. This is just what I remembered off the top of my head.

A friend and I from class once went out with a bud of his and we were talking about her and halfway through I realized she sounds fake. It sounds like writers all sat down in a room and were like ‘what pile of weird and asshole traits can we give a person?’ and then we created her. But we did not, we would not intentionally let ourselves suffer that way. And, AND, this is key- you’ve all read my writing here. You know I can create whole worlds with various levels of efficacy- I’ve written almost 200 stories that I’ve put on my AO3- but I simply am not creative enough to invent this person. I never would have combined ‘racist, self insert writing, tiny house obsessed person who thinks the Human Centipede is a movie that makes you think’. I wish that last part was a fucking joke but that’s deadass a quote. It is not a movie that makes you think. Wolf of Wall Street is a movie that makes you think assuming you figure out its a satire intentionally making fun of every white male power fantasy ever, not the fucking human centipede.

Conclusion: If you are so generally off the rails that a writer who prefers writing fantasy and science fiction is not creative enough to have invented you you are Some Shit ok. Like Hannibal Lecter is a character someone invented and that guy probably couldn’t have come up with my seasonal nemesis ok. There’s just too much to unpack there and she’s too willing to throw it all at us like a monkey flinging turds. I can’t believe this is a real human being. I wish I didn’t know she was, but if I have to suffer so do all of you.

5 notes · View notes

rosedalemike · 6 years

Text

“The Mood” Blog #9 - Farewell, Rosedale...It is time.

This is a really tough one for me and I'm not sure where to begin. I guess I'll be blunt and say that I have been finding more than ever that it is in the best interest of my musical journey (and well being) to put Rosedale to rest and start a new chapter.

Rosedale has meant everything to me for almost 15 years now. I've devoted the majority of my time, money, attention, and energy to Rosedale. And I don't regret any of it. I've learned so much more than I could have ever imagined about music and life and saw more of the world than most people get to see in a lifetime. I managed to actually grow Rosedale into a small business and it has made music my full time occupation. When I look at it that way, Rosedale screams success!

Touring has become a big part of Rosedale's agenda. Building a memorable live show, getting merch graphics and orders ready, booking shows, traveling to them, managing an intense amount of gear/production- and as I explain in my prior blogs - I don't really mind doing all the dirty work. I enjoy the challenge and it is all worth it for those magical moments where I get to see lives being changed/inspired. I love meeting fans and bands and I love that Rosedale has often been labeled a "musician's band". It's no surprise. I almost have no personal life because - for better or for worse - I love how much my work doesn't feel like work. So, evidently, I tend to write a lot of songs about the grind; the ups/downs, the pride/doubt, the dreams/memories. So that's how I'd like this farewell announcement to go. (Though, I'd like to think I'm a better songwriter than blogger.)

Before I touch on a few of the many reasons, I'd like to clarify that this is not a re-brand/name change, nor is this me quitting music. And I don't really wanna talk about what musical ideas I have for the future just yet. There are many options that I need to figure out for myself. But I am finally 100% positive that none of them will be under the name Rosedale. Rosedale will end as Rosedale and I want this announcement to be about Rosedale. The Rosedale songs/releases will rest as Rosedale songs after this tour. They had their time and proudly resonated throughout many amazing places/ears.

I want everyone to know sooner rather than later (even though the next chapter is nowhere near ready) because it is only fair. If you were thinking that you'll just catch this new Rosedale show the next time it rolls through town I wanna let you know there won't be a next time. And if you are over Rosedale already, chances are you haven't read this far anyway.

I understand if this is upsetting to some. Believe me, it’s hard to just call it a day like this almost as much as it feels absolutely necessary. So before you set your Rosedale apparel a-flame and make that tattoo removal appointment, hear me out:

Reason 1: The Unoriginal Name

As jaded and cynical as I may sometimes come across about the ever changing music industry, one of the new musts that I can definitely understand and respect is that being unique/original is crucial. The answer to a lot of musician's uncontrollable struggles is 'over saturation'. I hear it everywhere I go. And from the seminars and conferences I've spent my time attending/downloading over the years; having an original, easily searchable name is the first step to growing your brand. (Brand; If you've been reading these blogs, you know how much I had that word.) But, ultimately, the name is the brand.

And not only is there over 5 other Rosedale's on Spotify, the origin of name Rosedale is nothing original; Four friends walked down a street ‘ROSEDALE AVE.’ that leads to the music store- thought it sounded cooler than their current band name. Sure, to put it that way is a total slap in the face to the legacy that Rosedale became. But it is no wonder that here I am at a stand still, personally messaging 'fans' to come to their local venue/dive bar etc. to be reminded that Rosedale is unique/original/interesting/so much more (and all the other nice things I hear from people after the set).

I had the oportunity to go out for a long breakfast with my biggest hero the other day while I was home. He was showing me, first hand, the struggle someone not-so-technically-savvy might have finding my music on Spotify. He stoically said "you should change the name." I knew it was a burden for a while now and that it would be a big headache to commit to, but the way he said it made me realize it was no big deal and it was definitely time. (Biggest hero = my dad)

Reason #2: What even is Rosedale even???

Similar to Reason #1, a confusing brand is not a good brand. Side note; none of these reasons are things I just suddenly realized. They've actually been worsening burdens over the last four years. The truth is, back in November 2013 (when I was finalizing demos/new songs for Self-Titled and Again) we (as in me and my management at the time along with other industry friends) were discussing a name change/rebrand. Mostly because the infamous history of Rosedale was a bit of a confusing thing, (especially locally) and still is!

'Is it a band? Is it just Mike? Why is it just Mike? Is Mike's last name Rosedale? Maybe his middle name is Rosedale? What happened to the members from Get Going? Is that even Mike singing on the Past Times EP/You'll Count to Ten??'

We all felt a name change was necessary. But as we'd each listen to the new songs/demos separately on our drives home from the studio and try to brainstorm the perfect name, we couldn't help but realize that most of these songs were written about the history of Rosedale. One recurring idea was; change the name but call the album (/EP or whatever) 'ROSEDALE'.

In the end we just kind of decided to announce/shop these new songs as a "Re-Launch" of Rosedale. New logo, new songs, new sound, new line-up, new album; same name. The underground Rosedale following seemed excited, especially with the out-of-left-field, tongue and cheek T-Swift love song being the first single out the gate. But it still left a lot of question marks to some of the new followers we were picking up at Warped Tour etc. (especially because I had these awesome, well adversed fill-in/temp members building the brand). Slowly I was realizing that I was creating a clearer understanding, better response, respect from the venues (including Warped Tour), and much better merch sales from delivering my inevitable one-man show. But, nevertheless, still a confusing topic for even some of my most supportive fans. I am even confused - to this day - as to why my perfect fill-in members (from my hometown, to Virginia, to Indiana, to West Virginia) were not improving results/sales. But then again, we live in quite the different age for Rock N' Roll/technology.

Reason 3: Counter-Productive Shows

This one is extremely tough to explain. Especially to my supporters. So really try to level with me on this one. I tour a lot and I love it but If you read blog #5 - Lonliness/Perception you'll get an in depth insight on the kind of sheepishness I encounter in my travels. It's a natural process; people feed off the reaction of others. I've played some mediocre/catastrophic sets to big crowds (blew out my voice in Toronto to a crowd of 200+ , laptop crashed twice in Columbus to a sold out crowd at A&R, been booted off stage/muted after two songs opening to Eve 6's supportive fans in Albuquerque) and got a way better reaction/sales/follows/likes/LIVES-CHANGED than any flawless/powerful performance to an intimate crowd of 5-15 confused attendees. The reality is, the more common is the latter. And what’s worse is the next time I invite those confused attendees out to a show; 98% of them will give me the "I'll see what I can do" which 99% of the time means "I've got better things to do". Don't get me wrong, I'm aware people suck and I rock. And I'm still smiling up there on stage while I crush a feel-good set to 10 yawning, doubtful, distant sheep. And to the 2% of people who aren't yawning as their lives are being positively inspired; I appreciate you more than you will ever know.

But when I start the van and drive to the next city I can't help but realize that the 98% of the shallow people that I'm not reaching (due to the empty surroundings) I'm doing myself, Rosedale, and the newly inspired a dis-service by continuing to settle for less; to play shows to crowds of under 20. That’s why I tried that Show4me.com mcgiver with the Again EP release tour. I wanted to give back to supporters and confirm that there would be at least a small crowd committed to coming out.

If you're reading this and thinking 'who cares, keep playing for fun!' - my response is; try telling that to the venues/promoters that are giving Rosedale a home to grow my business with theirs. Luckily, many of them have been supportive/forgiving towards my sad numbers, but there are definitely some promoters/venues that 'will have to pass' on my follow-up tours through. Rosedale has always been more than a hobby to me. It is my life and my business. And any artist who is too lazy to handle the business side of things just doesn't love music as much as they think (or as much as they'd like you to believe). I'll admit, I could definitely still improve on the business side of my little DIY empire here. So let's call that the general consensus of this reason...and we can’t keep ignoring the unsearchable name conundrum.

Reason 4: No room for new/old songs

(This one can easily be argued with many other relik bands as examples...but-) I'm STILL playing 30 minute sets (usually)... yet I have over 200 minutes of released Rosedale material! I've had to become that stage hog that pushes my 30 minute slot to 35/40 minutes just to play 20% of Rosedale's released material, just to give my few attendees almost all that they came to see. (Luckily, most of these venues' staff have also been super forgiving/supportive of this no-no).

Some people wanna hear oldies, some people wanna hear new songs that I haven't even added to the set yet (because I don't have enough stage time anyway). And in most cities I'm not in a position to headline/play last because everyone but the few Rosedaliens will just leave after their friend's set. I've seen it too many times and I still "Turn whiter than a song in C" when it happens. Will Rosedale ever get to a headlining status World Wide? I still believe it's possible. But not if I keep spinning the tires against all these roadblocks. It is very obvious I need to take a different route to get there. So maybe Rosedale will come back down the road...but that is no longer up to me. And for the time being, it's time to move on to the next chapter.

Reason #5: Hit Reset

You ever work so hard on something (maybe like a school project or a video game or recipe) then realize you have to start over? Or maybe your computer crashed or the ingredients spoiled without you realizing it. That used to happen to me a lot and still does. But it bothers me less each time.

Because then, as you're starting the process all over, you have that comforting Epiphany of improvement; 'dang, this draft is way better'. You realize that first run was a practice round and now you've got this Ol' Gunner experience to do things right and avoid the mistakes.

I've always felt that way going into each Rosedale album/EP. After Past Times it was all about using the right mics and amps to get that polished mix for Get Going. Then for Real it was all about not over-editing and leaving in the string noise and breaths...even footsteps. Then with Self-Titled and Again I dug a lot deeper into lyrics / my personal story and really went all out with dynamics using orchestration of infinite instruments. A lot of those sessions I had to re-play/sing the songs. Sometimes by choice, sometimes by dumb technological luck. But it always came out better the next time because repetition is the father of learning.

Anyway, you get the obvious point. But I think it is the most important one. Also, I should mention; the bigger the reset, the bigger the results. Ending Rosedale and starting something entirely fresh would be the biggest reset I've ever done. It might take a while, but if I go at it with the work ethic I've driven into Rosedale, the step-up is gonna be huge! We're talking over half my life - BOOM - RESET! Clear brand! Searchable! Productive strategizing/shows! Working with a blank pallet could be a great advantage. I'm still the same person/artist but I have a chance to create content under a fresh....brand...damnit. Again, I don't know exactly what that brand is quite yet, but I do know for sure that it will be better and stronger than Rosedale ever was.

So again, don't worry, my fellow Rosedaliens (& don’t get excited, haters), I'm not throwing in the towel and I'm definitely not slowing down. I'm just being honest with everyone and keeping you in the loop. This is the victory lap. I was gonna buckle down and work on new tracks after this run anyway but I'm letting you know asap that Rosedale (and these songs) are retiring. If you were thinking about taking a trip this summer to see one last final Rosedale show, you should definitely do it. I'm out here still giving it 110% every show to make everyone realize that "the really tall Canadian with way too much gear" is really on to something. Even if he ditches the overly popular, unsearchable, confusing name.

Though this is yet another very long blog, this announcement could have easily been 10 times longer. There are hundreds of other reasons/things I meant to say but I just kinda let slip my mind or, evidently, they didn't seem nearly as important/relevant. (Like the Chicago horror rock band "The Rosedales", who showed up to our very first Chicago show in 2009 with a Cease and Desist letter for trademark infringement and contacted all the venues on that first tour to threaten all profits...they still threaten me from time-to-time...)

Probably not the best place for this but: Rosedale’s songs and CDs and merch will still be available online. I'm just not sure if I'll be reprinting anymore hardcopies (definitely not Past Times as is as I don't even have the art file). Likely not reprinting merch and there isn't all that much left. So I'll try to keep the merch store as up-to-date on sizes as I can on the rest of this final Rosedale tour. But if you'd like to invest in Rosedale stock (and help clean out my van/garage) CDs are the way to go. I'll even sign them on request and maybe they'll be worth something one day.

I'm still gonna be writing weekly tour/music/life blogs and I'll likely be starting that podcast/YouTube show I was babbling about when I introduced this blog in Blog #1 as a first step into the new chapter.

It'll be interesting to see how this announcement plays out amongst the many social-media-only Rosedale followers and the true Rosedaliens. To the true Rosedaliens; I can't thank you enough for hanging in there and supporting me through thick and thin. Even if you just recently found out about Rosedale, and are just now enjoying/sharing/supporting my art, I really do appreciate you like family. I highly encourage you to come experience this victory lap and join me for the next chapter. Know that this is not goodbye. This is see you later in a different fashion. Hopefully sooner than later, though future timelines are still all up in the air.

The only thing I'm sure of at this point is that this is the last Rosedale run and I'm gonna go 110% for every day of it. (Maybe even 120% now... I'm really gonna miss playing these songs!!!) Hope to see familiar faces as well as some of the mystery faces. Thanks again, everyone <3 xoxo

FINAL DATES: 5/30 - Boise, ID @ Shredder

5/31 - Vancouver, BC @ The Roxy

6/1 - Everett, WA @ Black Lab Gallery

6/2 - Seattle, WA @ Kate's Pub (acoustic)

6/5 - Tacoma, WA @ Real Art Tacoma

6/6 - Portland, OR @ TBA

6/7 - Portland, OR @ White Owl Social Club

6/8 - Grants Pass, OR @ The Sound Lounge

6/9 - Klamath Falls, OR @ The Pikey

6/10 - Phoenix, OR @ The Phoenix Clubhouse

6/13 - Sacramento, CA @ Cafe Colonial

6/14 - Cupertino, CA @ Homestead Bowl & Xbar

6/15 - Bakersfield, CA @ Sandrini's

6/16 - Las Vegas, NV @ Evel Pie

6/20 - Pomona, CA @ The Legacy Room

6/23 - San Diego, CA @ Soma

6/26 - Phoenix, AZ @ TBA

6/27 - Tucson, AZ @ TBA

6/28 - Las Cruces, NM @ TBA

6/29 - El Paso, TX @ Neon Rose

6/30 - San Angelo, TX @ The Deadhorse

7/4 - Austin, TX @ Mohawk

7/5 - Houston, TX @ Acadia

7/6 - Laffayette, LA @ TBA

7/7 - New Orleans, LA @ TBA

7/8 - Pensacola, LA @ Handlebar

7/12 - Santa Rosa Beach, FL @ Grayton Beer Company

7/13 - Nashville, TN @ Rocketown

7/14 - Columbus, OH @ Rock The Creek

7/17 - Cincinnati, OH @ TBA

7/20 - Memphis, TN @ TBA

7/21 - Birmingham, AL @ TBA

7/22 - Fort Walton, FL @ Green Door Music Hall

7/23 - Columbus, GA @ TBA

7/24 - Atlanta, GA @ Masquerade

7/26 - Savannah, GA @ TBA

7/27 - Jacksonville, FL @ Jackrabbits

7/29 - St. Augustine, FL @ Sarbez

7/30 - Orlando, FL @ TBA

7/31 - Tampa, FL

8/11 - Myrells Inlet, SC @ TBA

8/12 - Myrtle Beach, SC @ Klockers (acoustic)

8/16 - Asheville, NC @ TBA

8/17 - Norfolk, VA @ TBA

8/18 - Virginia Beach, VA @ TBA

8/20 - Richmond, VA @ Strange Matter

8/22 - Washington, DC @ TBA

8/24 - Philadelphia, PA @ TBA

8/25 - Long Island, NY @ TBA

8/26 - Hamden, CT @ TBA

8/28 - Providence, RI @ TBA

8/30 - Boston, MA @ TBA

8/31 - Albany, NY @ TBA

9/1 - Burlington, VT @ TBA

9/5 - Potsdam, NY @ TBA

9/7 - Montreal, QC @ La Vitrola

9/8 - Ottawa, ON @ TBA

Maybe a couple hometown farewells early September too. Depends on some things.Lots to book. Any help would be much appreciated.

#Rosedale #rosedalemike #Farewell Rosedale #15 years #past times #Get Going #Real #Sampler 2014 #Self Titled #Tour #Again #Victory Lap #Reset

7 notes · View notes