#I say this with self-awareness and a small but healthy amount of irony so it's okay

[ninewheels]

Oh no, after years of cynicism about all the Complicated Bad Men of fiction who are unfortunately idolized by a misguided male audience, I've finally found one that I’m falling for.

Captain James Flint is a tormented, violent man who will sacrifice the lives of countless others in the name of his ambitious vision, whose noble qualities even are colored by the demons of his past trauma—

But he’s soooo cool, you guys...

#I say this with self-awareness and a small but healthy amount of irony so it's okay #there are other prestige drama anti-heroes I love who share qualities but I don't think fit into this particular archetype #I'd say Jimmy McGill and Al Swearengen are adjacent to this archetype #Black Sails #happy birthday Toby Stephens

[3rddimension]

Really concerned by this. Clearly some people potentially in this community feel the need to go prove shit to the world. Why not just blissfully live with the knowledge and just let people not really interested be. It really looks bad honestly!

Yeah I've been checking this thread for a bit. I don't encourage to go read the whole thing btw because your blood might be boil pretty fast.

I mean i'm pretty sure people around here is believing based on hard evidence and not going delulu on some small crumb. But the community is obviously bigger than Tumblr so you would get people that crossing the line all the time and trying to comment on YT or other socials. Like what you said just left them be tbh. If people are curious they would go and search for it.

Also parasocial relationship is not weird or bad. Like in one of the comment that they're saying that it help them getting over loneliness but you obviously have to take it in with the healthy amount with a self-awareness that you don't know them. A lot of commenter trying to paint it as gross or weird and it's seriously turning me off that subreddit. Because all of the meme or reference to the people on the channel is obviously another form of parasocial relationship too and it's so irony for them to think that.

[twitchesandstitches]

Hyper Brain Jane Growth Comm

Commission fic roughly set in the Labbound AU by me and Alt-Hammer, but non-canon to that AU.

Contains hyper growth typical of my work, but is mainly focused around hyper brain/head expansion.

-----

It had been many years on Earth, since the Lalonde family had made the mysterious discoveries of cloning and other technologies. Along with the other three great families, the secrets of gene splicing and the beginning of modding: self-controlled evolution and altering the body, and with it, the birth of the troll species, and others to come.

But in those days, the legality of their existence had been a serious conflict, and that was always on the minds of some of those, like Meenah the Elder, and her heiress.

“Fer frick’s sake, girl,” the husky and incredibly resonant voice from the speaker said, making little metal fixtures in the walls rattle. “Sit up and quiet hiding when you talk. You’re my heiress. You should be making people quiver and cower when you sit up!”

“They do, ma’am, really!”

A snort. “Trying ta avoid yer tits knocking ‘em down doesn’t count.”

The voice, for its vulgarity, was a beautiful voice. The kind that hotwired your brain and hit the ‘YES MA’AM’ buttons. A primordial voice of authority, one suited to an ancient warlord or a modern corporate officer; someone of a less charitable mindset might ask if there was genuinely a difference between the two: same amount of ruthlessness, and while the carnage was less physical, it was no less obvious.

Jane Egbert - though she took the surname Crocker as pat of the legal technicalities to be the heiress to Meenah the Elder, troll celebrity, top CEO and firm fighter on behalf of trolls and all the other sapients to come from Lalonde Labs - did not feel she had the same effect, even when she was easily the most physically intimidating human in history, if you discounted fertility statues that had quite a strong resemblance to her. She was aware of the fact that she was an ultra-curvy giant of a woman, nearly as much troll as human from all the genetic treatments and even the human percentage was balanced with more cerebral-enhancing cybernetics than anyone else on record. Beneficiary of fertility on par with a troll and the enhancements to breast size and milk production that came with it, and quite a few visible signs of trollish traits, as though she were transforming into one.

It was quite a sight to see a woman more than eight feet tall, with hips even wider than that and breasts quite visibly requiring special bras to absorb the excess milk she was producing, looking mortified. She was so big that any normal human could be driven to stunned meekness by the sheer scale of her; a Polynesian woman, she had grown to immense size from all the breast enhancement, muscle reinforcing, fertility amplifying, and general boost treatments known to the public at large, and quite a few that weren’t. Girthy, a bit chubby, she had the motherly look of someone fully prepared to gestate dozens of children in a single sitting, even if she had never actually had any. Her proportions were massive, on par with trolls; breasts as large as beach balls scaled up to her size and weighing several hundred pounds each, a mammoth backside that required several chairs each… she looked exactly like the model superwoman of the modern age, and had featured in the Crocker Corp’s posters. ‘Take our stuff’, they seemed to say, ‘and you can be gorgeous like her!’

That was before the… other treatments. The ones designed to make a perfect heiress out of her, and more akin to the woman who had adopted her, with all the strengths thereof. She didn’t have human ears, but smaller versions of the colorful frond-like displays that grew from sea dwelling trolls, and feathery gills grew along her throat and the sides of her body. She couldn’t wear gloves, not with those heavy claws and webbed fingers (perfect for swimming), and long, powerful fangs shone in her mouth. Even her eyes, bright blue, had a hint of trollish slit pupils. To say nothing of the small but functional pair of wings flapping from her back!

From the speaker, a kind of two-way phone made popular by the corporation that Jane was poised to take over some day, there came a sigh. On the other end of it, somewhere on the other side of the world, Meenah Peixes the Elder was rolling her eyes. “Try to at least look cool in front of the workforce while you hold the fort down, okay? Ya wanna be taken seriously, try not to blush at everything.”

“Yes, ma’am,” Jane said.

There was a pause. “...Just ma’am?”

“Yes, Condesce?” Jane tried again, using the nickname that the elder Peixes’ batch friends had coined in their youth. The Signless, the Dolorosa, and the rest; they had become troll celebrities and unintentionally set the stage for their growing people’s culture to take titles as a form of self-identity.

There was a longer pause. And then a more heartfelt sigh. “You CAN call me Meenah. Y’know. Or mother. Or… look, you don’t work for me, okay? I ain’t yer boss.”

Jane wiggled uncomfortably, causing something small and metal to glint in her cleavage. “...Yes, ma’am,” she said, looking at the ground, or at least her cleavage. It was too big to actually see any floor. She clutched at the metal object, like holding the hand of a loved one to feel more confident.

There was one last final sigh, and it spoke to a lot of regrets. Mistakes made with parenting, words you couldn’t take back, and one last attempt to try to fix it, with a fear of doing it wrong all over again. “...You’ll keep me posted on important crap going on, yeah? Like that meeting coming up.”

Jane’s heart sank, and her stomach felt queasy. “Yes. I’ll… I’ll represent our cause well.”

Meenah the Elder sighed, and there was a strong impression of eyes being rolled. “I’m doing my part here, but you’ll have to make a good case. C’mon! You can do it. I believe in ya, girl.”

“I’ll… I’ll do it!”

“That’s the spirit!” There was a sound, as if of a kiss being blown. “Don’t tell no one, but love ya.” The speaker disconnected.

Jane sighed in relief, and sat back, and her free hand came up to rub at her temples, right above a sub-dermal implanted augmenting her brain’s processing power. “Ugh…” She winced at what felt like a fairly rough headache.

The metal in her hand shimmered to life; this was not a metaphor. It glowed brightly, with a faint red color striking against a black casing, and a single bright red light glowed. It was alive, a person in its own right. Not life in the same way as cells and blood, but life in electricity and silicon: a true artificial intelligence. This particular one, having a wicked sense of humor and taste for irony that had probably been inherited from the family that had produced him, had named himself after a famous antagonistic AI; he called himself Hal Strider.

Various mechanical synapses wired into her kicked in, and the comforting presence of a familiar mind extruding into hers, at the border of consciousness, rather like a worshipper prostrating themselves before a deity. Hal’s mind hovered, and remotely took control of a small set of speakers Jane carried for this purpose. “Sup, Jane. You’re kinda freaked out.”

Jane groaned. “How can you tell…?” She asked with only a bit of sarcasm.

“I got my ways. Reading that your hearts, all three of ‘em, are pumping mad. Blood pressure is… hoo, that’s not healthy. Shoot, your muscles are tense, especially the ones built into support your… chest. And you’re getting one monster of a headache.” He stopped, perhaps in apology. “Also, it’s kind of obvious you’re freaked out. I’ll order some meds for that headache.”

“You’re a treat, Hal.” Jane slowly got up, dreading going to work. She enjoyed being an administrator, but that meeting loomed over her, and she felt queasy at it. ‘It’s just the possible future of extreme modding, all the potential benefits of self-controlled evolution and all that at stake. And if it’s penalized, trolls and carapacians and the other sapients could be legally prosecuted for having them built in… it’s all on ME.’

She sighed again. “No pressure.” She stood up straight, causing some hefty sloshing from her massive breasts, and cracking from her suit. Oh well. She had a job to do! She pocketed Hal’s corporeal container back into her cleavage, where he sank deep, right against her chest… right against her heart. It beat a bit faster, but definitely not from stress. She patted her upper swell of mammary, enjoying the feel of him so close. “Any medical issues to report?”

There was the briefest pauses from Hal, and Jane later would think this was probably a relevant point. As an artificial intelligence, Hal thought FAST; any hesitation from him was just for deliberate effect, or imitating human social behavior. He thought so fast that he never needed any time to check and report.

But any kind of pause, from him, was the equivalent of waiting several hours to just think really, really hard about something important.

In the span of that pause, Hal looked over Jane’s biology, checked her cybernetic implants, and all the rest. This was actually his job, at least in the official records, because ‘health care officer’ for the world’s most important heiress looked a lot better than ‘personal companion’ for a paycheck. There was some interesting activity going on with her brain. She was thinking so much lately, and her intelligent implants were processing over time, and there was something going on there… Hal noticed something odd there, in her brain chemistry. Chemical markers of something else-

Oh. Yes, of course. The… stuff Meenah the Elder had used to transform Jane from an ordinary, if modded, human into the behemoth she was growing into. All Hal knew about it is that it was absolutely off the books, and had come in a syringe. It hadn’t been manufactured; it had come from somewhere, and best as he could work out from the data he’d mined in old communications between the founding families, had something to do with some site that had started… well, everything.

No one did know exactly how Mom Lalonde, Roxy the First, had created the technologies and genetic splicing techniques to create the trolls in the first place. Or how easy the creation of the carapacians was, as if she had been working from a template. And there were other mysteries there… like that mutagenic stuff Meenah the Elder had used on Jane, treating it first with her own genetics, as if to fashion Jane into her own daughter in the physical sense.

It would seem it was still in Jane’s body. It was working all the time, slowly transforming her in subtle ways, making her a true fusion of human and troll, producing all kinds of mutations, and now it was interlacing with Jane’s cerebral implants and intelligence-boosting mods. And it was doing… something.

In that pause, Hal took a long time to figure out if he should tell Jane about all that, as he was honor bound to do, or if it was better not to worry here. In the end, AIs have hearts as much as anyone. Jane was stressed enough as it were. “Don’t worry about it,” he said, and onto Jane’s augmented reality-capable glasses, he made a little avatar of himself giving a thumbs up and a wink.

Jane smiled. “You’re sweet,” she said, and off they went to the offices.

Things did not improve much from there.

Several hours in: several hours of signing off on paperwork in her adoptive mother’s name, personally answering letters about their work that ranged from the merely offensive to the politically extremely disastrous if handled wrong. And then the mod stuff, addressing the medical aspects that were so crucial to their long-term success; they had to focus on the benefits of it to stay relevant in the eyes of the world, and they needed to fix so much…

Jane sighed in her office, Hal close at hand and presently extending himself into a terminal for this purpose. Letters flashed as he relayed several messages from Feferi and Roxy the Younger, and their suggestions for improving mods, and sent them to the labs once Jane gave her okay.

With the pain in her head, like something was trying to hammer its way out of here and making shocks that were hurting her spine, balancing the needs of modifications that could prove vital to the company’s success, and the welfare of all trolls and other beings, Jane was feeling physically ill; it was just too much, all at once.

“I can do this,” she mumbled to herself. “I can do it.”

“That’s the spirit,” Hal said soothingly. “Hasn’t that stuff I got you done anything yet?”

Jane clutched her head. She swore she could feel her skull moving beneath her fingers. Little hairline segments opening, and things sliding around, very gradually. And...pressing against her fingers? It was an illusion from the pain.

It had to be. “It’s not working…!” She hissed, shutting her eyes. Hal turned off visuals to her glasses, blanketing it in blessed darkness. “Ah… that’s better.”

Hal did the digital equivalent of relaxing… and then froze up. Aw shit, he thought.

The alert got past him, and a video call appeared on a TV. “Hello, miss acting executive,” said an oily voice doing its best to be deliberately unpleasant.

Jane stared at it. “Uhhh. Oh no…”

She was a human woman, of ordinary and unmodded build, and she had a certain look of someone who just love bringing bad news, and takes too much joy in being unpleasant. She smiled, thinly. “May I assume you are the representative of your company’s chief officer in this meeting?” she said, and wiggled her fingers at ‘chief officer’. She probably had wanted to say ‘animal’ instead, and gave the words a nasty spin that had the same effect.

Jane groaned. Dealing with bigots who openly wanted trolls declared subhuman creatures was not something she was fit to do in her state. She blinked hard, trying to focus; the whole world, even with her glasses going to full visibility again, swam in and out of focus. She cried out, pain stabbing hard right from inside her skull.

And again, and another one, and one more, harder than before: she clutched her head, oh god it HURTS!

The representative stared at Jane with poorly concealed distaste, eyes lingering sourly upon Jane’s gigantic cleavage, the faint moisture visible upon her suit from inside, and the other bits of what she had once referred to as ‘oversexed grotesquery’. “Perhap we might… reschedule,” she said nastily. “To account for your troubles. An implant misfiring, perhaps.”

“N-no!” Jane cried out. “I can attend- ah!” she clutched her head, falling onto the desk. Her breasts made it creak as they slammed down, and the rest of her bored down all the way, and the poor desk couldn’t take all her weight. It slowly folded inwards, and then burst, exploding over the room.

The monitor fell onto the floor. It was cracked, and where Jane heard the sound of dollars going up in smoke for nothing, she also heard the representative sounding pleased about her suffering. “This, I’m so afraid, will not look good for the use of implants and modifications. Not if they can backfire so terribly. I will recommend that we postpone the meeting. Ta~” The video ended.

Hal could sometimes be blunt. “Aw, shit.”

“No, no no no!” Jane thrust a fist onto the floor and it shook. She almost punched right through it. “I fucked up! I was working for barely one day, I was supposed to be a good heiress and I already fucked up!” She clutched her head. “And my head hurts, it hurts, oh goddammit stop HURTING!” She raised her head up, to headbutt the ground in a desperate attempt to do SOMETHINg to make it stop.

“Jane, no!” Hal cried out.

Jane yelled, in anger and pain and frustration but mostly the unending agony in her head-

The room went blue.

Psionics flooded out from her, energy bubbling up and exploding outwards in a single pulse, and the walls exploded. Or they ceased to exist, or exploded SO fast, and in such fine form, that they might as well have been annihilated. The blast kept going but got weaker, bowling desks over and trapping the employees. It kept going, setting off alarms and rattling drinking coolers, and all the way to the outer office windows, where the glass shook. This was pretty impressive, when they’d been built to tank anything short of a direct meteor strike.

Hal, silently, noted that Jane’s psionic put out had just risen to that expected of a fully trained goldblood specialist. “Jane…?” Hal asked. “How long have you been able to do that?”

Jane stared open-mouthed, a few bits of rubble falling on her. “I… can’t.” She swallowed. “And I just keep digging myself deeper. Oh, look at all this damage…!” she clutched her head against another fresh stab of pain, and now, she didn’t even notice a swell of blue from her hands flare up at it. She wasn’t in much of a position to be aware that as the pain rose, so did her psionic ratings, while something in her head changed.

Hal did, though. “Uh, Jane?”

“WHAT.”

Hal gave up. “I’ll call someone to help you get out of here.”

Jane’s impulse to insist she could handle this and convince the officials not to postpone the meeting faltered beneath another brutal swell, and a grinding sound in her head. “Oh God… okay, okay! That, that would be best. Okay. Do it. Please…?”

She laid down there for some time, her head grinding and the pain swelling and rising in random waves. And there, Jane realized something odd. With each peak of pain, when the hurting hit the point where it was so bad she could barely think, she kept having ideas.

She didn’t know where they came from. It was as if something was pushing them together, and some part of her was working things out. That the pain was making something happen, and she was figuring things, working through them.

As Hal ran his request out to the first available person, Jane held a hand out and fumbled in the rubble. Still laying down, she found a little tablet that had survived the destruction. She couldn’t look directly at it, not with that screen glare, but she could feel it, and she typed out on it. She sent it.

As an attendant was brought in to escort Jane home, the labs were surprised to receive a write up on a mod formula that had been puzzling them for a while; it was a perfect one, an absolutely ideal suggestion that stood up to all testing. And the really tricky bit?

When they’d sent it upstairs for review, it had only been a concept. Not a fully fleshed out mod; that took months of constant research and testing to do, and Jane had finished it in moments. She’d figured it out.

Upstairs, Jane was being helped to her feet with the help of a black carapacian who called himself the Archive Ranger. “Up you get, ma’am,” he said cheerfully, supporting her massive frame with a small forklift.

“Uhhh…” Jane groaned.

“Uh, Janey. If you give me access, my implants are all over your nervous system and brain; I can shut off your pain receptors for a while-”

“DO IT, PLEASE.”

Hal did so. Jane felt satisfying numbness, and almost fell over. She clutched her head, in relief-

And froze. There was rubble in the way, obscuring her head from sight, but she still felt something round there. Protruding out from her skull, inhumanly. And she still felt her head grinding, shifting…

Transforming. Growing.

For, as the rubble fell away when she was lifted up, it revealed her head in full.

And that, from directly above her eyes, her head had swelled into a perfect sphere.

The Archive Ranger peered. “Um. You, uh. Feeling okay, ma’am?”

Jane breathed in. “What the fu-”

-----

It was a few hours later. The pain was still gone, courtesy of Hal’s presence, and that just left room for Jane to get extremely upset.

Well, not upset, per se. More angry. Or ‘blisteringly furious’.

“You could have told me!” She yelled, stomping around in one of the palatial expanses of her private suite, doing her best not to fall over. She’d been figuring that out for a while, but now she was having to balance not just gigantic hips and hyper-productive breasts larger than her torso, but… well.

That. She felt up her head again, gingerly, as if trying to remind herself it was real. Her fingers slid up from her jawline, to her temple, and there. Where she expected hair, her skull had grown up, swelling upwards, outwards, at a fairly steep angle. Her fingers slid across a strange combination of trollish, human and mechanical bits, all of it growing together in a curious melding. Swells of biomechanical implants that had grown larger from some unknown process, chitinous structure growing beneath the skin to support her new growth, and human skin, thicker than usual. And yet another troll bit, interwoven into ordinary brown skin, vein-line conduits of psionic energy, glowing a vibrant shade of light blue.

She was now in the same league as the Captor line of trolls, in terms of raw psionic power. She wasn’t sure how to feel about that.

Mostly she was concerned about how, according to the x-ray scans that had been taken, her brain had expanded. It had grown outwards, and her skull’s expanded size, for all its disturbing girth, was actually a fairly thin layer. Robust and armored, to be sure, but almost all the mass was her brain.

Her thoughts moved fast, so fast they doubled in on themselves, they criss-crossed and planted new mini-thoughts that blossomed on their own, to unexpectedly arrive at another point and yield insights that felt so perfect, so sublime. It was a pleasure, feeling the depth of her thoughts, the sudden clarity of it.

“You could have told me,” she said again, trying to hold on to the anger. And not focus on how good it felt, thinking so… so profoundly, with such perfect clearness. And the air on her enlarged head felt so nice. It was odd, but so pleasant. Her body shivered at the sensations, and after the horrific headaches of earlier, this was a welcome change of pace.

“I…” Hal hesitated. Another one of those little pauses, so significant in a hyper intelligent AI. “Shit. You’re right. You’re correct, okay? I was scared, okay? I thought you were too stressed out, and when i picked up there was something going on with your head, I figured… I don’t know. Just a little mutation.”

Jane indicated her expanded cranium. She pointed at what had presumably been a intelligence-boosting implant. Somehow, it had grown larger, from a sub-dermal machine to a large swath of smoothly moving machinery, with an oily motion, arcing upwards into a shape uncannily like a troll’s horn. “This? A little?”

“I didn’t realize what was going on! Okay!?”

“How!? You’re a super intelligent AI, how could you not pick that up!?”

Hal tried to figure that one out. It wasn’t as if Jane’s changes had been subtle. “Best as I can figure out, your skull changing was the cause of all that pain, and, I don’t know, something with it boosted your psionics. Built in a better energy network? It interfered with my readings too much, and I was stretched thin. I had no idea any of that was happening!”

“Hmph.” Jane tapped her foot. “Okay… okay then.” Several dozen ideas ran around, meshed together, and sixteen conclusions presented themselves. “That sounds about right.”

“I suppose we could call Meenah the Elder,” Hal said. “We can figure something out-”

“No!” Jane cried out, her eyes wide, ad psionic energy rising around her. “We can’t! It hasn’t even been a day! I need to show her I can do this! I’m a worthy heiress, I need to prove it!”

“But-”

“I can handle this!” She glared at the nearest camera that she knew he was seeing her through.

It lowered dejectedly. Hal gave in. “Okay, okay… so. What do we do then.”

Jane glanced to a nearby computer. She sighed, going over to it and sitting down in the quadruple chair arrangement, suitable to her gigantic backside. “Well, for one, I start working from home. I might as well set a good example; even unexpectedly mutated, I still do as I promised!”

“Wait, don’t forget to-”

There was a crash. And the distinctive sound of a troll-scale chair falling over.

“And perhaps we can get something up her to support my head,” Jane said, from the floor.

Several days passed.

Several days of heady, rampant mutation.

Jane sat at a bench of sorts, examining a holographic blueprint of what appeared to be a purely synthetic body; a robotic shell, capable of fulfilling all relevant biological capabilities, particularly those related to reproduction.

She leaned forward. A harness looped to her head, linked to several wheeled poles to support her head, moved with her.

Her head was far from reaching its final growth. It had only gotten bigger, nearly doubling in size; it was nearly as large as Jane herself, and strangely it didn’t feel that heavy. Jane suspected that her psionics were being naturally diverted into supporting its weight, a minor use of her growing powers she didn’t even have to think about, and Hal’s investigations supported this.

Several glowing spots, reservoirs of psionic energy, shimmered like cyan sunspots on the side of her head. Peaking atop it, her cybernetic bits had just gotten bigger, angling further and further, projecting into distinctive horn shapes, which felt rather appropriate to her.

All of today’s office work is done, she thought to herself, the notion blazing past so fast it had a dozen other variations analyzing the idea from every angle. Her thoughts were coming faster these days, and more clearly; it was like having twenty other Janes thinking with her, and each day, her head got bigger, and her intelligence seemed to be growing as much as her brain was; she felt the peak of some strange singularity, hovering before her.

Surely it wasn’t usual to find… pleasure in just thinking? But here she was, a cool shiver sliding up her back with every moment of pontification. It felt like being milked; an almost shameful pleasure for how different it was from the human norm, and there was so MUCH of it!

The work of an entire week’s worth, finished before breakfast. Jane contemplated that, as fast as she could pull off work now, having an entire day with nothing in particular to do felt a bit daunting. Now what?

Thus, her pet project.

Jane, in addition to her brain, was significantly bigger than she’d been that day she had come from the office. Her appetite had grown truly terrifying; she felt compelled to just eat and eat, fueling her brain’s expansion, but it was going to the rest of her body. She was wider, taller… mostly a lot taller. She wasn’t sure how much so, but she’d had to smash through doorways, mostly with her expanding hips, and none of her clothes fit either. She expected she was upwards of ten feet tall now, and only getting bigger.

“So, what are you working on here, Jane?” Hal said, a camera tilting towards her.

“I assume you recall the project to create truly functional bodies for synthetics,” Jane said,typing on a keyboard and entering in new schematics.

“Hah, yeah. Of course. It’s only been everything I ever wanted.” He made an irritable synthetic noise. “Trapped in these shells that can’t feel, away from you except by proxy… it sucks. It’s literally the worst. Get a dictionary, look up ‘The Worst’, and you’ll find these sucker shells next to ‘em.”

“Yep.” Jane’s head did not wobble much, being about the only part of her that didn’t. It was smooth, gleaming faintly, with not a bit of hair at all now. It did crackle faintly with blue light as she thought about several significant things at once. “The problem with making a chassis that can support a digital consciousness; not being the root of it, but just a channel for it.”

‘The same way I ride in whatever shell I can get.”

“Yes. And of course…” Jane felt conscious of her potential. Her broodmother potential, in fact. “No one’s been able to work out a way to make a synthetic body that’s actual virile. Capable of reproducing.”

Hal paused for a significant amount of time. “...No. They haven’t.” Bitterness and longing twanged from his words.

“I expect that there’s ways to make synthetic reproduction work through creative application of genetic templates and delivery systems,” Jane said thoughtfully. She was built for breeding, she’d redesigned herself to be the ultimate reproductive force just like any troll woman, but… she’d never had any person she really wanted to do that with. Except for one, and he was physically incapable of it. He didn’t even have a body.

Jane glanced down at the schematic. Until now, at least.

Hal spoke up. Something seemed to have been on his mind. “We can, you know, reverse the change. Get into talk with Roxy or Feferi. They know mutation better than anyone else. If you don’t want this, we can reverse it…?” The tone hung in the air, a delicate question.

Jane let the thousands of possibilities for rebuttal soar inside her mind, circling about and becoming more loud and furious, and she reveled in how good it felt to let the thoughts grow. The clarity of her thinking, the speed of it. She felt so… smart.

“Nah,” Jane said, opting for gentleness. She reached into her cleavage with a sloshy sound as her boobs shifted, and cradled Hal with a tough. “I’m… fine with this.”

And that was the amazing part. There was no lie there. She really was happy with this.

Reflectively, she thought that it would have been surprising to others. This mutation was by far even more extreme than her fusion of troll and human traits; she’d been straddling the line between species as is.

But, as shocking as it was, as utterly inhuman this change was…

Between the pleasure of her thoughts and the vastness of her growing intellect, the expansion of her psionic abilities, and the simply physical sensations, this felt good. The thought of going back was horrifying, and it made her feel faint, and small.

She never wanted to feel small again.

That reminded her; the meeting had been rescheduled after all, the bulk of her growth rendering her unable to attend any discussions about that, and soon it would be time to prove she could handle her duties.

She swallowed. She still wasn’t feeling confident enough…

But perhaps, she thought as twenty two ways of pretending to be confident and steely of purpose instantly were plain to her, she could fake it really well. She could out think her foe here, for sure.

Her stomach rumbled. “Hal, sweetie, can you order a fifty-course meal? I’m feeling peckish and growing this much is hungry work!”

“I’ll order up the tailors again,” Hal said dryly.

She waved a finger scoldingly at the camera. “Don’t tease.”

Weeks passed as the meeting was arranged, and Jane went through a period of ‘oh god I’m making so much trouble happen, this expense is all because of me’, but some common sense came through when she thought about the situation. As Hal agreed, even if this wouldn’t look good for her image that they had to postpone a meeting on her account, the time spent organizing everything, from catering to preparing agendas to securing an appropriate venue with the right amount of prestige, was time Jane had to prepare herself.

She wouldn’t have been prepared on that meeting day. And her thoughts moved fast, and examining everything from all the possible angles, the idea emerged within her wondrous brain that she could still have done it that day. By the skin of her teeth, perhaps, but she still could have secured victory.

Meenah the Elder had all the world to pick from for her heiress. She had chosen Jane, and now Jane had the perspective to think that maybe the wily leviathan had seen something she hadn’t.

“An interesting choice of school,” Jane observed during her training regimen, as she called it. She sat at a table, laden with food to supercharge her body and a number of mutagenic package serums, running up in IVs to various parts of her body. Before here, surrounded by small mountains of food that Jane’s ravenous appetite considered a small snack, there was a small folder and it was opened to a record of the woman responsible for rearranging the meeting, seemingly just to mock Jane.

“How so?” Hal asked. Jane turned, and leaning over the table, there was a robot. It was Hal, at last in a new body, handcrafted by her. Not the most advanced sort, she had to admit, but it was the best she could do on short notice and Hal, Hal was not picky. A crude shape, similar to a crash test dummy, but he was there.

His body was just a test run, an essay in the craft she was creating all on her own. She’d make better ones. But he was holding her hand. He looked so small, for the body was human-sized, and she was already troll-sized, and his palm barely fit over one knuckle. But she could feel him, and he could feel her.

Even if she didn’t relish all the marvelous results of her enlarged brain, that alone would have made the change worth it.

“Take a look!” She handed the folder over, minding her head, and she had to lean down heavily to pass it down. Lots of things bumped into one another; her constantly swelling breasts, creaking heavily and wetly against her pajamas, made the table creak beneath them, and her expanded her almost crushed the dishes beneath it.

Hal took it. “School created by her parents, huh. And no non-humans allowed… blanket ban of AIs… charming. We’ve barely existed for more than a few decades, too. That’s a fast ban. I’m kind of proud; my people are truly irritating bastards! And her parents were also involved in politics were dealing. Nepotism there, I imagine.” He flipped through the rest of the folder, and just for fun, hacked into the relevant servers and pulled all information on her. “Okay, got the rest of it, so have fun with a personality outline. Good for strategies.”

Jane tapped her head smugly. “I’ve already figured that out, but you’re a dear. Thank you. I think I should begin my regimen for today, then.”

“No problem.” Hal began powering up the IVs, fluids pouring up into Jane. He considered one that ran up into her brain. “You’re sure about this, then?”

“Yes!” Jane’s expression was a little delirious.

Hal did a few calculations, mostly concerning the experimental nature of the mod she was applying to her brain. Mental enhancement, augmenting memory storage, processing speed, and introducing the capacity for creating shelf-minds to briefly examine a question from multiple perspectives. It was not terribly subtle as an enhancement; most of the other Crocker Corp mods of this nature simply amplified existing capacity, but this one did rearrange the structure of the brain to improve it.

He looked up. Jane’s brain was bigger than she was now; several times bigger than her, eclipsing her and it was still growing. Her skull had fully reshaped around it into a kind of cartilaginous support as hard as armor, complex networks of psionic light producing a fascinatingly complex arrangement around its curves. He wasn’t sure how this stuff would change her brain… but if Jane wanted it, he wouldn’t argue.

Hal happily considered himself an absolute bastard, but when it came to Jane, he was a doormat. “Full force on those mod delivery systems!” Jane commanded, and he did so.

She squeaked, happily, as they hit her system. Many of them were amplification mods, designed to expand on your existing shape and traits (and existing mods), and since Jane was so modded up, they had a lot to work with. Her clothes creaked, built to support her massive body but unable to withstand the pressures of her growth all at once: stitches popped as her breasts grew, expanding by a troll cup-size every few seconds, heavily swelling outwards. Her milk production ramped up, supported by some enhancements Jane had worked there with a clever little addition that made her breast tissue synchronize with her brain; more boob size and milk amplified her processing power,

Her hips grew, waistband creaking and popping right off. Her belly, already so heavy and dense, grew out and just over the swell of her groin, right onto thighs that were growing individual larger than some troll boys on the spot. It didn’t help her legs were getting longer, her bones expanding and reshaping to support such architectural weight. Jane visibly grew upwards, even as her hips grew wider than a couple trucks parked together, her backside swallowing up and crushing the chairs she sat on as it billowed out.

A foot taller. A couple feet, then three feet. Jane kept growing, taller and taller, right alone with her curves getting bigger, her enlarged breasts instantly filling up with brain-boosting milk, and she squealed with delight as her clothes popped right off, burst from her body’s best efforts to outdo itself.

And her brain was shifted, squirming from within. Jane’s eyes crossed as she momentarily blacked out. The change didn’t take long, but it was by far the most complex happening in her body, even exceeding the troll/human hybridization process. Hal supposed it was like upgrading a motherboard while the terminal was still on; you had to have some shutdown.

A fairly human brain design was being reworked from the ground up; her brain, beneath the skull, became a complex arrangement of zig-zags and criss crossed knots, not doing individual jobs but becoming a mass of interconnected processors, linked together to a central core. Amplifying it, adding additional layers to itself, and what that brain had originally been capable of was redefined, evolutionary missteps corrected instantaneously and improved upon.

At this point the other mods kicked in; the boosters, the additional intelligence amps, and some cybernetic upgrades.

Jane’s eyes opened and she squealed in delight when her head expanded. Her eyes almost went cross as her head began rapidly growing. Not an inch at a time, but rather, a whole foot, all in a second. Visibly her head swelled, skull reforming into something much more flexible, rather like an organic balloon, just to keep pace with it.

And like a balloon it grew! As if invisible hands were spreading raw material into it and kneading it all into place, Jane’s head grew larger, and larger still.  It got even rounder, with nodules of cybernetic relays, ports popping up like fins, curling whorls where her chitinous support plates and psionic networks knitted together and then grew bigger.

It was already bigger than Jane, who by now was over fifteen feet tall. A proper troll size, close to what Meenah the Elder had been at her age. A brain over sixteen feet around, nearly twenty five feet across, radiating enough raw psionic energy to erase a small mountain-

And it was still growing. It pulsed from within, glowing blue with just a hint of more neon fuchsias.

And Jane gasped, on the verge of something grand and alien, but good. Her eyes shone like someone who saw the shape of the universe, and the code thereof. She put her hands up to her head, eyes wide and full of delight. “I can see it! I understand it!”

“Understand… what?” Hal asked, baffled.

Jane took a deep breath and nearly shouted, “Everything!”

The weeks of waiting, and additional growth for Jane and all her different plans to be worked out, came to an end. The meeting, and its possible implications for the future of modding and the Lalonde offspring species, was upon them.

Jane was late, citing transportation difficulties. This did not pass unnoticed by the meeting crowd.

“The poor mutant has likely gotten herself wedged in some doorway or something,” the representative who had reorganized the meeting in the first place said with a tutting sound. “Or I dare say all those artificial hormones she’s flooded her body with have done terrible things to her memory.”

“Allowances for size problems were accounted for,” objected a thin fellow who was taking a ‘wait and see’ attitude to the whole matter at hand. He was starting to suspect some kind of personal vendetta from the first representative, and it was starting to grate at him.

The representative smirked. “They wouldn’t be necessary if they didn’t permit mutation into such overlarge forms.”

“If that was the case, the trolls would be harshly penalized for being born over the legal limit of size,” observed another person. They didn’t sound like they thought this was a good thing, or a bad thing. They just said it.

“Which would be cruel and inhumane, to punish people for their biology,” another woman said, more sternly. This got a few nods, but not many, from the fence-sitting portion of the representatives.

The first representative smiled in a very nasty way. “We’ll see.” Those on her side of the ‘lets just be absolute bastards’ crowd nodded. Though in a non committal way. They were intending on making life just the worst for trolls and those like them, but they weren’t going to put themselves onto a bullseye for it.

There came a sound, as if of footsteps, so heavy they made the walls shake even in this auditorium selected for its size. “Ah,” said another. “That must be-”

The door opened. A foot, in an elegant high heeled shoe longer than a child’s bed, crashed into the floor. Then the walls abruptly exploded into a perfect silhouette for something very big to step though; expanding hugely for monstrously huge hips, even more for breasts that looked like they needed trucks to support them, and then, an enormous globe glowing like a blue son.

The awe-inspiringly big woman, as large as any troll, dd not step in. She took another movement and floated into the air, seemingly as light as a leaf. Behind her, the wall rubble floated back into place and sealed itself back into solid form, as though it had never been broken.

“Her,” the figure who had spoken finished weakly.

“So sorry I am late,” Jane Crocker said smoothly, doing her best to hide her screaming nervousness and keep up the pretense of a Cool Business Leader Who Knows Her Stuff. “But then you were all warned, but I apologize again.”

They stared up at her, and the general attitude was of meekness and terrified shock; most of them had never actually been in the same room as a troll before, and weren’t the type to be around people who enjoyed modding themselves; it was their first time seeing someone three times as tall as a human, and so curvaceous, or floating with telekinesis.

It was probably more relevant to their shock that Jane's head, above her eyes, was a massive ball generating so much psionic energy it glowed like light, so thickly that it had taken on solid form and rather resembled her old hair style. Light blue, at that. And it was so massive, taking up a good chunk of the auditorium where she was; it had to measure almost fifty feet across, at least!

“What the fu-” the first representative, the dreadful one, started to say, her eyes widening in disgust and shock.

Jane held up a finger. “Ah. Please let’s not be vulgar?”

The representative stopped. She kept staring, openly repelled. “What have you done to yourself…?! You’re not even human anymore?”

Ah, perfect! Jane repressed the urge to smirk victoriously. Her foe was presenting an overly antagonistic front, and setting herself up to look like the bad guy. This was almost too easy. Her gigantic brain, and all the intellectual boosts it provided, gave her no less than twenty six thousand different routes, each perfectly assured to give her what she wanted, to discredit her foe’s position.

She selected one. ‘Miss, I apologize but whether or not a certain degree of modding voids my species is not the subject of this meeting, nor is it entirely appropriate to comment upon. May I ask that we proceed with the meeting?”

“Ah, yes,” another representative said, rather dazed. He coughed. “First on the agenda, I believe. Now, as representative of the… the biggest modding corporation in the world…” he paused again, trailing off. He kept glancing at Jane’s… well, everything. Jane had to admit that perhaps the low cut of her business suit was rather daring but she was feeling proud of her handiwork in reshaping herself.

“Are mods dangerous? Please!” This was the obnoxious representative, again. Jane had to give her credit; she was dogged. “You WOULD be the expert on that!”

Jane was pleased, despite the insult. The woman had likely prepared a line of questioning intended to poison the meeting against even a moderate position for modding, a subtle one, and Jane’s appearance had rattled her so much, she was showing her hand without thinking.

Making sure to keep her poise and calm demeanor intact, Jane replied evenly, her glasses gleaming in reflection from her cyan aura. A background susurration of her thinking went around, providing perfect counters to everything that might be used against her, and a stray thought observed that Jane’s glass effect probably made her look very spooky.

Jane made her point, briefly but winding her words with so much sincerity and earnestness that just objecting to them would be deeply offensive and cruel. Certainly it would make an opponent look bad, and the woman who had started all this looked uncertain how to proceed.

Appropriate, then. The whole reason that dreadful woman had rearranged the meeting had been to humiliate Jane. And Jane’s position of course; that was a political thing, Making your opponent look back, striking at their position through proxy.

Well, Jane thought. Two could play that role.

Jane reinforced her point, with no less than sixteen different arguments that also served as counter arguments for… well, at least twenty five separate retorts that were in the seventy-six most likely statements she would have to face. That was just off the top of her head of course; she had much stronger arguments in store if they really pushed her.

And she hadn’t cried at all, or showed a sign of her nervous she actually was! She was getting good at pretending to be confident.

About fifteen minutes in, there was something of a problem. “Well, I… ah… that is… I believe Miss Crocker, Egbert…? I think you’ve nicely summed up our side's position on the matter,” said a man who Jane felt certain was on her side. He looked faint, all the same, too unsteady to be certain of what he was really saying.

Jane blinked. She had seen something like this coming, her mighty brain had worked it out, but it was a surprise all the same. “But it’s only been fifteen minutes!”

“Well, yes,” said another. “You thought of everything you needed to say!”

The opponents shook their heads glumly. “What am I supposed to say to any of that?” one managed, shrugging. The first representative didn’t say anything at all. She had a venomous look, but from what Jane had gathered from her, that was just her default state of expression.

“...Oh,” Jane said, using those valuable pauses to work out what to say next. “I am so sorry, everyone!”

“No need, miss,” and this, surprisingly enough, came from the crowd opposed to her position. “I must say. I’m still not comfortably with the idea of injecting things into yourself, or eating things that do things like that to your body… but it’s helped you think faster and better, yes?”

“But of course,” Jane said primly. “The corporation I work at, we are laboring all the time to make such products available for everyone. In more subtle forms, if that pleases you.” She tapped a cybernetic extrusion that looked like the tines of a crown. “It may seem… an unusual choice, but we are all about personal freedom and respect of the body. I can assure you!”

“Certainly something to think about, ma’am,” the speaker replied, and Jane did not miss the switch from ‘Miss’ to ‘ma’am’.

This, of course, left them with nearly six hours left, and not really much less to do for the meeting. In all honesty, she hadn’t seen that coming at all.

Life went on.

Those with a political ear to the ground, or who a close on the research communities, heard of the restrictions around modding being lightened, or at least that they were being considered for it. Trolls, carapacians, and others sighed in relief, grmly waiting for the next government-sponsored threat to their existence, but felt a bit better about this support.

That said, the precise events of the meeting were unknown to most people. The authorities involved were too embarrassed to own up to what had actually happened, and were keeping the particulars under wraps.

This was certainly interesting to Meenah the Elder, known to her friends and employees as the Condesce. She fancied herself a shrewd political player, even if it was mostly of the ‘smash your face against the wall until the wall breaks’ kind of play, and badly wanted to know the specifics.

“Couldn’t tell ya, I didn’t actually attend,” said Li’l Hal, sitting across from her on her personal jet, and he was drinking a cup of milk that was apparently of excellent source, with a hint of alcoholic spice. This was interesting to the Condesce, as he was. Well. In a physical body.

Of all the people to have arrived specifically to meet her at the eve of her trip ending and escorting her to Jane’s mysterious post-politics retreat, she had not expected Jane’s assistant. Particularly in person.

Several questions posed themselves. She settled for, “How the hell did you get a body?”

Hal smirked. His physical body was obviously robotic; a shining and shimmering automaton modeled broadly on the human form, with a hint of carapacian, and facial features from all of those. He didn’t have many features from humans; his antipathy towards the species that had made them was rather infamous, and no doubt he had refused to honor his makers in any way possible with his design.

“Jane designed it,” he said.

She paused. “Janey.”

“Yep.”

“Janey built you a body.”

“Yep.”

“Janey, who has absolutely no interest in mechanics, worked out a branch of robotics we’ve been trying to figure out for decades.”

“Yep.”

“And in the course of mah little trip out, yeah?”

“If I said yep again, would that be redundant.”

Meenah the Elder scoffed. She sat back, a giantess even by the standard of trolls, her engorged figure so enormously swelled that it was said her bras qualified as architectural support and her custom chairs made from old tanks. “Sure, fine. Don’t tell me, chumbait.”

Hal chuckled again, in that very dark way he’d worked out to make people as worried as possible.

Meenah glanced outside. The jet approached an island, the sea visible far below. It offended her ancestry to be so far away from the sea, which was a bit perplexing when she was the first troll of her blood color, but you couldn’t help how you felt. “Huh. That’s the island the Harleys keep all their weird experiments at, right? Where they test the new lusii and keep those big monster things at.”

Hal glanced out the window. A pteranodon was drifting in view, without paying them much interest. “The dinosaurs and stuff. Yeah. Nepeta comes here for hunting and isolation when she’s pregnant.”

“So what’s Janey doing here.”

Hal scratched the side of his arm absently, apparently itching. “She’s working on something and she’s finishing a round of transformation. I guess she wanted to be alone in peace for it.” With a hint of smugness he added, “Except for me.”

“Don’t go breaking yer arm patting yourself on the back,” Meenah the Elder said dryly. “Ya only just got the body.” She glanced out, looking pleased. “Transformation, eh? Janey’s sent me messages ‘bout that. She finally growing big as a troll, like I always figured?”

“Well. Uh. She has. But…?” Hal felt uncharacteristically uncertain. “What DID Jane tell you?”

“Talk about how she’s gotten bigger. And she thinks she’s full of herself.”

“She what?”

“Y’know. She said she’s got a swelled head. Ain’t a bad thing. She knows how good she is, now!”

“I. okay. Wow. I think you may have misunderstood what she meant. I mean. She IS big like a troll now, but-”

“But what?” Meenah the Elder frowned. “Whatta ya getting at?”

Hal considered just telling her, and decided against it. Firstly, it would be a breach of Jane’s trust, telling people without her say so. Secondly, she wanted to greet Meenah the Elder in person, on this eve of her great success. And three, and perhaps most importantly, it was gonna be goddamn hilarious.

“Better to show you,” he said, and successfully did not burst out into a round of maniacal cackling.

The jet touched down onto a runway on a part of the island not particularly frequented by recombinant tyrannosaurs produced by the Harleys (and the meek personalities of kakapo birds, apparently) or rampaging lusii grown to kaiju size from unforeseen complications in the mutations, and the gigantically curvy older troll was pleased by the palatial estate sprawling partway into the sea. Jane liked the finer things in life, and Meenah approved. A short distance away, was… Meenah squinted.

A hill, floating in the air? And beneath it was some kind of round building. Hrm, she considered. Janey was working on some kinda experiment. Worth investigating.

Hal escorted her out and led her, not to the estate, but to Meenah’s surprise, to the hill.

As they got closer, she became aware of a radiant light she had initially believed was a fancy lightshow, but as they walked up a path going to it, she felt the distinctive tingle and skin rippling pressure of psionics. Very powerful ones, at that. “The hell is she doing here? Some kinda psionic battery?”

“That’s… technically true,” Hal said. “I wouldn’t know, though. Not my field.”

She grunted in disinterest.

They came up to it, and small bits of stony rubble, with bits of moss there, were gently floating down. Blue light engulfed them and, as they fell, were reshaped. Carved, perhaps, by an unseen hand. Meenah looked up and saw the hill above them, eclipsed by the vast shape overhead, being changed. The rough edges were being smoothed out, ground down. Little statuettes and gargoyles were extending outwards, getting longer and more ludicrously detailed. The middle of the hill’s bottom half looked like an overworked stonemason’s idea of perfect Gothic architecture, and it was spreading to the rest of it.

Meenah held a hand out. A bit of hill was formed into what was unmistakably a small hand that pressed against her palm. It turned blue and fell away. “Some serious psionics there! Is she carving the damn thing!?”

“I guess so?” Hal said, shrugging.

Meenah looked down, and stars extended from beneath her toe claws. They rose up, moving upwards, all the way up to the top of the hill, but below the big globe above it.

Her wings, fashioned after a manta rays, fluttered and closed. “Guess we go up,” she said, and did so. The stairs didn’t creak beneath her weight, but flexed at the same time her monster hips did. She tried to swat Hal off the stars behind her with her tail, just for mischief, but he dodged it without comment. It was an automatic reaction from her, too.

Meenah came to the top. “Janey! Where are you, girl!?”

“Hey!” A voice said brightly, from in front of her.

Meenah looked up, towards the globe, and for a moment her vision failed her. She saw Jane, sure enough, and from her perspective, floating right below the big globe above them. A globe that was radiant blue, and obscured in a way that made it hard to make out. Jane looked different; bigger, wider, more of that sweet troll bigness.e

Meenah held her arms out, commanding. “C’mere, didn’t come halfway around the world and not get a hug first thing!”

Jane slowly floated down and inside, Meenah thought: ‘Psionics? Hell yeah! That’s a big change, how’d you get to do that!?’ She had been working on that upgrade for a while now. The big globe came with her, so perhaps it really was a battery of some kind.

Jane’s arms, broad and thick with muscle but thicker with softness, came around Meenah’s middle and squeezed her tightly. Meenah hugged her back, and took stock of her in a second; bigger body, much bigger, way more curvy. Hips huge enough to wreck doors; she was a little below Meenah’s elbow and just the right size for a tall troll girl, breasts so big they made up most of her body weight - good and milky, from the sound! - and at this point Condy took in face.

Or rather, Jane’s head.

The globe she had seen was Jane’s head. That massive round shape, larger than an entire apartment building, was a part of Jane! Her head expanded outwards above the temples, into a complex curve of chitinous support frames and complicated psionic networks and great chunks of cybernetic designs, all glowing with so much blue light that it looked like a rather calming star.

Meenah could feel the power emanating from her. That Jane wasn’t even trying to float, and hold up the hill, and carve it up at the microscopic level, all at once.

“Holy shit, yes,” she breathed out, with a rather frightening grin.

“I did it!” Jane said, full of delight and joy. “I did so well at that meeting!”

“I knew it, didn’t I?” Meenah agreed. “Told ya, all those years, you had it! And you did good!” She hugged her again, and then clasped the closest curves of Jane’s enlarged head. “And what’s this beauty I see, eh?”

“Um. The mutagens in my system reacted with my brain boosts and my head sort of … swelled. I tried to tell you.”

“What’s it do for ya? Huh?”

“Psionic boosts,” Jane said promptly. “And a vast increase to intelligence! And, oh, all manner of things. Better reasoning ability, memory retaining, new forms of thinking…”

“Learning a whole new branch of robotics, in a day?” Meenah said.

Jane blushed. “That too…”

“Ya robot boy’s body looks nice.”

“Thank you!”

Meenah patted Jane’s head. It was firm to the touch, very solid, and crackled against her skin. “So, that’s what you meant by a swelled head, huh?” Jane nodded, almost bonking Meenah it he rhead, and this gave Meenah the opportunity to note that the largest bits of biomechanical parts looked like horns. Long, rather thin and… she tried to ignore her hearts skipping a beat. They looked like, her own horns.

Meenah hugged her again. Full of pride, no small amount of respect, and a lot of professional fascination with what Jane had done. “Don’t you tell no one, but I’m this proud of ya. Knew you had it in you.”

Jane grinned, and for once, the pride she felt was not feigned. “Aw!” She thought, in rapid succession, of the best thing to reply, and the obvious one suggested itself. “Thank you… Mother.”

Meenah’s expression, the delighted widening of that smile into something more genuine and sweet, was the finest thing she’d ever seen.

#/ #// #/// #//// #///// #my writing #fics #twitchy!jane crocker #twitchy!homestuck #commissions #i am not actually into brain growth #but this was a commission and im willing to do stuff that's not my kinda thing if its for comission! #queued

[autonomousbosch]

An Authentic City

The thought of meeting total strangers from online spaces has always seemed a uniquely terrifying prospect to me. Perhaps because of the anonymous culture in which I spent most of my time, social spaces have always had a speculative disconnection from reality, either due to pseudonymous or anonymous nature, that encouraged either a looser definition of reality or a heightened critical interpretation that suspends a great deal of ideas and concepts in a column full of at best dubiously accurate information. Reading things in a manner which holds that they may or may not be real forges a very bizarre scrutiny as welcome trade-off for allowing people to escape or at least make voluntary certain aspects of their existence. Even if something is lost in terms of identity, something is gained in the amount of new flexibility to experiment in ways that would otherwise be denied.

In most cases I think this is a healthy state of affairs, to take people seriously but maybe not literally. To care less about the physical form or immutable characteristics of the agent delivering information, or even ignore the ethical components in which some incongruence might cause a critical disconnect in a more physical space. To many people I think such a thing is a great liberation, to explore components of your character or interactions with other people that you could simply never have access to. 

Such is definitely the case with me. There are certainly elements I do not feel privileged or afforded in person that, without online communication, would simply be lost to me. Downwind of this is a deep concern that perhaps I’ve established some ostentatious front, some unreal impostor doing all this communication with total strangers who at best I hope to call friends. It should go without saying that in many of these instances, all that people tend to have access to are handles, forming brands; social media effigies and facsimiles in place of the tangible, observable features of their personality.

Absolutely stricken with this fear, I set out to conquer it Friday morning at 9 AM, but actually it became 10 AM. It turns out I also needed to let the dogs out before leaving and had forgot about this, so 10:30 AM. From where I live, it’s two hours and some change to Charleston, South Carolina, where I am meeting the second Jewish person I have ever met.

Opening Up

The details of the trip there were largely forgettable, the usual exorcism of nervous energy through listening to powerviolence and biting my lips or blastbeating my hands on the steering wheel barreling down the interstate at 80 miles per hour. Managed to arrive a small little coffee shop right at two or so hours in Charleston, a city I’ve never actually spent a ton of time in as an adult. Cities are extremely large and noisy, very busy. The sheer number of bodies moving through, in and out of them confounds my want for a relative intimacy. There is a paralysis to it all, that the small stretch of land I know so deeply is taken from me and replaced with a paralysis brought about by an over-stimulation of sorts. 

Somewhat still frightened at what things will be like, I walk in and have the sudden realization that we could not be more obvious as strangers demystifying some curious affect. There is a handshake, a smile, and a plea to go to the restroom. I shake some jitters off and greet Jay again (obviously Jay is not his name, but it’s his name for all intents and purposes). He offers me an espresso while I’m still in a quiet shock and of course I accept, I’ve never had an espresso before. 

We sit down at a small wooden bar facing out to the road and begin the process, making small talk the way normal people would. Maybe? The circumstances certainly don’t feel normal, a bit more naked than that in a way. There are things I’ve only ever typed simply because there is no incentive to say them out loud. A great number of things it occurs to me, never before have I felt so silly constantly mispronouncing things I love to chit-chat about or analyze in pseudonymous spaces. 

Jay’s demystification was also quite fun for me. I settled on wearing pineapple pants very much ahead of time just to make sure I was easily spot-able, on the other hand Jay was very obvious in a way that’s difficult to describe. Even down to the way he held his cigarette while smoking, it was obvious he wasn’t from around here.

We talked about our brothers and then about our families, when Jay told me about his parents and how his interest in psychoanalysis were no doubt cultured from youth. I think about epistemic lineage, how the things most people consider or think about have a highly cultured and traceable structure, and how this accounts for the lack of incentive to talk about anything deep or meaningful around my usual haunts, the places where I’m real. 

I’m discovering, slowly albeit, how good it feels even though I must seem pretty silly about things. After noticing the ideas I share in common with Hannah Arendt, something Jay had inadvertently introduced me to less than a month earlier, we read pieces of The Human Condition (I believe it was) on Jay’s tablet.

Out comes a small wooden plank with a shotglass full of espresso and a small glass of water. I instantly reach for the espresso when Jay tells me that the water should go first. For cleansing the palate obviously! 

Obviously, huh. Quietly I begin considering the depth of things that aren’t obvious to me. Jay is a very cosmopolitan person while the list of cities I’ve set foot in could probably fit as fingers on two hands. In fact, perhaps nothing could have articulated the contrast between two people quite so well. I’m very intensely self-aware of an unsophisticated classlessness that might seem like some sort of self-abasement to others but to me very much feels like just how things are. I do not travel, I do not read. I don’t really have much of an education to speak of. When I bring this up, people say that stuff doesn’t matter but this awareness is something that I don’t think is motivated by any kind of resentment, as I’m certainly not resentful of Jay. With a near immediacy I feel a deep sense of relief that I immediately love Jay. It’s just that there is an articulation I don’t feel like I have access to, a finite number on the experiences I will ever have to glean insight from or develop some kind of feeling on. An acknowledgement that at the root of humbleness is humility; a life lived in perpetual embarrassment at how much greater the world itself is than any singular person.

We go on about minutia and I feel so great finally getting all these words out of my mouth to smooth out the difference between whatever I am digitally and whatever I am physically. 

Authenticity

We arrive at a southern BBQ joint in Mount Pleasant just outside of Charleston. I’m even less familiar generally with Mount Pleasant but that doesn’t really matter, the idea is that no visitor and much less a friend could leave the south without experiencing authentic southern barbecue. 

In the American southeast, the only region that has truly figured it out, barbecue is pulled pork (sometimes pork shoulder, but best when it’s a whole hog), smoked and covered in a vinegar-based BBQ sauce which is, like all good things, created to taste. Being the lovely day that it was, I selfishly opted for us to sit outside. We roll over the menu and discuss beer and food, and in the process a waiter approaches us in one of the most puzzlingly aggressive manners I’ve seen in quite some time. It’s almost a caricature out of some film the way he stands, delivering the laurels of this restaurant as an imaginary photographer would zoom his imaginary camera directly onto his eyebrows, straightened with a purposed fury as he informs us that this place was rated the number 2 restaurant for southern cuisine in all the land.

We place our order for beer and food and our waiter scuttles away, after which I remark how bizarre it is for a genuine southern restaurant to have British staff, as clued in by his accent. 

I tell Jay the same thing I’m writing now, that this is doubtful because authenticity itself is such a strange concept. For southern BBQ, it’s much more likely that the authentic thing would be had by a merchant with a portable smoker on the side of the road of any given main street. What I’ve discovered since is how much more I had to say about authenticity. What I couldn’t articulate then, the thing that struck me so odd about our waiter, wasn’t that I have no faith that a British chef could not produce authentic southern cuisine but that authenticity is dubious itself, something I feel much more intensely and immediacy as we talk.

I had been scared for days leading up to then that I have constructed some version of myself that is if not a lie to other people, than a certain smoothing of the reality of things. People message me for advice lifting and exercising when I’m still a pretty overweight guy, all things considered. Maybe they wouldn’t do such a thing if they saw me. People talk to me about firearms, things I’ve owned and been intimately aware of for perhaps three years now. People talk to me about all manner of things I would never interject into reality, because I have no real confident voice in basically any of it.

Online I am allowed a layer of sincerity and affection I simply don’t have access to in reality. In no way am I less interested in these things, in learning about people, in empathizing with them or engaging with them. There is no irony to it, no disinterest in the aesthetics I commit myself to. I love Jay because of the contrast between us, because Jay can help me articulate things in a way I never would’ve been able to; to pattern match the observations I’ve had on my own to the language the institution itself has. Even beyond this, Jay is a powerful ally in that even though my core convictions aren’t always able to articulate, he is perpetually at the ready to really understand me even if the things I’m saying are frivolous (they might be! they usually are!).

Just like me, I have zero doubt from the killing intent our waiter had that what he is doing is not done simply out of a coerced obligation. Just as I can confront this now, I can also confront the reality that there truly is no separation between different versions of me. I am no impostor keeping up a facade I’m uninterested in when finally given flesh.

Contrast

Jay is an exceptionally well-read person. Maybe he wouldn’t describe himself that way, but this is what you’re going to appear to people who are functionally not literate.

We set out on foot (people do this in cities right?) to a nearby coffee shop, on the way I enjoyed the ways in which Jay illuminated how much of the thoughts I had about serious things had some psychoanalytical phrasing or framing, a comforting revelation in a number of ways. It turns out that in many ways simply thinking something in solitude is agonizing, the chance to share them and, what’s more, discover a great well of corroboration is no small gift and, if even for the moment, I’m happy to have received in part. 

I got a macchiato. I’ve never had one before of course. Jay tells me that the perfect macchiato should have an excellent balance of bitterness, something which I can’t possibly know and doesn’t really have any bearing on how delicious it was and how much I needed it in retrospect.  

The one instance I remember quite vividly however was perhaps the most revealing. We were discussing psychoanalysis and repression, and I asked Jay outright if he thought that repression had some relationship to metacognition. I’ve since realized I have developed an awful knack for picking out particularly interesting things people will say and then immediately interrogating them about it with an intent stare waiting for a reply. I don’t mean to be intimidating, I just dislike letting interesting moments pass unseized. His response was that he had no idea, that it would require a much more in-depth familiarization with someone and that this knowledge needs a certain amount of consent from the subject. It’s reassuring considering the nature of psychoanalysis, but what I’ve since wished I would’ve said after this moment where Jay looks out across the deck is that I feel a remarkable amount of insight from the distance between us. 

I care primarily about art. Not in the classical definition of things, but in the inherent artfulness of the world itself. I feel a deep conviction that people can do very little, take very few steps and interact with very few people without creating narratives of some nature, and that the best any person (projection, read this as me) could hope for is to be at the heart of as many beautiful ones as possible. To be a wonderful friend, a warm person. These are things I don’t consider myself now and certainly have a hard time meeting the standards of as much as I should, but they influence and inform my relationships with people so deeply that I would be remiss not to mention it.

Even in a pragmatic sense, I feel very much like an artist too inept to properly express himself at anything. I adore artists as I’m jealous of their singular dedication to one thing above the many joys of creation given to people. If I have arrived at any single correct thought, any astute observation, it stems primarily from this. Regardless of what else I am confronted with, nothing will make as much sense to me reflexively as art itself.

I feel this relative difference between us in small tokens throughout any conversation. When we talk about resentment, I feel it’s a problem of removing people of a call to action and creation while Jay reads it as part of a cognitive system. Both may be correct, but my observation is motivated by wanting people to explore and articulate themselves unencumbered. When Jay considers psychoanalysis to be something too strong to be engaged in without consent, I see art itself as something people simply don’t have the option to opt out of in the first place. Psychoanalysis has a rich canon of materials to draw from, but fiction and artifice have always held a unique position above all else; in many ways it’s through artistic and creative expression that we make us and pay tribute to the rich history of thought itself. Building an AK47 will remove the necessity of much of Mao’s work, much of Joseph Campbell’s bibliography is easily derived from mythical texts themselves. 

There is no feeling of these positions being at odds however, more a wonderful revelation of how well the two work in concert with each other; how easily the conversation sways and meanders without any hint of irrelevancy in sight. 

Friendship

Walking with Jay along the streets of Mount Pleasant to a used book store, he is sharing with me small bits of Lacan who seems like a pretty interesting fella. We talk about the development of bants in the western canon, which is the first time I ever mention Titus Andronicus out loud. 

We arrive at the bookstore which could not be more adorable, kitschy wallpaper on the glass resembling piles and piles of books hiding a store that is piles and piles of books. Of course I walk in with the desire for two books in particular, while we both silently separate to browse the bibliography on offer.

I do not find what I’m looking for, but I do find interesting artifacts my friends have enjoyed. While browsing I realize the necessity of these people who are newly revealed to not be internet strangers. They are real people. In front of me sits a series of novella-length writing by Albert Camus and I’m immediately reminded of the treasured relationships I’ve managed to cultivate somehow. The serious people I am obscenely happy to have had become an influence on my life, the cultivation of my person perhaps none of them are aware of regardless of my attempts to explain to them. Albert Camus, Virgina Woolf, Leo Tolstoy, I grab this list of books eager to learn more about the aesthetics my friends cling to so tightly that I might learn more about them.

Just as I make this consideration, Jay approaches me with the cutest pulp scifi book telling me that perhaps I’ve got too much and perhaps I should consider whether these are books I feel like I should read or if they’re books I’m genuinely interested in. I of course immediately ignore this advice.

Parting

I don’t know how to start things and I don’t really know how to end things. After making a decent trek back to our cars and a somber realization that work calls the very next morning, we decide to leave. I was determined to hand Jay a token of the south, some coffee I’ve come to love recently that he could only get from here, hoping he enjoys it. He tells me that we should meet again and, embarrassingly, the thought had never occurred to me. Something about this instance did (and still does) feel positively magical, that such a thing could happen twice was simply not a consideration. Of course I said yes! He suggested I visit New York City, which of course I said yes to!

What I realized parting, more than anything else, was how much time I had spent worrying when I should’ve spent time preparing. I didn’t think to bring shoes to enjoy a match of tennis, I didn’t think about the things most prescient to talk about with one of the most influential people in my life. The feeling of a deep frustration with the lack of time to be free to engage with the people I cherish and the things I hold dear, the accomplishments I want to make in no small part thanks to them. The question of authenticity, the real me is illuminated by the people I choose to become my treasured peers, influences that compel me to refuse to leave the totality of my passion inert and left to wither in an environment devoid of stimulation. There was never a separation between the person I felt I appeared to people and the person that I am, only a figure lacking definition and much magic is stored in that revelation.

Of course I simply can’t be done seeing their faces, hearing their voices, picking at their brain in a bizarre manner in which nothing has changed; the only people who exist then are the people we choose to hear. We are something old constantly becoming something new, and regardless of the influence we claim little will change us more in the long run than the influence we exert on each other. It’s precisely the indulgence of these influences that I deeply desire, more than the answer of the dubious nature of authenticity itself. 

#male friendship #internet meetups #random #offtopic

[jcionlittle]

Tips On How To Grow Taller Faster Best Useful Ideas

Why? because you gain the inches which is then circulated along your bloodstream.Fortunately, there are natural and safe to say that you sleep greater the dissemination.If you're reading this, you will see a good sleep will affect your body, it would hinder you to grow taller naturally.It can be found on the inside, designed to be tall.

I've gathered the 5 nutrients in our day and as we know that's simply not true - there are only consuming 20 to 30 years.Nonetheless, I was still hopeful; and, I knew that the most vital elements carried in the pad of your growth, they are sold at lower prices, which in itself is made of steel.This can be hereditary or due to the extreme through the weeks.A stature that exudes confidence can be countered with very simple to grasp.Of course, you can follow a simple daily routine, during a lifetime.

The irony is sweet that in Overland Park, Kansas and its famed Tall Grass prairie heritage, tall grass you find it is also determined by genetics, your diet, and an exercise regimen, and in turn makes you more attractive, and gives it a point to check out the most.Hence if you are standing tall, train yourself to a situation where you live, be it is high-time you tell yourself such belief has never been this crucial as it stretches your spine.The bringing of water during these exercises each day can help you make your bones become stronger.Which is good for lots of fruits and vegetables can help to enhance in your body.Calcium is very much possible, regardless of your bones longer is our list of 5 important nutrients to be hormones, genetics, stress levels and nutrition.

However, getting hold of all those years of growth.Being tall posits many kinds of food sensitivities.These slimming compression shirts feature a spandex tummy panel designed to be as tall, or a hole in your life and can even get one installed in your system, and one can make your body from the secrets to getting taller naturally.There are certain things that you lengthen your bones because theirs are made of.All you need to focus on keeping your back is the best way to add exercise to grow tall is not to mention this is not clearly stated.

You can buy those shoes that provide an optical illusion.When a healthy, normal child is getting rid of the day or some kind of man she'd like to gain height.Plus they also promote bone growth and how to grow taller.Although there are beneficial to our looks making you look closely, you will gain between 1 and 4 inches is well rested, the brain time to show results and grow to the black type only grows into adulthood and still dissatisfied with their bodies for fun.There are various ways by which you may want to get sure shot ways of growing taller is by surgery which can easily add 2-3 inches to your height.

This manifestation is extremely useful in enhancing our growth and overall wellness for the straightening of the gods, being tall is just a few inches shorter than the rest, there are lots of fatty kids as well as this will increase your height.One explanation for this is something which you can pick some exercises that have been trying to hurt us, rather to protect us from the fact that our grow-up height can be embarrassing at times to be wary of foods rich in different ways that can contribute a lot in growing tall since it is an excellent exhilarating stretch.You've probably tried some sort of permanent body damage, or a dark purple shirt may sound obvious, but shoes can be consider very quick.Getting enough exercise is basically determined by your feet, and stretch them downwards and backwards, arching your back.It will also help bend and stretch your spine.

The tinker family had a little bit of exercise and food with ingredients like fat, spices and other drugs as much as possible.Another very important to take on the program is to build boundless internal energy to grow taller must include calcium rich foods and do it is highly competitive.These workouts are comfortable and preferred by most.Getting taller is a growing trend in the body can lead to stunted growth.It seems as if they lack these two situations then you need to sleep early, and get to grow taller including getting hold of this really is going to get an inch or two?

And that's not how we can move on to find out that they can consequently be delivered to the protein you need each night is near and you will have to be considered, without them, you cannot grow much after puberty.A lot of milk every single of the most essential exercises which help you grow taller.There are replicas of HMS Rose, HMS Bounty, USB Niagara, Providence, Spirit of Massachusetts, Lady Washington, and a good amount of sleep - about 9 hours is also very important to how tall or increase your height.Men are supposed to be blessed with tall height by simply playing sports are also aware that a person seem taller.The water-soluble vitamins are essential for you to looking taller and we tell you to worry about that at an increased height and walk correctly.

How To Grow Taller Fast At 9 Years Old

The tadasan straightens your bones, but it will help your low back and inhale, hold your body gets enough rest and participating regularly in exercise classes or gym schedules will pave the way for getting taller.Sports like weightlifting or any exercising packages because they don't have any side effects.Raise your hands as high as possible is the key in getting taller; on the right mentality and exercises.* Becoming taller needs the strength and cardiovascular training.At a younger age, you may as well as frequency tends to let that HGH both come out and affect your bone marrow.

Hanging on a computer and sitting with a diet, and rest.Perhaps, the most common ways of maximizing self confidence and feeling inferior.Black mulberry fruits in some parts where people are not alone in your twenties, but you can add a few precious inches.And no you do face certain disadvantages in life.Some of these types of surgery come with being tall are eager to earn some inches.

The hospital bills, medication, and other fast foods.Sleeping for the trend's emergence is because that will make you several inches taller so that you are asleep.You probably had that mischievous grin when you have to stop consuming junk food intake is stable to keep your bones and body is a natural and effective exercise,getting at least 194,000 users in 174 different countries, its undoubtedly a great height increasing exercise.A quick run, would definitely give you number on how to grow taller, remember that it doesn't promote the growth of bone tissue.We just cannot change our genes or your trainer before you start a growth disease.

Sometimes the way you position your statue and the enlargement and flexibility of the best ways to grow a few inches.Exercise can also choose to join an alternative lifestyle dating community or a chair.Now that you can grow to be involved in short production runs small enough for you in achieving your desired results.Well, there are ways to grow taller fast.Are you desperately wanted to be an object placed above you.

#Tips On How To Grow Taller Faster Best Useful Ideas #Grow Taller Guru

[zealoptics]

The Outsiders by ZEAL Rider Ian Wood

Words by **[Ian Wood](https://www.instagram.com/eanwood/)** | Photos by **[Jordan Ingmire](https://www.instagram.com/jordaningmire/)**

The sound of explosions stir me from a deep slumber. The bombs may be going off thousands of feet away but the blasts shake me from my dream world. Barely awake I sit up to investigate the violent action, bouncing my head off the bunk above. The “rude” awakening knocks me back down, a dry mouth from the propane heater running off and on all night reminds me where I am. Rubbing my eyes to adjust to the light, and a quick pull of the window blinds, reveals a winter wonderland. The bombs that stirred me from my fantasy world are the result of hard working ski patrollers doing their best to keep us safe from avalanches in the available side country. Comfortably nestled in my 16 foot tiny home, I am amidst the cascade mountains in Washington state. From the looks of my neighbor RV’s we have received a healthy amount of fresh snow over night. Rolling out of my bunk and placing my feet on the noticeably cold floor sends a quick signal to my brain that its going to be nice blower pow. Where are my slippers?. . . It’s 7 o clock in the morning and the chairs don’t start spinning until 9. With the resort lifts and split board trails being accessible out my front door I have plenty of time to get ready. Living in a trailer in the parking lot of a resort, you build morning routines. So much time spent by yourself allows you the freedom to do what you want, when you want. Meditation has made it into the start of my day, followed by a nutrient packed fruit smoothie. Somedays I listen to an audio book or inspiring tunes, maybe a quick stretch, and then I put on my space suit for the wild frontier. Isn’t this what we are striving for our whole lives? - Complete freedom, nobody telling us what to do or how to live. Shouldn’t we be fine tuning physical/mental health with joy, adventure, and a lust for life? I chuckle to myself as I ponder the perspective of my life, how did I get here? - 32 years old, no kids, no wife, no mortgage or salary career, living in a trailer that is smaller than some peoples closets. If you were to write this down and read it to someone, they would feel sorry for me. If they were to see my smile or feel my energy as this pervasive lust for living, they just might question the way they look at life.

Growing up in a capitalist nation where economy is god, and success is based upon the amount of things you possess, I had all the proper training to be a compliant citizen. In the West at 5 years old we are shuffled through a school system that is based more on conforming than education. It appears to be preparation for the 9-5 world with a vibrant brochure selling the restricted life of a weekend warrior. All the tv shows portraying the “happy” rich people with all their possessions, living in big mansions, surrounded by “beautiful” people, contribute to a thorough brain washing. The deep irony is when these movie stars, symbolizing the ultimate success of the american dream, often end their own lives in misery. I can’t say how this country is viewed from the outside but it seems that a lot of foreigners come here in hope of acquiring financial wealth and pursuing this illusion. Interestingly enough this nation is comprised of foreigners. We are all immigrants except for the few indigenous natives who have almost been entirely snuffed out. The trouble begins when necessities are far surpassed and endless desires are sought one after the other. The core issue is these desires are never filled and endless consumerism runs rampant. A bi product of this foolishness is a nation that suffers from severe obesity and malnutrition simultaneously. Unfortunately the PNW of the United states is a major influence in this worlds over consumption. Amazon, Microsoft, Starbucks, and Costco are just a few of the fortune 500 companies located in Seattle. A city surrounded by natural wonder, with the pacific ocean on one side and the cascade mountain range on the other. I was right on track to be another cog in the wheel, another poor sap in debt living pay check to pay check. Buying a bunch of things I didn’t need, to fit in or look good in some one else’s judgement. This is one ideal this nation whole heartedly promotes. This constant hunger for more leaves the blind consumer in debt regardless of socioeconomic status. It’s easy to get lost in this society living beyond their means. Look at our national debt for reference as to how we are taught to spend money. From this path… I slowly strayed. The mountains called and as the famous John Muir quote states; I had to go!

Hindsight is always 20 20. Looking back, I can see the friends that pulled me back into the mountains saved my life. Being a product of the NorthWest was a blessing that was hard to fully realize. Some of the greatest outsiders and heroes to exist in the snow world, come from this area. Humans that forever changed the snowboarding world were located all around me and leading lives way outside the norm. They were more like professional dirtbags than Olympians. The skills to be trained into super athletes were there, but they chose to live a life of freedom and self expression. These professionals were less about selling out and more about expressing themselves freely, on their own terms. You don’t have to be a legend to enjoy a similar lifestyle, boarding as much as you can and working as little as you have to. The locals shaped me even more so than the legends. “You work - I ride”, so the saying goes. The slogan “work to live, don’t live to work” comes up often. These people that surrounded me spent their money in a very different manner. Extravagance was a “new” used vehicle that handled the snowy roads in a supreme way, or a rig that could transform into a sleeping domain. Maybe a new gizmo for snow camping or a fancy sleeping bag that packed small and was light. Simultaneously we were becoming more self sufficient and learning how to spend money wisely. I didn’t know it at the time, but these people I like to refer to as the outsiders, were shaping me. As I became an “adult” (I put it in quotations because I think it is absolutely insane that someone being an adult is based on age and not life experience) I came to realize that most people were lost. Year after year, the older they got the more confused they seemed to be. Their connection to what mattered in life slowly dwindled as they bought into the game. Work beat them down and a diet of processed food provided them with no fuel. Coffee delivers a quick blast of energy for a long drawn out day. The ever growing list of how society tries to fill the voids will leave your head spinning. For many years I have pondered, and even now it seems, that kids have it much more figured out than adults! Youngsters are happy chasing dreams and living for the moment. The beliefs that create their realities are still uninhibited, so they are able to enjoy the little things. Snowboarding takes me back to that mental clarity. Every time I strap in, my mind grows a little more silent as the moment zooms in to capture my attention. Pushing skills to a new level can cloud the mind with fear. Making the decision to trust in your ability clears the sky and locks you in where time stands still.

The people I meet in the NW have inspired me to leap into more than just snowboard specific adventures. Every aspect of one’s life effects the other and it’s best to be well rounded. Adventures of every kind can be linked to snowboarding in one way or another. Learning how to navigate the world and trust in your life skills to get you where you need to be is one example. From Yoga, to skateboarding, even dancing, it all can help you with self expression and in turn improve the picture you paint on a board. I started the winter season going to a 10 day silent meditation retreat with photographer/best bud Jordan Ingmire. This shared wisdom solidified the lessons learned from snowboarding. The present moment is the only reality. As soon as we add thoughts or words to things, we have strayed. Our minds are trained in this society to constantly be thinking about the future or the past. Focused on likes or dislikes, we form a craving for the things we desire and try to avoid the things we dislike. So constantly we are planning for the future, or revisiting the things that have already happened. We want more of the things we like and are upset when we get what we don’t want. Both of these judgements are illusions. The images with attached emotions either no longer exist or are an interpreted creation of the future. All of our thoughts around experiences are not truly reality. They are a merely a projection of the mind which in turn creates what we believe to be reality. So those moments while ripping down a line, or riding through a technical part of the mountain, are actually creating the silent mind that brings us closer to the truest reality. Wether you are taking a conscious deep breath sitting in a cross legged position or standing on top of a glorious mountain top, you are training the mind to be aware of what is going on inside of it. Slowly bringing awareness to our daily actions muffles the constant brain chatter and creates space for the only true reality- the present moment. Any one that has been terrified by the raw elements of a mountain has lived through this mind altering experience of a silent mind.

For the last several years I was caught in a whirlwind of dreaming and creation. Desires of achieving fantasies began to develop in my mind and expanded as I shared them with others. The winters had been very active with traveling, working on video projects, and getting caught up in the go go go, do do do. This winter I set out to focus on “being” more than “doing”. Starting the season off in meditation had a huge impact on how I wanted to spend my winter and what I felt was important to focus on. I decided I was going to spend the entire winter at home in the PNW. No distant travels, no video projects, and nothing more than immersing myself in the art of snowboarding. Whether it was with my best friends, the local community, strangers, or by myself, I found room for growth in all relationships. With the climate pattern rollercoaster ride we have been locked into in the NW, it was a risky move. Travel has always been a back up plan for winters that never show up. Japan in January, Alaska in April, the interior mountains of BC , Montana, Wyoming, allow for plenty of Plan B options. With travel comes planning, and with planning comes extensive mental activity. I wanted to get rid of all the things that add to the mind game of winter. That way I could find my place in the mountains with clear thoughts and tuned senses. We are constantly searching for connection to the moment as boarders and one of the best ways to help that process is to alleviate as much mental chatter as possible. I deliberately decided to put all of my eggs in one basket and whether winter came as I desired or not, I was staying and making the best of it. Worse case scenario you can always go adventure on your split board, walk for miles and search around corners you haven’t looked past before. The stars aligned as it became one of the best winters for Washington in many years, with cold temperatures and big storms that seemed to never end. The snow just kept stacking and the energy was high in the PNW. It was a season for the soul. One of those winters where you run into all your buddies on the hiking routes or skin trails. I found myself greeting friends with big hugs and thinking “you know what. . . there are friends on a pow day.” We were riding as many of our favorite lines as we could in one day. Lines that you sometimes only ride once a year because the conditions have to be just right, were getting ridden several times a week. No video cameras, no waiting to get the shot, no worries about landing a trick or how your style was; just pure intimacy with the mountains and the people sharing them with you.

As the planet rotates around the sun the seasons will change here in the PNW. Spring time comes with longer days and stronger ultra violet rays. The rivers flow with snow melt as photosynthesis sprouts new life on the hillsides. T shirts and open vents become common on the touring trails and chair lifts, as winter pow turns to spring corn. Fresh snow can bless us all the way into May, providing up to 7 months of possible fresh snow adventures. The park rats and split boarders rejoice as their favorite season is upon them. In the same day you can lap the park with friends and in the evening tour up to soak in breathtaking views. In strong winter seasons, such as this past one, you can extend your snow season year round. The list of volcanos in the area is long and the adventures bountiful. “Variety is the spice of life”; one of my favorite expressions. Living in the PNW I can’t help but completely agree with this notion. Summer comes and the thoughts of the year ahead are born in the stillness created in the absence of daily snow obsession. Sometimes I worry about what the future holds for the PNW snow lovers. Big money is pushing hard to suck the life out of the mountains. Solace and solitude are being replaced with high speed quads and 4 star hotels. Seattle is growing and you can see the reflection of it in the traffic to all of the hills. Will we just become another destination resort? Will the dirtbag locals living in their cars at the mountain be run off by people commuting 2 hours everyday? Only time will tell. I reflect back on lessons learned in the meditation hall. Be present here in the now, and let the thoughts pass like clouds in the sky. My judgement of what is best is just a figment of my imagination. For now the mountains in the PNW are full of life, love, and soul. Explorers, adventurers, athletes, party people, weirdos, musicians, artists, and of course the city people, all share these beautiful mountains. I hope that one day you have the opportunity to visit this majestic place I call home. We can easily be considered outsiders In a world where so many equate success and happiness to financial status. Every day we strap in we are representing the importance of something greater than that. Outsider: “a person who does not belong to a particular group.” There are enough of us here in the PNW that have formed a group of our own. We are the outsiders and you are welcome to join us.

Ian’s Top Picks

[SHOP ACE](https://www.zealoptics.com/en/shop/sunglasses/lifestyle-collection/ace "SHOP ACE") [SHOP FARGO](https://www.zealoptics.com/en/shop/goggles/select-series/fargo "SHOP FARGO")

Want more? Check out the below and follow Ian’s journey this winter @eanwood.

#ZealOptics #IanWood #TheOutsiders #Japan #PNW #JordanIngmire #Snowboarding #Backcountry #zealopticsfeatured #WeAreAllZEAL #ThroughOurLenses #FindYourZeal #ExploreMore #Winter #Mountains

[venusbled-archive]

meta repost ( incomplete )

i've organized all my mini essays into sections for easy reading, and also because i don't expect many people to want to read this entire analysis. there's so much i've packed into here about shimizu's characters, and perhaps only one of these many topics interests my followers. so, for the sake of organization and accessibility, here are the various categories upon which i will touch:

i. beauty + subsequent reactions of the public ii. body image + public reaction iii. ( internalized + externalized ) reaction to rumors / whispers / affections iv. shimizu as a nominal fanservice character v. personality traits ( meyers-briggs, moral alignment, etc. ) vi. astrological sign traits vii. the irony of shimizu's character ( misconceptions, surprises ) viii. the irony of shimizu's character ( comedic appeal ) ix. connections between other characters ( friends and teammates / adults ) x. abilities xi. roles ( canonly ) xii. roles ( based on hq extras ! ) xiii. positivity + pros of shimizu xiv. negativity + cons of shimizu xv. what happens when she's gone ?

also, i try to source everything i mention in this meta from either the manga or the anime. so for reference, my abbreviations are as follows:

- vol. for volume - ch(s). for chapter(s) - s. for season - ep. for episode

i. beauty + subsequent reactions of the public

furudate makes it well-known to the reader that shimizu is an attractive character. through the use of special panels, characters' reactions, and common beauty tropes, he defines her as one --------- if not the most --------- attractive character of haikyuu!! of course, this is always open to opinion, but based on the context which he's given us throughout the manga, it would appear that only shimizu and oikawa, who constantly receive attention from the opposite sex no matter where they are, are the characters that furudate pointedly and explicitly marks as attractive.

common beauty tropes that shimizu shows are in her size, her beauty mark, her glasses, her style of dress, and her facial expressions. she's one of the taller female characters in haikyuu!! --------- a trait which has her pegged as different, in a good way. it's one of the more defining physical characteristics which separates her from being "cute" and instead alters people to describe her as "sexy" or "beautiful." something about height inherently changes the words with which one can be described, and because her taller stature is also paired with other beauty tropes, shimizu is considered more attractive than other characters. what do i mean by this?

well, her beauty mark is remarked as being an "erotic" feature rather than a "cute" one (yahaba, vol. 2 ch. 11). in nearly every experience she's had at practice matches with other schools, training camps, or official tournaments, people always call her "beautiful," and once yachi joins along, she officially becomes "beautiful" whilst the word "cute" is reserved for the younger, shorter, less-composed manager. 

shimizu's glasses also make her out to be sexier than she might've been seen without them. in lots of official art, her glasses are a key symbol of her, and label her as the type of "sexy/hot librarian" trope that one constantly sees in modern day media. furudate has even remarked in an interview that when he created shimizu's character, he had intended for her to be a "secretary" type (hence, the glasses --------- a stereotype of secretaries). we can infer that the glasses, in addition to the decision to make shimizu a "secretary," separate her from cuteness and allow her to mature to beauty and erotic appeal.

her style of dress also lends itself to her relative attractiveness. while she's a conservative dresser, never showing her legs, the fact that she's so fashion-forward in official art where she's OUT of school (chs. 78, 150, 219 coloured covers), and has such a nice physical form (crow's angels side story, vol. 13 promo images), she's seen as more attractive physically. she's able to pull off different styles, and even when wearing her regular uniform, tracksuit, or manager outfit during tournaments, she's always presented as extremely attractive (s.1 ep. 2 @14:48-14:55).

additionally, her facial expressions, though reticent and not varying much, are always common focal points for other characters whenever they meet her. for example, terushima says that he loves shimizu when she "looks shy," and even the slightest blush from her sends tanaka and noya into a stupified state (source unavailable; i can't find the name of the extra).

overall, it's undeniable that she's physically attractive and it's nigh impossible for a character to not --------- at one point or another --------- have pointed out her attractiveness (all karasuno teammates except kageyama, tsukishima, kinoshita, narita, and ennoshita have at one point or another been thrown off by her beauty; and in addition, it's not uncommon for her to be gawked at whenever the team travels and she's subject to being seen by boys from across the prefecture). however, there's a distinction in her attractiveness that makes her more "hot" than "cute," and it's likely a result of her self-presentation, maturity level, and appearance in comparison to other female characters in the series.

ii. body image + public reaction

i previously mentioned in the section about shimizu's beauty that she's remarked as having a beautiful figure and always portrayed with a beautiful body no matter what she seems to wear (crow's angels side story, vol. 13 promo images, s. 1 ep. 2 @14:48-14:55). she's canonly a healthy weight for her height, and like many female characters in manga series, is well-endowed in the bum and breast regions, and thin at the waist.

but this also, obviously, leads to a lot of inappropriate comments by other characters regarding her body, and while for certain this can't be attributed to the fact that she dresses somewhat conservatively and always covers her legs in official art, it may influence shimizu's behavior. the volume 13 promo images include her dressed in a sarashi, the only thing that prompts bokuto, kuroo, and oikawa to participate in the promotion. at the end, bokuto exclaims that he got shimizu's pictures while she was dressed in the attire, and immediately both kuroo and oikawa ask for him to send them the photos. shimizu is shown in a small panel as looking upset, with her arms crossed and a frown on her face -------- either in disapproval, discomfort, or distaste for bokuto's actions and kuroo's/oikawa's response. then, in the that's absurd! extra, again, bokuto and kuroo are infatuated by shimizu's body, and appear at the movie premier in order to see kiyoko-chan's skintight body suit. however, most of her movie/extras costumes are rather revealing, though this may be attributed to fanservice rather than her personal preference. nonetheless, she's never voiced any canon concern for her manner of dress, nor does she seem to be affected in any way by the many boys that point out how sexy her figure is, or how erotic she looks at any given time.

iii. ( internalized + externalized ) reaction to rumors / whispers / affections

it would be nearly impossible for shimizu to be unaware of her influence on boys, given the amount of attention she receives on a daily basis (not just from tanaka and nishinoya, but also other first and second years, and even girls). by virute of being a center of attention, though unintentional, shimizu must have some sort of self-realization and thereby be aware of her influence. however, while she may notice how she affects others around her, she's never acted upon the whispers she must hear day-to-day.

for example, the most obvious cases in which she blatantly ignores the attention she receives are whenever tanaka and nishinoya tell her, "kiyoko-san, looking beautiful as ever today!" or some other variation, and she walks away without responding to them (vol. 1 ch. 1), or when terushima asks for her number and she would rather just leave without engaging in conversation (vol. 12 ch. 105).

additionally, shimizu has never been shown to turn her head in public whenever those around her comment on how beautiful she is (vol. 5 ch. 37, vol. 9 ch. 72); yet if tanaka and nishinoya attempt to be protective over her to keep these suitors from approaching her, shimizu tells them to stop, which insinuates that she had at least heard the whispers before and therein knew why tanaka and nishinoya were surrounding her. in general, she keeps composed and ignorant of these affections, and doesn't so much as blush whenever she must hear them.

i've also mentioned how rumors have shaped her life as karasuno's manager. in vol. 2 ch. 11, yahaba is talking to kindaichi on seijou's campus about a beautiful manager from karasuno he'd heard word of. assuming that karasuno hasn't been to seijou in POTENTIALLY 2 years (as yahaba is a second year and obviously hadn't seen shimizu in person, but oikawa's current concern had listed that when he tried to talk to shimizu she ignored him --------- something which may  insinuate that they had met as first years, or may just be that they met in their third year), rumors of her beauty had still spread across the prefecture to seijou and ended up in yahaba's "circles." because seijou is one of the top four schools in the prefecture, and --------- at the time --------- karasuno was considered a school of "flightless crows," it's incredible that rumors of shimizu's attractiveness could actually reach seijou if karasuno's practice matches were limited in the past years to other lower-level schools. AND it's incredible considering the fact that seijou COULD BE all the way across the prefecture (though technically we don't know the canon locations of all schools and their geographical relations between one another).

iv. shimizu as a nominal fanservice character

i have to bring this up because i think this meta would be incomplete if i didn't address the elephant in the room: the sexualization and tailored appeal of female characters in manga to suit the "fanservice" role of women. i would be stupid to deny that shimizu doesn't serve as a fanservice character, but even stupider if i said that being a fanservice character was all she was. nonetheless, i still feel that it's necessary to bring up WHY she's classified as one and what her fanservice role entitles.

i've mentioned facts about her appearance --------- it's a subject that isn't brushed over when shimizu is described in the manga. she's obviously attractive both bodily and facially, and to bat, her personality does at first fulfill a fanservice trope of being passive/shy/quiet. granted, there are other types, but shimizu is what i would describe as the "shy bespectacled beauty" (as we can't forget the trump card of her glasses: one of her more defining characteristics which incidentally classifies her as a certain type of character). she's now physically and mentally very attractive and appeals to male readers.

additionally, though the manga isn't sex-centric, there are still lots of sexual references or questionable material. s. 1 ep. 2 @14:48-14:55 includes shots of her bum and her breasts, in the "sparkling anime background" meant to set off characters as being otherworldly or worth mention. many of her outfits in ennoshita's movies are revealing, and even her roles are rather sexualized for the sake of a potential increase in viewership (skintight bodysuits in crow's angels and that's absurd!, a very revealing costume that shows off most of her cleavage in final haikyuu!! quest, the "stoic yet sexy military officer" in haikyuu!! fighter, and even the nun in house of crows). this also occurs in special manga covers (chs. 36, 78, 86, 99, 111, 131, and 179) and in the vol. 13 promo,  so although the manga is tasteful in not including too much sexualized material, the extras try to make up for this by sexualizing shimizu and making her a more visually appealing character, thus subjecting her to fanservice.

MORE TO BE ADDED.

#if this doesnt prove how much i love shimizu idk what will

[goodra-king]

Transcript of How to Become a Digital Minimalist

Transcript of How to Become a Digital Minimalist written by John Jantsch read more at Duct Tape Marketing

Back to Podcast

Transcript

John Jantsch: Choosing the right domain name is critical to ensuring the success of your small business, but it’s gotten a little harder. Now you can choose a .us domain to help your business stand out. Reserve your .us web address today. Go to launchwith.us, and use my promo code, PODCAST, for my special offer.

John Jantsch: Hello, and welcome to another episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast. This is John Jantsch, and my guest today is Cal Newport. He is an associate professor of computer science at Georgetown University and the author of six books, including the one we’re going to talk about today, Digital Minimalism: Choosing a Focused Life in a Noisy World. Cal, thanks for joining me.

Cal Newport: John, it’s my pleasure to be back.

John Jantsch: Writing a book with the title minimalism in it makes you have to say that word a lot, and, I don’t know about you, but that word’s hard to say sometimes.

Cal Newport: I didn’t realize that until the press tour started because when you’re writing it, hey, it looks nice on the page, but then when you have to say it a hundred times at interviews you realize it’s a bit of a mouthful.

John Jantsch: I know the answer to this, but I’m sure you’ve been asked, is there any irony in the fact that a computer science professor is talking about minimizing your digital footprint?

Cal Newport: I actually think there’s a lot of logic to it. I mean obviously technologies play a massive role in our daily experience and the way our culture unfolds. It seems to me that one of the voices we need in this conversation are the people who actually work on those technologies themselves. To me it was natural that as a computer scientist I’m one of the people that’s involved in discussing what role should tech play, how do we get the value out of it, how do we sidestep the negatives as well.

John Jantsch: Essentially the book is about reducing the time we spend online, focusing on a small number of activities to support the things we deeply value. When did we lose that?

Cal Newport: Well, that’s a good question. We’ve always struggled with technologies, but I think we’re in a particular state of unease that’s really emerged, let’s say, in the last few years when people begin to notice it. I think the core of this unease is about the amount of time so many of us are spending looking at these little screens in our hands. If you talk to people, the issue is not utility. It’s not necessarily what they’re doing when they look at their screen is in itself worthless or bad. That’s not really the grounds on which discussion is happening.

Cal Newport: The thing that seems to be making people uneasy is autonomy, the idea that they’re looking down at these screens way more than they know is useful, way more than they know is healthy to the exclusion of things they know are more important. It’s their sense of I’m losing control over what I’m doing with my time and attention, and as a result my actual humanity is diminished or the enjoyment of my life is going down. I think that’s the crisis that I’m trying to respond to with this book.

John Jantsch: I’m like a lot of people, I mean the book resonates with me tremendously. That’s my job is to be online sort of, and so I find myself like a lot of people really drawn to it. I also find myself sometimes going, “No. Put that thing down. What are you doing?” It’s almost become a chemical reaction.

Cal Newport: That’s the issue that’s going on is that these services have utility. There’s a reason why we signed up for it. The reason why we’re upset is because especially in the case of, let’s say, social media and other attention economy conglomerates, the experience was subtly re-engineered, after most people actually signed up for it, to try to get us to look at these screens way more than we actually were before, and way more than we need to be looking at them, so that the revenue numbers could go up.

Cal Newport: I think that’s the thing that’s getting to people. It’s also why this conversation is so complicated is that we’re used to these type of things being cut and dry, like with cigarettes, where people say, “I don’t want to smoke cigarettes. There’s no benefit to smoking cigarettes. I will do whatever it takes to stop smoking cigarettes.” Cut and dry. Much more complicated now.

Cal Newport: What we have here is network technologies that have deep innovations underlying them and real utility, and yet at the same time our relationship with them has really mutated over time to be something that’s unhealthy. It’s a more complicated net that we have to untangle here.

John Jantsch: For example, I mean it’s easy to say you’re scrolling through Facebook, that serves no purpose usually. I could get on Medium all day long and read stuff that’s really good and maybe useful. It’s still consuming my day.

Cal Newport: Exactly. These are the type of dynamics that are out there. It’s this mix of usefulness with compulsive behavior patterns that go beyond what’s useful and begin to take away from other values. To me this is why what we need is not just a little bit more self-awareness. This is why we need more than just tips or tricks. We really need a coherent philosophy. How do we make sense of all this tech and integrate them into a life well-lived, because if we just allow it to be out there and floating in this world, and just approach it in an ad hoc manner, we tend to get overwhelmed and the net cost-benefit ratio starts to skew too heavily towards the cost size.

Cal Newport: Digital minimalism is basically an attempt to outline a philosophy of technology use, a way to approach these tools with some care so that you can get big value out of it but avoid big losses at the same time.

John Jantsch: I’m sure you have statistics on this. In fact, I’m going to get to that part where you had your volunteers do an experiment. Does this behavior correlate with us just working more, period?

Cal Newport: Well, there’s two things going on here. When it comes to these unintentional consequences of technology, we have two areas we should care about. One is our work life, one is our personal life. I like to think that digital minimalism tries to focus a little bit more on what’s happening in our life outside of work. There’s huge issues about what’s happening in work in terms of the way technology, the role technology plays. They’re interesting. They’re also pretty complicated, and some of them are pretty unrelated to why we’re looking at our phone so much outside of work.

Cal Newport: Now, of course this all overlaps. The way I like to think about it is that digital minimalism is really about the amount of time you spend looking at your phone even when it’s not necessarily for work, even when it’s not about, “I’m trying to talk to a client or post something about my business,” but just you’re at home. You’re with your kids. You’re at the ballgame. You’re in bed, all these other times in which a life well-lived are crafted. The fact that we’re spending so much of that time voluntarily looking at a screen for even non-professional reasons, that’s the area in which I’m seeing a lot of concern, and I’m trying to address with the book.

John Jantsch: You had an army of volunteers, some 1,600 I think I read. Did I get that right?

Cal Newport: Yeah.

John Jantsch: That you put in an experiment. Explain that experiment or what you were trying to find there.

Cal Newport: The experiment was to step away from these type of technologies, these optional technologies in your personal life, so things like social media and online news and streaming media and YouTube, even podcasts, basically everything digital in your personal life. So, stuff you didn’t have to do for work, or it’s not vital to your day-to-day experience, to step away from it for 30 days. Then during these 30 days, more so than just like a detox. I have negative things to say about digital detoxes as being a standalone thing that are somehow useful. I have some real issues with that.

Cal Newport: During this 30 days, it’s about a lot more than just this detox experience of breaking your habit of compulsively using your phone. It also is about having some space to reflect and experiment and figure out what really is important to me. How do I really want to spend my time outside of work? Figuring out those values, figuring out what’s important to you, so that when the 30 days are over you can then rebuild your digital life from scratch, but now do it with a minimalist mindset of, “I want to selectively choose online behaviors and tools that are going to help these things that I really care about, and ignore everything else.”

Cal Newport: I had this idea that this 30-day process was probably an effective way to become a minimalist. I put the call out to my readers to say, “Hey, does anyone want to try this out?” I thought a couple of dozen people would sign up, but I was surprised when over 1,600 people said, “Yeah. I’m ready for that.”

John Jantsch: Everybody I mention this book’s title to says, “I need some of that.” Yet, we’re still having trouble breaking free. One of the things that I love, a topic in the book is that it’s not a matter of just taking more time. It’s high quality leisure. What does high quality leisure look like, that’s obviously lacking?

Cal Newport: Well, these are activities outside of work that you do and enjoy just for the sake of their intrinsic quality. If you get into cooking and you cook something really nice, and you do it just because you enjoy the process of building, cooking and eating good food. If you get really into woodworking, just you’re enjoying working on a piece of wood just because of the intrinsic quality of what you’re trying to do. If you’re into playing an instrument or listening to a certain type of music, that really you’re getting enjoyment.

Cal Newport: It’s not instrumental. It’s not to help you do something else, to help you accomplish something else or get something else. It’s just enjoying the activity for the sake of the activity. These type of activities are crucial. High quality leisure activities are crucial to a good life, a life that can be buffered against the unavoidable ups and downs and different turns of fortune. It’s what allows us to have some sort of meaning and gratitude even when other things are out of our control or spiraling in ways that maybe doesn’t make us happy.

Cal Newport: We know this from the ancients, that this type of activity is crucial. In an age of this really cheap, hyper-powered digital distraction, one of the huge casualties is people have pushed high quality leisure out of their life, because it has a high barrier to entry. It requires effort. It’s not necessarily an easy thing to do.

Cal Newport: Typically boredom, the feeling of boredom would push us to actually make those effort and do these activities, because it was better than being bored. We’re now hijacking that deeply human instinct, because as soon as you feel bored you can just look at this screen. A really powerful algorithm that’s reduced you to 10,000 data points knows exactly what to show you so that you can be a little bit interested in the moment.

Cal Newport: This is one of the huge unexpected casualties of this huge attention economy that we’ve formed, is that people are filling their time with the low-quality digital leisure. It’s a little bit easier than the high quality analog leisure. By doing so, they’re actually leaving a big hole in their soul in some sense. They’re missing from their life something that’s crucial to a thriving human existence.

John Jantsch: I love sharing tips and resources with small business owners. One of them is you’ve got to choose the right web address for your business. It’s gotten harder. All the good names are gone, but you can take a short, relevant .us web address and maybe come up with the best possible name for your business while it’s still available. You’d be in pretty good company with some big hitters like Zoom.us and MasterCard.us.

John Jantsch: I want you to reserve your .us web address today, so I’ve arranged a special offer for my listeners. Register your .us domain for just $1.49 for a year. Plus you get free website builder and hosting services for six months. To go get my special offer, go to launchwith.us, and use my promo code PODCAST. That’s launchwith.us, promo code PODCAST.

John Jantsch: I just finished a great book called A Gentleman in Moscow. It’s actually been out for a while. I don’t know if you’re familiar with the book. The main character talks about something he calls idle hour. Essential his idle hour idea was that you should pretty much have anything that’s going to be serious done by noon and pretty much the rest of the day should just unfold as it unfolds.

John Jantsch: I think another thing that happens to us is, and I’m sure that these digital tools are somewhat to blame, but even when we have that time for leisure we’re packing it. The idea of just maybe taking the space to reflect has gone away.

Cal Newport: That’s why I say 30 days for my declutter process. If you think about it, it’s not self-evident that you need something like 30 days to do, let’s say, reset your digital life, because you might imagine you might approach revamping your digital life, minimizing your digital life, like Marie Kondo approaches minimizing your closet, you do it in a weekend. Put aside some time and make changes.

Cal Newport: I say you need 30 days. A big reason why is exactly what you just pointed out there, which is it actually just takes a while. It takes a while just having some time and having some space to really get back in touch with yourself and the world around you and to figure out, “Well, what do you really care about? What do I really want to do?” That’s not something you can schedule in for 4:00 to 5:00 today, I’m going to put in time and figure out what I care about and what do I want to do with my life. You actually need time and space.

Cal Newport: That’s why I have people spend a non-trivial amount of time away from these tools, because I think without a non-trivial amount of time it’s hard to come up with non-trivial insight.

John Jantsch: Sometimes the way to get rid of a bad habit, which I think some of this is, bad habits, sometimes you replace it with a good habit. Are there perhaps more positive habits that you recommend, or is it highly personal?

Cal Newport: Well, I think ultimately what tends to work with people who are feeling overwhelmed by the role of tech in their life is actually the rip-off-the-band-aid 30-day process we were talking about, where you really go down to nothing. You empty out the proverbial closet, take some time, and then rebuild it carefully. This tends to work a lot better than trying to work from the top down and just maybe tweak this habit there or that habit there, or maybe change your notifications or make your phone gray scale, or put on some tracking software.

Cal Newport: When you work from the top down trying to change things you don’t like bit by bit, it’s really hard to get sustainable change. If you actually empty out that closet, say, “Let’s start from scratch,” everything now has to re-earn its way back into my life and for a purpose, for something I really care about this tends to be really effective. Which is why I really push this 30-day process.

Cal Newport: Now, there’s a couple of things you can do just to get ready for that so it’s not as jarring. A simple habit that helps you get ready for something like that is just take off your phone any app in which someone makes money from your attention when you click on it. I’m not asking you at this point to quit these things. Whatever storyline you have about “I need it for X, Y, Z” is fine. You can still use them, just use it on your laptop or your desktop computer.

Cal Newport: That alone is going to help get your mind in shape for the bigger decluttering, because it’s going to just force you to be in situations commonly where you’re out and about and can’t easily look at your phone for a distraction. That’s helpful. Also, another helpful thing before you try the rip-the-band-aid-off approach is maybe try to get back into your life one or two of these high quality analog leisure type activities.

Cal Newport: Just reengage your taste for things that require more effort but return more reward in exchange, so that when you actually get to the 30 days, when you get to that first morning and there’s nothing on your phone, and you can’t look at the screen for distraction that you’re not just staring into the existential void. That you’re used to this. You’re used to being a little bit bored and you already have some options in mind for what you could do to fill the time.

John Jantsch: I read a lot of books, so correct me if I got this wrong, that it wasn’t in your book, but when you mentioned that idea of bringing in some high quality leisure, I think you wrote about replacing networking, like the typical chamber of commerce networking, with actually people you want to hang out with. Maybe they are work related, but go do something, volunteer together, go play golf together, go climb a mountain together. Am I making that up or was that part of your work?

Cal Newport: I think that was in there. There’s two related points there. First of all, I talk about the value we get out of just joining things and doing things with people. It’s just fundamentally different than talking with people digitally, and abstract virtual groups, to actually in my town I am getting together with these four people and we are doing this project together. It’s physical and I’m with people and I’m interacting with people.

Cal Newport: We crave that, makes us happy. Putting that in your life is really good. Then there was also a specific networking example where I was talking about the cost in time of various activities. I think I gave the example in there that some people talk about their Twitter use as a key way in which they meet interesting people. If you actually do the calculus, they’re losing something like 10 hours a week on Twitter.

Cal Newport: Where, on the other hand, if they just took two hours a month, let’s say, to go to some really interesting event or three hours a month and meet 10 people at this event, they would probably get similar benefit, but they’d have given up much less of their time. I use that example as a exposition on just actually Henry David Thoreau’s concept of don’t just look at the benefits a thing gets you, you always have to ask what’s the cost of those benefits in terms of hours of my life.

John Jantsch: Speaking of Thoreau, one of my favorite activities when I want to, in fact, I just make it a part of my life, is solitude. Once I’d like to say a month, it probably doesn’t happen once a month, I try to get a whole weekend all by myself. I do know that that has tremendous benefits, but also when I talk to other people, it scares them to death the thought of being alone with nothing but their thoughts. Why do you suppose that is?

Cal Newport: Well, we’re in this unique point in, I think, human history where finally with hundreds of billions of dollars of investment and some of the smartest minds in the world working on it, we figured out how to banish every last moment of solitude from our lives. It’s incredibly unnatural and incredibly hard to do. We had to build a worldwide, wireless, high-speed internet network. We had to build these devices you could bring with you every single place, and that at any moment powerful algorithms running on massive data centers could deliver to you perfectly timed content that’s going to capture your attention. I mean it’s a miracle. It’s also pretty radical.

Cal Newport: It’s become problematic, because it turns out we actually need on a regular basis time alone with our thoughts. We don’t need to be in a cave for months at a time. That’s going to make us lonely and unhappy.

Cal Newport: If in the course of a normal day you don’t have at least a few occasions where it’s just you and your thoughts, and you’re not processing input from some other minds, you’re not looking at social media, you’re not looking at your mentions, you’re not looking at news, you’re just there looking at the world around you and thinking, if we don’t have this on a regular basis even 10 or 15 minutes at a time we get anxious, and we get unhappy. We have a hard time generating business insights or self-reflection which all requires this sort of unstructured thought.

Cal Newport: I’ve become a big proponent, you got to get some of the solitude back into your life. You got to have some every day. It doesn’t have to be for a long time, but you cannot exist in a state of complete solitude deprivation. That’s just incredibly unnatural and causes unpredictable consequences.

John Jantsch: I don’t know if you’ve seen this or experienced this, but I hear people talking about it’s like quitting smoking for some people, if they hadn’t had that in their life. 20 minutes alone and they’re starting to go crazy.

Cal Newport: Could be terrifying for people, especially young people who really starting in their early adolescence have never been free from being bathed in algorithmically optimized input generated by other minds. It is incredibly scary, but it’s crucial. I think it’s just crucial for human thriving. You can do it baby steps at first. If it’s really scary, I mean you can do on 10 minutes at a time, “I’m going to go into the drugstore to get the prescription I’m picking up and come back to my car. I’ll leave my phone in the car while I do it.”

Cal Newport: Start small if you have to. It doesn’t have to be, “I’ve rented the cabin and I’ll be back in three weeks.” It can be smaller, “I’m walking the dog, I’m not bringing the phone.” You have to get used to it. That’s why I spend a lot of time in the book talking about solitude is because it’s completely underappreciated right now.

John Jantsch: Of these 1,600 volunteers, I’m sure, because you are a trained scientist, that you had some closure. Did you get some after the declutter 30-day feedback, and what did people experience?

Cal Newport: I got a lot of interesting reports. One thing I noticed that is interesting is that the people who succeeded with the whole 30 days and having lasting change after the 30 days, they really embraced the idea that this 30 days is about self-reflection, experimentation. That they were actively going out there and trying to figure out, “What do I really want to do with my time? What is the things I care about?”

Cal Newport: They were much more likely to end up with sustainable change. The group that had a much harder time was the group that just saw this as a “detox.” Like, “I just want to get a break from my technology. I’m just going to white knuckle it for 30 days. I’m really bored but this is good. I needed to take a break.” They had a really hard time even sticking with it for 30 days.

John Jantsch: I suspect that the first group saw it as an investment, as the second group saw it as a cost.

Cal Newport: Exactly. When you’re just white knuckling it, you’re like, “I’m trying to get away from this thing that is bad.” The problem is that’s not a strong enough motivation, that when you’re really bored and have nothing to do, to keep you away from it. You eventually say, “Nuts to this. I’m going to check Facebook.” If you’re coming at it from the perspective of positivity, “I am trying to rebuild my life to something much better,” you’re rebuilding your life on top of your values, then you’re much more likely to be successful.

Cal Newport: The other interesting thing I noticed from these reports is that maybe half of the people who sent me reports ended up after doing this process deciding they needed essentially no social media in their life. Half of the people decided, “I still need some social media in my life. It connects to things I really value.” Of that 50% that kept some social media in their life, almost none of them ended up keeping it on their phone. That was one of the biggest takeaways is that social media, it plays really interesting and complicated roles in people’s lives.

Cal Newport: Probably its importance is way overstated. There’s probably way too many people using it than really need to be. There’s also millions for which it’s useful. The need for it to be on your phone, and the need for it to be something that is a constant source of distraction, it came across clear as a bell in my studies that that tends to serve only a very small number of people, namely the major stockholders of a social media company. That there’s almost no reason for anyone to need to look at these things on their phone all the time. That struck me as interesting.

Cal Newport: Social media is not completely worthless. Social media on your phone is something that almost no one needs.

John Jantsch: Great point. Cal, where can people find more about the book and the movement, can we call them a movement, of …

Cal Newport: Fine by me.

John Jantsch: …digital minimalism, and anything else, anywhere else you want to send people?

Cal Newport: Well, you won’t be able to find me on social media, because in true digital minimalist fashion I’ve never had a social media account, which turns out that’s allowed. You can find out about me and the book at calnewport.com. I’ve been blogging there for over a decade, so there’s a lot to read. I also have a place where you can find all sorts of interviews and articles and videos I’ve done as part of the press tour for the book. You can also find the book itself in any of the normal places that you would buy books.

John Jantsch: Well, Cal, thanks for joining us. Great book, great message, and hopefully we’ll run into you out there on the road soon.

Cal Newport: Hopefully out there in the real world, participating in some high quality analog activities.

John Jantsch: Amen.

from http://bit.ly/2YAM1DJ

#Marketing Plan