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iampikachuhearmeroar · 5 years

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Skincare/ makeup culture ☕️

oooh. i’ll divide this post into two parts: makeup culture and skincare culture.

(1.) makeup culture.

i think everyone knows that I’ve never liked makeup, mostly because I had relatively bad cystic acne throughout high school, that reacted badly to all of the makeup that my sister used (but most particularly her l’oreal foundation). I think makeup culture is particularly harmful to young girls, like the makeup youtube channels that are run by the parents I suppose of 8 year olds, where the 8yo is the actual youtuber.

like don’t get me wrong, i know young girls like playing with makeup (I actually did when I was that age, funnily enough)….. but the fact that professional or just plain fucking ridiculously expensive makeup palettes are now being marketed to girls in bloody primary/grade/elementary school, is just fucking wrong. and yeah there’s the post on here about how some younger girls are finding themselves ugly when they don’t wear properly applied makeup or something like that. and that breaks my heart. why the fuck should a young girl be made to feel ugly if she can’t blend like josiemaycosmetics (I made that up btw idk any makeup channels besides Jeffree star, James Charles and that tatti woman tbh) and can’t afford the bullshit Too Faced $98 powered foundation, $65 Sunday Riley blush (I roughly remember the price of this particular blush bc my sister bought it for me for my 20th birthday so that I could according to her “look good for uni” but I never actually used it lmao… and it’s no longer sold here in australia) and Kylie Jenner’s overpriced lip kits and idk Smashbox “photo finish” primer priced between $AU23-$AU55????

like I had this bad enough in fucking HIGH SCHOOL with my sister telling me that I’d “never get a boyfriend” or “never get a date for the formal/junior prom” if I didn’t spend hundreds of $$$$ for a good face of makeup and didn’t spend hours and hours learning how to do my own makeup. or how last year for my uni grad, she made out that I’d ruin my own uni grad if we didn’t spend $250 on the makeup artist we got for me….. where I unfortunately found out that my skin reacts to MAC products 😭😨 bc the MUA used MAC concealer and foundation. my sister also expected me to remember the setting spray the woman used for my makeup, when I was there from like 4:30am till like 6:45am and i was barely fucking awake. the setting spray probably could’ve easily cost over $100. let’s be real here. like why am I expected to remember shit that early in the morning???

one of my least favourite things with makeup culture is that you’re not meant to fuck it up in any way, shape or form. like when my sister did my makeup for my two high school formals/proms (year 10 & year 12) she constantly told me not to scratch my face while she was doing it (but it made me itchy, hooray for L’Oréal being shit lmao)…. not to fuck it up while I ate at those events….. and she didn’t let me eat before my uni grad last year bc “you’d definitely fuck up your makeup. don’t you dare scratch your face at all today!” like for someone who has hypersensitive/highly reactive skin that she has to scratch when it’s itchy….. and also loves fucking stuffing her face with food….. expecting me to never touch/scratch my face and to practically starve myself to preserve the integrity of my makeup (that i ended up paying for some in the end anyway) for an event is fucking stupid and over-restrictive.

like i always hated the way that the kardashians ate on KUWTK bc it looked so fucking mechanical and whatever bc they had to obvs preserve their makeup while shooting and also look nice for the camera. like why the fuck am I expected to eat ~like that~ when I have a faceload of MU on???? FUCK OFF. I will scratch it off. I will smear the food all over my face (ok not really) and eat however I motherfucking want, thank you very fucking much. like for my uni grad last year I was up from 4am and my grad ended at like 12:30pm….. so I didn’t have food til about 12:35 when I left the hall. and the whole time while I was eating my sister kept reminding me to not fuck up my makeup that we’d spent $250 on. JUST LET ME FUCKING EAT WOMAN, I SWEAR TO FUCK. lmao.

the last thing I hate the most about makeup culture is that like….. I absolutely hate makeup like I said above….. but once I have it on I feel pretty and cry a bit bc I’ll just never learn to do it myself…. mostly bc I couldn’t be bothered…. bc I save hundreds, if not thousands of $$$$ from not buying all the bullshit essential items you need just for a ~basic no makeup, makeup look~, and bc my hands have never been steady enough to use some of the things, like false eyelashes and eyelash curlers or liquid eyeliner/normal eyeliner…..

but yeah. I just hate that it makes me feel pretty???? but I also feel good and more natural without it???? and I’ll never like my sister’s comment that: “you’re the prettier one out of the two of us…. but if only you hurried up and learnt to do your makeup, you’d be even prettier” or some dumb semi-condescending shit comment she’s said to me like that before. like why is the only way a woman can be pretty (other than some clothes that make her feel good) by smearing 100s/1000s of dollars worth of makeup on???? like why the fuck am I expected to spend all that money when a good bulk of men will never bother with the male makeup trend anyway???? like why am I expected to act differently when I basically just have grown up face-paint on lmao???? I’ve never felt natural in makeup, I’ve always felt awkward and like…. not sound like an cringey edgelord emo kid…. but i never felt ~real~ wearing makeup lmao. just yeah.

but yeah I also understand makeup is an art and I appreciate that. makeup culture is so fucked on all sides for women.

(2.) skincare culture:

now skincare culture is different for me. considering that, like I said before, I had relatively bad cystic acne…. and I’ve since also developed eczema during the winter months….. so I’ve had to develop a good skincare routine over the years to keep my skin under control. but again, there are parts that I don’t like about skincare culture…. like women are typically meant to spend, again, hundreds and if not thousands of dollars on super expensive skin creams (some of which I’ve tried) to fix their fine lines, their laugh lines, their crows feet, their blemishes, their birth marks and cellulite…… the list truly goes on and on….. and on top of that (well this hellsite which isn’t entirely accurate) I’m, or we as women, are expected to teach all of that to men in their 20s???? like fuck off. why and how the fuck didn’t they get the fucking memo to look after their own goddamned skin???? like my 20s are already tiring enough, and now I gotta pass on important skincare advice to men, who could easily fucking find it themselves online???? lord help their asses lmao.

but other than the men bit…. yeah skincare culture is just as bad as makeup culture. like when Cosmo mag was still running in australia, more than half of the shit the women at Cosmo were advertising as part of their skincare routines were literally $300 night treatment creams or moisturisers; $150 facial cleansers; or $500 skin peels, or $600 appointments at dermatologists and skin therapies like electrolysis that I’ll probs never be able to afford. like one of the luxury brands that I LOVE (💖) is Mario badescu bc the two pimple treatments that i sometimes I use from them (the drying lotion and the anti-acne serum) are the ONLY two acne treatments that have NEVER made my face turn red and my skin peel off (besides a really good neutrogena one that Neutrogena discontinued 😭). every other chemist bought pimple treatment cream makes my skin peel off/itchy/turn red. but sadly the two Mario badescu treatments are priced over $50 if bought together (ones now $31 (formerly $28, this one’s great bc it dries clear), the other is like $26, this one dries pink). so the chemist bought ones like the ones by Clearasil or OXY10 are my saviours at $11.99-$12.99, even though they dry out my skin to buggery and leave big white marks on my face bc they both dry white lmao. but I’ve gotta suffer that for the price of beauty lmao.

also there’s expensive face washes (or skin care program packs etc) from Paula’s choice that I love.... but again they were like $35 for a 400ml bottle and $25 for a fucking 150ml or 250ml bottle. now the one i like is $20 for 177ml, which is a rip off. some of the other luxury things that I’ve tried (via free samples) that don’t work, like Kate Somerville (priced at like $65 and over), Philosophy and god knows what else that i’ve bought from Mecca Cosmetica, which is the Aussie version of Sephora in the past. and yes, for acne treatments, i’ve used pro-activ before. it was ok… but i never used it in high school, after the awful time we had trying to cancel our subscription to it back in the day for my sister lol.

also can we talk about the ultrasonic face brush systems that are still raging strongly??? like they’re also super rip offs, especially with buying replacement heads for $35 a pop. like I’ve had a Clarisonic for years (that I’ve stopped using, admittedly)…. the model was roughly $250 when I got it for my like 19th birthday. now they’re even more expensive at like $315 for the latest “clarisonic mia fit cleansing system” which is linked on the $315. or now there’s the foreo that costs anywhere between $75 (the cheapest model) to fucking almost $400… ie $395. the replacement heads for the clarisonic and i suppose replacement like pads or something for the foreo are meant to be replaced every three months “for optimum cleansing” or whatever. like $35 every three months is a lot to maintain after a while. also using the clarisonic added like 10 extra minutes to my showers/general skincare routine bc you’re meant to use it for five mins or whatever and then spend another 5mins washing it out to make sure that it doesn’t collect mould and buildup too much soap residue. it was just a lot of effort to use, even if it did make me feel like i had a better and deeper face washing routine.

and yes, i know there’s Lush. both my sister and i (but more my sister) were obsessed with Lush back in high school, after one of our sydney cousins introduced it to us. but Lush’s skincare stuff for pimples just never worked for us. it made me breakout more, actually. but their old apple pie and choc-orange lip balms were the BOMB. it’s a pity that they no longer make them tbh. their jelly soaps were fun to use and smelt nice too. i can’t remember much else about lush tbh lmao.

for face masks, i’ve found that store/chemist bought formula 10.0.06 or whatever works the best for my skin. but the push, especially again in cosmo and other places, to buy more expensive face-masks and like designer FMs that you should really ask a professional to use first imo, is fucking harmful, especially when you’ve got ones that take off the whole top layer of skin from your face (like the famous and the overly popular charcoal face peel masks), or so i’ve read. like it’s yikes out there. please be safe with these masks, ya’ll. and the same goes for making your own organic face masks, considering that i’ve seen posts on here about using lemon juice which is bad for your skin??? idk anyway. i also hate how with the face masks i buy, there’s about 6 different “skin-illuminating”/“skin brightening”/”skin detoxing” etc masks, that all essentially do the same fucking thing. just keep it at one and fucking go; for gods fucking sake lmao.

but yeah, skincare culture does suck just as much as makeup culture, considering that is heavily focused on women’s self-esteem and wallets…. and barely ever focuses on men. like it’s a double-edged sword tbh.

also as side notes: why the actual fuck are makeup companies still giving their makeup shades or makeup lines sexual names???? like i just found a fucking blush shade by NARS, in my research for this post, called “Orgasm”???? like what the FUCK is wrong with ya’ll??? like y’all actually have the fucking AUDACITY to really make 8 year olds say that in their makeup tutorial videos as well??? “our best selling orgasm collection” sweet lord. that sounds bad. y’all need to sort your shit out, and so do the people who name nail polish shades..

the other worrying general beauty trends that i keep getting on my facebook newsfeed are the teeth whitening systems like hismile and at home laser treatment machines… and then also the charcoal toothpastes to whiten your teeth. oh and also the facial skin “vacuums”, that suck out dirt/oil and your blackheads/pimples etc from your pores. stay safe out there everyone, and do your bloody research. don’t believe the reviews and the hype.

also finally: take your skin type and skin condition/(s) into account if you want to use any of the things that I’ve mentioned that I use/have used on this post. or that I’ve just generally mentioned, like the Clarisonic and the foreo. because what works for me, might not work for you. I’m not a skincare expert or dermatologist. check with your doctor or a skincare professional or whatever before you start using some of these things, even if you might think that it’s stupid & pointless to do so.

#life #about me #shut up ilona #ask game thing #anon ask #answered anon ask #anon #answered anon #anonymous

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radiumeater · 5 years

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Alcoholics Anonymous is famously difficult to study. By necessity, it keeps no records of who attends meetings; members come and go and are, of course, anonymous. No conclusive data exist on how well it works. In 2006, the Cochrane Collaboration, a health-care research group, reviewed studies going back to the 1960s and found that “no experimental studies unequivocally demonstrated the effectiveness of AA or [12-step] approaches for reducing alcohol dependence or problems.”

The Big Book includes an assertion first made in the second edition, which was published in 1955: that AA has worked for 75 percent of people who have gone to meetings and “really tried.” It says that 50 percent got sober right away, and another 25 percent struggled for a while but eventually recovered. According to AA, these figures are based on members’ experiences.

In his recent book, The Sober Truth: Debunking the Bad Science Behind 12-Step Programs and the Rehab Industry, Lance Dodes, a retired psychiatry professor from Harvard Medical School, looked at Alcoholics Anonymous’s retention rates along with studies on sobriety and rates of active involvement (attending meetings regularly and working the program) among AA members. Based on these data, he put AA’s actual success rate somewhere between 5 and 8 percent. That is just a rough estimate, but it’s the most precise one I’ve been able to find.

I spent three years researching a book about women and alcohol, Her Best-Kept Secret: Why Women Drink—And How They Can Regain Control, which was published in 2013. During that time, I encountered disbelief from doctors and psychiatrists every time I mentioned that the Alcoholics Anonymous success rate appears to hover in the single digits. We’ve grown so accustomed to testimonials from those who say AA saved their life that we take the program’s efficacy as an article of faith. Rarely do we hear from those for whom 12-step treatment doesn’t work. But think about it: How many celebrities can you name who bounced in and out of rehab without ever getting better? Why do we assume they failed the program, rather than that the program failed them?

When my book came out, dozens of Alcoholics Anonymous members said that because I had challenged AA’s claim of a 75 percent success rate, I would hurt or even kill people by discouraging attendance at meetings. A few insisted that I must be an “alcoholic in denial.” But most of the people I heard from were desperate to tell me about their experiences in the American treatment industry. Amy Lee Coy, the author of the memoir From Death Do I Part: How I Freed Myself From Addiction, told me about her eight trips to rehab, starting at age 13. “It’s like getting the same antibiotic for a resistant infection—eight times,” she told me. “Does that make sense?”

She and countless others had put their faith in a system they had been led to believe was effective—even though finding treatment centers’ success rates is next to impossible: facilities rarely publish their data or even track their patients after discharging them. “Many will tell you that those who complete the program have a ‘great success rate,’ meaning that most are abstaining from drugs and alcohol while enrolled there,” says Bankole Johnson, an alcohol researcher and the chair of the psychiatry department at the University of Maryland School of Medicine. “Well, no kidding.”

[...]

AA truisms have so infiltrated our culture that many people believe heavy drinkers cannot recover before they “hit bottom.” Researchers I’ve talked with say that’s akin to offering antidepressants only to those who have attempted suicide, or prescribing insulin only after a patient has lapsed into a diabetic coma. “You might as well tell a guy who weighs 250 pounds and has untreated hypertension and cholesterol of 300, ‘Don’t exercise, keep eating fast food, and we’ll give you a triple bypass when you have a heart attack,’ ” Mark Willenbring, a psychiatrist in St. Paul and a former director of treatment and recovery research at the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism, told me. He threw up his hands. “Absurd.”

Part of the problem is our one-size-fits-all approach. Alcoholics Anonymous was originally intended for chronic, severe drinkers—those who may, indeed, be powerless over alcohol—but its program has since been applied much more broadly. Today, for instance, judges routinely require people to attend meetings after a DUI arrest; fully 12 percent of AA members are there by court order.

Whereas AA teaches that alcoholism is a progressive disease that follows an inevitable trajectory, data from a federally funded survey called the National Epidemiological Survey on Alcohol and Related Conditions show that nearly one-fifth of those who have had alcohol dependence go on to drink at low-risk levels with no symptoms of abuse. And a recent survey of nearly 140,000 adults by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention found that nine out of 10 heavy drinkers are not dependent on alcohol and, with the help of a medical professional’s brief intervention, can change unhealthy habits. We once thought about drinking problems in binary terms—you either had control or you didn’t; you were an alcoholic or you weren’t—but experts now describe a spectrum. An estimated 18 million Americans suffer from alcohol-use disorder, as the DSM-5, the latest edition of the American Psychiatric Association’s diagnostic manual, calls it. (The new term replaces the older alcohol abuse and the much more dated alcoholism, which has been out of favor with researchers for decades.) Only about 15 percent of those with alcohol-use disorder are at the severe end of the spectrum. The rest fall somewhere in the mild-to-moderate range, but they have been largely ignored by researchers and clinicians. Both groups—the hard-core abusers and the more moderate overdrinkers—need more-individualized treatment options. The United States already spends about $35 billion a year on alcohol- and substance-abuse treatment, yet heavy drinking causes 88,000 deaths a year—including deaths from car accidents and diseases linked to alcohol. It also costs the country hundreds of billions of dollars in expenses related to health care, criminal justice, motor-vehicle crashes, and lost workplace productivity, according to the CDC. With the Affordable Care Act’s expansion of coverage, it’s time to ask some important questions: Which treatments should we be willing to pay for? Have they been proved effective? And for whom—only those at the extreme end of the spectrum? Or also those in the vast, long-overlooked middle? For a glimpse of how treatment works elsewhere, I traveled to Finland, a country that shares with the United States a history of prohibition (inspired by the American temperance movement, the Finns outlawed alcohol from 1919 to 1932) and a culture of heavy drinking. Finland’s treatment model is based in large part on the work of an American neuroscientist named John David Sinclair. I met with Sinclair in Helsinki in early July. He was battling late-stage prostate cancer, and his thick white hair was cropped short in preparation for chemotherapy. Sinclair has researched alcohol’s effects on the brain since his days as an undergraduate at the University of Cincinnati, where he experimented with rats that had been given alcohol for an extended period. Sinclair expected that after several weeks without booze, the rats would lose their desire for it. Instead, when he gave them alcohol again, they went on week-long benders, drinking far more than they ever had before—more, he says, than any rat had ever been shown to drink. Sinclair called this the alcohol-deprivation effect, and his laboratory results, which have since been confirmed by many other studies, suggested a fundamental flaw in abstinence-based treatment: going cold turkey only intensifies cravings. This discovery helped explain why relapses are common. Sinclair published his findings in a handful of journals and in the early 1970s moved to Finland, drawn by the chance to work in what he considered the best alcohol-research lab in the world, complete with special rats that had been bred to prefer alcohol to water. He spent the next decade researching alcohol and the brain.Sinclair came to believe that people develop drinking problems through a chemical process: each time they drink, the endorphins released in the brain strengthen certain synapses. The stronger these synapses grow, the more likely the person is to think about, and eventually crave, alcohol—until almost anything can trigger a thirst for booze, and drinking becomes compulsive. Sinclair theorized that if you could stop the endorphins from reaching their target, the brain’s opiate receptors, you could gradually weaken the synapses, and the cravings would subside. To test this hypothesis, he administered opioid antagonists—drugs that block opiate receptors—to the specially bred alcohol-loving rats. He found that if the rats took the medication each time they were given alcohol, they gradually drank less and less. He published his findings in peer-reviewed journals beginning in the 1980s. Subsequent studies found that an opioid antagonist called naltrexone was safe and effective for humans, and Sinclair began working with clinicians in Finland. He suggested prescribing naltrexone for patients to take an hour before drinking. As their cravings subsided, they could then learn to control their consumption. Numerous clinical trials have confirmed that the method is effective, and in 2001 Sinclair published a paper in the journal Alcohol and Alcoholism reporting a 78 percent success rate in helping patients reduce their drinking to about 10 drinks a week. Some stopped drinking entirely.I visited one of three private treatment centers, called the Contral Clinics, that Sinclair co-founded in Finland. (There’s an additional one in Spain.) In the past 18 years, more than 5,000 Finns have gone to the Contral Clinics for help with a drinking problem. Seventy-five percent of them have had success reducing their consumption to a safe level. [...] In the United States, doctors generally prescribe naltrexone for daily use and tell patients to avoid alcohol, instead of instructing them to take the drug anytime they plan to drink, as Sinclair would advise. There is disagreement among experts about which approach is better—Sinclair is adamant that American doctors are missing the drug’s full potential—but both seem to work: naltrexone has been found to reduce drinking in more than a dozen clinical trials, including a large-scale one funded by the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism that was published in JAMA in 2006. The results have been largely overlooked. Less than 1 percent of people treated for alcohol problems in the United States are prescribed naltrexone or any other drug shown to help control drinking. To understand why, you have to first understand the history. The American approach to treatment for drinking problems has roots in the country’s long-standing love-hate relationship with booze. The first settlers arrived with a great thirst for whiskey and hard cider, and in the early days of the republic, alcohol was one of the few beverages that was reliably safe from contamination. (It was also cheaper than coffee or tea.) The historian W. J. Rorabaugh has estimated that between the 1770s and 1830s, the average American over age 15 consumed at least five gallons of pure alcohol a year—the rough equivalent of three shots of hard liquor a day. Religious fervor, aided by the introduction of public water-filtration systems, helped galvanize the temperance movement, which culminated in 1920 with Prohibition. That experiment ended after 14 years, but the drinking culture it fostered—secrecy and frenzied bingeing—persists.In 1934, just after Prohibition’s repeal, a failed stockbroker named Bill Wilson staggered into a Manhattan hospital. Wilson was known to drink two quarts of whiskey a day, a habit he’d attempted to kick many times. He was given the hallucinogen belladonna, an experimental treatment for addictions, and from his hospital bed he called out to God to loosen alcohol’s grip. He reported seeing a flash of light and feeling a serenity he had never before experienced. He quit booze for good. The next year, he co-founded Alcoholics Anonymous. He based its principles on the beliefs of the evangelical Oxford Group, which taught that people were sinners who, through confession and God’s help, could right their paths. AA filled a vacuum in the medical world, which at the time had few answers for heavy drinkers. In 1956, the American Medical Association named alcoholism a disease, but doctors continued to offer little beyond the standard treatment that had been around for decades: detoxification in state psychiatric wards or private sanatoriums. As Alcoholics Anonymous grew, hospitals began creating “alcoholism wards,” where patients detoxed but were given no other medical treatment. Instead, AA members—who, as part of the 12 steps, pledge to help other alcoholics—appeared at bedsides and invited the newly sober to meetings. A public-relations specialist and early AA member named Marty Mann worked to disseminate the group’s main tenet: that alcoholics had an illness that rendered them powerless over booze. Their drinking was a disease, in other words, not a moral failing. Paradoxically, the prescription for this medical condition was a set of spiritual steps that required accepting a higher power, taking a “fearless moral inventory,” admitting “the exact nature of our wrongs,” and asking God to remove all character defects. Mann helped ensure that these ideas made their way to Hollywood. In 1945’s The Lost Weekend, a struggling novelist tries to loosen his writer’s block with booze, to devastating effect. In Days of Wine and Roses, released in 1962, Jack Lemmon slides into alcoholism along with his wife, played by Lee Remick. He finds help through AA, but she rejects the group and loses her family. Mann also collaborated with a physiologist named E. M. Jellinek. Mann was eager to bolster the scientific claims behind AA, and Jellinek wanted to make a name for himself in the growing field of alcohol research. In 1946, Jellinek published the results of a survey mailed to 1,600 AA members. Only 158 were returned. Jellinek and Mann jettisoned 45 that had been improperly completed and another 15 filled out by women, whose responses were so unlike the men’s that they risked complicating the results. From this small sample—98 men—Jellinek drew sweeping conclusions about the “phases of alcoholism,” which included an unavoidable succession of binges that led to blackouts, “indefinable fears,” and hitting bottom. Though the paper was filled with caveats about its lack of scientific rigor, it became AA gospel. Jellinek, however, later tried to distance himself from this work, and from Alcoholics Anonymous. His ideas came to be illustrated by a chart showing how alcoholics progressed from occasionally drinking for relief, to sneaking drinks, to guilt, and so on until they hit bottom (“complete defeat admitted”) and then recovered. If you could locate yourself even early in the downward trajectory on that curve, you could see where your drinking was headed. In 1952, Jellinek noted that the word alcoholic had been adopted to describe anyone who drank excessively. He warned that overuse of that word would undermine the disease concept. He later beseeched AA to stay out of the way of scientists trying to do objective research. [...] As the rehab industry began expanding in the 1970s, its profit motives dovetailed nicely with AA’s view that counseling could be delivered by people who had themselves struggled with addiction, rather than by highly trained (and highly paid) doctors and mental-health professionals. No other area of medicine or counseling makes such allowances. There is no mandatory national certification exam for addiction counselors. The 2012 Columbia University report on addiction medicine found that only six states required alcohol- and substance-abuse counselors to have at least a bachelor’s degree and that only one state, Vermont, required a master’s degree. Fourteen states had no license requirements whatsoever—not even a GED or an introductory training course was necessary—and yet counselors are often called on by the judicial system and medical boards to give expert opinions on their clients’ prospects for recovery. Mark Willenbring, the St. Paul psychiatrist, winced when I mentioned this. “What’s wrong,” he asked me rhetorically, “with people with no qualifications or talents—other than being recovering alcoholics—being licensed as professionals with decision-making authority over whether you are imprisoned or lose your medical license?

#ref

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porchwood · 6 years

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I wish I could even begin to articulate how difficult things are in my life right now. I’ve admitted to depression in previous posts but that’s barely a fraction of the picture. In mid-December I lost my just-barely-sustaining-me job because my boss closed her bodywork practice, and if you live anywhere with seasonal traffic, you know that the off-season is the worst possible time to find work, especially if you’re in a tourism-fueled industry. I was able to cobble together two days a week each at two different places (a spa and a yoga studio) but traffic is still painfully slow and no matter what the law says, no one wants to pay their therapists if there aren’t clients coming in. I’ve been creeping by on about $250 a week at a time of year when it costs $300-400 a month to heat an apartment to 60 degrees. (That’s the lowest possible temp at which I don’t have to keep Lucky in a sweater. :/ I can’t begin to comprehend why propane is so inefficient.) Thankfully I have a roommate (and a good one) to help offset utilities, but unfortunately, I’m dealing with a lot more than that.

There was a glitch with the direct deposit at my second job and I only just received all my wages for the month of January, which will significantly help out for the moment, but that money would have been awfully nice to have for groceries (and heat bills) in January. I’m not starving by any means, but I’m truly living week-to-week and I can physically tell that I’m not getting enough protein (because meat is expensive, even for a bargain shopper).

Right after Christmas I had a terrifying episode of chest pain and wound up in the emergency room at 1am. (I don’t go to the hospital for anything, so that should tell you what a desperate situation this was.) The hospital experience was terrible to say the least, and about three weeks later I got a bill for $1,343 (and a subsequent smaller one for my chest x-ray), because my Obamacare policy covered nothing. (Let that sink in, okay? They “adjusted” the fee but covered no part. Of an ER visit - in-network, no less! - which is the end-all reason everyone tells you that you need health insurance.) I applied for financial assistance right away, which required exhaustive paperwork, only to be informed that they need my 2017 tax return (this was before I’d even received my W-2s) or they would automatically reject my application. Which means I now have to come up with a couple hundred dollars to have my taxes done in order to - wait for it - qualify for a payment plan. It’s pretty clear that I’m not going to receive any assistance or bill forgiveness (if your income isn’t below a particular number - and ironically, my 2016 income was - it’s an automatic rejection), but they won’t even let you have a payment plan (for a $1,343 bill) unless you send them gobs of paperwork demonstrating sufficient financial need.

Lucky’s separation anxiety is relentless and responding to nothing, and I spent the month of January making weekly 90-minute round trips to a veterinary acupuncturist, to the tune of $400+ (maxing out my credit cards in the hope that finally, this would help). Lucky hated the treatments (and I hated myself for putting her through them), her anxiety only got worse and the day before my birthday, the downstairs neighbors left a note implying that if I don’t put her in daycare (which is a whole other mess of a subject), they’ll report us to the landlord.

That night was the lowest I think I’ve ever come in my life. Thankfully, my sister must have picked up on this somehow because she called to chat for a little, but it was the first time I actually looked up the contact info for Lifeline (didn’t call but looked it up), and when my poor roommate finally got home I broke down in ugly tears and told her about something bad that happened to me a long time ago that I’ve never told anyone.

Right now I’m...coping. I guess that’s the only word for it. I’m eating, bathing, dressing, going to work, going outside, etc - and most importantly, taking care of Lucky, who is my literal lifeline. I’ve found one last vet to try and we’re going in tomorrow for a consult, but my roommate is dubious about the chances of success and concerned that the neighbors will flip that I’m not putting Lucky straight into a kennel this week. But right now the future boils down to two equally awful prospects:

1) I get Lucky vaccinated for bordetella and board her at the safest place I can find, to the tune of $20-30 a day (plus round-trip drives of about 30-40 mins twice a day), and try to function at work. There’s no way I can afford those rates, of course, and most of these places only take cash, so I’ll have to get another credit card to pay for living expenses while my wages go to daycare. Or I could look into getting a third job, but that would mean another day or two of daycare to pay for, so I wouldn’t be getting ahead, I’d be exhausted out of my mind, and I’d never see my little girl, who is not a young dog anymore.

2) I move permanently back to Nebraska (in stages, because there’s no way I can afford a U-Haul anytime soon) and continue to pay my half of rent and utilities as long as my roommate wants to stay here. (That was our arrangement last winter and remains the only fair thing to do, really, especially as subletting is forbidden.) My sister would take me in at her tiny house and probably let me stay rent-free, but now my aging father is back in Nebraska, and while my sister and I would buffer each other as much as possible, we’d be expected (read: pressured) to serve as caregivers to some extent, especially me, because I’m a massage therapist. And there aren’t a lot of resources to help you deal with an elderly narcissist. (Fun example: Dad ranted to my sister that he didn’t know why I moved to Maine right before he returned to Nebraska because, and I quote, “She only went to massage school so she could take care of me!” He also lamented to a friend - in front of my sister - that he’s not going to get any more grandchildren because my still-unmarried sister is about to turn 40. Which is a horrible thing to say in and of itself, but I don’t think it even occurred to him in the moment that his youngest child doesn’t have a reproductive system anymore and that the loss of it made her want to die.) Someday I might tell you about the rift with my parents, if I haven’t already - it’s not the aforementioned bad thing from my childhood, but it effectively means that I don’t have parents anymore, not in any kind of supportive sense.

Anyway, I’m scared and weary and hopeless and I hate the assumption that when someone isn’t engaging through social media or responding to messages that they’re self-centered, snooty, having too much fun to bother, etc. My life began to crumble four years ago and has continued at a relentless snowball-roll ever since without getting minutely better or even letting up a little, and I can’t swim a lick so I don’t know how I’m supposed to keep treading water indefinitely. And I don’t want to talk about it because even the nicest of those conversations start with “Are things getting any better?” and the answer is always, ALWAYS, “No.”

I don’t expect sympathy or support, because four years of relentless crap have taught me that the worse your life gets, the less people care. It becomes part of your identity to them (”Well, sounds like Elisabeth’s having some trouble again...”) and, I suspect, starts to paint you as a person who just can’t figure it out/get on in the real world, not someone who’s being subjected to an inordinate amount of bad fortune. I’ve had to fight tooth and nail just to survive these past four years, and if God and the world could agree that, just maybe, I finally deserve a little break, maybe I could stop subsisting and start rebuilding from the wreckage.

#personal #bad life stuff #thanks for listening #long post

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swordarkeereon · 3 years

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No More Outside Publishers. Period.

I made a solid decision at the beginning of the year to no longer work with any outside publishers. There are two exceptions. The first being my friend Bernadette’s publishing house, 5 Prince Publishing, where Saving Sarah May (my first, and perhaps only, sweet romance) was published. The second, being my friend Andre Gonzalez publishing house, M4L Publishing, which publishes me and Andre’s co-authored Amelia Doss series.

What was the final straw, you ask? It wasn’t a straw really. It was more like I had a realization of what my work is actually worth, and that people were coming to me with TERRIBLE publishing deals and offering to pay me what professional writers were making back in 1990. YES – 30 years ago professional rates. I’ve been writing for almost 30 years, and I’m really not doing anything for other writers in the industry, or myself, by accepting anything less than .20 cents a word for an article (plus more if newsletters and videos are required).

Modern day, professional advances on non-fiction books are running $5,000 – $20,000 ($2,500 is noob, rock bottom), and I’ve had publishers contact me and offer me $500 -$700 and tell me that’s a professional rate. Uh, no. Sorry. Not for a professional writer who’s been at this game for over 30 years, and who is one of the foremost world experts on her subject matter. Advances on non-fiction haven’t been that low since the 90’s, and if you’re working for that — you’re fucking yourself.

What is even worse is when you know what these publishers are selling the books for, and that they’re only paying their authors $4-$5 per copy sold toward the advance of $700, and you know the publisher is making $36 a copy (after you deduct the $10 print cost). Yet — it was the AUTHOR who did all the work. Especially in occult publishing, I’ve learned, no one is hiring editors, and layout is often done by the publisher him/herself. I know this because I’ve later found mistakes in my own work published by certain publishers that any editor would have caught.

Frankly, coming to a professional author who isn’t just starting out, and offering them 1990’s rates for professional content, is FUCKING INSULTING. And between last year and this year, I’ve been insulted enough to realize – hey – I’m worth getting paid professional rates!

Especially when I can publish my own work, do a fantastic job, AND make 100% of the profit without having to include a middle man, and not only make my professional rate, but also the publisher’s cut (minus printing, editorial, and formatting fees). But still, the difference is huge. Let me just spell it out for you.

ARTICLES: A 7,000 word article at .20 cents a word (which is the rock bottom professional NF rate in 2021) is $1,400.00. If you’re writing NF articles for someone and they’re paying you less than that…. WTF are you doing? The last one I did has barely netted me .10 cents a word, which is what I was being paid to write articles for a trade magazine back in 1996. Not kidding.

BOOKS: Let’s specifically talk the economics of limited edition hardcovers (LEH). Let’s say a publisher prints 250 LEH. They offer the author a $700 advance with an 8% royalty toward that advance (that means you have to sell at least 175 books before you earn out that advance and start actually making money, of which there is approximately only $300 more to make.) This means you’re being paid, AT MOST, $1000 to write a content rich book at a minimum of about 30,000 to 40,000 words. SERIOUSLY. Now, take into account that the publisher is likely only paying about $2,500 in printing (including shipping, taxes, etc) and the book, with all copies sold, the book stands to bring the publisher $12,500. Even if the publisher hires an editor for about $400, that means it’s only $4000 out of his pocket. The author gets $1000. The printer and editor get $3000 between them. The publisher walks away with over $8,000. Seems a bit predatory to me since without the author, you don’t have the book. Period.

Now I’m not saying the publisher shouldn’t make money. After all, they have to hire the editor, format it, get it printed and do the distribution, marketing, etc… But honestly — that’s the easy part nowadays. I know because I’ve been indie publishing since 2006. The hardest part is learning how to format or finding a formatter, where to find editors, where to find a printer, and how you’re going to distribute it. Once you have those things set up – you sit back and delegate. You line up orders, you package them and ship them out. Hell, you don’t even have to leave your home office to do that. You can print your own mailing labels directly from most point of sale systems, or via USPS online. USPS will deliver your mailing material, and they’ll pick that shit up for you if you arrange it. After the initial rush of sales on a book, your time spent packaging orders is minimal (unless you do that as your primary business).

There are some publishers that are doing better splits with authors, but the sad fact remains that many of them are just putting out the up front money to have the books printed, hoping the author ran it by a few friends who edited it, they quickly format it via word (which literally takes maybe an hour depending on length), and distribute it. For that, they’re taking half, or more. They don’t edit. They don’t market. (They’ll tell you they do, but they don’t. One post on their social media page doesn’t count.)

I published one book with a publisher who honestly didn’t know how to sell my books. We did have a 50/50 split, but this guy was HORRIBLE at selling the books. I got the first few royalty payments okay, but then, like a lot of small publishers do when they start to go under because they don’t know what they’re doing, he started spending the money as it came in and when it was all said and done, he owed me a little under $1000 and basically whined that it was my fault the book wasn’t selling. That I wasn’t well-known enough and the books were worthless to him. (All this so he could get out of paying me my $950 or whatever.) So I told him that instead of cash, he could send me the books he couldn’t sell. He did. I made well over that $950 he owed me on those books. A lot over, actually. I had no problem selling them. He couldn’t figure it out. ::shrug:: To this day, I don’t know what was so difficult about selling them and my only guess is HE wasn’t putting forth any effort to market them, and was expecting me to do it. And so I did and I ended up doing well on that book.

So — there’s that. Not all publishers know what they’re doing beyond distribution, and if they want to pay an author peanuts for a book and expect the author to do all the marketing — well seriously, fuck that. Let’s not even get into the hourly rate you’re making. If you make $1000, divide by the minimum wage in your state (it’s almost 12.50 in Colorado) — that means you have to be able to write a full book in 80 hours (two weeks) just to make minimum wage. That means all outlining and research, all the writing, and all the revision. 80 hours. Considering most NF books can take authors six months to a year to write — how much you think authors are actually making per hour at $1,000.00 for a book? Even for a 30,000 word book at .20 cents a word – the author should be making a minimum of $6,000.00. That at least pays the author for 480 hours, which covers twelve 40 hour work weeks at minimum wage (12.50 an hour), or three months of their time. (I could write a solid 30K book in 3 months).

Then the question is — if you’re going to do the bulk of the work anyhow, why not just add managing the project and distribution to the mix and do it yourself? You can have readers fund the printing costs through paid pre-orders. You only need 50 people to pre-order to pay for a 250 print run. 56 if you want to hire an editor. At least then you’re the one making the eight to ten-thousand dollars. Yes, you’ll have earned every cent with writing, hiring editors, formatting, dealing with printers, and doing your own marketing and distribution, but you won’t feel used – like a cheap whore.

If you are a professional writer, you charge professional rates because you’re WORTH PRO RATES. End of story.

Is there an instance where I would consider a traditional contract? Absolutely. The contract would require the following:

Contract limit of 3-5 years, at which time 100% of all rights revert back to me.

It better be a million dollar book deal.

I get full creative license.

HAHA — contracts like that don’t exist. But if I can do what a publisher can do, and I could do it better and actually make what I’m worth, then why wouldn’t I? That said, I don’t often deal in LEH anymore. I prefer my books to be affordable for readers which means ebook, paperback, and hardcovers that won’t break the bank. Which means I do make a lot less than the above example, but at least I’m not handing most of my wages to a middle man who is basically my pimp while I do the bulk of the work. If I’m doing the bulk of the work anyway — I’m doing IT ALL. Eventually each book will earn out the work I put into it. Some books it happens faster – others it happens slower.

Okay, I’ll quit bitching. I am simply fed up with being offered insulting contracts.

#bitch and moan #daemonic bitch-slap

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rylredrants · 3 years

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Early COVID Life (another from the vaults: 04/26/2020)

Excerpt from a personal history about 2020

March 15th was my last time in a restaurant as of April 26th. (ETA- as of November 15th, I’ve still not been to a restaurant in the US.)

The pandemic had been a conversation topic with both of the dates I’d been on the previous week. The screenings in some airports had begun in January and the first confirmed case in the US had been noted on January 21st. Back then it was still being called the “Wuhan Virus” because of its origins in the Wuhan province of China. Italy had gone on full lock-down back on February 23rd.

The ‘national emergency’ in the US was announced on March 13th- the same day as my first “first date” with a border patrol agent.

The panic buying, specifically toilet paper hoarding, began that week as well. My brunch date told me that he had hired someone to do some work for him that morning. He had offered $300 and the guy said he would take $250 and a pack of toilet paper.

Basketball was the first sport to be cancelled on March 11th.. the Utah Jazz had 2 positive cases. Baseball, hockey, soccer, and the Olympic Games followed. For me, it was learning that the WWE had shut down that made it feel real. Not because I’m an avid fan these days but because they were the first to hold a major event after 9-11 when other people were still afraid to gather in crowds for fear of more attacks.

Utah was hit with a series of earthquakes in the midst of it all with the biggest one on March 18th.Oh, and there were 2 meteors that came, in relative terms, closer to hitting the earth than any others in decades. Can we say, end of the world feeling much?

The first ‘stay at home’ order was in California on March 19th. Blue states were still scoffing at it as ‘liberal fake news’ in the wake of tweets like this from 45:

By March 23rd several other states issued similar orders.

Here in AZ it wasn’t official until March 31st.

On April 3rd CDC guidelines were released recommending cloth face coverings when in public in addition to the ‘social distance’ recommendation of staying 6’ or more from other people. An old friend in CA was making masks so I ordered 2 from her.

Monday, April 13th was the first trip into the grocery store since the pandemic began. My best friend picked me up at 6:45am and I gave her one of the two masks that arrived from California a couple days before. We pulled up to Walmart and saw a line of people outside waiting for the 7am opening. By this point, stores had begun limiting hours in order to properly sanitize things each night and some places started giving senior citizens an extra hour before general opening 1-2 times each week.

Our face masks were made of cotton on the inside and denim on the outside. I made the mistake of not taking my gum out of my mouth before putting mine on which only added to the difficulty breathing. On top of that, my glasses fogged up over and over again. It was awful.

The store itself didn’t seem too bad. The toilet paper aisle was about 10% stocked. The usual brands weren’t there and signs hung on empty shelves that said it was limited to one package per household. I got myself a pack of the Great Value brand, even though I had several rolls still at home. I also bought 2 two-packs of my dish gloves because they were another item that had become hard to come by.

My basket was filled with frozen tater tots, steak fries and jalapeno poppers... junk food that I normally wouldn’t keep in the house, along with 2 packs of my favorite cookies, tuna, shampoo (2 big bottles) and deodorant even though I wasn’t out of either, command strips for hanging the 2 puzzles I’d recently completed, Kleenex because they had them in stock and had been hard to come by, mini loaf pans because I was baking banana bread before it was trendy, and instant coffee because I wanted to try the whipped coffee thing I kept seeing online.

I spent $100 and got $40 in cash that I would later turn into quarters for laundry and water bottle refills.

It has felt like Groundhog’s Day… work, dinner, couch, bed, stare at the darkness, and eventually fall asleep and do it again.

I’ve had even more trouble than usual concentrating at work and instead find myself scrolling Facebook incessantly. Earlier this month, my department fired 3 people and transferred another out to her previous position which has made me that much more nervous about my job. Despite that, I’ve still struggled to get motivated to do the work I’ve just been assigned including a new course to create and an article talking about what my company is doing for our customers “during this time.”

I began watching the daily ‘Coronavirus Briefings’ from the White House as often as possible just because I’ve found that words really can’t capture just how awful the scene is. One day they showed a video that was all about the administration’s “terrific” response to the virus. Reporters described the video as a campaign video and when questioned about a missing chunk of time in it between the end of January when the Commander-in-Tweet said he had ‘bought time’ for the country and early March when they officially announced a national emergency 45 had his now-standard tantrum including, calling reporters “fake news” and attacking their credibility rather than giving any kind of answer.

Another day last week 45 started rambling on about possible cures including injecting UV light or disinfectants into patients. I immediately messaged the co-worker who has been posting about this kind of thing daily and told her that the next big episode would be about people injecting household disinfectants.

Within 24 hours Lysol, Clorox and other household cleaning companies released statements telling people NOT to consume or inject their products. This is the world we live in.

Also last week, the governor of Nevada broke CNN’s Anderson Cooper with her lack of reasoning about how and why Las Vegas should re-open. There have been protests in several states as people who have been unemployed for weeks with only a single $1200 check from the government to help are demanding the economy re-open now. These protests have included masked (white) men holding guns and people with signs such as the one that read “My body, my choice” with an image of a face mask. All the while, other states have used the pandemic as a way of further restricting abortion access calling them ‘non-emergency medical procedures.’

People have applied for unemployment en masse while 2 trillion dollars in federal funds, grants, and loans “designed to help small businesses” (The CARES Act) were snatched up almost immediately. Some funds were granted to large publicly traded companies including as Ruth’s Chris Steakhouse ($20M) and Potbellies’ ($10M). They are among a handful of these companies who are returning the money only after public outcry.

I’m scared.

Not of the virus necessarily, my county has just passed 30 cases which pales in comparison to a lot of other places, but I’m scared for how this is changing “normal” in terms of social interactions that would have typically lead to deeper bonds and eventually, hopefully, a new relationship for me.

A couple weeks ago, I loaned my sewing machine to a friend. She’s been notoriously anti-social and when I came by she invited me to hang out at a “social distance” for a bit. We ended up sitting on the concrete outside her front door about 5’ apart for about an hour just chatting. For her to feel the need for socializing is big. It’s on par with me having the urge to exercise (which hasn’t happened… yet).

I’m scared for my friend in Baltimore whose partner is a nurse in New York where the bodies have been piling up for weeks. He works for the Smithsonian and has been able to work from home for all but one day/week. Coping with the isolation for him has included turning meals into art that he posts along with the daily videos of his strongman feats and the occasional live shows with other performers who are struggling financially.

I’m scared for the New Jersey firefighter who told me about the increase in kitchen fires because people who never cooked are having to do so for the first time. He then told me about a friend that lost both her parents to COVID. She was unable to be with them in their final hours and their bodies were put into refrigerated trucks because there isn’t enough room in the morgues now.

If something happens to him, I’ll never know. He’s not on social media and we don’t have any friends in common who could tell me about it. He could just disappear one day. Or he could just appear. He’s talked about running away from his life for the last 5 years and I think this is really showing him that it’s time to make a change.

I’m scared for the friend in WA working 80+ hours a week between his two jobs. His health was shaky before his daughter’s murder in November 2018 and he lived in his car for months during the trial. He is finally working and has a roof over his head but is in contact with people daily who could potentially get him sick. Again. Because he was one of the people whose blood was being tested for antibodies, assuming he had already had COVID and survived.

I’m scared for my ex-husband who retired from the Army and moved to DC for his dream job right before the lock-downs started. The start date for his dream job was pushed back, and his last Army paycheck was getting closer and closer. Fortunately his resume is one that allowed him to start another job rather quickly and he just got an official start date at the dream job. But he is alone with the dogs, trying to rebuild himself and his life much in the way I am right now.

We had friends in the area from the 3 years we lived there, but the virus means that all of the parties he wanted to go to that I wasn’t comfortable with… those parties may never return. They don’t have the grocery pick up options I have here, and his health has been an issue of concern for a long time.

His girlfriend in the quad was a nurse who said that he had the ‘trifecta for a heart attack’ with diabetes, high blood pressure and high cholesterol. We are still legally married on paper so I have health insurance and am the primary beneficiary on his life insurance, but money can’t replace him.

We may be separated but he is my family… and the only family I’ve really got. And money wouldn’t make it any easier for me to have to re-arrange my life again and somehow go get the dogs if, Gods forbid, something were to happen to him.

It’s all a mess. It shouldn’t be such a big decision to go grocery shopping.

Seeing people in movies and TV just casually touching one another and hugging shouldn’t seem so foreign already… but it is and it does. I know that we will never got back to the way it was. Masks are going to be part of my wardrobe for the foreseeable future.

Just meeting a new person for coffee will feel riskier than unprotected sex, which makes dating a completely different experience… assuming I bite the bullet and reactivate my OkCupid account at all. And rather than calling my best friend and going out for lunch right now, I’m going to go stare at my stocked pantry with ‘nothing to eat’ and end up having leftover biscuits and gravy before putting on something resembling clothes, even if it’s just so I can take the trash out.

This is my life right now. This is the world we live in.

#covidー19 #lockdown #early days of the plague

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bienready2122 · 4 years

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Watching Away A Small Fortune - How Watching Television Depletes Your Retirement Accounts

I, as most Americans, love to invest significant energy dying before the TV. I have my "can't miss" appears however don't confine myself to those... I watch whatever looks intriguing. Presently I don't watch the national normal of four hours of TV daily, yet like a great many people I likewise love motion pictures. I watch at any rate three or four motion pictures each week. I have almost 200 motion pictures in my very own video assortment.

So how does sitting before the TV add up to lost dollars? All things considered, there are a ton of money related commitments that go with t.v. watching, from connecting the link, to purchasing your TV and sound framework, to leasing films. This is one of the most costly types of diversion.

Sitting in front of the TV

Americans currently watch 28 hours of TV every week. This number is declining with the expansion in web time yet regardless of what you look like at it four hours daily is a great deal of time Free Movies Watch Online

With an end goal to streamline satisfaction in t.v. land there are numerous extravagances that you can enjoy: your TV itself, TV administration (link, satellite, HD, and so on), and even the garbage you consume while you squander.

The Gear. I don't generally comprehend why individuals who make under $15,000 a year need a 60" plasma screen (at present retailing around $4000) yet go into any trailer park and you'll see this is an unequivocal need. Considerably more sensible is a $1000 32-inch LCD. Or then again, in case you're similar to me, a 27 inch no-name brand level screen ($250) works fine and dandy. You ought to hope to utilize your TV for 10-20 years before overhauling or supplanting. At 20 years the value breakdown (barring power) for TV buys would be: Plasma ($200), LCD ($50), cheapo ($12.50).

You'll most likely likewise need to purchase a DVD player ($20-150), VCR ($35-80), DVR ($100-1000), and speakers ($50-1000). You likely know just as I do that purchasing hardware modest includes some significant downfalls... they separate rapidly. You don't need to be lavish, yet don't be modest with your toys either. On the off chance that you purchase not too bad peripherals: DVD $75, VCR $50, DVR $250, and speakers $300 (total=$675) and they each most recent 10 years, that solitary adds up to about $70 every year or $6/month.

The Service. Link or satellite can undoubtedly cost $40-80/month. Toss on the additional channels, on-request programming, and TiVo and you could be burning through $100 or all the more every month. The vast majority can't envision existence without link and Tivo yet I've overseen it fine and dandy. The greater part of the significant systems presently show a significant number of their shows online for nothing, and for my other review needs I look at TV programs from the library. Need a brisk method to spare $100 every month, take a stab at surrendering link. A decent alternative for the individuals who NEED web, neighborhood telephone, and link is packaging those expenses. You can generally get it around $100/month for each of the three which should set aside you some cash.

Separating TV

Impractical notion: Buy a 60 inch plasma ($15/month), get all the extravagant peripherals ($20/month), advanced link with additional channels and TiVo ($100/month), and go throughout the day consistently dying. Complete: $135/month.

Smart thought: Buy a 32-inch LCD ($6/month), get not too bad peripherals ($6/month), satellite TV ($30/month), and incidentally go out for a walk. Complete: $42/month

Better thought: Buy a fair 27-inch level screen ($1/month), not brand name however solid peripherals ($4/month), and watch t.v. on the web or look at DVDs from the library (free). Complete: $5/month

Best thought: Give up t.v. inside and out. Absolute: free

On the off chance that you conclude you are investing an excessive amount of energy and cash on TV, bravo! The cash you spare every month from going from impractical notion to better thought is $120/month. Through the span of your working lifetime (35 years) that cash put resources into the securities exchange (10% annualized return) would return you $1.4 million dollars.

Paying for motion pictures

Over the most recent five years I have amassed almost 200 VHS, DVDs, and iPod motion pictures and network shows. Twelve or so of those films were given to me as endowments however the incredible larger part I bought myself. Since the vast majority of these buys originated from carport deals, Goodwill, and eBay I paid just a small amount of the evaluated retail esteem. I gauge I spent some place in the ballpark of $600-700 for my whole assortment (retail would have run them near $5000). So I spent somewhat over $100 every year taking care of my video assortment.

I additionally watch motion pictures that I don't claim. Sometime in the distant past I went to Blockbuster yet now I can't envision paying $5 to watch a film when I can hold up two or three months and purchase a similar film online at a similar cost. Netflix has been the best approach for a large number of my companions, however once more, I don't comprehend the entire idea of leasing... for what reason should I be paying $5-25 every month to acquire films. I can do that at the open library for nothing which is actually what I do. I look at a few films every week. For motion pictures I just can hardly wait to see I go to the supermarket and lease it for $1 out of the Redbox machine. "Leasing" motion pictures along these lines I spend under $10 every year. The most ideal approach, be that as it may, is by not going through any cash whatsoever and looking at your motion pictures from the open library or acquiring from companions. This will conceivably spare you several dollars per year and thousands over your lifetime.

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entergamingxp · 4 years

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In the virtual world of Fallout 76, Gun Runners are making thousands in real-world cash • Eurogamer.net

For some reason I’m rapidly accruing a collection of dumb stories about my time in multiplayer games – and seeing as the Rust murder tale went down so well, I thought I’d recount another. This time it’s about my brief foray into the world of Fallout 76 virtual gunrunning, which has since escalated into a detailed look at the life of the traders making serious bank from selling Fallout 76 items. I don’t know how I ended up here.

Back in January, when the first wave of Fallout 76 backlash was at its peak, vast swathes of the Fallout subreddits were busy complaining about in-game glitches – and in particular, a cheating method called duping. It’s a process by which players exploit a bug to duplicate items, with potentially game-breaking consequences if uncontrolled numbers of top-tier items suddenly flood a community and upset the balance. It’s a phenomenon witnessed in other online games, but for Fallout 76 it was perceived as a serious problem by the community – with Bethesda constantly playing whac-a-mole trying to patch out new glitch methods as they appeared.

Over on eBay, some enterprising hustlers capitalised on the mess by creating their own cottage industry. Using the various duplication methods, the eBay accounts started selling dozens of Fallout 76’s most valuable items. Fallout 76, of course, doesn’t sell guns in its Atomic Shop on account of Bethesda’s pledge to avoid pay-to-win microtransactions (although some argue it’s already broken this pledge) – which means there’s a market for gameplay-affecting items such as weapons and armour (and the raw in-game money and materials to acquire these). Then the secret dev room was discovered and unreleased items started appearing – a problem that hasn’t quite gone away, judging by some recent listings.

Looks like a cat burglar’s been in the dev room at some point.

At the time, I’d already started investigating the item duping, as I was intrigued by how this worked. Who were these people? How did the gun delivery process work? And how had they avoided being caught? I then got a little sidetracked by the sight of those unreleased items and Wooby, so I never got around to talking about Fallout 76’s real-money trading market.

Except, I’d already purchased one of the guns.

It didn’t take long to find. A simple eBay search threw up a bunch of options for every platform – and faced with an abundance of choice, I searched for one that looked as overpowered as possible. “Two Shot Explosive Light Machine Gun (2star) (for Fallout 76, PC)” sounded like it would work. It set me back £7.75. The next step in this process was to contact the seller with my Discord name. I can happily report the anime-avatar eBay seller had excellent service: within hours, a Discord friend request popped up and they introduced themselves.

“hello

“im currently delivering an item to another customer, you’re the next in line so will be available right after im done with him

“sorry for the delay.”

Not only incredibly polite, the seller also seemed to have a full delivery schedule. It was a level of professionalism I wasn’t prepared for, and I hurried back from my lunch break to arrange an in-game meet-up.

After a small struggle to add each other as friends, I was instructed to join the game world and fast travel to the seller’s location. They’d chosen to set up shop at Charleston Station – a sensible choice, given it’s typically one of the earliest locations players find in the game. The stations are always fairly enemy-free, and heavily populated by players seeking to access the vendor, stash box and workbenches there.

This didn’t stop the transaction from feeling a bit shady.

As I approached the station, I could see the seller gesturing at me to come over. Entering cautiously, in the gloom I could see them squatting in a dingy corner, gesturing towards a rickety old end table, in which I found my gun. As the glorious weapon whirled around my monitor, the seller gave me a thumbs-up, and momentarily forgetting where the emote button was, I performed the universal gaming symbol to express gratitude: jumping. And there it was, my very own illicit gun.

If you want to see all of this play out in real time, you can, because I recorded it. (Apologies for the keyboard clacking away in the background – I left my mic on.)

youtube

Feeling a little dirty after the transaction, this is where I left this story for several months – until recently, when I revisited Fallout 76 to check out the new Fallout 1st subscription. Then, I started wondering to myself: who are these people selling virtual guns on eBay? Is it actually a viable side-hustle?

So I went back to my messages and found my gunrunner. Having confirmed this previously, I knew my seller had used duping as a method to make a vast quantity of weapons, but I wanted to find out more – and they were happy to oblige.

“I just started selling them out of the blue due to frustration with the game not listening to players,” they told me over Discord, explaining it was a matter of making it “easier for others” while also making money for other games on the side. It was their first time selling virtual items, as in other games they played, the market was already oversaturated with “Chinese gold seller sites” (for games like World of Warcraft).

As the seller was mostly unemployed during this period, they had time to hop between deliveries – taking random customers from eBay and “making some notes on delivery times… in order to make buyers aware of some possible delays”.

But then for the million-dollar question: how much had they made from Fallout 76 gunrunning?

“I’ve made around $2k (£1.5k), have been able to customise my gaming PC and can now enjoy high end better current and future games thanks to Fallout 76,” the seller said. “So for at least that reason I’m happy with the game.

“There are people who made over $10k (£7.7k) or even more, due to them setting up personal sites listing those items, [with] an even broader customer base and no limitations or special costs imposed by eBay (some packs they were selling were even $100 or $300+).”

This Lithuanian company started out in Elder Scrolls Online gold farming, and now sells Fallout 76 guns for £20-30 a pop.

While it didn’t sound like a sustainable long-term earner, I was still surprised by the numbers. Yet it was a gravy train that eventually ended for the seller, thanks to measures taken by both Zenimax and Bethesda.

“The first ones who did something were Zenimax [Bethesda’s parent company] by sending a global notice to eBay to force people selling in-game items related to F76 to stop selling them and end the listings, or they would incur in suspension of the eBay account, at which point I retired from this practice,” the seller claimed. “After I stopped, some weeks later the mass ban happened and I was included in it.”

The seller later clarified they got caught up in the February banwave, which cleared out a significant portion of the dupers. Judging by those dates, the seller must have made the $2k in less than four months.

With a steer from my eBay seller, I spent some time trying to get in contact with traders on the sites where weapons bundles are still being sold for up to £1500, such as G2G, along with privately-owned sites U4N and U4GM where items and weapons are bought directly from suppliers to be re-sold. Generally speaking, the sites sell items and in-game currency for a wide variety of online games (such as WOW, Rocket League and even Pokémon Sword and Shield), and often charge more than sellers on eBay – although the “face-to-face” delivery methods are the same. eBay takes a 10 per cent cut for each item sold – and while G2G starts at 9.99 per cent, it lowers to 4.99 for experienced traders. U4GM takes a more direct approach by purchasing bulk items from players, and then selling them on the platform. On a smaller scale, some traders post adverts on forums and arrange trades over Discord, with payments made via PayPal or cryptocurrencies such as Skrill – thereby bypassing service fees entirely.

After several attempts, I did manage to talk to one of the traders on the website G2G, who had an extensive trading record with over 250 items sold on that site alone. They’re currently listing one of the super expensive packs my eBay seller had talked about – a triple-item pack for £779.32 (although my eBay gunrunner claimed this is far less egregious than some of the listings from earlier this year, before the banwaves).

It does seem that some of these extremely high-price packs are more for show (or perhaps out of hope) than a realistic listing. The G2G seller’s biggest deal to date, they told me, was actually a $250 (£189.96) strangler heart power armour set – which has now been reduced to $60 (£46.53) thanks to increased competition from other sellers. The seller also estimated they’d made $20k (£15.2k) from selling Fallout 76 items – which I found hard to believe, but not impossible, given their activity was split across several trading websites.

While my seller’s Fallout 76 eBay journey had ended, even checking the site now, it’s possible to spot plenty of people still selling Fallout 76 items in bulk. Some of the most expensive weapons still being sold are called “legacy weapons”: such as the powerful explosive energy weapons Bethesda removed from loot drops at the beginning of the year, but not from player inventories. The most expensive one I saw was a £249.99 “furious explosive gatling plasma” (now £199.99) with god roll stats (effectively the best stats you can get from a RNG drop).

I eventually managed to get in contact with another eBay seller, who provided me with an up-to-date perspective on the current state of Fallout 76 gunrunning on the site. This one told me they’d been involved with duping and in-game trading from the very start, before the practice eventually moved to real-money trading (RMT).

“I have used duping and greatly profited from it – I won’t deny it,” they said, adding they were only aware of one publicly-known throwables duping method at present. “It’s quiet now compared to [the] old days but you can still make some money. I have [a] few deliveries a day and I don’t really play the game itself due to lack of new content. My endgame is effective cap generation methods and trading.”

The seller was unable to tell me how much they’d made from selling on eBay, but it was interesting to learn that after a certain point, duping was no longer necessary to produce goods. Once you get rich in-game in terms of caps and assets, they explained, it’s relatively easy to keep up with the demand for items.

I thought my journey into the world of eBay Fallout 76 trading would end there – but little did I know, I was about to encounter one of the biggest sellers on the platform. Curious about the expensive legacy weapons, I shot a message to the gatling gun listing’s owner, who runs the store eBay store Fallout76Armoury. The seller, a college student who goes by the name Martin Tim in the Fallout community, boasts one of the biggest collections of Fallout 76 items on eBay – with over 140 items for PS4 currently listed for sale.

“I noticed a demand for items and a market I can invest my time in so I took advantage of it”, Martin told me, explaining it had taken a long time to reach the major leagues in Fallout 76 item trading. “The process of me getting where I am now was not easy. I invested a lot of time trading my way up in ranks to access information and items I’m in need of… I’ve had to build relationships and a reputation with people who have knowledge of an upcoming duplication glitches and top tier items I can use to trade and build an inventory that I can sell.”

For Martin, the first few months were time-consuming thanks to the need to build his reputation and promote his store – along with establishing a system to manage 12 different PlayStation accounts and document all his items on spreadsheets. Having built that trust, customers then started to approach him – and he now says there is “no overwhelming aspect” to the trading at all: merely meeting customers in-game to deliver items, and updating his spreadsheets to keep clients informed of new gear.

While Martin has noticed a gradual decrease in demand for items, he says it’s still an extremely profitable industry – claiming he’s sold weapons anywhere from £10-£500 each, making a total of $55k (£41.8k) in the 10 months since he started selling the items. “I consider myself the most successful ‘individual’ seller on the entirety of the platform and I say this as I have spoken to other competing sellers from all platforms,” Martin added.

Although he couldn’t provide records to back up that figure, I manually trawled through the publicly-viewable feedback on Martin’s eBay page, and the sum of these alone is impressive. The most expensive item sold on this list is a custom bundle for £165, and roughly totalling up the items gets you slightly over £11k. This number, of course, doesn’t include sales where best price was accepted (and therefore hidden) – nor does it give us Martin’s total sales, as many customers fail to leave reviews. Martin also claims to sell on platforms other than eBay – with about 60 per cent of his deals made in private DMs to avoid website service fees. Privately, Martin also showed me sales records of the highest-priced items he’d sold, including a gun which shipped for £250. With these factors in mind, the publicly-verifiable figure does make Martin’s claim seem plausible.

While real-money trading seems to be against Zenimax’s terms of service – and selling duped items definitely is – when asked if Bethesda had tried to crack down on their trading, one seller argued there was a difference between duping and RMT.

“They have not and they should not – traders are providing a service that people are happy to pay for… RMT is a just a side effect for any ‘serious’ MMO. They should (and have) cracked down on duping in-game – I had two accounts banned for 100k Ultracite ammo but that is just the cost of doing business.”

Martin, meanwhile, said he’s never been banned. He estimates 80 per cent of his stock is duped (something he says is due to a spate of mass duping crazes previously flooding the market – claiming he’s only been involved in later “more controlled duping”), and he’s managed to avoid hitting the weight cap by spreading his inventory over 12 PSN accounts and 70 different Fallout 76 characters.

“Bethesda has never interfered with any real life currency trading … simply because they couldn’t care less,” he added. “Bethesda is a multi-million company who I assume does not consider from my perspective sellers who are selling items and somewhat promoting their game.”

Of course, the Fallout 76 sellers were probably never going to argue against their own interests – but they did make a fair point about RMT. Given the, um, buzz around Fallout 76 has now calmed down, it wouldn’t make sense for Bethesda or Zenimax to really crack down – and from the sounds of it, the most public duping methods have been patched out, and the demand for items is slowly decreasing. So long as people aren’t using mass duping methods to produce the weapons – which upsets the game balance and has been blamed for destabilising servers – it at least seems relatively harmless.

Eurogamer contacted Bethesda and eBay to ask about the sale of Fallout 76 in-game items for real money, but both failed to comment by time of publication.

Given the amounts these sellers made from selling weapons, it does make you wonder how much Bethesda could have made if it had straight-up sold weapons in the Atomic Shop – a slightly scary thought. But above all else, this experimentation with duping methods and glitches to produce grey-market product – delivered via in-game meet-ups, arranged on Discord – feels very Fallout. “Gun Runner” is even the name of a perk in Fallout 76 – while in New Vegas, the Gun Runners are weapons merchants who supply both the NCR and the Courier. One source told me he estimates 90 per cent of Fallout 76’s wealth is held by less than one per cent of the player base: a small group of glitchers, dupers and traders who all know each other and share secrets. And aside from being strangely similar to our own world, that in-game wealth can clearly be converted into real-world bank through gunrunning. Now that’s post-nuclear entrepreneurial spirit to make Mr. House proud.

from EnterGamingXP https://entergamingxp.com/2019/12/in-the-virtual-world-of-fallout-76-gun-runners-are-making-thousands-in-real-world-cash-%e2%80%a2-eurogamer-net/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=in-the-virtual-world-of-fallout-76-gun-runners-are-making-thousands-in-real-world-cash-%25e2%2580%25a2-eurogamer-net

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tamboradventure · 4 years

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The Best Travel Credit Cards for 2019

Posted: 11/16/2019 | November 16th, 2019

It can be difficult to choose the best travel credit card. There are hundreds upon hundreds out there — and so many of them seem to be the same! Which one is right for you? How do you decide? Which one gives you the best points? Are the fees worth it?

For someone who isn’t deep into the travel the industry, it can be very confusing — and a bit nervewracking — to figure out which card to get.

Let me say this: the best travel credit card is the one that aligns with your travel goals.

Are you interested in loyalty to a brand, free rewards, or avoiding fees? Do you want to milk the rewards and bonus system to get free flights, or do you just want a card that won’t charge you a fee for using it at that restaurant in Brazil? Is elite status the most important perk for you? Do you want points you can use like cash for anything?

Obviously, the airline and hotel cards you’ll pick are going to be based on those you use a lot. For example, I have a Marriott card and a Delta card because those are my brands of choice.

But, for those general points credit cards, are some cards better than the rest for daily use? I think so. If you don’t have any specific goals in mind and are just looking for some you can use in your day-to-day life, here’s a list of what I think the best travel credit cards are, their features, and why and when you should have them.

Note: Once in a while I get new cards if they have a good bonus, but for the most part, I think that you shouldn’t spread yourself too thin.

MY TOP PICK: Chase Sapphire Reserve

For me, this is the gold standard of travel cards. Yes, there’s a high fee but you get a lot of perks (and cashback) that I think this card is worth the fee and it is the card I use the most. When you sign-up for the card, you get:

50,000 bonus points after you spend $4,000 on purchases

$300 in annual travel credit

3x points on travel and restaurants

1 point per $1 on everything else

The ability to transfer to points to a dozen travel brands (I use this feature the most)

A statement credit of up to $100 for Global Entry or TSA PreCheck application

Free Priority Pass lounge access (a super awesome perk)

No foreign transaction fees

When you factor in that $300 credit, you’re really paying only $150 a year. You get 3x on restaurants and travel (which is most of my spending). Combined with the other perks, this is my all-around favorite card and the one I use the most for my day-to-day spending. I think this card gives you the most value for your money, especially if you are a frequent traveler.

—-> Sign up for this card by clicking here!

Chase Preferred

This card is like the “starter” version of the previous card. You don’t get as many perks, but if you’re dead-set on not paying a high yearly fee (this card only $95 a year), you can’t go wrong with this card. It’s great for the more infrequent traveler (this is the card I got my mother). When you sign for this card, you’ll get:

60,000 bonus points after you spend $4,000

2x points on travel and restaurants

1 point per $1 on everything else

No foreign transaction fees

It’s a simple, easy to use card. —-> Sign up for this card by clicking here!

Citi Prestige

I’m personally not a huge fan of this card and I don’t have a lot of Citi cards in general as I’m not a huge fan of their transfer partners. But, this card is great for people who stay at hotels because the fourth-night-free option (even though it’s capped) will cover the cost of this card’s fee right away. Plus, you get a $250 travel credit with this card too. Especially, when used right, you can actually make some money on this card! This card comes with a $495 yearly fee and the following perks:

50,000 bonus points after spending $4,000

5x points on airfare and restaurants

3x points on hotels and cruises

1x points on everything else

Complimentary fourth night at a hotel when booking through ThankYou.com (capped at twice per year though)

Free Priority Pass

$250 travel credit every year

Points transfer to their partners, including 16 different airlines

No foreign transaction fees

I don’t love this card because I don’t use a lot of their transfer partners but if you stay in a lot of hotels and use any of their transfer partners frequently, this is a must get card because it pays for itself and is easy to get points through their spending bonus structure!

—-> Sign up for this card by clicking here!

American Express EveryDay

I love this no-fee Amex card for the bonus points and the 2x points at supermarkets. I use it when I’m buying groceries because it’s a great way to rack up Amex points. When you sign up for this card, you’ll get:

20% extra points when you use your card 20 or more times each billing cycle

2x points at supermarkets (up to $6,000 per year)

1 point for every dollar spent

Double points on every dollar of eligible travel purchases when you book through AmexTravel.com

It’s simple, it’s easy, it’s a quick way to get points. —-> Sign up for this card by clicking here!

Capital One Venture

I used to really dislike this card but, with the recent changes they made last year and the addition of transfer partners and 10x points on hotels via hotels.com, this is now one of my favorite credit cards. I absolutely think you should get this card, especially if you’re looking for a no-fee, easy to use card. When you sign up for this card, you get:

No fees for the first year, $95 after that

50,000 bonus miles once you spend $3,000 within the first three months

Unlimited 2x miles on every dollar spent

10x miles on bookings via hotels.com

Transfer miles to any of their 10+ travel partners

Up to $100 credit for Global Entry or TSA PreCheck

No foreign transaction fees

Factor in the free first year and this a card that should be in your wallet. When they relaunched it, I liked it so much I got one myself! —-> Sign up for this card!

Chase Freedom

If you’re looking for something more in the ways of cashback and/or want to stick with Chase points over Amex points, this is the best card for it. It’s simple and easy to use and the cashback points give you more flexibility than points. For a traveler like myself, I prefer points but, for some people, like my dad who doesn’t fly a lot, he’d rather get cashback. So he actually has this card. When you sign up for this card, you’ll get:

No annual fee

$200 cash back after you spend $500 on purchases in your first three months

5% cash back on up to $1,500 in combined purchases in bonus categories each quarter, and unlimited 1% cash back on all other purchases

If you’re like my dad and want a no-fee card that gives you cash back, then this card is for you!

—-> Sign up for this card by clicking here!

***

One thing to remember is that there’s not one card to use for all occasions. Each card has its perks, so you want to maximize your point earning by sticking and matching your spending. I use three or four cards for all my spending. Chase for travel and restaurants, American Express for groceries, Delta for travel perks on the airline, and Marriott for my hotel stays. That way I always get the most points possible for every dollar you spend without spreading my points around too much.

So, if you’re looking for a travel credit card, pick one of the above. They are the best in my opinion.

Advertiser Disclosure: “Nomadic Matt has partnered with CardRatings for our coverage of credit card products. Nomadic Matt and CardRatings may receive a commission from card issuers.”

Editorial Disclosure: “Opinions, reviews, analyses & recommendations are the author’s alone, and have not been reviewed, endorsed or approved by any of these entities.”

Book Your Trip: Logistical Tips and Tricks

Book Your Flight Find a cheap flight by using Skyscanner or Momondo. They are my two favorite search engines because they search websites and airlines around the globe, so you always know no stone is being left unturned.

Book Your Accommodation You can book your hostel with Hostelworld as they have the largest inventory. If you want to stay somewhere other than a hostel, use Booking.com, as it consistently returns the cheapest rates for guesthouses and cheap hotels. I use them both all the time.

Don’t Forget Travel Insurance Travel insurance will protect you against illness, injury, theft, and cancellations. It’s comprehensive protection in case anything goes wrong. I never go on a trip without it, as I’ve had to use it many times in the past. I’ve been using World Nomads for ten years. My favorite companies that offer the best service and value are:

World Nomads (for everyone below 70)

Insure My Trip (for those over 70)

Looking for the best companies to save money with? Check out my resource page for the best companies to use when you travel! I list all those I use to save money when I travel — and they will save you time and money too!

The post The Best Travel Credit Cards for 2019 appeared first on Nomadic Matt's Travel Site.

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president-coriolanus-snow · 7 years

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“You live in your mom’s basement? Back in my day ...”

Um ... Well actually let me explain to you a thing ... It’s literally impossible to live on your own anymore. I make above minimum wage, I’d consider myself lucky in that regard, and it’s still impossible for me to live on my own. I make about $1600 a month (take home pay) ... So lets break that down shall we? (Keeping in mind these prices are Canadian) Where I live, vacancy rates are at a whopping 0.9% .... That’s less than 1% chance of finding an apartment. If you ARE able to find an apartment, you’re looking at $1200 a month if not more, that leaves me with a whole $400 left. Lets add in $95 for my bus pass, which is the cheapest travel option here, it would be a LOT more if you had a car. I’m left with $395. On average for an apartment utilities are $155 a month Brings me down to $240

$85 for a cell phone. Brings me down to $155

Internet is on average $64 which brings me down to $91

Now lets calculate in food costs .... Which for 1 person is on the low range $200 a month I'm now at -$109 (Yes, That’s a minus sign)

RRSPs which are required if you want to retire at any point in your life - $100 a month I'm now at -$209

Tenant Insurance is on average about $41 a month Brings me to -250

Medications Which for me alone is about $180 a month.

Which brings me to a ground total of -480

Just for the things the average household has - I would need to make $480 more a MONTH than I already make.

This is not including the cost of anything else that is a requirement that could pop up. Ex. Ambulance - $550 Dental - Which a check up alone is $110 not to mention the work that would need to be done which can be in the thousands. Eye care - Which a check up alone is $130/Glasses on average $300-500 Clothes - Which can easily be a couple hundred dollars a year, even if you shopped at Value Village. Need nice clothes for work? There's another good chunk of change. Need new shoes? There another $100+ unless you want to buy cheap shoes you’ll have to replace in a month or two.

And heaven forbid you want to go out with your friends. It's literally impossible to live on a single income ...

Not to mention if you’re a single mother?! Whooo watch out! There’s an extra $1400 a month, which might I add is a GOOD portion of women who are working minimum wage. So, as a Millennial, I’d really like for someone to explain to me how it’s possible for me to not live in my mom’s basement.

“Well in my day I was married by your age, we had two incomes coming into the house. And we had a baby to take care of.”

Really Grandma? Back in your day a house cost $85,000, your education could be paid off in a year working a part time job, you didn’t have to pay $300 a month on daycare you had your mother watch her because she was already retired, and your husband was a drunk who died of kidney failure because he spent all his money on booze.

#Millenials #Millenial #Finances #Single Income

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thewanderingkru · 7 years

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5 DAYS IN BURMA FOR LESS THAN 300!

Burma, the old name of Myanmar is a country in South East Asia. It is known for its beautiful and enchanting pagodas, natural wonders, and of course, its rich and unique culture.

Last July of this year, I spent my long weekend in Burma for less than 300 US DOLLARS (approximately 10,000 Thai Baht/ 15,000 Philippines Peso). For a country that is not very familiar to everyone, or perhaps, still, an undiscovered touristy place, this is definitely a must place to visit.

(Flying with Myanmar Airways International featuring my first Burmese meal. Yay!)

In this blog, I will share my thoughts, insights, as to how, I spent my five day itinerary in Burma for less than 300 USD!

DAY 1 (Bangkok to Yangon)

It takes about an hour from Suvarnabhumi Airport (Bangkok) to Yangon International Airport. I arrived at Yangon (a city in Myanmar) at around 8PM, although it took me an hour to really got outside the airport. From the airport, it took about 20-30 minutes to the city center (although it depends on the traffic), lucky as I am, I have a best friend who happens to work in Yangon. Got a free taxi ride! Yay!

As for visa fees: As a Philippine Passport holder, I got a 14-day visa free since Philippines and Myanmar (Burma) are both members of ASEAN. So, when you arrive at the immigration, just show your passport, and of course, your boarding passes.

As for the taxi fares:

(City Center to the airport and vice versa fare: 5,000 - 10,000 kyats/ 100 Thai Baht - 250 Thai Baht/ 3 - 5 USD) However, it depends on how you haggle. The lower the price, the better! As for this trip, although I’ve only traveled in South East Asia so far, this is, perhaps, the cheapest taxi fares I’ve had.

Since it is a bit late then, although, I’ve had a hotel booked, I’ve decided to couch surf at my best friend’s place (Well, my best friend of course, offered to stay at his place for a night), because of course, it would be much better and lesser the expense.

As soon as we arrived at my friend’s place, changed clothes, and ready ourselves for late dinner and of course, in hope of finding a good bar, or club, to make the most of the night on my first day in Burma. Fast forward, we had our dinner and of course, party!

(First decent meal/dinner after an exhausting trip. You can get this at dinner meal for two approx 8,000 Kyats/200 Thai Baht/5 USD for two at 365 Cafe Yangon International Hotel)

Yes, for about 5 USD, you can get a huge burger meal at that price with a Mango smoothie (seasoned)!

(Cheers to the good life with a picturesque view of the Shwedagon Pagoda and a local Myanmar draft beer at a Sky Bar Yangon International Hotel)

And of course, while the night is still young, although, it’s almost midnight, perhaps, time for Cinderella to go home, well, not for us. We went to a sky bar (free entrance) located near Yangon International Hotel. No need for taxi as you just have to walk. Beer costs: 2,000 Kyats/2 USD

Thus, ending the first day in Burma at the MUSE Club, still, near the Yangon International Hotel.

(Clubbing with my best friend, and of course, with the locals at MUSE CLUB)

MUSE CLUB Entrance Fee: 6,000 Kyats/150 Thai Baht/4 USD

TOTAL OF MY FIRST DAY TRIP: 11 USD

2nd day (FULL DAY TOUR TRIP IN YANGON)

From last night’s jaunts, we’ve started the day at around 10 in the morning, went to a really good brunch place in downtown Yangon and had our brunch.

(Yep, that’s full pack meal for the whole day Pagoda trip in Yangon)

(Cozy ambiance for brunch at the Brunch Society, downtown Yangon, nearby Sule Pagoda)

Brunch cost: 5,000 Kyats/4 USD each. Not bad for a full pack meal!

After our full-packed brunch, we went to our first stop: Sule Pagoda!

(Favorite view at the The Sule Pagoda over the foot bridge at Downtown Yangon)

Entrance Fee: FREE!

Although it’s a really beautiful Pagoda, and it was my first sight-seeing of one of the beautiful Pagodas in Burma, we didn’t enter, as there was of some sort of a Buddhist ceremony. Also, during that time, it was a Buddhist holiday in Myanmar.

As we continue our walk around Sule Pagoda, we came across at some local markets along the way.

(Colorful sights at a local market in downtown Yangon)

This local market is actually located near Maha Bandula Park in downtown Yangon.

(Selfies shouldn’t be missed, of course!)

Entrance Fee: FREE!

After spending some time around Maha Bandula Park and Sule Pagoda, we went to one of the most visited Pagoda, the Shwedagon Pagoda.

Going to Shwedagon Pagoda wasn’t really that far from Sule Pagoda, however, due to the weather, as it was really hot then, we had to take a taxi.

TAXIS AROUND DOWNTOWN YANGON: 2,000 Kyats - 5,000 Kyats/1USD - 3 USD (Note: And again, since, the taxis in Yangon doesn’t have a meter, so, all you gotta do, is to haggle. Make use of that haggling skills!) I got mine for FREE since my best friend paid the taxi. THANK YOU, BEST FRIEND!

ENTRANCE FREE: 8,000 Kyats/4 USD

Of course, perhaps, just like everyone else in this world, when entering a religious or a holy place, there should be a dress code for everyone. So, no shorts or slippers or shoes when entering the Pagoda.

I bought myself a longyi (this is a local sheet of cloth widely worn in Burma), in entering the Pagoda. Although you can rent a longyi for 3,000 Kyats at the entrance of the Pagoda, however, I bought mine, for souvenir. :)

Longyi: 5,000 Kyats/3 USD

It was my first time then, to see a crowd, it’s like a concert or convention, or more like a pilgrimage, as it was more like a feeling of the whole Burma is at the Shwedagon Pagoda, then I was reminded that, it was a Buddhist holiday.

After a few walks around the Pagoda. Yes, it’s huge! We went to another local tourist spot, the Kandawgyi Lake. Just a few minutes walk from Shwedagon Pagoda.

After visiting the Pagodas, bucket list checked! We had our time to chill at the moment in the lake. It was a bit exhausting as the weather was really hot then, so don’t forget to bring bottled water while on a day trip.

Kandawgyi Lake Fee: FREE!

After we had our moments at the lake to chill, we went back to my best friend’s place as I had to prepare for a night bus trip to Mandalay and Bagan. It’s another cities in Burma known for its ancient and historical Pagodas.

Around 7 in the evening, I arrive at the bus terminal. I booked my overnight bus trip online at JJ EXPRESS, you can look for them in their facebook page. All you gotta do is just private message them.

Taxi ride from my friend’s place to the bus terminal: 10,000 kyats/245 Thai Baht/7 USD

If you’re wondering that, if it’s a little bit pricey, because, downtown Yangon to the Bus Terminal takes around an hour or two drive, depending on the traffic. Thus, it was typically the price going to the terminal. Also, I got myself an air conditioned taxi. And by the way, normally, the taxis in Yangon doesn’t always have an AC, so might as well, bring a fan, and of course, water!

As for the bus trip, I got free food and drinks. Well, it’s more just like riding in an airplane. Plus, a comforter!

Overnight sleeper bus trip fee: 19 USD

TOTAL OF DAY 2: 36 USD

DAY 3 (Bagan)

At around 5 in the morning, I arrived from Yangon to Bagan. So, there’s new and old Bagan. I stayed in new Bagan, where the chill and perhaps, hippie, as they say, areas in Bagan.

As soon as I arrive in Bagan, all foreigners should pay for the national park fee. Then, you get the rest of the Pagodas/Stupas for free (Although, not exactly since I paid 20 USD, lol!). So, always keep your national park ticket when entering Pagodas/Stupas in Bagan, as they sometimes, ask you for it. Or, you might pay another 20 USD for it.

Bagan National Park Fee: 25,000 Kyats/20 USD

I paid in Kyats (Burma currency) since, the conversion then, was like, 25,000 Kyats = 18 USD. Saved 2 USD. Yay!

Haggling skills doesn’t always work when there’s a fixed price, though. As for the taxi from the Bagan bus terminal to my hotel costs 15,000 kyats. Expect that this is the normal price. Bus terminal to the hotels normally around 20-30minutes ride. Taxi fare: 10 USD

When I arrived at my hotel, it was almost 5:30 then, and I had to hurry as I need to catch up the sunrise in the Bagan temples. I rented an e-bike for 8,000 Kyats. Lucky me, as my best friend told me that renting e-bikes normally costs 10k - 11k kyats. Well, another perks, perhaps, since it’s a hotel e-bike.

It was also a moment of rush, as I myself, still in sleepy mode, asked the receptionist for the maps about the best spots of pagodas to catch sunrise, although, I have no idea at the moment since it was my first time in Bagan, dared to drive the e-bike with using only the map. And finally, found a good spot, for myself, to watch the sunrise in Bagan.

(Breathtaking moment while watching the sunrise in Bagan)

I know, this photo doesn’t give justice as to what my eyes saw at that very moment. Bagan is really beautiful as it is. As I barely remembered, it was only in my dreams to visit this country, and specifically, this place. Well, as they say, if you want to make your dreams come through, you have to work hard for it. Make it to a point that you do it. Privilege as it seems, but this travel session, took me months to save and make the most of this trip. At those moments, too, was, while watching the sunrise at the pagoda, perhaps, one of the best highlights of my 2017.

(Of course, selfie, in my most, unusual and sleepless self. I had to wear my long sleeve then, since I forgot to bring a coat during this trip. Well, after all, smile!)

After sunrise watching, at around 7, I had to go back to the hotel and check-in. Thus, I had to get more sleep, since I didn’t really sleep well while at the bus, perhaps because of excitement of the wonders of the unknown. Hours later, around 10, I had my time for breakfast and took a dip in the hotel pool.

Supposedly, check-ins are usually at 2PM, however, I called the hotel the night before I arrive for an early check-in at around 5AM since I will be arriving very early. Due to circumstances, they are fully booked. But as soon as I arrived there, they got me checked in at 7AM. Lucky me, again!

Buffet breakfast for 5,000 Kyats/3 USD. Yep, that’s eat-all-you can! Since arriving earlier, I will have my free breakfast the day after my check-in. Still, for only 3 USD, why not!

By the way, as for my hotel, I booked at booking.com and checked in at the Floral Breeze Hotel, New Bagan. from 79 USD to 29 USD/Per night (Since it was low-season, as they say). Fast and easy transaction! Plus, very welcoming receptionist! They will help you with your itinerary trip while in Bagan.

(Morning dip at the pool after a heavy breakfast)

After some swimming time, I prepared myself for a whole day trip in the Old Bagan, Mandalay. With only maps and google maps with me, I traveled for about 20 - 30 minutes to get there. Visited the Stupas and some Pagodas. I didn’t really have an exact itinerary for the day because all I ever want was just to let things flow and make the moments do its worth.

Stupas and Pagodas fee: FREE! (Well, since I already paid when entering the national park)

(Afternoon journey to Old Bagan, Mandalay with my e-bike, locals, and my shadow)

(Shwezigon Pagoda at Old Bagan, Mandalay under the heat of the sun… Just imagine how hot it is while walking bare foot)

(Don’t mind my sweaty face while at the market as it was really and literally hot then)

After some time at the Pagodas, outside of it, was a local market, bought something for souvenirs and more longyis!

Souvenir shopping cost: 30K kyats/22 USD

(Stop-over for lite brunch at Sharky’s in Old Bagan, although it looks lite, but the chicken sandwich was huge!)

Lunch: 7,000 kyats/5 USD

After lunch, pagoda visits, and souvenir shopping, I went back to the hotel to take a rest, refresh myself and wait for the sunset. At around 5pm, I went back again outside, in hope of sunset viewing and of course, taking a photo of it. However, the sun got shy. Unfortunately, I wasn’t able to take pictures of it. Well, regardless of it, I got myself my own Pagoda to watch the views for myself.

(It’s just me, the pagoda, my backpack, and of course, my longyi)

(Afternoon solitude moment in Bagan, Burma)

Traveling alone can sometimes be lonely, or, perhaps, most of the time, but I think, it’s all about in the state of mind. On a personal perspective, I think, traveling alone can be fun, too, of course, because you get to discover your inner potentials especially in being responsible, vigilant, and most importantly, you discover more of yourself that you thought you couldn’t do it.

As twilight came, I went out to a local restaurant for dinner. After dinner, went back to the hotel and sleep.

Dinner cost: 5,000 Kyats/3 USD

DAY 3 TOTAL COST: 94 USD

DAY 4 (BAGAN to YANGON)

My fourth day in Burma was perhaps a bittersweet moment, as I have don’t want to leave yet, but reality hits, as I have to go back to Yangon the day before my flight.

(Morning dip before hitting reality)

I spent my morning just dipping at the pool and a full-pack breakfast in preparation for a 9-hour trip from Bagan to Yangon. It was drizzling and raining on midday til afternoon then. So, most of the time, I just spent my whole day sleeping at the bus and a bit feeling sick, because perhaps, I didn’t get to have lunch and just sleep the whole day. From 9 hour trip turns to 12 hour trip due to rain and traffic.

(”Are we there yet?” feeling… Nope, just traffic)

As soon as I arrive at downtown Yangon, I met up with my best friend again for dinner and some late shopping at junction city mall. Living in Thailand for a quite some time, there was no sign of any Philippine brand, as expected, of course. And of all places, I couldn’t believe that, I could find a Philippine brand shops in Yangon (Bench and Penshoppe), and without further notice, I bought stuff for my self. Perhaps, a proud moment, and of course, exciting moment for me. After all, we’ll never know what’s in store in the future.

(Wandering dolls for sale in Bagan)

Bus trip from Bagan to Yangon cost: 13,000 Kyats/9 USD

(It’s a bit cheaper since it’s not a VIP Sleeper Bus, thus VIP BUS travels only on a night trip)

Yangon bus terminal to downtown Yangon taxi cost: 10,000 kyats/7 USD

Dinner at Junction City: 5,000 Kyats/3 USD

Shopping: 10,000 Kyats/7 USD

(Not in my best smile at the time, I wonder, too. But my best friend is happy to shop with Bench at Junction City, Yangon)

DAY 4 TOTAL COST: 26 USD

DAY 5 (Flying back from Yangon to Bangkok)

Not as exciting as it seems, as the morning started with a drizzle and turned to heavy rain, I didn’t explore much of the city, but instead, I went for a local cafe hopping (the usual, every time I visit a place).

(Drizzling Yangon on my last day at Burma)

(Rewarding myself with local Burmese-style fried rice for breakfast… it may look the same as any other fried rice meal, but the taste really makes it unique and worth the penny)

I had my breakfast at a fancy local restaurant/cafe (Cafe 26) which somehow a bit pricey, although still, affordable. But the ambiance and the food was really delicious! At lunch time, my best friend, toured me to a local cafeteria, where they serve the one of the best Shan noodles (popular local dish in Burma).

(Shan Noodles with Fried Tofu)

Ultimately, as they say, never leave a place without trying their popular local dish. And so, before I leave this beautiful country, I got what I deserve! SHAN NOODLES for lunch. Yay! After lunch, I went to my to Yangon Airport and go back to reality.

Breakfast: 8,000 Kyats/6 USD

Lunch: 4,000 Kyats/3 USD (However, I got it for free since my best friend treat me)

Taxi from downtown Yangon to Yangon International Airport: 8,000 Kyats/6 USD

DAY 5 TOTAL COST: 12 USD

Airfare cost (Bangkok to Yangon) back and forth: 100 USD (Got it on sale with Myanmar Airways International)

OVERALL TOTAL COST: 279 USD.

(Waiting for my flight with my backpack, passport, and of course, my self at Yangon International Airport)

To wrap up everything about this journey, things change, plans change, people change, as it is inevitable, but one thing is for sure, if you want something to happen, it may be your dream, or your goals in life, work for it. Do it! Break barriers and of course, always be vigilant. But above all, love yourself first. Because, with loving yourself, you will understand your own worth, and what you are capable of.

Special mention to my best friend Max for taking care of me when I was in Yangon. Thank you very much!

8/22/2017

Updated: 8/23

#Myanmar #Bagan #Yangon #SoulSearching #Traveling #Alone #thesuperlex #thewanderingkru #backpacking

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gdolowokandi214-blog · 5 years

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We did it!! We raised $18,002 for charity

A year and a half ago, I saw a speech that changed my life - and the lives of at least 600 other people in the developing world.

I was at the World Domination Summit in Portland, where I'd later be speaking. I sat in the audience as Scott Harrison took the stage.

Scott is a former nightclub promoter who, at age 28, had a crisis of conscience. His job was encouraging people to get drunk. He smoked two packs a day. He gambled. He felt like he wasn't adding anything to the world. And he wasn't sure if, or how, he could.

“One day, I woke up and I realized I was the worst person I knew,” he wrote in an article on Medium.

He quit his job, sold most of his possessions, and spent the next two years as a photojournalist on a hospital ship off the coast of Liberia in west Africa. He saw diseases that were unlike anything he'd imagined.

As WIRED describes: “Some of the patients were grotesquely deformed by grapefruit-sized tumors, while others were nearly blind from cataracts that turned their eyes opaque.” (Here are images.)

He felt surprised - and then sad, then angry, then determined - when he realized that thousands of people die from preventable diseases, like cholera and dysentery, that are spread by drinking dirty water. More than 660 million people in the world don't have access to clean drinking water, which is almost 1 out of every 10 people. That's twice the population of the U.S.

That's unacceptable.

Scott decided to spend his life bringing safe water to the villages and communities that need it most. He came back to the U.S., threw a party at a nightclub, and raised the initial seed capital for charity:water. More than a decade later, he stood on the stage in Portland, sharing photos of the people whose lives he's changed.

I've seen many nonprofit leaders deliver speeches. But there was something about Scott's mission that struck me. Maybe it's because nearly everyone at that conference in Portland seemed to be carrying a BPA-free water bottle. Maybe it was the experience of walking past the hallway drinking fountains without a second glance. But for some reason, in that moment, I thought: “I have a platform. I could use it to save lives.”

Cue the eyeroll. I get it. I get it. “Saving lives” is a lofty goal, and its achievement is hard to pinpoint. That's the thing about prevention; you never know whom you may have spared.

A decade ago, when I worked at a newspaper, we'd write articles about community nonprofits on slow news days. The staff would refer to these as “angel-sheds-a-tear” stories.

Don't get me wrong; we supported these efforts. But the stories seemed so cliche, so repetitive, that a part of me wondered: “Are we actually doing anything, or are we just making ourselves feel better?”

The gulf between cynicism and hope is bridged by effectiveness, and Scott built an organization that's indisputably effective. Their mission is critical. What's more basic, more fundamental to survival, than drinking water? Their results are tangible, specific, and easy to verify.

They've funded more than 28,000 water projects, like digging wells, creating rainwater catchment systems, and distributing biosand filters. Their projects can be tracked on Google Maps.

They've also opened two separate bank accounts. They use one account for their administrative overhead. This account gets funded by a small group of donors. They use 100 percent of their other account for water projects. This account is funded by public donations. This means every dime they raise from the public goes directly to water projects. Their accounts are audited. They can prove it.

I interviewed Scott on my podcast last year, and I told my audience that I had a lofty goal: I wanted to raise at least $12,000 in the year 2018 for charity:water.

If we raised that amount, Afford Anything could sponsor a water project. We would fund a specific project, tangible and GPS-identifiable. It would exist because of this community.

I started 2018 with huge enthusiasm for this goal. My Chief Sanity Officer Erin and I designed three shirts and sold them on Amazon, and we donated 100 percent of profits ($5.38 per shirt) to charity:water. I also set up a page on the charity:water website where people could make direct donations.

Then I waited. And watched. And bummed myself out.

By July 2018, we'd raised around $3,000. While that's amazing and helpful and I'm grateful for it … it also felt like a blow. We were halfway through the year, but only one-fourth of the way to our $12,000 goal.

There was no way we'd be able to raise $12,000 by the end of the year, I thought. I felt deflated. Disappointed. I knew I should feel grateful for what we have achieved, but I kept feeling like this was a setback. I'd been in contact with Anna, who works on the charity:water team, both last year and this year; we'd spoken on the phone about Afford Anything's sponsorship campaign. I didn't want to have to call Anna at the end of 2018 and say, “Sorry, we failed. We tried to raise enough to sponsor a project, and we failed.”

I spent the late summer and fall making peace with that idea. I told myself that if I could make any difference at all, that's something to celebrate. I told myself that it's better to fall short of lofty goals than to create errors-of-thinking-too-small, as I'm prone to doing. I told myself that it doesn't matter if we sponsor a project or not; what matters is that there's at least one human being who won't suffer from typhoid or cholera or guinea worm disease. This isn't about us, it's about the person on the other side.

I found peace with it. I let it go. I accepted what is.

And then I checked the charity:water fundraising page, and saw this:

HOLY MOLY WE DID IT!!!!!!!!! We did it, we did it, we did it, we did it, we did it!!!!

We - no pun intended - we blew it out of the water!!!!!

I'd like to express massive, massive gratitude to several people right now, starting with Richard Potter, a podcast listener who generously matched donations up to $4,000. He fueled the fire that made this possible.

He made the donation that brought us up to the $4,000 mark, and then he announced that he'd match contributions, dollar-for-dollar, up to a $4,000 limit.

When I announced this on my podcast, the floodgates opened (no pun intended yet again). This community responded with enthusiasm unlike anything I've ever seen. Donations skyrocketed from $4,000 to $8,000 nearly overnight. Richard matched these donations, as promised, which brought the total balance to $12,000 and allowed us, the Afford Anything community, to become the official project sponsor of a water project.

WE DID IT!!!

And can I admit something? I thought it would stop there. Yes, I know; ye of little faith. I thought that once we reached the matching contribution limit, donations would slow to a trickle. (So many puns. I can't help it.)

Thank goodness I was wrong.

You all amaze me so much … the donations keep coming! Here are a few of the many:

Susan, a podcast listener, gave $300 after she watched an interview with Scott. A family in Israel, including their daughters ages 9, 13 and 16, contributed $191. A podcast listener named Clara gave $15 with a note that said, “Only a little bit as I'm a student, but it all helps.” And a listener named Mark donated $250 with a note that said, “I'm so proud of how you handled Suze.”

Massive thanks to Lancy Erdmann, who donated $2,000, J Clark, who donated $1,500, two anonymous donors who gave $1,000 each, Charles Rosenbusch, who gave $500, and the many, many people who gave $100, $50, $25, $20, $15, $10 and $5. I'm also grateful to everyone who bought a t-shirt to support the campaign.

The support keeps coming!!

Wow.

Tonight, as I write this, with 15 days remaining before the end of the year, we've raised more than $18,000 for clean drinking water.

Thank you. This is amazing. Afford Anything is you. It's this community. It's this incredible group, gathering together to improve lives and help others and focus on money and purpose and meaning and contribution and life.

We are Afford Anything. And we are creating a legacy.

____

To support this campaign:

Buy a t-shirt on Amazon. 100 percent of the profits will go directly to charity: water.

Make a donation at affordanything.com/water

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bookswithmissingpages · 6 years

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He was totally gorgeous, and he knocked me off my feet the first time I saw him. I knew right away that I wanted to go home with him, but what I didn't know was that I'd end up falling for him. The night we met I was at girls' night at one of the gay clubs where Philippe worked. The gay clubs would open their doors to women one or two nights a week because they always had the hottest-looking guys working there, and ladies would line up around the block to get in. I saw Philippe dancing for some girl and thought he was adorable. I wanted him to dance for me too, so I gave twenty dollars to another dancer and asked him to get Philippe for me. I waited for him, but to my surprise, Philippe never came over. I watched as he danced for two more girls and then said, "Fuck him," and decided to leave with my friends. As I was heading toward the door, Philippe finally came over and asked me what I was doing later. "Coming to get you," I said, try- ing not to blush. My friends were all giggling behind me. I really just wanted a little affection. At 3:00 A.M., when Philippe was due to get off work, I drove up to the club, and there he was standing outside. He smiled at me with these big dimples as he got into the car. 94 We ended up taking some ecstasy together late and then couldn't keep our hands off each other. We were both instantly in love and checked into one of those cheesy motels with heart-shaped water beds and Jacuzzis in every room. To this day I remember that as one of the most passionate nights of my life. Philippe and I spent every night together for the next six months after that. During the course of that first night, I was flirting with Philippe and told him that I ran an escort agency. It sounded better than being a part-time dancer and a dealer's ex-girlfriend, and I wanted to impress him. It worked. I definitely had his attention after that, but the truth was I hadn't run girls since I was in Baltimore. After what happened there, I hadn't been in too much of a hurry to get back into business for myself and deal with that kind of responsibil- ity. At the time, the fact that I was kind of lying didn't matter to me because my plan was to have a one-night stand—my first ever, since I'd been a serial monogamist up until then—and never see the guy again. The thing that bothers me the most about love is how hard it is to control. The next morning I realized how much I actually liked Philippe. I didn't want him to think I was a liar, so I decided the only thing I could do was make my lie true by starting up a new business. I figured I could use some more money anyway. Ignor- ing the fact that I had no clients and no employees, I threw up a quarter-page ad in one of the local skin magazines advertising my new agency. Twenty-four hours later I was in business. The ad for what I was calling my University Escorts service not only attracted customers, it attracted girls looking for work, just like when I opened my New York brothel. I started out by offer- ing better-than-average rates so that I could lure some of the best girls away from other employers. It totally worked. After the first week I had ten girls ready to work for me. Starting up may have been easy, but staying in business was hard. At the time the going rate in Montreal was $140 Canadian 95 for an hour-long appointment. Of that, $70 to $80 typically went to the girl (or her pimp, as was often the case there), and $20 went to the driver who brought her to her appointment, leaving only $50 or less for the agency. And with the better rates I was offering girls, I often got even less than that. It was chump change. The problem was $140 was al most of the locals could afford to pay. On top of that, competition was fierce. In a pretty small city, there were over three hundred agencies to choose from, many of which were run by biker gangs, who had the local French-speaking market pretty much sewn up. So if you tried to charge more, guys would just go somewhere else. A lot of agencies even offered dis- counts to survive, advertising girls at as low as $120 an hour. At those rates, with my gambling habit (sometimes I lost as much as $5,000 a week), I'd have had to work myself silly to make a decent living. Everyone else around me just accepted these standards, but I decided I needed to figure out something better. Experience had shown me that Americans were willing to pay a lot more, so I fig- ured the only real money would be in marketing to tourists. I started taking out ads in American newspapers and tourist magazines. Unfortunately, I soon discovered that there weren't enough tourists to sustain the business, and I knew that if I didn't keep my girls working, they'd leave me just as they'd left their last agencies in search of something better. So in order to keep things going, I had to appeal to both the wealthier tourists and the cheap locals at the same time. That's when I came up with the idea of having dif- ferent categories of girls at different prices. I called my service University Escorts because I planned to mar- ket my girls as if they were al young coeds just discovering their sexuality, the kind who went to school during the day and partied hard at night. I kept that $140 price point that everyone else around me was charging, labeling those girls "Sexy Classmates." That was the low-end category. In the middle I had "The Honor Roll," a 96 smaller group of higher-class girls who were more experienced and gave better service for a rate of $200 an hour. Then we had our "Teachers' Pets," who went for $250 to $300; we usually rolled out this category when there was a big event or convention in town that attracted lots of tourists. And every month I'd feature a different "Student of the Month," a luxurious treat for $500. The secret was that there really was no difference among the categories. I used the same girls to fill all levels, depending on who was available when a call came in. Still, it worked. The marketing gimmick attracted customers of al types. There was something for everyone. Most important, it made those willing to pay more feel like they were getting something extra special for their money, which made them more inclined to use my service instead of another one. I still had to hustle, but during a good week I made $5,000 for myself. That was much better than the $1,000 per week I had been making when I first started out dancing in Montreal. I wasn't very fair to my girls back then. I figured that their job was pretty much the same regardless of what the client was pay- ing, so when I got a higher-paying client, I pocketed the extra myself. After all, if the girls were willing to take $80 or less per customer before, then they would stil take it now. Don't forget, I started out paying them more than the other agencies did. But since the girls were the ones who collected the money, they knew what was happening, and I began to get complaints from some of them. Sometimes, to make a girl happy, I would pay her a small bonus over what she was used to getting when she was working as a "Teachers' Pet" or "Student of the Month," but it was really just a token amount. If I had to do it all over again, I would pay the girls more. The truth is they deserved it. I used only local girls then, and Montreal girls are very hardworking. Because they have a more European sensibility, they also tend to be more uninhibited and very sexy. There are so many adorable little French girls there, it's no wonder 97 that there's so much prostitution. I had one very finicky client who liked only girls who weighed under one hundred pounds. He would even bring a scale with him to the hotel and make the girl stand on it before he paid her. I can think of maybe one or two American girls I've worked with over the years who would be able to satisfy his fetish, but there, I could almost always find some- one he'd be happy with every time he called. I bring in girls from Montreal to work for me to this day because they tend to be so good at their jobs. The saddest part of it all was that I could get away with paying girls less in Montreal no matter how good they were because the trade there was mostly run by pimps, who barely paid them any- thing. I came to realize that if I had paid them better, they proba- bly would have given better service and that could have meant more repeat business, which would have made my job a lot easier because I wouldn't have to be reaching out to new tourists all the time. But even more than that, as I've said, I believe in karma, and I think the way I treated the girls back then lost me some points in that area. Now I give my girls a standard percentage of the price of each appointment no matter what it is, so that if I make more, they do too. I wasn't doing business the right way in Montreal, but at least I learned from my mistakes, and now I believe in always sharing the wealth.

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longlivekookie · 4 years

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Watching Away A Small Fortune - How Watching Television Depletes Your Retirement Accounts

I, as most Americans, love to invest extensive energy squandering endlessly before the TV. I have my "can't miss" appears yet don't restrict myself to those... I watch whatever looks intriguing. Presently I don't watch the national normal of four hours of TV daily, yet like the vast majority I likewise love motion pictures. I watch at any rate three or four motion pictures each week. I have almost 200 motion pictures in my very own video assortment.

So how does sitting before the TV add up to lost dollars? Indeed, there are a great deal of money related commitments that go with t.v. watching, from connecting the link, to purchasing your TV and sound framework, to leasing motion pictures. This is one of the most costly types of amusement.

Sitting in front of the TV

Americans presently watch 28 hours of TV every week. This number is declining with the expansion in web time yet regardless of what you look like at it four hours daily is a great deal of time.

With an end goal to enhance happiness in t.v. land there are numerous extravagances that you can enjoy: your TV itself, TV administration (link, satellite, HD, and so forth), and even the garbage you consume while you squander.

The Gear. I don't generally comprehend why individuals who make under $15,000 a year need a 60" plasma screen (right now retailing around $4000) yet go into any trailer park and you'll see this is a clear need. Substantially more sensible is a $1000 32-inch LCD. Or then again https://best-123movies.com/other-brands/view47 in case you're similar to me, a 27 inch no-name brand level screen ($250) works fine and dandy. You ought to hope to utilize your TV for 10-20 years before redesigning or supplanting. At 20 years the value breakdown (barring power) for TV buys would be: Plasma ($200), LCD ($50), cheapo ($12.50).

You'll most likely additionally need to purchase a DVD player ($20-150), VCR ($35-80), DVR ($100-1000), and speakers ($50-1000). You likely know just as I do that purchasing hardware modest includes some significant downfalls... they separate rapidly. You don't need to be indulgent, yet don't be modest with your toys either. On the off chance that you purchase better than average peripherals: DVD $75, VCR $50, DVR $250, and speakers $300 (total=$675) and they each most recent 10 years, that lone adds up to about $70 every year or $6/month.

The Service. Link or satellite can without much of a stretch expense $40-80/month. Toss on the additional channels, on-request programming, and TiVo and you could be burning through $100 or all the more every month. The vast majority can't envision existence without link and Tivo however I've overseen it fine and dandy. The vast majority of the significant systems presently show a large number of their shows online for nothing, and for my other review needs I look at TV programs from the library. Need a brisk method to spare $100 every month, take a stab at surrendering link. A decent choice for the individuals who NEED web, nearby telephone, and link is packaging those expenses. You can normally get it around $100/month for each of the three which should set aside you some cash.

Separating TV

Poorly conceived notion: Buy a 60 inch plasma ($15/month), get all the extravagant peripherals ($20/month), advanced link with additional channels and TiVo ($100/month), and go throughout the day consistently squandering endlessly. Absolute: $135/month.

Smart thought: Buy a 32-inch LCD ($6/month), get nice peripherals ($6/month), digital TV ($30/month), and at times go out for a walk. All out: $42/month

Better thought: Buy a conventional 27-inch level screen ($1/month), not brand name yet dependable peripherals ($4/month), and watch t.v. on the web or look at DVDs from the library (free). All out: $5/month

Best thought: Give up t.v. by and large. Complete: free

In the event that you conclude you are investing a lot of energy and cash on TV, bravo! The cash you spare every month from going from impractical notion to better thought is $120/month. Through the span of your working lifetime (35 years) that cash put resources into the financial exchange (10% annualized return) would return you $1.4 million dollars.

Paying for films

Over the most recent five years I have amassed about 200 VHS, DVDs, and iPod motion pictures and TV programs. Twelve or so of those motion pictures were given to me as blessings yet the incredible larger part I bought myself. Since the greater part of these buys originated from carport deals, Goodwill, and eBay I paid just a small amount of the evaluated retail esteem. I gauge I spent some place in the ballpark of $600-700 for my whole assortment (retail would have run them near $5000). So I spent somewhat over $100 every year taking care of my video assortment.

I likewise watch films that I don't possess. Some time ago I went to Blockbuster yet now I can't envision paying $5 to watch a film when I can hold up several months and purchase a similar film online at a similar cost. Netflix has been the best approach for a considerable lot of my companions, however once more, I don't comprehend the entire idea of leasing... for what reason should I be paying $5-25 every month to obtain films. I can do that at the open library for nothing which is actually what I do. I look at a few motion pictures every week. For motion pictures I just can hardly wait to see I go to the market and lease it for $1 out of the Redbox machine. "Leasing" motion pictures right now spend under $10 every year. The most ideal approach, be that as it may, is by not going through any cash whatsoever and looking at your films from the open library or getting from companions. This will possibly spare you several dollars every year and thousands over your lifetime.

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shumparker1953-blog · 5 years

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We did it!! We raised $18,002 for charity

A year and a half ago, I saw a speech that changed my life - and the lives of at least 600 other people in the developing world.

I was at the World Domination Summit in Portland, where I'd later be speaking. I sat in the audience as Scott Harrison took the stage.

“One day, I woke up and I realized I was the worst person I knew,” he wrote in an article on Medium.

As WIRED describes: “Some of the patients were grotesquely deformed by grapefruit-sized tumors, while others were nearly blind from cataracts that turned their eyes opaque.” (Here are images.)

That's unacceptable.

Cue the eyeroll. I get it. I get it. “Saving lives” is a lofty goal, and its achievement is hard to pinpoint. That's the thing about prevention; you never know whom you may have spared.

A decade ago, when I worked at a newspaper, we'd write articles about community nonprofits on slow news days. The staff would refer to these as “angel-sheds-a-tear” stories.

They've funded more than 28,000 water projects, like digging wells, creating rainwater catchment systems, and distributing biosand filters. Their projects can be tracked on Google Maps.

I interviewed Scott on my podcast last year, and I told my audience that I had a lofty goal: I wanted to raise at least $12,000 in the year 2018 for charity:water.

If we raised that amount, Afford Anything could sponsor a water project. We would fund a specific project, tangible and GPS-identifiable. It would exist because of this community.

Then I waited. And watched. And bummed myself out.

I found peace with it. I let it go. I accepted what is.

And then I checked the charity:water fundraising page, and saw this:

HOLY MOLY WE DID IT!!!!!!!!! We did it, we did it, we did it, we did it, we did it!!!!

We - no pun intended - we blew it out of the water!!!!!

He made the donation that brought us up to the $4,000 mark, and then he announced that he'd match contributions, dollar-for-dollar, up to a $4,000 limit.