#in 2019 i started keeping an electronic journal

[lizardtaro]

My Year in Review  - 2022

It is me, Taro! Yes, it's time for another Journal Update!! It sure has been a while...

So, um... yeah. What's up? I apologize for being kinda inactive these couple months, but that's because I kicked myself in the butt and did some stuff that was LONG overdue. I started out with said stuff in the second half of the year. There was this one time where I said: "Okay, Taro. Stop procrastinating. Finally do it." and then I started finishing my tasks one by one. Here's what I did:

✓ Updating my financials

An update to my building loan contract was long overdue. I concluded an additional building loan contract and my monthly payment towards that contract has increased from €790 to €1000. So, I'm saving up €12000 a year which might come in handy in the future when it comes to overhauling my house. I expect that I'd need about €400000 for house repairs, because there's a lot to do. And prices are constantly rising, so...

✓ Clearing out the attic + archiving all my school stuff

Imagine this: you buy something on Amazon or something, but you want to keep the box because you either expect that you might want to send the item back, or you expect that the item might break in a year and want to make use of warranty, or you want to keep the box because you might want to sell the item in its original box in the future. Those boxes piled up in my attic. But that wasn't the only stuff. There were also old electronic devices, old magazines, old school stuff and much more. I bought 8 big transparent boxes to keep that stuff in and made use of all of them. I also archived everything related to my school stuff by making videos and scanning documents - then I threw everything away since I still have it in digital form. Yes, thousands of documents - gone. But not quite. Because I still have everything in video form. I know it's a weird way to archive stuff, but that was the fastest way of transferring data to the digital world: by making videos of them. I made videos of me (or, well... more my hands) going through all my school stuff - secondary school, high school, vocational school, apprenticeship stuff and let the camera record everything in 4K resolution, so everything will still be readable on video. Clearing out the attic and archiving all my stuff took me months. But now everything is clean and tidy. In fact, the attic hasn't been this clean over the past 15 years!

✓ Doing the tax returns for 2019, 2020 and 2021

Another thing that was on my "to do"-list for quite some time. And I did it without even knowing how all this stuff really works. But thankfully, I let a tax accountant to my tax returns for 2015 - 2018, so I just looked at what he did and did the same for the years that follow (of course with different numbers and such). I got about €500 back from the tax office in total, which is line with what the tax accountant did. Also, I now know how to do this stuff, so I'll always do it at the start of every year for the previous year. No more procrastinating!

✓ Getting my money back from the hosting provider that charged me for 10 years in advance

Not sure if it's blunt incompetence, or if it's systematic - but the web hosting provider that I use to occasionally upload files to charged their customers for ten years in advance. And it started in 2019 already. I was confused when I looked at my bank account and noticed that the hosting provider took money from me. The reason why it took me so long to realize this mistake is because they usually just do it once a year, and every time I looked into my account I was like: "What, another year passed? Dang, time sure flies!". But instead of doing it yearly, they took money every few months. And when I actually inspected one of their invoices more closely, I realized that they charged me for the year 2032!!! And the previous years as well! I then checked the reviews for that hosting provider at TrustPilot and saw that I wasn't the only one what got charged for stuff way in the future. Instead of getting a lawyer and escalating the situation, I just wrote them a friendly e-mail asking for them to refund the money. A couple weeks later (yes, it takes WEEKS for them to respond!) I got a friendly response that they would refund the money. Six months later, and still no refund. I wrote them another friendly e-mail and then I actually received a reply from the CEO that they will refund the money in the next couple days. And - lo and behold - they did! But they also did the mistake of refunding me €100 too much because apparently they didn't read my e-mail correctly. So I got a couple years hosting for free, I guess. I wonder when they will charge me again. I can still log-in to the server and upload stuff. I know it would probably be best to drop that provider entirely, but I heard some stuff that it is kinda difficult to get away from them, lol. And I got my money back, so there's nothing to complain about. It is an incredibly shady provider though. I find it very unbelievable that they charge everyone for stuff way in the future because of an "accounting error"...

✓ Sorting all my papers

Deeply connected with the archiving as well, I sorted all my papers. Now there's a couple folders for all my stuff - car stuff, tax stuff, insurance stuff, bank stuff, school certificates, job applications, invoices, and so on. All is neat and tidy and organized.

✘ Applying for a second job

Too lazy for that, lmao! But a second job would probably be recommended due to inflation and rising energy costs. Maybe I'll try it next year. Writing the job application isn't the problem. The problem has always been the job interview.

✘ Getting 32TB of SSD storage

One of my Seagate drives is already throwing errors after just a couple years of usage. It is time to go full SSD. SSD's are faster, lighter, more robust and live a lot longer than traditional HDD's. The only problem is that they are also vastly more expensive than HDD's. So far, the "Samsung 870 QVO 8TB" provides the best "bang for your buck", but it's still very expensive at about €600 a pop. So I'd be spending €2400 just on storage. I'm afraid I'd need to wait until SSD storage becomes even cheaper. I just hope my HDD's survive until then. Black Friday, Cyber Monday, Cyber Week etc. didn't do much here.

✘ Getting fiber optics

Yes, it is finally time for fiber optics and vastly improved Internet speeds! But, sadly, it will take a little while longer. At the end of 2023 I'll be getting fiber optics at the LATEST. However, I think I'll get it in the first half of 2023. With fiber optics, my download speed will increase from 50mbit to 300mbit, and my upload speed will vastly increase from just 4mbit to 150mbit.

Well, that's about it for this year! Despite the horrible world situation, I'd say that 2022 was one of my most successful years. I finally overcame my procrastination and did all the stuff that needed to be done for years! Onward to 2023!

! Server open

Hit me up with a DM and I will grant you access to my Discord server! It's a very simple server (no roles, no bots, no bullsh*t) in which you can talk with others and share your artwork and stuff. Occasionally we do some online gaming sessions (Mario Kart 8 Deluxe, Dolphin netplay), movie sessions (via Parsec) and GarticPhone. Right now there are 9 people in my server in total.

! Tumblr

I am glad that Tumblr became more active in the past couple of months. I guess you can thank Musk for that, and also for the fact that Tumblr allows nudity again! I’ll try to be more active on here again as well!

#lizardtaro #year in review 2022 #personal

[mimimosas-blog1]

2021: Day 1, Reflection Journal

What new coping skills did I learn or emphasize to help me through 2020 (meditating, seeing a counselor, walking daily, eating healthier, being more financially responsible, being more honest with others about my emotional experience, getting help for an addiction, joining or starting a support group, performing spiritual rituals) that I plan to keep in my self-care first-aid kit for 2021?

Some coping mechanisms that really helped me get through the year of 2020 were cooking, socializing, cleaning, exercising, being financially responsible (created an Excel budget sheet), being honest with others, setting boundaries, alone time, reading, and keeping up with my hair and skin care. These are all really great tools that helped me throughout the year. I would definitely try to continue all of these listed items because even though the year wasn’t so great I didn’t complain too much... maybe because I knew I had to enjoy the little moments and my precious time that I couldn’t get back. I made the most of the majority of situations and always tried to focus on the positive. I would try to think about all the things I’m grateful for (which I should really be journaling but I just keep them in my thoughts). I am hoping that this is my new tool to help me journal more often. I am so bad about writing everything down because I have so much to say and my mind races faster than my hand writing it all down. 

Towards the end of the year, I slacked off on exercising because my life got so busy, so I really want to get back on my fitness routine at least 3 days a week. I was even proud of myself for trying to work out at least once or twice a week with an extremely busy schedule. I know I can complete at least 3 workouts every week for at least 30 minutes. The hardest part is starting and so I just need to get my routine in place. I should workout after work and then cook dinner. That’s a good plan.

Also towards the end of the year, I slacked off on reading books. I really want to get more books and really read them through. I also have ebooks but I find it so hard to sit here and read an electronic book... there is something about a physical book. However, I don’t have enough storage space to be buying a lot of books. I should try to read ebooks more. I will aim for one ebook and then finish my physical book that is half way finished.

I found so many tasty recipes that I want to try cooking! I am really excited about that. I never knew how much I enjoyed cooking. This year has really taught me how to cook (well sort of towards the end of 2019 but got really into it 2020). It all started with prepping my lunches for grad school since I was there all day long then it led to cooking with my boyfriend and then we ended up trying different recipes and cooked more often. I used to “hate” cooking, at least I thought I did! I am trying to find a dish that many people enjoy and I can bring that to outings haha! I also aim to be a great cook because living on my own will really test me.

Those are a few things that I really want to implement starting today. I have plenty of goals and things I like to improve on. I don’t like calling them new years resolutions though. Of course, there will be times where I don’t follow through and I won’t be so hard on myself. I will continue to love myself and my efforts and give myself credit for all the things I have gone through. There is a lot to endure in a day and I think we should all be proud of ourselves for making it through another day. Life isn’t easy.

Side notes: Crazy how 2020 flew by so quickly. So much has happened this year. I am so grateful for every single little thing that happened even though I was in a dark place at times. I am human and there will be ups and downs. I don’t need to hold high expectations of myself. I am not perfect and don’t promote perfection. 

[going-there-and-back-again]

tagged by @theleavesoflorien

So sorry for the long delay on this, Marianne, and thank you so much for tagging me!! had to do some school stuff and time got away from me :)

1. Do you prefer writing with a black pen or a blue pen?

Black!!

2. Would you prefer to live in the country or in the city?

ahhh i don’t know! i’ve lived in a city for most of my life but went to university in a much quieter area so it’s really hard to decide! I prefer towns, I think (small city center, old buildings, hanging lights, but also nature and greenery and rivers and hills and trees 😍😍) 

3. If you could learn a new skill, what would it be?

Asdfhjkl there are so many things I want to learn !!! I can play the piano but I really wish I was better ✨✨. And languages! LANGUAGES. There are so many languages I want to learn it’s an entirely unfeasible dream but I just want to read everything and translations just aren’t the same as originals, you know? (including Elvish, obviously, because Quenya/Sindarin are just so beautiful and they actually just sound like what they mean, you can hear the feeling and I love that so much). I wish I could bake (I tried making pound cake with dried fruit and let’s just say I was disappointed 😂😂😂). And do origami. And art (I can’t draw to save my life, but I’d love to be able to. I keep seeing scenes from movies or just pretty landscapes or imagining things from books and I want to draw them and I can’t). On the flip side of the spectrum, I like read and learn new things about science, too. Biochemistry and plants and physiology and the like. Haven’t read that stuff in ages, and there is no need for me to read them now, but I enjoy it :)

4. do you drink your tea/coffee with sugar?

Nope! Tea only, and no milk or sugar 😊🍵 

5. What was your favourite book as a child?

Does 12 years old fall within the boundary of childhood? If it does, then Lord of the Rings 😆😆. Other than that, hmm, it’s hard to choose. Gaiman’s Ocean at the End of the Lane was the last ‘children’s’ book I read (it’s been 7 years; I still love it). In primary I had a huge mystery phase and loved The Boxcar Children and A Series of Unfortunate Events. And Narnia (though I didn’t finish the series) !! Laura Ingalls Wilder’s Little House series was also one of my favorites 🌲👧🏻

6. Do you prefer baths or showers?

I like both :) Baths are a treat though, I usually just shower

7. If you could be a mythical creature, which one would you be?

Not sure...I think I once took a quiz and got ‘faun’? I want to be an Elf in Middle Earth most though! Or a hobbit 🍏🍊

8. Paper or electronic books?

Paper books all the way!! I read with a pencil in hand and if I can’t annotate it just doesn’t feel right 

9. What is your favourite item of clothing?

a baby blue cardigan with ‘I need sleep’ written on the back (story of my life??)

10. Do you like your name? Would you like to change it?

Yup, I like it! It means butterfly. My mom picked it because it was invented by Jonathan Swift for his book ‘Cadenus and Vanessa’ (she said ‘it has character’; do i have character??? who knows but it’s easy to come up with nicknames for my name which makes me happy)

11. Who is a mentor to you?

Don’t know if this counts, but I met a few people a couple years older than me through litsoc at uni and they really made me think/unknowingly taught me so much  

12. Would you like to be famous? If so, what for?

No - no fame no cameras just nooo :((( I just want to live my life

13. Are you a restless sleeper?

I’m more of a crash-and-sleep-so-deeply-I-can’t-hear-my-alarm person 

14. Do you consider yourself to be a romantic person?

...I have absolutely no idea

15. Which element best represents you?

Air, I think. Or bodies of water (the sea, lakes, rivers)

16. Who do you want to be closer to?

I don’t know...I hope to stay close to my friends; everyone says people drift after school/uni’s over and I really hope that doesn’t happen 

17. Do you miss someone at the moment?

My friends from uni. And just uni in general :((

18. Tell us about an early childhood memory.

Swingsets!! hahahaha

19. What is the strangest thing you have eaten?

Don’t think I’ve eaten anything *that* strange before...

20. What are you most thankful for?

Family, friends, school, books, home

21. Do you like spicy food?

Can’t eat spicy food at all, oops

22. Have you ever met someone famous?

I’ve met a couple of authors! ohmygod if i was old enough to have talked to tolkien or tennessee williams though i would s-c-r-e-a-m (someone pls invent a time machine)

23. Do you keep a diary or journal?

I tried once, I think? I was in primary though

24. Do you prefer to use pen or pencil?

Pen now, but I annotate in pencil.

25. What is your star sign?

Libra, but I don’t do astrology.

26. Do you like your cereal crunchy or soggy?

Crunchy...why would you like soggy cereal??

27. What would you want your legacy to be?

asdfghjkl i don’t know. To have done some good, I suppose. To have been kind, and to have thought deeply and loved well. (ha you really see the lotr coming out here don’t you)

28. Do you like reading? What was the last book you read?

I like reading more than I like breathing I think . Am reading Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s ‘One Hundred Years of Solitude’ (so so good)

29. How do you show someone you love them?

The little things, I guess?? Through actions. I rarely ever tell family/friends I love them outright

30. Do you like ice in your drinks?

Love iced drinks

31. What are you afraid of?

So many things (heights! bugs! rollercoasters!). and sometimes i just feel afraid, and if you asked i wouldn’t be able to tell you why (it’s just a feeling i cannot quite explain).

32. What is your favourite scent?

That smell in the air when autumn has just started but it’s warm, still, and you can smell the air changing and just the sense of something something coming -

33. Do you address older people by their name or surname?

Surname!

34. If money was not a factor, how would you live your life?

No idea...not in a drastically different way I guess. I would still want to study, and I’d want a job too. It’d just feel safer I guess - like I wouldn’t have to worry about buying a house or anything. And I’d definitely travel more 

35. Do you prefer swimming in pools or the ocean?

The pool...the sea’s too salty

36. What would you do if you found $50 on the ground?

Take it to the nearest frontdesk type of place if that’s possible?

37. Have you ever seen a shooting star? Did you make a wish?

Yes! I was walking back from the library at 11:45pm or so and I was trying to get it on camera so I forgot to make a wish

38. What is one thing you would want to teach your children?

Understanding, I think - to be true to themselves, and accepting of others; to learn and to think, broadly and deeply; to make decisions for good reasons

39. If you had to have a tattoo, what would it be and where would you get it?

Don’t really want a tattoo tbh

40. What can you hear right now?

Nothing much, it’s quite quiet here at night.

41. Where do you feel the safest?

At home, I think, or at uni.

42. What is one thing you want to overcome/conquer?

sometimes I feel like I can’t speak, like I’m not going to again for a very long time. it’s just a feeling, but still

43. If you could travel back to any era, what would it be?

I want to go to Imladris more than any era of this world 🍃🍃

44. What is your most used emoji?

Laugh-cry 😂😂😂

45. Describe yourself using one word.

Quiet, maybe? idk

46. What do you regret the most?

every embarrassing situation i’ve ever been in i guess? 😆

47. Last movie you saw?

The Tolkien 2019 biopic (the tcbs friendship was great; unfortunately the Tolkien-Edith relationship wasn’t portrayed well at all)

48. Last tv show you watched?

Modern Family haha (it’s my go-to comfort show)

49. Invent a word and its meaning

I think we need more words for smells! the smell of rain, the smell of the grass at night in early summer, the smell of early autumn 🍃

@shiremaiden, @fool--of-a-took if you guys want to do this, but it’s super long so no pressure at all :)

#mine #personal #interactions #about #theleavesoflorien #shiremaiden #fool--of-a-took

[blackswaneuroparedux]

Anonymous asked: With all the travel and long hours you do, do you get time to read at all? Do you have reading habits? What books are you currently reading and would you share yourt thoughts on them?

I do work very long hours and I do rack up many air miles as well. I’m not complaining as I do mostly enjoy what I do and I get to travel which is a big part of who I am.

But so is reading. I used to be voracious reader as these habits were ingrained since childhood and all the way through my graduate studies. When you are in your teens or at university you think you have all the time in the world - and of course you don’t. Not until you enter the real world of work and living and relationship commitments do you understand what a precious resource time is. These days I feel like a dunce in comparison.

Time is a gift of course as so many competing things demand one’s attention. One advantage I have is that I already minimise my social media to the barest minimum i.e. no Facebook or Instagram. I use WhatsApp for only family sharing stuff as well as close friends. Tumblr is a guilty pleasure.

I try to set aside time at the weekends exclusively to reading. During the week I steal time to read whenever I can: an hour’s drive to the airport, or the wait in the business class lounge, a ride on the Paris Metro, or a late night in the hotel room. I try and get my work notes out of the way first before I read.

As for reading habits, at home I treat myself to a glass of wine as I read before I go to bed. I make pencil and pen notes in my books and scribble in the margins (only to non-fiction books such as history or biography or specialist articles).

I’m a moderately fast reader and so I can scan the page using some techniques I honed from my student days from long ago. I basically read the middle of the page and use my trained peripheral vision to pick up the words on either margins. I use my scanning finger to direct my reading line by line and I never go back on the text but push on to the end. It’s a good trick to learn to read faster without losing deep understanding. Anyone can learn it with enough with the discipline to try.

I also take hand written notes - writing out a brief synopsis - of what are the main points of what I’ve read and file them away in a folder. There’s no point taking notes on phones as it doesn’t sink into the memory. With hand written notes you give yourself room to cogently think out each thought before you set it out on paper. I find I retain more information that way and it’s an excellent way to cultivate a habit of patience and discipline of critical thinking.

So I have a pile of 15 books or so on my bedside - meaning I dip into each one depending on mood and time. But I really focus on about 5 or so.

I carry at least 2 books in my tote bag because again I’ll dip in one or the other depending on mood. I often surprise myself how quickly I can finish a book and then I find myself having to scramble for another; so I always pack a reserve of books, just in case.

I never ever read books on an electronic device. I just can’t bring myself to read a book this way. I need to touch paper and even smell the words coming of the page. I read online newspapers and articles but not books.

I do ‘read’ the bible as part of my spiritual ‘quiet time’ on a daily basis. I hate to say I read the bible because I don’t. I let the bible read me. That’s the whole point with engaging with the bible for spiritual nourishment. My bible is the King’s James version as it’s one of the most profoundly beautiful texts in the English language. Modern translations are just dumbed down, in effect fast food for the stomach and not the soul.

In the same way I need to read some poetry or Greek or Latin verse to centre me before I start the working day and to end the day (if possible). It’s to remind me that I am flesh and blood and not a corporate machine.

One of the other goals I give myself is to give myself a year to re-read the entire canon of plays by Shakespeare. Last year it was Christopher Marlowe and Tom Stoppard.

There’s no method in my madness so to speak in choosing books. They often fall in my lap through personal recommendations from friends and family or I come across them in book reviews of journals I read. But I try and widen my eclectic tastes from fiction to non-fiction. It’s hard keeping up with the languages I can read and so I try and read something in that language if I can. Some non-fiction books I read knowing I will disagree with its thesis but I’ll read it anyway because I want to be challenged and be open to having my mind changed or it helps me understand where others are coming from as well as sharpening my own arguments as a riposte. The purpose of books is to read with an open mind and an honest heart for no one side has a monopoly on wisdom.

The books I’m curently reading are:

War Music by Christopher Logue (1981) Markens Grøde (Growth of the Soil) by Knut Hamsun (1917) A German Officer in Occupied Paris: The War Journals, 1941-1945 by Ernst Jünger (2019) Journal of the Disasters in Afghanistan 1841-2 by Lady Florentia Sale Capital et idéologie (Capital and Ideology) by Thomas Piketty (2019 not in English translation until March 2020)

At a later date I may share my thoughts of each of these books from my notes.

Thanks for your question.

#question #books #reading #personal

[sad-sweet-cowboah]

A Book of Thoughts

Summary: Reader finds Arthur’s journal and gets curious.

The sun shone brightly through the blinds of your bedroom window, dust spiraling through the beams of light that had been stirred up. You were in the beginning of tidying up your room, tossing clothes into the laundry basket before moving over to the bed.

You’d woken up not too long ago, making a plan to clean the house after breakfast before heading out for a nice lunch afterwards. Arthur was in the shower, and though it was tempting to join, the slight mess in your room prompted you otherwise.

Grabbing the comforter, you flicked it. The fabric awkwardly flourished as something heavy hit the floor. You blinked and looked down, recognizing the worn leather binding of Arthur’s journal. It’d fallen open on a random page.

Without a second glance, you grabbed it. Normally Arthur would have put it in his nightstand. You wondered if he was writing in it before breakfast. You glanced at the open page, noting a rough sketch of a woodland creature along with some writing.

Closing it, you turned to place it onto the nightstand. Though in the back of your mind your curiosity piqued, wondering what else was contained in this pages. Some of his entries weren’t a secret to you, as you’ve read some of them in game prior to his arrival.

Yet, you wondered how he would react if he found you invading his privacy, or if he cared at all. He wasn’t shy about keeping it a secret, yet he never offered to let you read either.

Glancing at the bathroom door from your spot, you wondered how much time you’d had. Arthur had only gotten in a few minutes ago, and he never took too long.

Taking a deep breath, you finally sat down and opened the journal, letting it sit on your lap. The pages smelled faintly musty, with a hint of pine and tobacco. Like him.

You recognized the page immediately, a drawing of Blackwater. You flipped through the pages gingerly, your eyes glossing over familiar entries and sketches. You marveled at how well he was able to draw, his handwriting so gorgeous when yours could be chicken scratch in comparison.

A full page had caught your attention when your name jumped out at you.

I don’t know what happened to me. Don’t know where I am or how I got here. Must’ve blacked out somehow. Last thing I remember was being in Saint Denis, and now I’m in this strange house.

Ah, that day.

I was trying to find my way out when a woman came out from one of the rooms. She seemed as confused as I was. Told me I was in a place I ain’t even heard of before. She even told me the year, 2019. I thought I had to be dreaming.

You couldn’t help but to giggle to yourself, remembering how exactly Arthur had reacted back then. You turned to read another entry.

Been a few days since arriving in this strange future. Can’t made head nor tail of it. I miss my family, but I don’t know how to get back. Y/N has been kind enough to let me stay at her house, and her cat has taken a liking to me. She’s been showing me how her contraptions work. The telly-vision is my favorite, who knew you could record performances and watch them whenever you wanted?

On the page following was a drawing of Artemis, curled up contently. You turned the page again.

Guess I’m starting to adjust to this place now. No telling when or how I’ll get back to my time, but Y/N’s hospitality is endless. Can’t say I mind staying here for the time being. No worries about Pinkertons or the O’Driscolls lurking around every corner. Food is readily available, and a personal bathroom too.

You flipped through a couple of more pages, which were just sketches. A view of your car from the living room. Your backyard. Random electronics from around your home. You paused when you came across one of yourself, relaxing on the couch and gazing out your patio doors. You never realized he’d drawn you then.

With another excerpt found, you began to read again.

Y/N’s patience with me is confusing. I don’t know how she isn’t tired of me by now, but she insists that I’m not a bother at all. She’s gone most of the day, off to do her job. She trusts me alone here, even though she asked me not to go outside. Not sure what would happen if I do anyway, she’s worried I might cause trouble. What could I possibly do in this future world? I keep myself busy, but I’m starting to get bored…

The next one had really caught your attention.

Something happened, something I never expected to experience again. I laid with her yesterday. Wasn’t expecting it honestly. I’ve always avoided sharing myself with another woman in such a way after Eliza. Y/N is a different woman entirely, beautiful in every way.

Your cheeks burned with a blush that crept up your face.

Didn’t think I would think of her that way, not until she kissed me. Everything about her…was wonderful. It is wonderful. She took me without hesitation. Made me feel in a way I’d never felt before.

We’re sweet on each other now, sleeping in the same bed and all. I never did imagine myself as the type to settle down, guess that’s why no one else wanted to have me, not even Mary. Though I can’t live like I did, running out robbing folk, so I have no choice. If I ever do go back to my life, I would sure miss Y/N.

You continued through, glancing quickly at some more entries. The first time you took him out, his first club experience, and of course, the day he found out the truth about himself. It carried through to his diagnosis, and the process of him taking his medications. You were thankful the sickness had long since cleared up by now, but you couldn’t say the same for his virtual counterpart. Neither of you had touched the game in a while now.

You were beginning to lose track of time, reading through everything. There were a few more drawings of you, ones that you were both aware and not aware he was drawing. He certainly was sneaky about his artwork, not that you minded. Another entry had piqued your interest.

I think I’ve fallen completely for her. That woman has been nothing but kind and loving toward me. All those times we’ve laid together, every time she kisses me, holds me, smiles at me when she wakes up every morning. I keep thinking she’ll change her mind, that she don’t want an old, ugly man like me. But she says otherwise. Her words make me feel good, though I still can’t say why she wants to be with me. Either way, I think I love her…

Your heart fluttered.

Y/N was worried she was with child, even though she once told me she was on sort of birthing control. She took a strange test, turns out she wasn’t pregnant at all. I know it’s a different time now, but I got lost in my memories of Eliza and Isaac. I told her about them, my worries and all. She was more understanding than I thought she would be. She also told me she wouldn’t mind having a child with me…she told me why, still can’t believe it…I told her I loved her after it all. And she feels the same way.

The reminiscence of that day nearly choked you up. The raw emotion exchanged between him and you was powerful, electrifying. Sometimes you had to wonder if you had been pregnant, what would have changed? Taking a deep breath, you turned to another page.

It’s been a while since I got here, and I think I’ve made a life here. I ain’t fully adjusted to everything, but I got a handle on most things now. I even got a job, one that reminds me of my old life. I’ll always miss my old life, and I think it’s certain that I won’t return at this point. But if it meant waking up next to Y/N for the rest of my life, so be it. It’s the first time in a long time that I feel truly happy. Maybe one day, we’ll take things further.

Your finger toyed with the edge of the next page, ready to turn when you heard the bathroom door open. Your heart leapt to your throat as you hurriedly shut the journal, quickly placing it on the nightstand just as Arthur stepped into the bedroom.

Hair dripping and him donned in only a towel, he looked at you and smiled. It didn’t seem like he knew what you were doing, though you gave him a smile in return and tried not to look guilty.

“Hey you.” you greeted him.

“Hey sweetheart,” he turned to grab some fresh clothes from the dresser. The towel dropped from around his waist, granting you a sight you’d never tire of. “Still cleanin’?”

You’d almost forgotten, your head still swimming with what you’d just read. Arthur was such a poet in his own way, a sweet and soft man hidden behind a tough exterior. You stood up and closed the space between you both, wrapping your arms around his thick torso. He paused in surprise, turning to face you. “Y/N, you okay sweetheart?”

His skin was warm and damp against you, cheek pressed against his chest. You peered up at him with a warm smile. “Nothing, Arthur. I just love you so much.”

His gaze softened, raising his hand to smooth your hair momentarily before gently taking your chin. He pulled you in for a tender kiss, which you met halfway. “I love you too.” He murmured against your lips.

#Arthur Morgan x reader

[purplesurveys]

891

Could you live without power for a week? I wouldn’t die, but it would really suck because then I’d have to watch out for my phone’s and laptop’s battery life, plus it would be incredibly uncomfortable without electric fans and aircons...I wouldn’t die, but I’d hate it. When was the last time you slept on the floor? The day before I got sick. End of May.  Have you regretted anything you said today? No. I haven’t talked to anyone; it’s only 7:59 in the morning. What do you think about airport security? I think it’s essential. I understand why they have to be rigid; better that than not at all. How many doors are in your house? I just answered this on a recent survey, how interesting lol. 13.

Do you keep a journal? This is it. What was the last thing you wished for? A tray of baked sushi. Do you pray? No. Do you like it when your date pays, or do you feel bad? I feel bad, but I’m also appreciative. I only let her pay when I’m short, or when I’m craving a certain restaurant but don’t have the budget for it that day. Most of the time we prefer splitting the bill. Do you spoil your friends? Just my girlfriend.  Are cramped places scary? Not for the most part but my anxiety will sometimes get triggered. But what happens and what sucks about it is that it gets set off at the most random times, so I never really know when I’m bound to get scared. Would you ever consider riding in a trunk? If it was a dare and I’d be paid handsomely for it then I don’t see why not. Does it irritate you when a fellow passenger brings lots of luggage? No. Their business shouldn’t bother me. Ever been leeched by a leech? Nope. Have you ever lied to make someone dislike you? Why would I actively make someone dislike me? Ever had a fear of mirrors? No, I find them fascinating. All four walls in the elevators of the hotel that my mom works in are mirrors, and they’re fun to take photos with haha. What song can you not stop listening to? Right now it’ssssss no song without you - HONNE. Do you take vitamins? Yeah we take vitamin C tablets every night, but sometimes I’ll forget. What's the longest you've stayed at a hotel? A week. Do you buy your music or download? I stream them on Spotify. I used to either buy CDs (usually if I was a big fan of the artist/band) or convert YouTube audio to MP4 to transfer it to my iTunes. Do any of your friends grow weed? No. Not that I know of, at least. Do you like arguing? I don’t like fighting, but if by arguing you mean having a respectful and civil debate then yes, those are fun. Does it bother you when people don't say goodbye before hanging up? It doesn’t really bother me? It just confuses me haha. I need a verbal cue to know when I can hang up. If the person on the line doesn’t say bye I’ll just linger on the phone waiting until it starts to feel awkward and I go initiate the bye instead. Have you ever owned an unlucky object? I don’t believe in those. Do you think voodoo works? No but it’s funny to think about sometimes, in a childish way. What habit do you find most disgusting? I really hate seeing people spit in public. Usually it’s truck drivers or their co-drivers. I always encounter at least one spitter while driving everyday, and it has never failed to make me shudder. Do you often feel ignored? It’s not a strong feeling, no. Can you read music? This is on every survey lately... no I can’t.

Are you optimistic? Sometimes. I think I’m a healthy balance of that and pessimism. Does it scare you to walk over sewer vents in the street? Yes. I always avoid them or skip over them, especially the ones that are already obviously unstable and wobble when someone steps on them. Is your lifestyle healthy or unhealthy? Unhealthy. I don’t watch what I eat and I’ve never entered a gym. But idk, the genes on my mom’s side are impressive and all of us have decent physiques and never get sick – my grandma is 74 but can honestly pass for 50 – so I must’ve taken after that side of the family. Is it easy for you to remember stuff? Yeah, very. Except for numbers. Last electronic object you drowned? That has never happened to any of my gadgets, fortunately. How well do you handle responsibility? Depends how comfortable I am with the task at hand and how much I already have on my plate, if ever. But I never not get anything done. I’m very deadline-driven and everyone who knows me knows I turn in everything asked of me at the end of the day, even if I don’t think I did well enough. Are you afraid of getting old? Sometimes I’ll start to get scared at how short life actually is and what can possibly happen after it, but these are fleeting thoughts. I like living in the present. What's something you wish you could start over? College. Just so I can do my freshman year the way I actually wanted it to go. Are you a loud person? In certain situations. I love being loud with my friends in a bar or when we’re at an amusement park, but I prefer that we don’t make a ruckus at the mall or at a restaurant. Do you believe in guns? No. I honestly don’t understand those who buy it for themselves when they can get other weapons if they’re really hell-bent on self-defense. But idk, I guess I’m speaking from a place (like, a literal place lol) where it’s extremely uncommon for ordinary people to get themselves guns. Are porcelain dolls attractive, or scary? Neither. I just find them a little unsettling, but not scary. Are you friends with someone because you feel bad for them? Not currently. But one time I did try to befriend someone who would be considered a loner, but I realized we had different personalities and interests so I stopped talking to her after a while. Oops. Do you like back rubs? No, I’m ticklish. Do you give good ones? No.

Which of your friends provides the most stimulating conversations? All of them do, to tell the truth. I guess I’m just automatically drawn to intelligent people haha. Do you wish to go to London? It’s not high up on my list but eh, sure. Have you ever felt like you were in a movie? No. I feel that movies are outlets for situations that would never happen in real life, so I’ve never felt as if I was in one. Do you drink enough water daily? I don’t drink the ~recommended~ amount but I still the drink the most in my family. Is burning things fun? I’d rather watch other people burn things. I’m scared of fire, so.

Do you like morbid things? Some. Can you sew? Nope. Have you ever just sat and read a dictionary? Oh my god yeah... after I watched Akeelah and the Bee for the first time I wanted to start joining spelling bees too, so I’d whip out my dictionary almost everyday and start reading the words. There were never any competitions to join here, but from 4th to 7th grade we would have spelling quizzes in our English language class and I aced all of those. Whose cooking do you most despise? No one’s. I love the cooking of all my loved ones. When you were little, did your parents make you sit in the corner? No but in school they made me do it once, for something that wasn’t my fault. My parents didn’t have any methods to discipline me because I was mostly a well-behaved kid anyway. Red roses, or black roses? Red. Do you blast your music concert-loud? I used to. Don’t really do it anymore. Do any of your exes bother you? Nope. Do you like taking pictures of yourself? Hell no. The camera has never been my friend. How about just taking pictures? I like taking photos of my dogs, my best friends, the food I eat, and new places I go to. So to an extent, I do. I don’t dabble in photography though; I just like taking snapshots.

Is cheaper really better? Sometimes, especially when you’re naturally good at hunting down that kind of stuff. My sister will sometimes find Zara jeans or jackets for like ₱80 at an ukay-ukay lol Last thing you ordered from Amazon? I’ve never ordered anything off of Amazon. Or do you prefer ebay? Never ordered from eBay either. Are you good at writing cards for people? I love writing letters for my loved ones. I never buy cards that already have text in them as I want the whole thing to come from me. Do you like camping? I’ve never tried it so I wouldn’t know. I want to go camping at least once though, and with my best friends. Last place you were stranded? The highway. Do you like dragonflies? Omg no they freak me outtt. How many pages is the novel you're currently reading? I’ve started to reread Little Women because I’m planning to watch the 2019 adaptation, but I’m not sure how many pages it has. What's something everybody's never heard of? The sound of a tree falling in the middle of the jungle that no person is currently in. Hahaha that was my philosophy professor’s favorite example to use. Are your talents recognized? I think they are, yes. Can you handle silence for long periods of time? Only if I need it. Otherwise it tends to make me uneasy. Do you do well against temptation? For the most part, yep. But if food is involved I usually fail lol

#survey #surveys

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Pluralistic: 08 Mar 2020 (Ghost flights over Europe, Patagonia joins Right to Repair, EU's R2R showdown with Apple)

Today's links

EU airspace is full of empty planes: Flight slots are use-em-or-lose-em.

European Right to Repair for phones is finally on the horizon: Will the EU finally defy Apple?

Patagonia offers tutorials and supplies to fix your clothes: Companies that guarantee their products for life have different incentives.

This day in history: 2005, 2015, 2019

Colophon: Recent publications, current writing projects, upcoming appearances, current reading

EU airspace is full of empty planes (permalink)

In the EU, airlines that do not fly at least 80% of scheduled flights risk losing their spots to competitors, so Europe's skies are filled with largely empty "ghost planes," burning tons of fuel for no reason.

https://www.businessinsider.com/coronavirus-airlines-run-empty-ghost-flights-planes-passengers-outbreak-covid-2020-3

Covid-19 has crashed aviation demand, but not flights themselves. Miraculously, UK Transport Secretary Grant Shapps – an otherwise useless idiot – has led on this, asking British aviation regulators to relax the 80/20 rule.

https://twitter.com/grantshapps/status/1235614933292920832

European Right to Repair for phones is finally on the horizon (permalink)

The EU has led the world on Right to Repair, with extensive regulation mandating both easy-to-repair designs and manufacturer cooperation with the independent repair sector. But there's been one glaring omission in EU rules: smartphones. Though the official reasoning for not mandating Right to Repair for phones – which are universal and a major source of e-waste – is that the sector is too fast-moving to regulate, it's far more likely that the EU shied away because were scared to pick a fight with Apple.

Apple, after all, is the most repair-hostile manufacturer in the world. It's official reasoning on this is laughably terrible and transparent.

https://www.ifixit.com/News/33977/apple-told-congress-how-repair-should-work-we-respond

Especially when considered in light of its investor disclosures, which make it clear that the company views the tendency of customers to fix and keep their phones (rather than buying new ones) as the major threat to its profitability.

https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2019/01/letter-from-tim-cook-to-apple-investors/

Apple is a one-company environmental apocalypse, with the industry's worst practices for old/broken electronics. Others fix systems, re-use parts, and keep parts available. Apple literally orders its partners to shred it all and turn it into landfill.

https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/yp73jw/apple-recycling-iphones-macbooks

This has the major advantage (for Apple) of curtailing the used equipment market, which means that potential customers are herded into buying new. It also means that those new devices have a hidden drain on their value, because they have no aftermarket commercial life. It's no wonder, then, that Apple led the industry coalitions that killed all twenty state-level Right to Repair bills in 2018.

Which brings us to today, as the EU is contemplating a new set of Right to Repair rules, including rules for electronics, including – possibly – phones. The new rules will be published this week, and Apple has lobbied heavily against this outcome.

https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2020/03/right-to-repair-will-the-european-commission-have-the-guts-to-stand-up-to-apple-et-al-details-on-wednesday.html

If the new ecodesign directive covers mobile phones, the Commission will finally be addressing one of the great e-waste sources worldwide. If they do, though, expect Apple to squawk, as they did when the EU mandated a single charger for smartphones, which Apple publicly freaked out about as though it was an extinction-level event.

Patagonia offers tutorials and supplies to fix your clothes (permalink)

People buy Patagonia not just because it's long-wearing, but because it comes with what amounts to a lifetime guarantee.

https://help.patagonia.com/s/article/Ironclad-Guarantee

Companies that offer lifetime guarantees want their customers to be able to effect their own repairs and maintenance – unlike companies whose profits depend on you throwing away and replacing your purchases every 18 months.

https://pluralistic.net/2020/03/08/ghost-flights/#eurighttorepair

So it's delightful (but not surprising) that Patagonia have partnered with iFixit to produce detailed repair and maintenance documentation for its products.

https://www.ifixit.com/Wiki/Patagonia_Product_Care

The official Product Repair Guide fits right in with the company's longstanding ethic and messaging (after all, these are the people who ran an anti-consumerism campaign called "Do Not Buy This Jacket!").

https://www.treehugger.com/sustainable-fashion/patagonia-will-teach-you-how-repair-clothes.html

This day in history (permalink)

#15yrsago Waxy and his mom trying to save journalism program in SoCal's Oxnard College https://waxy.org/2005/03/my_mom_fights_t/

#5yrsago Stomach-churning details of CIA waterboarding crimes https://web.archive.org/web/20100310233037/https://www.salon.com/news/feature/2010/03/09/waterboarding_for_dummies/index.html?source=rss&aim=%2Fnews%2Ffeature

#5yrsago Imaginary ISIS attack on Louisiana and the twitterbots who loved it https://render.betaworks.com/media-hacking-3b1e350d619c

#1yrago The media company paid by the EU Parliament to make a video promoting a copyright law it stood to make millions from once sued a photographer for complaining that they'd ripped him off https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20190307/16175941758/eu-parliament-paid-news-publisher-afp-to-create-bogus-propaganda-video-favor-eu-copyright-directive.shtml

#1yrago Thanks to audiobooks, reading's popularity still strong in America https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2019/09/25/one-in-five-americans-now-listen-to-audiobooks/

#1yrago Millions of Americans have left Facebook, led by young people aged 12-34 https://www.marketplace.org/2019/03/06/tech/exclusive-look-numbers-showing-users-leaving-facebook-by-the-millions/

#1yrago A machine-learning system that guesses whether text was produced by machine-learning systems http://gltr.io/

#1yrago Towards a general theory of "adversarial examples," the bizarre, hallucinatory motes in machine learning's all-seeing eye https://perma.cc/3ZQQ-A7MY

#1yrago Chelsea Manning has been jailed for refusing to testify at a grand jury about her whistleblowing https://www.theverge.com/2019/3/8/18256173/chelsea-manning-wikileaks-jailed-testify-refusal

Colophon (permalink)

Today's top sources: Slashdot (https://slashdot.org) and Naked Capitalism (https://nakedcapitalism.com/).

Hugo nominators! My story "Unauthorized Bread" is eligible in the Novella category and you can read it free on Ars Technica: https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2020/01/unauthorized-bread-a-near-future-tale-of-refugees-and-sinister-iot-appliances/

Upcoming appearances:

Museums and the Web: March 31-April 4 2020, Los Angeles. https://mw20.museweb.net/

LA Times Festival of Books: 18 April 2020, Los Angeles. https://events.latimes.com/festivalofbooks/

Currently writing: I'm rewriting a short story, "The Canadian Miracle," for MIT Tech Review. It's a story set in the world of my next novel, "The Lost Cause," a post-GND novel about truth and reconciliation. I'm also working on "Baby Twitter," a piece of design fiction also set in The Lost Cause's prehistory, for a British think-tank. I'm getting geared up to start work on the novel afterwards.

Currently reading: Just started Lauren Beukes's forthcoming Afterland: it's Y the Last Man plus plus, and two chapters in, it's amazeballs. Last month, I finished Andrea Bernstein's "American Oligarchs"; it's a magnificent history of the Kushner and Trump families, showing how they cheated, stole and lied their way into power. I'm getting really into Anna Weiner's memoir about tech, "Uncanny Valley." I just loaded Matt Stoller's "Goliath" onto my underwater MP3 player and I'm listening to it as I swim laps.

Latest podcast: Disasters Don't Have to End in Dystopias: https://craphound.com/podcast/2020/03/01/disasters-dont-have-to-end-in-dystopias/

Upcoming books: "Poesy the Monster Slayer" (Jul 2020), a picture book about monsters, bedtime, gender, and kicking ass. Pre-order here: https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781626723627?utm_source=socialmedia&utm_medium=socialpost&utm_term=na-poesycorypreorder&utm_content=na-preorder-buynow&utm_campaign=9781626723627

(we're having a launch for it in Burbank on July 11 at Dark Delicacies and you can get me AND Poesy to sign it and Dark Del will ship it to the monster kids in your life in time for the release date).

"Attack Surface": The third Little Brother book, Oct 20, 2020.

"Little Brother/Homeland": A reissue omnibus edition with a very special, s00per s33kr1t intro.

[gumnut-logic]

V. T. Green (Part Eight - The End)

Title: V. T. Green

Part One | Part Two | Part Three | Part Four | Part Five | Part Six | Part Seven | Part Eight

Author: Gumnut

20 - 25 Oct 2019

Fandom: Thunderbirds Are Go 2015/ Thunderbirds TOS

Rating: Teen

Summary: “Did you discover this, Brains?” He frowned. There was something familiar about this. Maybe they had discussed it recently.

“Oh, no, this is V. T. Green. The man is brilliant.”

Word count: 3555

Spoilers & warnings: None.

Timeline: Standalone

Author’s note: Here we are, the final chapter. I’ve been staring at this for far too long, so who knows what’s in here. Thank you for all your wonderful support on this fic. I hope it lived up to expectations and I hope you enjoy this last bit.

Many thanks to @scribbles97 , @vegetacide  and @thunderstorm-bay for all their wonderful help with this.

Disclaimer: Mine? You’ve got to be kidding. Money? Don’t have any, don’t bother.

-o-o-o-

 Virgil slammed the door to his rooms behind him. Okay, so he was being petty, but they should have known. Why didn’t they know?

Whatever.

Now he was here, he had no idea what to do with himself. A glance around the room and he realised this was not where he wanted to be.

His ‘bird.

He would go and work on his ‘bird.

With one hand.

He stared down at the sling restricting the movement of his arm. A moment of thought, and he was sliding the offending piece of material off his arm.

Scott had force fed him his medication so there was only twinging. He tentatively stretched his arm out.

Ow.

Okay, respect needed.

At least he could shower and change his clothes.

His train of thought was interrupted by a knock on the door. “Virgil?”

Gordon.

A sigh. “Leave me alone.”

“Not this time, bro.” The sounds of fumbling and a second later Gordon waltzed through the door.

“What the hell did you do to that lock?”

Gordon held up the unit in one hand. “This one?” Wires hung loose from the half disassembled electronic device. Virgil stared at it.

“What? You didn’t know I could do that? Hmm, you’ve underestimated me, bro. I should get angry and storm out.”

Virgil’s shoulders dropped and he sent his brother a flat-eyed glare. “Fine. Do that. At least I’ll be left alone.”

The lock landed on a side table and Gordon shut the door quietly behind him.

Virgil ignored him and began pulling off his shirt, prepping for his shower. His arm and shoulder protested loudly.

“Hey.” Gentle hands pulled the sleeve of his flannel shirt off his arm. “You shouldn’t have that sling off yet.”

“Yeah, well, I stink and I want to shower.”

His brother’s hands didn’t stop helping him. The flannel shirt landed on the couch, followed slowly by his grey undershirt.

“You’re not pulling my pants off.”

“Why not?” Gordon looked up at him, no trace of humour in his expression. “You’ve helped me with everything.” That gaze intensified.

Virgil sighed. It felt wrong to have his little brother helping him like this. “That was different.”

“Why? Because you’re the older brother? I’m sorry, Virg, I can’t change our birth order, but I’m still going to help you.”

“Gordon...”

His brother darted in and undid his button and, before he knew it, he was standing there in his briefs.

No smart ass comment passed his brother’s lips despite the green coffee cups on his underwear. The two men stood staring at each other for a moment.

Virgil’s lips curled up slightly in a smile. “It must be killing you to hold it all in.”

Gordon bit his lip, but his eyes sparkled. “Not saying a thing.”

The smile became a grin and Gordon’s expression became pinched with strain. Before he knew it, Virgil was laughing his ass off. He ended up holding his arm close and sitting down on the couch in order to not injure himself with his own humour.

His little’s brother’s face broke out in a grin and he sat down beside him. “That is so much better, Virg.”

The laughter petered out into a fond smile and Virgil reached out to put an arm around Gordon’s shoulders.

The aquanaut backed off immediately. “Hey, you’re almost naked! A little too much skin, bro.”

Virgil grinned and mussed his hair instead.

“Oh, man. Gettorf!” Gordon flailed at his fingers.

He let his brother off the hook and sank into the couch cushions. “Thanks, Gordon.”

A brown gaze so similar to the one he so often saw in the mirror. “Virgil, do you think I’m smart?”

He froze, the question such an echo of what he had asked Scott the day before, his heart lurched.

“Sure, Gordon.”

The gaze didn’t blink. “No, you don’t, Virgil.”

“Gordon! Your achievements-“

But Gordon was shaking his head. “You don’t, Virgil.” He held up a hand. “I’m not angry, not hurt, don’t worry, I’m happy with what I am.”

“No! Gordon, you are smart.”

“Not the same smart as you. Or John.”

“Maybe not, but smart comes in many different forms.”

His brother shrugged. “How did I get into this room, Virg?”

“You broke the lock.” Another job to add to his list.

“I disassembled the locking mechanism.” A pause. “Did you know I could do that?”

“Uh-“

“You didn’t, did you?”

Virgil looked down at his hands. “No, I didn’t.”

“Virg, I have a whole array of skills I don’t use day to day. Some of them I hope I never have to use again, ever.”

A darted stare at his brother. “WASP.”

“Yep.” A quirk of a smile. “I doubt my brothers are aware of half of the things I’m capable of.” The smile became grim. “And I’d like to keep it that way.” A shrug. “Okay, maybe Scott knows more than most, but...” He turned to face Virgil. “I don’t want you to see how smart I am.” He straightened and the smile came back. “I like being the goofball brother.”

Virgil’s smile was soft. “You’ll always be the goofball brother. No contest.”

“And you will always be the grumpy bear before his morning coffee no matter how many smarts you declare.”

The smile became fond. “How did you know, when no one else did?”

Gordon shook his head. “Sorry, bro, I didn’t. You told me with your reaction.”

“At least you considered the possibility.”

“Didn’t I say that the first rule of International Rescue is if Virgil says it is, it is? That didn’t come from me, you know. John passed that on in a lecture after I screwed up, and he heard it from Scott when he screwed up before me. Scott heard it from Dad. It is a rule that has been learnt the hard way by all of us. Except you. Because you are damn good at what you do, Virg. You may not realise it, but trust me, your brothers do.”

Gordon drew a breath. “We didn’t realise that you were V.T. Green because we have gotten so used to your expertise in action, we forgot the theory behind it all. We know you’re smart and we rely on it every day. I’ve seen your head buried in so many engineering journals over the years, I should have realised it sooner, but don’t you dare think that because we didn’t connect the dots between you and a website, that we don’t know our brother has whatever it takes.” A small smile. “Because you always do. That brain of yours has saved our butts so many times, Virg.”

“But, Brains-“

“What is this? A competition?” Gordon frowned at him. “Brains is smart, too. So are John, Alan, Scott, Tin, Grandma and even me. There is no shortage of genius on this island. It just comes in different forms, just like you said. It has to. Otherwise this crazy rescue organisation wouldn’t work.”

The room fell silent. Goosebumps rose on Virgil’s arms, the air still a little cool at this time of the morning. Another reason to sleep in. Give the island some time to warm up.

“I’m sorry, Gordon. I shouldn’t have exploded like that.”

“What? Of course, you should have. It doesn’t hurt to surprise everyone now and again. Keeps them on their toes. Well, all except for Tin.”

Virgil snorted. “Nothing gets past her.”

“I wouldn’t be surprised if she bugged your underwear.”

He stared at his brother. “What?”

Gordon just grinned at him.

“You are the goofball, aren’t you.” It wasn’t a question.

“And you wouldn’t have me any other way.”

He reached out to tousle Gordon’s hair again and the man ducked off the couch.

A fond grin. “No, I wouldn’t.”

-o-o-o-

Virgil managed his shower and Gordon left him to it. It gave him time to think. Time to look at it all from a different perspective. Kayo had dobbed him in for a reason. His sister never did anything without a reason and honestly, now the cat was out of the bag, it lifted the worry from his shoulders. Perhaps he should thank her. Maybe grab some of her favourite chocolate from that little shop in southern Australia.

But he still had to face Brains and for the first time in his life, he was hesitating in approaching his fellow engineer.

There had never been anything but a strong and honest friendship between himself and Hiram Hackenbacker. His friend was just that little bit older than him, just that little more experienced...

And so much smarter.

He had been inspirational when Virgil was younger. His studies had been both guided and assisted by the brilliant young engineer discovered by his father. Brains had been there at the start of his career and he had been a constant companion in his engineering endeavours ever since. He owed him so much.

He sighed.

It would be up to Virgil to approach Brains. The man’s social skills were almost inversely proportional to his genius.

He should have spoken to him earlier.

Brothers were one thing, they would forgive him eventually. They were his brothers.

But friends...mentors...

He didn’t want to lose Brains’ trust.    

He managed to get some pants on without too much trouble. He gave up on the undershirt and slipped the sling on over his bare chest before draping his flannel shirt over his injured shoulder and slipping his good arm through the sleeve. It wasn’t the greatest solution and Grandma would likely frown at him, but he didn’t care.

What he did care about was hunting down Brains and apologising.

He made it through the house without encountering anyone, oddly enough, and caught the elevator down to the labs.

Virgil had his workshop. Brains had his labs. Perhaps that illustrated the subtle differences to their individual approaches to engineering. Traditionally, Brains tackled the theories and experiments. Virgil’s domain was more maintenance. His ‘experiments’ little more than finding solutions to mechanical problems encountered in the field or during repairs.

Brains designed and built Thunderbirds.

Virgil kept them in the sky, under the water and in space.

And it was there in the corridor between Labs One and Two that he realised exactly what his problem was.

He was in Brains’ shadow and he hadn’t even realised it.

The thought stopped him in his tracks.

He was familiar with the shadow cast by his high achieving eldest brother. Scott Tracy had always been a hard act to follow. But Virgil’s focus was so different to Scott’s he felt he had carved out his own niche and, to be honest, he was quite comfortable beside Scott. He fit well as his second and a small niggling voice at the back of his mind sometimes warned him that he was relying far too much on his brother for skills he had no wish to develop himself.

But Brains...Brains shared his interests, worked in the same field, was so much smarter...

Had he slipped into being Brains’ second as well?

The thought felt wrong. Virgil wasn’t competitive. He was happy where he was...wasn’t he?

He still had those thousands of notifications in his inbox.

Shit.

“Virgil?”

He jumped. He had been completely lost in thought standing in the middle of the corridor. Brains was staring at him.

Virgil straightened. “Uh, hey, Brains.”

“H-how are you feeling?”

A blink. “Um, okay.” He was such an on-the-ball conversationalist this morning.

“I was h-hoping that while you are off r-rescues we could...” But Brains’ voice petered off and a frown crumpled his brow. “I am s-sorry, V-Virgil, that I did not r-recognise you as V-V. T. G-Green.”

Virgil shifted where he stood. “I didn’t know you read my blog. Well, until the other day.”

“Oh, your blog is amazing. That polymer is brilliant. I also enjoyed your discussion with O’Malley regarding tensile steel versus polysteel in bridge construction. Where did you get that idea for interweaving the two materials?”

“From that bridge in Mexico last year. The one that buckled due to uneven weight distribution on the secondary pylon grouping.”

The engineer was running calculations, Virgil could tell. “Yes, I can see that now. Do you think that would have m-managed the harmonic wind factor as well?”

“Oh, definitely.” And that led into a discussion of harmonic pressure and the properties of the new combination of materials. They slipped easily into engineering jargon and they ended up in one of Brains’ labs deep in the most fascinating and satisfying discussion Virgil had ever had with his friend.

It was Scott standing in the doorway several hours later that finally snapped them out of the land of scientific imagination. By that time, the self-healing polymer was modelled and ready for initial experimental trials.

“Am I going to have to share him with you now, Brains?” Scott was smiling, obviously amused. Virgil wondered how long his brother had been standing there.

But Brains grew flustered. “Th-that’s entirely u-up to V-Virgil.”

Virgil held up a hand. “Hey, nothing’s changed. I’m still the same wrench monkey I was yesterday.”

Brown eyes caught his. “N-no, Virgil, you are so much more. I-I’m j-just s-sorry I didn’t see it b-before.” His friend’s shoulders dropped.

“Hey.” He walked over to the engineer and placed his good hand on Brains’ shoulder. “I should have told you. Though, I honestly didn’t realise...a lot of things.” He squeezed gently. “But now we know and we can move forward.” It was quite exciting really. Brains had experience Virgil could learn from and Brains saw possibilities in several of Virgil’s theories.

“Wh-why did you shut d-down your website?” It came out in a rush, the worry on Brains’ face obvious.

Virgil was very aware of his silent brother still standing just inside the door. And, no, he hadn’t missed the bottle of pills in Scott’s hand.

Voice quiet. “Abby Applegate. You made me realise the potential I was making public. I pulled it to give myself time to work out what I want to do with my theories.”

“You want to keep them under the blanket of International Rescue?” It was Scott’s commander voice asking the question and it had Virgil automatically straightening his posture in response.

He turned to his brother. “I haven’t decided yet.”

“But isn’t this technology that the Hood could...”

Virgil held up a hand. “This technology could save thousands of lives and, yes, if it got into the wrong hands it could make our jobs harder, but...” And as he was saying it, the idea clarified in his mind. “It could save so many more lives than we ever could, if we release the technology so manufacturers can build it into their products to prevent us from needing to be called in, in the first place.”

“Virgil-“

“No, Scott. I have to think on this further, but this polymer, at least, will be released in some form. Maybe we can release it through Tracy Industries, maybe some other way, But I don’t want to deny the possibilities it could mean for sheer safety in areas like marine habitation or airships, for example.”

His brother’s glance immediately flicked to the other engineer in the room. “Brains?”

Virgil couldn’t believe it. The rational part of his mind knew it was only reflex on Scott’s part, but... “No! This isn’t Brains’ decision, it’s mine!”

He saw the moment of realisation as to what he had done flicker across Scott’s eyes. His mouth opened but Brains interrupted. “Th-this is V-Virgil’s decision.”

Virgil straightened his spine.

Scott echoed his stance, but his voice was soft. “Yes. Yes, it is.”

“I need to remember that.”

-o-o-o-

When Scott finally dragged him out of Brains’ lab, Virgil discovered it was later than he expected. He and Brains had well and truly gotten lost in their discussion. It was lunch time, but a very late one. His eldest brother continued the dragging all the way to the kitchen. There was pill taking demanded, followed by a glare directed seat at the table.

Food appeared in front of him.

Brothers wandered into the room and found their own lunches. Soon there were conversations bouncing around.

Gordon clapped him around his good shoulder as he entered. “So, when is Four getting this groovy polymer upgrade?”

“It doesn’t even exist yet. We’re still a way off a workable application.”

“Hey, just getting in first dibs. I read your blog entry on that you know. It was amazing.”

Virgil stared at him. “You read my blog entry?”

“Sure. Brains was over the moon about it and I wanted to know more. Plus, it was great sport to see you put that colon-custard guy where he belonged.” Gordon grinned.

Okay, that was an image. He held back a shudder. “Coloncous.”

“Whatever. You scored big.” His fish brother swiped a piece of carrot off Virgil’s plate. “Let me know next time you want to take down another hot air balloon, I’d like to watch.” He grinned and headed off into kitchen, likely to pilfer from other plates before finally throwing his own lunch together.

A glass of juice appeared at his elbow, Scott arching an eyebrow to match Virgil’s query, the message obvious. Look after yourself.

Brains wandered in, distracted as usual. This time it was John who stopped him from colliding with the furniture and directed him to a chair before he collided with anything else.

Kayo slunk into a seat beside Virgil on his good side, nudging him with her elbow. “Forgive me?”

“For what?”

“Telling.”

A one shoulder shrug. “I guess.”

“They had to know.”

“I guess.”

She stared at him a moment, her expression assessing him. “Letting an opponent underestimate you makes good tactical sense. Just don’t underestimate yourself.”

“I...” But the words escaped him as her green gaze pierced him, pushing her point home.

Her hand rested on his shoulder and she leant in and whispered in his ear. “Though I must say it was great sport to see you get one over all of them.” She smiled. “Never underestimate a Tracy.”

And with those words she was gone from his side and delving into the refrigerator as if there was no physical space between him and the appliance.

A blink. Kayo was a law unto herself. He shook his head and couldn’t help but smile.

A sudden exchange of words at the kitchen counter ended in an outraged squawk. “Gordon!”

Alan had raw egg in his hair and dripping into his eyebrows and onto his cheeks.

A second later, Gordon had flour in his hair.

As Virgil leapt out of his chair and Scott dove across the room, another egg sailed through the air and the butter dish made airborne. It got loud and there was yelling.

“What the hell are you two doing?!” Scott was answered by a cloud of flour.

“Hey, guys, cut it out!” Virgil reached into the fracas with his good arm and yanked, landing himself a furious Alan screaming profanities at Gordon and coated in what equated to omelette.

His eldest brother grabbed a glaring Gordon and restrained him. There was moment of stunned silence before an angry Scott broke it. “What the hell are you two doing?”

“Teaching the squirt a lesson.”

“Screw you, Gordon!”

“What? Did you underestimate your dumb brother, genius boy?”

“I never said you were dumb!”

“You don’t think I’ve got the brains to keep up with you.”

Virgil had to pull Alan back again, his balance off due to one arm in a sling. His littlest brother was furious. “I never said that either!”

“But you thought it!”

“HEY!” It was Virgil’s voice, not Scott’s that brought the argument to a dead stop. “Gordon, what the hell?”

The aquanaut lost the glare and let his shoulders drop, shifting to a nonchalant stance as if he wasn’t coated head to toe in flour and egg. He ignored Virgil and addressed his little brother. “Point made?”

Alan shook off Virgil’s grip and straightened up, his shoulders squared. “Point made.”

“We good?”

A stare at his next eldest brother before Alan once again shifted his stance, relaxing even further. “We’re good.” And to Virgil’s astonishment, Alan’s face split into a grin. “That was a smart move with that first egg. Did not see it coming.”

“You shouldn’t expect anything less, little bro.”

“I know, I know, point made. You’re smart, I’m smart. Now show me how you flipped your wrist like that.”

Virgil stared as the two youngest brothers huddled together discussing how to slingshot an egg with a single wrist twist. Across the room, Scott appeared equally mystified as to what had actually happened.

Eventually the engineer just rolled his eyes and wandered over to the sink to wash the flour off his hand. Scott ended up beside him, the smother hen helping him clean his one hand.

Virgil rolled his eyes.

“We good?” Scott’s voice was quiet almost tentative.

A frown. “Of course. Yes, we’re good.”

He was surprised at the smile that spread over Scott’s face. A wet hand squeezed his shoulder and handed him a towel.

And dried his one hand.

Oh, for the love of...

Scott was grinning at him.

“God, you’re an ass.”

“Yeah, a smart one.”

Virgil cuffed him up the back of his head.

-o-o-o-

FIN.

#thunderbirds are go #thunderbirds #thunderbirds fanfiction #Virgil Tracy #Scott Tracy #Gordon Tracy #alan tracy #John Tracy #kayo kyrano

[socialissueavenger-blog]

Love is Blind

For my first blog I have decided to write about domestic violence with a focus on intimate partner violence. This June will mark four years since I got out of my very abusive relationship of four years. So, I thought this would make the perfect blog to bring awareness. I remember one time I will never forget. I thought I was definitely going to die. I just found out he had cheated on me yet again two weeks after having our second child together. I put it in my mind that I would kick him out and leave him. That night after we left his grandma’s house, I was following him back to the house and I sped off and left. I hid on a dim street for two hours and figured he probably would go back to his grandma’s house. When I got to my house, he wasn’t in sight I was so happy. I assumed he went back to his grandma’s house. Boy was I wrong. He came up behind me and said “I’m going to teach you to never try to leave me again. I’m going to kill you”. I remember crying and telling him to please leave me alone. I was holding my two-year-old daughter and two-week-old son in the car seat. He said, “once we get in the house, I’m going to kill you”. He pushed me in the house, and I laid our daughter in her bed and put my son’s car seat down. He immediately grabbed me by my neck and slammed me into the window and broke it. Then he slammed me on to the ground and started choking me and banging my head on the floor. I yelled for help and tried to get him off me, but he was too strong. I started to black out and prayed to God that he would keep my babies safe. That’s when my two-year-old woke up and yelled at him and started hitting him. He finally let me go. I ran to my phone to call the police and he went outside and broke it. Then proceeded to call his family and say that I bruised myself up and was going to lie and say he did it to me. His family responded by saying we know she’s lying we didn’t raise you to put your hands-on females.

I have attached a picture of my children and I at the time. They were my strength to finally walk away.

So many young people believe that pain is love. Whether it be you seeing your mom being abused, abusive relationships being praised on television, social media, etc. You see so many people being abused that it seems normal. “According to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention one, in four women experience severe physical violence by an intimate partner in their lifetime”(Adams and Beeble 2019). A conflict theory’s perspective might say that “The family contributes to social inequality by reinforcing economic inequality and by reinforcing patriarchy. Family problems stem from economic inequality and from patriarchal ideology. The family can also be a source of conflict, including physical violence and emotional cruelty, for its own members”(Social Problems 2010). 

I have attached a photo that shows the harsh statistics about intimate partner violence. Contrary to popular belief men also are victims in these type of situations.

It is time to speak up against domestic violence. You never know whose life you can save by just standing up against domestic violence. “Researchers consistently find a significant positive association between history of IPV and symptoms of depression, anxiety, posttraumatic stress disorder, suicidal ideation, general psychological distress, and sleep disturbance”.

I have attached a video that shows how abuse starts. You think it’s normal and okay. But it isn’t. It starts to consume you and you become depressed and are trying to escape but leaving seems close yet so far away.

Many people may think if you’re getting abused why not leave. People who are on the outside looking in have no idea how hard it is to walk away.  “First, domestic violence is a leading cause of individual and family homelessness. Second, the struggle over rights to a shared home can increase the violence to which the woman is subjected. And third, a woman who decides to continue to live with the person who abused her receives little or no legal support, despite the evidence that this decision could most effectively reduce the violence.”. For some women they have no other family, or no income, no stability to make it without their partner.

I have attached links for support if you or someone you know is dealing with abuse. Do not be afraid to speak up and leave. There are so many people who stay and live and fear and some even die. Please call and you will get the help that you need.

https://www.thehotline.org/is-this-abuse/

https://ncadv.org/resources

https://youtu.be/yJ4Mn25G4Qc

References:

Adams, A. E., & Beeble, M. L. (2019). Intimate partner violence and psychological well-being: Examining the effect of economic abuse on women’s quality of life. Psychology of Violence, 9(5), 517–525. doi: 10.1037/vio0000174

Johnson, M. E. (2013). A Home with Dignity: Domestic Violence and Property Rights. SSRN Electronic Journal. doi: 10.2139/ssrn.2332089

Metz, C., Calmet, J., & Thevenot, A. (2019). Women subjected to domestic violence: The impossibility of separation. Psychoanalytic Psychology, 36(1), 36–43. doi: 10.1037/pap0000186

University of Minnesota Libraries Publishing. (2015). Social problems: continuity and change. Minneapolis, MN.   

[bexmaddy]

Make up time!

FMLS 90 12/23-29

12/23 - Share either your favorite or least favorite memory of 2019. If you would like, feel free and do both.

12/24- Share a picture and or story from the beginning of the year and one now. Talk about what has changed over that time.

At the beginning of the year, I was very critical of myself.  I’m starting to let that go.  It’s a process.

12/25 - What did you learn in 2019? How can you apply that in the future?

Letting go of negativity.

12/26 - How did your friendships and relationships change in 2019? Are you satisfied with this? What do you want to do to improve your most important relationships in 2020?

I wish I was more socially adept to make friendships here.  I just am not very confident in the electronic age I guess.

12/27 - How did your habits change in 2019? Are you satisfied with this? What do you want to do to improve your most important habits in 2020?

I started tracking habits consistently, which was good.  I want to improve this by keeping a bullet journal.

12/28 - What is your theme for 2020? Describe how you would like 2020 to be in a word or sentence.

Kindness.

12/29 - What is one goal you have for 2020. What are you going to do to make it a reality? (We will revisit this in more detail next week, for now write a few sentences documenting the goal and high level approach to deal with it.).

Grow my yoga teaching (business).

#fmls90 #bexmaddy #fatmaninalittlesuit

[fishdavidson]

(BELATED!) Dream Journal 2019-07-10: Sort of Like Good Omens, But With Superheroes And Loud Farts

Good news, everyone! So far the new medication is not affecting dreams! However, I didn’t end up posting last night because I played Electronic Super Joy and AudioSurf 2 (purchased in the most recent Steam sale) until it was too late for me to write anything substantial before going to bed. But now that I have steeled my resolve to not play any more computer games until I have caught up on my writing, I’m finally getting around to posting some high-quality content.

This dream in particular was an almost perfectly coherent narrative without doing any editing, and it was a pretty cool story, too. And the best part is that it even had a semi-plausible and self-consistent mythology. So let’s get to narratin’!

It is mere days before the end of the world, but everyday life looks pretty similar to how it looks today. Except there were a handful of superheroes that the general public knew about who were trying to keep the world safe from various threats. These superheroes were more like Iron Man than Superman, in that they were regular mortal people that happened to own super-suits and fantastic technology.

An unnamed detective with an interest in historical archaeology is trying to solve a case where some expensive Vera Wang ceramics were stolen. She finds the plates in a disused janitor’s closet in an apartment building, and the only person who had access to that closet claims the plates were counterfeit items purchased at a dollar store. Either way, the plates got confiscated as evidence and the detective went home for the evening.

Later that night, the detective is contacted by a superhero who is basically Arthur from Amazon’s version of The Tick. Arthur has discovered something written in an ancient language that he believes may herald the impending end of the world. The detective translates it, and she confirms it has some bearing on an ancient prophecy about the battle for the end of the world.

It postulates that Adam and Eve were forbidden from ever entering the Garden of Eden again, but Adam will one day be reborn and use powerful magic to unmake the world as we know it and reshape it into a new Eden that Adam and Eve will live in to spite God. Yes, my asleep mind actually came up with this. But it gets even better!

Adam has come into our world already and reached adulthood. His mighty powers begin to manifest, but they are not quite as strong as God’s powers of creation. In order to achieve omniscience, Adam has only a scant handful of days to accomplish several large tasks:

Sing the Song of Creation, which had long since been lost to time

Find the Letters of Creation, which were a set of love letters written between Adam and Lilith.

Summon Eve into the world

Move all the land into one big supercontinent that shall become Eden.

You might think that it is nearly impossible to reconstruct a song that has been lost for thousands of years and was never written down, and you’d be right. Unfortunately, Adam realized that he can just pick a song and use his semi-divine powers to declare it to be the new Song of Creation. His choice is a little too on-the-nose, and he chooses “The Circle of Life” from The Lion King soundtrack.

This is where I, Fish Davidson, enter the picture. It’s also one of the few points in the dream that aren’t as narratively consistent. Somehow I have managed to acquire five of the twelve known Letters of Creation. Twelve letters? SUBCONSCIOUS SYMBOLISM, I SAY!

I meet up with Adam in the service corridor of a shopping mall. Adam wants to negotiate for possession of the letters. Why he doesn’t smite me on the spot at this moment is beyond me, but I have brought the letters in a ziploc bag and I am prepared to do stupid and reckless things to prevent the end of the world.

I have not come to negotiate. I am just here to stall for time.

Adam starts singing “The Circle of Life,” and it is filled with majesty and divine power. It is hard to resist singing along, so I do the only thing I can think of: yank the letters out of the bag and start literally eating them. Apparently reading the letters aloud was the key to bringing Even into this world, which would allow the newly-reunited power-couple to work even faster. But I put the kibosh on that plan by gnawing on that ancient parchment like a cow on grass-flavored methamphetamine. You can’t read the letters if they are impossibly shredded by the gnashing of teeth.

Meanwhile, Arthur has reverse-engineered something called the Engine of Creation with the help of the detective’s impressive knowledge of history. The Engine is an apocryphal golem that looks like a large clay urn with dog legs that God supposedly used to create land and vegetation in the beginning. It requires the power of a true god to work at full capacity, but Arthur is reasonably confident that it will still work (albeit less efficiently) with some big batteries and a bit of ingenuity.

Adam has already begun moving big chunks of land toward Africa. Most of South America is now underwater, traveling like a jet plane under the sea toward the western coast of Africa. By the end of the day, South America, Africa, and Australia will be one big continent.

Arthur has is charging every battery he can get his hands on, and has even sacrificed the nuclear reactor in his flying super-suit to power the Engine of Creation (codenamed Seedy) in an attempt to make more land for the displaced people of South America.

Seedy gets powered up and runs around like a playful puppy for a moment before it lowers itself to the ground and starts shaking. If God was there to give Seedy some extra power, it would be spraying industrial quantities of dirt and trees everywhere. But on battery power, all Seedy can manage to produce is a loud 10-second long fart and a single turnip.

In more traditional narratives, this would be the place where all hope seems lost. Adam has far more power by himself than we could ever muster on our own. But between Arthur activating Seedy and me eating the Letters of Creation, God got angry enough to come back Old-Testament style and smite Adam with an adequate amount of force to destroy him forever.

Humanity, you’re welcome.

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

Header image is Adam and Eve expelled from Eden by an angel. Etching by H. Winstanley after G. Reni, 1728.

#dream journal #dreams #fishdavidson #adam and eve #good omens #end of the world #plates #vera wang #the tick #arthur #detective #circle of life #lion king

[mercurykelly]

Why travel?

There are people who do not like to travel.  I know this is true because I once worked with a woman who wouldn’t leave Seattle except under extreme duress. I am the other sort of person, someone who loves to travel and does so at every opportunity provided my bank account can handle the expense, and to be honest, even when it can’t.  I won’t pretend that travel isn’t grueling at times and that I am often incredibly grateful to arrive back home.  But what draws me back, time after time, is the feeling of seeing the world through wide awake, fully engaged, almost childlike eyes.  

I’m not writing this blog to provide travel tips, or to tell you what to pack or where to go or which hotel is cheapest or coolest, or which restaurants have the hot chefs.  (Although if i happen across this kind of information I will share it.) I am just someone who loves that ecstatic, super-alive feeling that new places, people and experiences engender. I always keep a travel journal (I wrote my first during a family road trip from Iowa to California at age 14), take far too many photographs, collect far too many souvenirs, and get very swept up in the entire experience.  To take all this one step further, I have decided to share my travel experiences in this blog, Tropic of K.  

I’m starting this whole experiment by writing a few details about my recent road trip from Seattle to Mesa Verde to New Orleans to Chicago to Seattle in May of 2019.    

Now, I realize this trip is nothing special in the grand scheme of things – and pales in comparison to people who canoe down the Amazon, sail solo across the Pacific, or climb Mt. Kilimanjaro.  But so what? If I judged this trip by the reaction of some of my family and friends you might think I was undertaking something very nearly as daring.  What?  You’re driving solo from Seattle to New Orleans?  At your age?  I got all kinds of advice: buy a gun, buy Mace, at the very least buy pepper spray. Take a super-strong flashlight.  Don’t stay in hotel rooms with doors that open directly onto the outside. Don’t sleep in rest areas.

Oh please.

I planned for this road trip in general terms for over a year, but specifically not at all except for making a three-night reservation at Hotel Mazarin in the French Quarter two months before I intended to hit the road. But I started packing a month before my departure.

I’ve got a thing about packing.  I sometimes wonder if I travel in order to give myself the opportunity to pack, unpack, repack, plan to pack, make lists about packing.

Here is one of the lists I made for my trip to New Orleans:

· Two six packs of sugar free cranberry juice (to use when taking supplements and to maintain urinary health)

· Two gallons distilled water (for CPap)  

· Triptik and associated books and maps  (ordered from AAA 3 weeks in advance)

· New travel bag for electronics

· Walking sticks

· Yoga mat and assorted physical therapy bands and paraphernalia

· Yeti cooler

· Writing notebooks and laptop (with a goal of digitizing writing practice ideas )

· Old New Yorkers and Harpers (two to three years old – in order to read all the short stories before I throw the magazines out)

· Swimming gear (as a lap swimmer, I had hopes of finding public pools where I could swim)

I didn’t list clothes and toiletries and electronics as I take these every time I travel and didn’t need a list.

I’d had my suitcase open in the spare bedroom for a couple of weeks so I could toss in items as I thought of them.  I gathered supplements and medications, stowed electronic devices, cords, chargers. I packed clothes for warm weather and layers for cold weather. I packed toiletries, my mouthguard, my travel notebook, prescription sunglasses, a hair dryer and flat iron, two beach towels, two swimming suits, dressy clothes and casual clothes, a selection of scarves and jewelry, several kinds of jackets, wraps and hoodies. In addition to the shoes I was sure I would wear (flip flops, black comfy casual, trainers, and dressier sandals) I added two more pair of sandals, water shoes, beach shoes, and pale gray comfy shoes in the same style as the black comfy shoes.

I am more or less resigned to my inability to pack light.  One time, many years ago, I packed light for a long weekend and was miserable because I had to wear the sweaty clothes I’d been wearing on a  LOOONG bicycle ride when I went out to supper.  Never again.  I now pack as much as I can reasonably  (sometimes not all that reasonable actually) carry – and considering I had an entire car to work with for this trip, I packed with abandon.  

Note to self:  just because you have an entire car to work with does not mean you should fill the car.  

#travel roadtrip #traveladdict #packingfool

[bookthievery]

somewhere along the way i learned that journaling doesn’t count unless you use actual pen and paper and that robbed me of many, many years’ worth of documented thoughts + events because it Wasn’t Allowed for me to use a word processor as a journal. 

no, seriously, i didn’t realize this was an option until ~2019-2020 when someone i follow released a memoir and recounted how he combed through his journals + electronic diary files in writing said memoir and my mind was frikkin blown. 

anyway. something something intrinsically ableist something something rules are stupid something something and if a rule or aesthetic is actively preventing you from doing something you wish you could do...break the rule. seriously. it’s your life. 

#autistic ash #personal #ramble #in 2019 i started keeping an electronic journal #and i still have paper journals #and both are #invaluable to me #because my thoughts often go faster than my hand can write (because my writing is MINISCULE) #also my thoughts are Long and my hand is Tired (read: i have carpal tunnel) #so typing is actually Ideal for me #anyway #sad that i'll never know what childhood me was thinkin #because i just couldnt keep track of journaling #(and also my childhood computer hard drive got FUCKED) #(need to see if geek squad can do smthn abt that)

[donnnoir]

Dallas, TX                                                                          June 30, 2019

Well Friend’s, although currently I suspect there are no readers of my crude blog.  Other than those that may have an interest from the Shadow Government’s perspective.  They always keep tabs and monitor my actions and interactions at large or singular.  An annoying fact of Life as me.  So hopefully at some point and time in the future an interested party will have numerous pages to sort through.  I am trying to get all my material under one or two roofs / forums which can and are accessible to everyone.  At least that is my hope and the intention of all this.  Granted it also allows me an outlet to vent some of my frustrations and the various events, occurrences and histories with this and more that I have Lived and experienced throughout my Life.  Now in such a spirit I am posting a electronic log entries after I arrived back in Austin TX, following the events I experienced in Southern California.  Which events culminated in my being shot twice in my left leg and subsequently ran over by an F-350 dually pick-up, running me over from toes to my head being dragged under the dual tires on the driver’s side of the vehicle.  Needless to say it was an interesting evening.  I was run over on East Anaheim St. about one hundred feet from the intersection with North Henry Ford Ave., on the south bound side of East Anaheim heading back toward Long Beach, I believe the location is still in Wilmington. With the location of my being shot some distance from there and that being approximately 325 North Lecouvreur Ave., Wilmington.  These events happened on or around the 5th of March 2018.  I was transported to St Mary’s Hospital at 1050 Linden Ave. Long Beach, CA..

The following are a series of electronic entries to an ad hoc journal at the time.  I Post this ad hoc journal in its raw form, the only editing being for the most part that of correcting some of the major spelling mistakes.  Hopefully I  have retained the jagged nature of my mind set at the time.  I freely admit that upon my return from California for the first time in my life I was showing signs of Post Traumatic Stress Disorder.   I still have on occasions bouts associated to this PTSD.  I trust as coming events unfold and I have New Obstacles and Challenges to focus my attention and thereby forestall the elements of the Disorder.  Thus I Post this warts and all.  Without regard to its chronological or content of order. Because of this I will no doubt be covering much of the data, information and stories at a later Posting.  I will also be Posting the images of my hand written journal, as the loose leaf entries that I have adopted as my handwritten format.  Since every log or journal I have started has been stolen repeatedly.  So I now write on whatever loose leaf papers I have before me in the moment.  I hope to Post those as packaged folders Postings in their chronological order.  There is a degree of overlapping entries between this Posting and those of my handwritten entries.  Bear that in mind should you actually elect to read all of these.  Most of the entries some date and location headers.   I hope that in doing this that no seeming contradictions arise, especially since I am the source.  I welcome any inquires from any reader of my material.  Thus I submit the following:

Welcome, seems it has come to this. I am going to attempt to compose my thoughts and histories via electronic medium. My reservations must give way to practical realities. Not to mention the fact that each and every one of my previous logs / journals has been stolen from me. A immensely annoying recurring theme.

Thus I am going to try and make a virtual journal. Presumably I will augment this with the additional paper journal. Which will then be uploaded into a file of images. The hope being the combination will effectively accomplish the task. Towit that of providing a record of my life including events in the extreme. Additionally I wish to leave behind in some convoluted fashion my diverse understanding of things. By far I would consider the latter to be a far greater contribution to the brain wealth of humanity. I would like to think that should any of this writing come to light. It does so some time in the future . When the more fantastic elements can be seen in historical context. Such that what would otherwise be seen as speculative ventures into science fiction writing, will be known as simply fact. Because believe me when I say I truly wish and hope to be / will be wrong, regarding that which is to come. For a change!

Sigh… I must take a break, now. Necessity requires I consider many issues, not the least of which is where to start, and how best to proceed. Besides the fact I have not developed the requisite manual dexterity to type with my thumbs.

Monday July 2, 2018 … Killeen Texas

Sigh… damnit all to hell! I am having one of those rare days when I feel anxious, overwhelmed to the point of feeling trapped. I do not know if it is possibly PTSD related. I suppose I have to accept that as a issue with in me from now till the day I die. Regrettable not to mention humiliating for me. Granted, I suspect that the the cannabis Jade bought had a little something extra in it. So she could anesthesias more effectively giving her a reprieve from the increased infra-sound, ultrasound, microwave along with the entirety of the electromagnetic emissions I am at present enduring. I am concerned for her and her son Joey's well being. Despite her being one of the girls / operatives / victims of our government’s illegal covert initiatives know as MK Ultra. She is a bundle of contradictory issues and personalities. Your typical Golem. Her biological father is Warren Causey. He was George Bush Sr. right hand even prior to Sr becoming head of the Central Intelligence Agency. Causey was Sr's go to man for wet works and deep black bag operations. Especially if the back side had a tail which could be exploited for control of any or all parties involved. Causey is a true satanist and worse. He recently developed a rapid onset of Alzheimer’s. Not quite as sever as my own father and name sake Donald Paul Williams. But the timing of both though separate is suggestively coincidentally to events associated to me and those involved in FOXing me. I suspect brother Magnus of being petty. Grinding and hammering on old grudges. Along with becomingly increasingly punitive in operational objectives concerning breaking me to the point of my “losing” it. At which point and time my only anticipated options would be to appeal to their overview and / or full capitulation to their agendas. Thus far I have successfully thwarted their attempts. Yet it has come at an immense cost to me, across the board. Okay in anticipation that I may never acquire the journal I started last year upon my departure from Long Beach, California. A long walk beginning by The Queen Mary and which ultimately landed me in Salt Lake City, Utah. It is becoming increasingly incumbent that I reiterate elements I previously wrote down back then. You would think it would be a simple straightforward process. Naturally such is not the case, for a variety of reasons. Not the least of which are context and my desire to avoid sounding narcissistic, or worse disillusion. Yet failing to do so will ultimately end in me portraying myself as such, even more so. Besides I really hate repeating myself, sorta a pet peeve of mine.

To the uninitiated this is going to sound ludicrous and insane. However, any comprehensive primer would require volumes of esoteric information, along with accompanying commentary and should include appropriate citations. All from tomes that are closely guarded. That I am denied access to permanently and utterly. Thus it is best to proceed directly into the matter wading through the initial convolution, realizing by degrees it will work out becoming about as clear as mudd. The luciferains according to their Canon refer to me as “The Dark One”. It is an appellation pulled directly from their actual scripture as initially iterated  to Cain from lucifer, himself.

Obviously atheist may take exception to these concepts, especially the language used. There is not much I can say in response to their misgivings. Because their beliefs lack the framework from which to attach this model. Hell most individuals beliefs also in like fashion lack similar mental framework. Yet most have allowances or the tools where with the modular architecture of their minds are able to “build out” an additional wing to the mansion in their minds which houses their understanding of “reality”. At the very least they can entertain the blueprints to an “add-on” to their mansions. Similar to the operations of our minds “cognitive consistency”. Dr Richard Alan Miller is fond of noting “I would never have seen it if I hadn’t believed it”. Or by extended reference the belief that if you have enough information to postulate a coherent question, you already have enough to know the answer. You just have to convince yourself of it. The implications are profound. Stretching into metaphysics and the issues of faith preceding the miracle(s), and even magick! All topics I have and will continue to touch upon in my ramblings. But I go too far afield of my primary focus. Simply, I am The Dark One. This is both metaphoric and literal. For the few people whose sight allows them to to clearly see into the underlying spiritual realm of our world. Because all things that “are” where first created in spirit. Elsewise they would not exist or remain lifeless sterile elemental at best. There are also at worst case possibilities, but we will forego any such dialogue for the moment. Everything we see and interact with has a corresponding spiritual aspect providing impetus to the whole. Usually the spiritual aspect even resembles the physical expression, although at times the proportions differ. A fact that I know I will touch upon in other areas as topically necessitated. Nonetheless if one was to see our spirits they much resemble the physical form of our bodies, though a bit taller (note this is a foreshadowing hint, to a vastly different topic I Will Be Addressing. At times I may interject future foreshadowing hints, though sans the extensive explanations). Depending on the scope of vision applied a person may / can see many other things. For my current model I am going to stick to issues of direct correlation to what we perceive as the physical world.

Okay, yes I do know I tend to take a long round about, seemingly loquacious manner, almost tediously so in my explanations. This is due to the fact that words are nebulous, our ability to effectively communicate was fractured becoming compromised long ago. As a consequence, for clarity's sake I find this too wordy manner necessary to minimize confusion later in the discussion. By degrees we lose our way, or perpetuate our lost condition. Therefore it is by incremental degrees I am trying to more properly realign the various skewed beliefs we all hold. It is simple geometry, trigonometry or if you prefer vector math. If your initial bearing line is off by a few degrees, as you proceed further down its vector, or direction of travel where you end up will be considerably different than you meant to be. I wish to be aptly clear as to this fact early in my shared discourses.

Back to the proximate relationship of the spirit to our physical nature / condition. Also know that our spirits are gender specific. The entirety of humanity in this expressed Creation, the sons and daughters of Adam and Eve. Have migrated to this plane and place from Our Heavenly Home. That being a higher plane of existence, a organized realm of Love and Light. We, being all of us from Adam, Lilithe, and Eve till the last child of Eve is born, we are they that kept our first estate. Thereby earning both our right and place to be born here in this that by our common assent / consent / agreement we agreed would be real, thus we call it reality, simple. Wherefore, this being real by our mutual assent, means by extension that our actions here shall have real consequence to our station thereby effecting our progression. Those within Our Divine Family that rebelled and failing to reconcile back into the Family are denied participation in the progression of this estate and the subsequent assignments as to which paths we are to be assigned to in our individual journeys to progress back home.  Meaning, i.e. lucifer and the one third that fell (more properly “that were cast down”) with him. At times I will refer to lucifer as lucy or louie a small affectation I have over the years grown fond of as pet names for he who would seek dominion through his lies. Know that for my part I have always viewed our existence as an ongoing extension of the war in Heaven. Even as a toddler this was simply the nature of the world, in both a literal and metaphoric sense. Lucy is playing an end game gambit. As to our day to day offenses he for the most part cares little, seldom choosing to involve himself.  As I try to tell people; we can do bad all on our own, we don’t need the devil or louie's help. Matter of fact regrettably this particular Creation is an aberration. Most Creation’s do not have a Lucifer, who refuses to repent and reconcile, and worse yet becomes Satanish.  In so doing thereby becomes completely nonredeemable. Fit only to be cast out beyond the dark realms / dimensions. So far that not even a god could ever hope to make it back to Our Heavenly Home. Heady fanciful stuff, with a touch of discordance due to conflicting superlatives, I already know. From the presumed position of our understanding as a whole it is the best I can do with our shared mythos. The presumed contradictions fade as our understanding increases. Please accept I know little, next to nothing. What little I may grasp, has been fought hard to obtain over a tumultuous lifetime.

One of the hopeful eventualities concerning our collective situation in this Creation which I try to communicate to those that appear to show potential for understanding the following idea. Is that, Once we “eventually” progress through this Creation. As our then on going progression continues through multiple future Creations we will in all probability never encounter another such circumstance / Creation wherein any of those will again be with the added burden of a Satan / Lucifer persona to add complications to our individual, group, and familial progress. Who would threaten to usurp Creation from G-d and all of us. We can do bad all on our own. We really don’t require an objective excuse or archetype on which to pin our failings. If you are acquainted with the Book of Revelations, in its pages are the clues to understanding Lucy’s actual focus / agenda for our Creation. For we are eternal beings, Children of Divine Parentage. We live through infinite eternities, progressing and striving to Perfect Ourselves unto the Image of Our Heavenly Mother and Father. Now I sound like a some traveling revivalist preacher. Might as roll out the tent and tambourines, hahaha.

Wednesday July 4, 2018 – Killeen, Texas

Well happy 4th of July, U S of fucking A. Not to be cynical, but here we are celebrating another Independence Day in the Land of the Free. The irony is inescapable. Sadly too many individuals become distracted and lost in the perpetually shifting landscape of dysinformation. Yes the horrors these people revile against are very real and indefensible. Except in the losing of perspective, failing to see that these innumerable struggles are purposely being generated to engage the population to distraction. Usually these horrid distractions are set cross ways of social and cultural lines. This formulaic tactic is meant to ferment hostilities, hate and conflicts across the associated strata. This has been repeated throughout history to create wars, fracture our social structure, warp our values, and indoctrinate the population en mass with beliefs such as to reshape our view of reality shackling all of us to a diminished image and sense of self along with the entire human race. Once we accept this warped view as the archetypal potentiality of us all. We are guaranteed to sell ourselves and our brethren into slavery. In due course I will be discussing at length the geopolitical history within the framework of our limited knowledge of what we recorded since the flood. Rather what we have been permitted to know of said records. The fact that much as been redacted from the common brain trust passed on to us via academia. Those alabaster halls occupied by self appointed guardians of the approved versions of knowledge and information released to us vulgar unfortunate masses. So burdened, I shall pass this Holiday celebrating the antithesis of its traditions.

Continuing in the same vain as previously began prior to the day’s celebrations, in much the similarly convoluted fashion as before… I, The Dark One of Occultic Lore. I have been told; that I have done things no one in the history of the world has ever done previously. Personally I can only cite one quality as being demonstrative of such high praise. Though in all honesty I am more often than not being chastised for lacking focus, being lazy, acting the fool in the face of my enemies, or being cavalier in my affections, or placing myself at undue risk of life and limb, and the list goes on and on ad nauseaium.  This from the select few who know and understand who and what I am.  Those who may actually care about me, and would see me fulfill that which I have been foreordained to do whilst sojourning here. The totality of our circumstance here, now at this moment, we soon shall enter perhaps the most critical and precarious point of our history and that of this Creation.  I am all too well aware of this along with that which shall soon come to pass shortly.  This awareness, I experience across multiple vectors while being cognizant of a sea of permeations which ultimately stream toward a specific Crux in Our Familial Aggregation (I am trying to develop appropriate nomenclature – wherein I avoid certain more readily common labels or descriptors and/or appellations. Whose usage has been subverted into the double speak practiced by the various satanic and blood occultic families which run the world. Who have ritually (via trauma) conditioned and indoctrinated their acolytes, golems / victims to hear and respond to accordingly, never in a positive manner. Wherefore it is incumbent upon me whenever possible to avoid affirming these, even to the point of reinventing the ascribed nomenclature.) within this Creation. As a consequence I must stumble through idiomatic constructs, ungainly though they be. Believe me if you knew and understood the actualities ascribed to words and the double or multiple meanings applied to them within the Families. The evils, the pain, the denigration of the individuals / victims usually by those nearest them; ultimately by extension it eventually infects and corrupts societies unto the world at large.  You would weep an endless river of tears unto filling the seas, if you could see this in your minds eye properly.  As long as this perniciously malicious spiritual / familial / multi-generational / social / cultural pathogenic practice continues, our struggles will end in naught. Hence into this morass I must seek to keep my appointed task. How best to explain this? I have spent the majority of my life in the haze of denial.  Avoiding my differences.  Putting off my preparations for that which is to come.

Since approximately twenty four plus months prior to Operation Jade Helm our covert Intelligence apparati, including elements of the ruling shadow government began a concerted effort at Foxing me. The on set of Operation Jade Helm and its scope marked an exponential increase in expanded efforts against me.  Now, let me make clear Operation Jade Helm’s purpose was not solely to target me, there where many targets across the greater portion of the United States of America.  Death dealers and various squads of assassins executed / murdered an increasing number of American Citizens, most had been identified for some time to be exterminated.  Impunity seems to have become the operational by word.  The extremes demonstrated continuously since that time defy all reason. Defining the architects of this action as being criminals is almost quaint.  This level of criminal insanity goes beyond the point of being treasonous. With the majority of resource allocation comes from “military Intelligence” which then utilizes other military resources and supplies.  Thus it is that we have been duped into financing our own demise.

For purposes pursuant to their agendas, they have labeled me a domestic terrorist.  Thereby presumably justifying illegal exercises and persecution of my person.  Rationalizing by extension similar acts against my family and anyone I may care about and or Love. Death for them would be preferable to the horrors their personages have been and are being subjected. I know I sound ludicrously paranoid with delusions of grandeur in the extreme. Hahaha….  gosh how I wish, hope and pray such were the case. I make this record in defense of myself and my actions. Naturally I fear all my good intentions with their accompanying actions are for naught. I realize that upon my death as allotted to the sons of man, as to the first part, my character will be maligned in the worst manner possible.  A issue I will address at length later in this on going exposition of myself and my misadventures as they may be.

Thursday July 5, 2018.  Killeen Texas

Despite my misgivings it seems I survived all the pops and bangs of our nosiest of American Holidays. A joyous circumstance to be certain. From now till my last day of my allotted life as unto the children of men, my life hangs in the balance. The ante to live my life as it were.

My current accommodation over the past almost six weeks has been with an old flame and friend Jade Causey – Chamlee, and her 18 year old son Joey, whose given name was Freddie. Bless their souls for extending to my worn out arse a place to stay and recover. Regrettably my physical recovery is taking much longer than I anticipated. I am fully aware my expectations regarding the time necessary for a complete recovery was / were unreasonable. But I need to set the bar high to keep from being complacent. Now had my situation been inclusive of adequate financial resources I would be at least relatively close to my timetable. I would have had access to better medical, dietary, living and therapies. Hell my injuries would have been properly tended to at the hospital in my initial admittance. Instead I continued to be the object of curiosity and experimentation. With little consideration to trying to give me appropriate medical care. I have come to know what to expect, due largely to my younger brother's general attitude. Wherein he rationalizing what him and others do to me, as simply a matter of effect associated to the who and what I am. It is rationalized that if  I, Donn am this special chosen person than he/I should be able to survive everything, whatever it may be.  Because if he/I don’t than obviously he/I am not that special and thus not protected from on High.  Horrific logic used to rationalizing a growing list of atrocities committed against my person. A ugly fact of my reality, one I anticipated. What issues make this whole fucked up process unacceptable, malicious, acutely painful and unforgivingly egress is the manner by which they have targeted and used others. Especially my younger brother, father, son, Tiffany, Revaka, Heather, Angie and numerous others. They have been tortured, abused and treated as disposable commodities. All are scared and precious, some are very unique with abilities reaching into arenas not generally accepted or understood in today’s world view. Yet these individuals are denigrated, abused in some of the most deviantly sordid manners. Most are ultimately destroyed, first robbing them of their minds, bodies and in some final insult of their very souls. As it appears that they are being harvested for physical vehicles to have demons placed in their bodies. Yeah, I suppose I could say it in some sort of more politically correct parlance as “aliens” from a lower resonating dimensional reality / realm. Somehow I find that by doing so it fails to communicate the malicious evil inherent in the process. I find the old nomenclature to communicate the Truer meaning. Though some eras of our past carry their own obvious failings magnified exponentially by ignorance while fueled by misguided zealotry. They were not called the Dark Ages for nothing. Similarly different cultures, societies, periods, places and times have fallen to various abysses of Darkness. We have this false mental image of life on Our Earth proceeding in some linar fashion from primitive man (including Adam, for those of a theological inclination) struggling out of caves. Fighting against their own primitive brain / mind which was trapped in a diminished brain pan capacity from questing for fire against ignorance and superstitions. With us being the cumulative beneficiaries of this on going process. Peoples of those ancient times could not have been as intelligent as those today. Therefore they could not have grasped the concepts we do. Some of the most ridiculous fallacies of logic ever presumed to rationalizing and justify conduct or beliefs. Matter of fact the inverse is actually True. But what the fuck could I possibly know!

Sadly my frustrations are rearing their collective heads as it were in my writing. I wish I had been more diligent in securing my journal I started last year upon my departure from Long Beach towards Utah. I was more focused recording relavent issues in a contemporaneous fashion. Not to mention a considerable investment in explanations dealing with a variety of associated topics. Grrrrr… all I did then was walk and write. I may soon be in a recurrence of such, shortly. I can no longer abide where I am. All the more so under these conditions. Deep in my mind I am aware of happenings which require my attention. Not to mention my friend’s household is not psychologically conducive to my state of being. At least not in a healthy way, good intentions not with standing. My largest obstacle to my leaving believe it or not, is my need for acceptable footwear. Flip-flops aren’t going to cut it. Hell they are wholly inadequate to even walk just up the street a block or two. I must admit the sidewalks and streets of California were well suited for walking.

Monday July 9, 2018.  – Killeen, Texas

As Pooh would be apt to say, “Oh bother”. I feel for the most part Tigger. Bouncing all about spinning, twisting, flipping… as well on my head as my tail. I am most acutely wanting to find my focus once again. My communication skills seem heavily compromised. Not that I was ever able to write as effectively as the great Nobel Laureates. Generally speaking I could at least maintain some linear cohesion in my writing.  Physically, emotionally, spiritually and mentally I am shaken.  Much as if my being was trapped in the tremors of advance Parkinson’s. In similar fashion my expressed thoughts and experiences lack focus, my abilities at lucidly articulating my larger life occurrences is choppy at best. Failure is NOT an option! No matter how I feel or how events are or may effect me, I must regain my composure and find my center. While reacquiring my skills of teaching and sharing what I have learned.  Please excuse me if I don’t edit the foregoing entries. As convoluted and murky as they may be, their relevance contemporaneously can not be diminished. Hopefully they will in due course provide a benchmark to juxtaposition future writings and notes thereby effecting a glimpse into my state of being at the time of writing.  Grrrrr…….

They have done a very good job of isolating me. All the more so, as I try to come to terms with the potential cost to those I would seek commerce with across all levels of our socioeconomic strata.  If what I endured while being the object of a Foxing protocol by our shadow government’s covert intelligence community are any indication. Anyone who associates with me, either at mine or their initiation is subject to become targeted for retribution as punishment to me. Too high a cost to blindly impart with out consideration to finding possible means of mitigation. Or at the very least terms whereby I am ultra selective with whom I interact. Along with the rationale for said interactions. Soon enough our social dependency will require I abandon all such pretext or attempts at shielding anyone from consequence. I fear that time shall be upon us/me far too soon. Perhaps I am again being exceedingly naive. My efforts are most probably for naught. An on the at large canvas of the bigger picture my presumption at damage control will only result in a larger area and impact of effect upon our society as a whole. Not that I am some savior or prophet, far from it actually. In the grander scale of things, I might best be referred to as a “wild card”.  Meaning that in any analysis of the interaction of variables, one may with a degree of certainty predict the outcome of any issue, contest, conflict even war. However should certain individuals or a very small dynamic group of individuals enter the forum. Suddenly the landscape of the matter shifts radically to the point that the original outcome no longer applies or is meaningful. We have numerous examples of such occurrences throughout our histories. Of salient import to us here in America is The Battle of Thermopylae, and the 300 Spartans. We all learned about continents in school. Did you ever notice that Europe and Asia were counted as separate despite being one land mass. The reason is that Western Culture and Asian (Oriental) Cultures being vastly different it was traditionally ascribed to them being two separate continents. We may naively presume to ridicule such a blatant indulgence as arrogance. Yet there are fundamental reasons for this error being valid. We as the heirs of Western Culture, need to understand the mythical / legendary impact of these distinctions upon our mameic memory, especially those of us of the West. From Greece to Rome, then following our Angelo – Dutch (Iberian) roots it is transmitted to us. The importance and permanent impact of the actions and sacrifice of Leonidas and 300 Free Spartans against over a 1,000,000 servile basically slaves to a potentate deemed quasi divine, carved out a legacy of Freedom which stands even today. An Epic “wild card”. There are many others, most are lost to us today. With the occasional exception that survives in our Epics, our Mythologies, our Legends. Most such stories are the blending of factual events with older religious or semi religious traditions. Which aliteration was a common and accepted means of teaching the lessons of both convanents in a factual and metaphoric means. Much the way Jesus Christ taught using parables, allegories composed to have layers of meaning dependent upon the degree of understanding had by the student. So a natural continuation of this is to be inclusive of many historical events, along with the trans literal substitution of the individuals to those of prophecy or the the Divine or Angelic intercession of some ancient history. These depending on circumstance would be iterated and reiterated in verbal traditions to be celebrated in the retelling, usually in association to particular annual festivals. Such as the case with the Saga of the Norse Kings. A subject I hope to have the opportunity to entertain at length later in my writings, scribblings. The vast majority of my ideas, concepts, models and histories can generally be attributed to greater minds than mine. As has been said before, the reason I / we can see so far is that we stand on the shoulders of giants, those that have come before us. Yes I paraphrase taking a degree of liberty. More particularly to hopefully retain its original meaning.

Funny I have been much as I am, the entirety of my life. Before I commence an in-depth sharing of many of the somewhat unique occurrences and events that have brought me to this proposition in time. I wish to clarify and reiterate some postulates. Elsewise a portion of my own records and logs may well be used against me. Principally by interests who would wish to call my lucidity and grasp of reality into question, in the hopes of indicting or coloring my character via my words. No doubt they shall do so nonetheless. I only wish that my original is sufficiently vetted in the sane understanding of reality has to be a defense to my honor and mental facilities. Thus, again – I am No prophet! Nor am I an Alien. Hahaha… Nor am I some savior! As far as religion – I will say as was told to me by what would be termed alien contactees, or more specifically those that I felt and believed we’re genuine. Of the many I personally met back in the 1970s. According to these individuals as to the subject of religion and the Bible when broached to the various aliens these contactees interacted. All the aliens responded that yes the Bible was more or less correct and that it was wholly applicable to us, our Creation, and Our G-d. I know not at all what they say on the popular shows in the media today. Hmmm,…. As to my personal religious beliefs and inclinations, I am Mormon by conversation and have been excommunicated for many more years than I care to mention. By the way my excommunication was due wholly to personal moral matters not issues of doctrine or beliefs of Faith. So if somewhere in my upfront acknowledgements, you find me wanting of naïve. Fine, do or do Not as is in you, or as is your want. I make no apologies, nor seek to compromise in some misguided attempt to achieve an accord or consensus. Rather quite to the contrary, I share, present, seeking dialogue broader than an account of the happenings surrounding my life. Simply because I am appalled by the amount of lies and disinformation being used to indoctrinate the populace. Add to this the lack of corrected and broader views from the dreadfully homogenous perspective droning from damn near every sector. The present modalities disgust me, breaking my heart such that I would to weep day and night for Our collective Family. Yet better spent are my efforts in defense of the Truth and an improved accounting of our histories and circumstances. In pursuit of same I find I must submit my private life and experiences to general scrutiny. The majority of which I have never shared with anyone prior to the last six to eight years. I have desired to live a rather conventional life, for the most part. Realizing that soon enough I will forever be denied the Joy of such.

To this end and the accompanying process I submit some of the earliest memories and events of my life and childhood. One of my earliest, if not the earliest is being in my crib prior to the age of two. My father was working for numerous government and governmental contractors at the time. Naturally I don’t recall those details. Our family had just moved to Southern California. We were living with my mother’s sister somewhere in East Los Angeles. Their home was the typical Spanish Colonial. Anyone familiar with the style and form of such. Know that hallways usually converge into a common room, you cross to the hallway leading to the room you have as your destination. In this pass through common room is where my crib was stationed. Probably the best location for it and me. So the various women could occupy my attention should I become fussy. An many times this common room was an area where the women would congregate as my recollection is. Well across this room was a pantry closet, with selves and full of the sundry items found in such for the time. In the coming and goings of my family and relatives there were numerous occasions that would find me unattended, alone in my crib. It was during one such interlude that the commencement of a reoccurring vision / dream began. I having been left alone to my own devices (parenting back in the day). When the door to the aforementioned pantry slowly opened wide. A beautiful female Golem, her physique had the appearance of red bricks. Yet the contours of her form were singularly female. Rather she had distinct curves with aquiline sculptured features. Most hauntingly she had these striking blue eyes. She never spoke a word, her eyes spoke volumes to my initially shocked mind. As the sounds of returning relatives approached, she gracefully returned from whence she came. On the first couple of occasions I witnessed this I raised a bit of a commotion. I was not yet verbal, and in all honesty I was a late talker. Well the relatives thought I might have seen a rat. So they dutifully opened the pantry to inspection. The pantry was then as it always was, with neither a rat or exquisite Lady Golem. This parade continued off and on for the majority of the our short time residing at my aunt’s house. Usually the Lady Golem had those blue blue eyes, though green and grey versions are among the visits. Each and every time she would come to the side of my crib, moving her head, or tilting (cocking) it just so. Always her eyes full of questions and disbelief. Her eyes seemed to express; You? You are the one sent? Hmmm… You don’t look like much! Look more like a little wet rodent, but who knows?. This was more or less the sentiment expressed in her eyes. Following my first encounters I became accustomed to her visits and would actually miss her on the rare occasions of absence. Needless to say from early childhood I saw the “world” differently than others around me. I also learned to accept this altered perception without fear, understanding its validity within the accepted context of what is “actual” or the “concrete” reality of our existence.

If you may recall back in the haze of school days. During various lectures the teacher's would sometimes use what is commonly referred to as an over head projector. Depending on what was being taught, it was also common practice to layer over lays. These would either complete the image or at times super impose other images as needed. Sometimes even as multiple layers of over laid transparencies. Some of you more contemporaneously educated individuals may never have seen such primitive presentations, having known only power point. For those so blessed what I describe next may be Greek to you. For the dinosaur amongst us most should have some recollection. This model is the closest I can use to illustrate how the world appeared to me growing up as a child. Usually I would see what could best be described as up to two transparencies overlapping the “real world” in general. I could even lift these overlays to get a clearer view of what was being presented before me. At times these would both be at in the foreground of “reality”, other times both would be in the background, while at other times it would be split one in front and one in back. Yet there were numerous other configurations, sometimes completely unrelated to the happenings around me (foreshadowing alert). Gradually this ocular affect of the world began to diminish till it no longer was within my field of vision. By the time I was around sixteen to seventeen years of age this effect was effectively gone. Since then I have experienced this only a handful of times. I usually take a different approach, I will address momentarily. One of the proximate results almost immediately of perceiving my world in this manner is that I usually know the scope and degree that anyone is lying. As an adult it is not quite as prominent as in my childhood. Though there have been exceptions. As a direct consequence my earliest life lesson was in due course the hypocrisy of the adults around me. Everyone would profess such devotion to “the necessity” or importance of always “speaking the Truth”. Yet I would be punished to no end for pointing out the hypocrisy of the fact the adults more often than not lied as suited them. I learned to keep such to myself. Something I still do to this day. I tend to filter or make allowances far too much now as an adult. Invariably leading to greater complications. Besides transparencies certain images or objects would “float” across my field of vision in similar transparency manner. Some of which I could not decipher any context or meaning at the time or since. To begin to place elements of this visual experience I need to explain tangent events of recent.

The advent of the Internet and the information highway is as with most such paradigms, both a blessing and a curse. Dependent largely upon the nature and supposed inclination of man. We are all no doubt familiar with the media platforms of Facebook and YouTube. Like everyone else to some degree I have had occasion to surf around doing research or simply for mindless pleasure. Back prior to Jade Helm, when my Old Lady (though she was substantially younger) Tiffany and I were keeping house in Austin, Texas. I noticed a YouTube video regarding the Apollo 20 mission. Oh by the way according to my histories the Apollo lunar missions went up to 20. I wanted to see what was been discussed along with what twists and turns the disinformation specialist spin their distractions. Which if you can determine it sometimes conclude what they are trying to hide or if their direction of spin is a “z” vector you can sight 180 degrees opposite to determine the landscape they don’t wish you to see. You may consider all this a large investment of mental energies, it is just how my mind works at times automatically. Back to the Apollo 20 video. In the video there was some general discussion of aliens, their nature and origins. During this open dialogue, there was a series of various old clips. I presume were some how removed from the archives of NASA. Many of the older non-defined clips I was quite familiar with the images. Not because I have ever seen them as photos, images, clips or video. At the time I was floored, since previous to that moment I was unacquainted with their context or related meaning. These objects I use to see in the exact same configuration and involved in the exact motions approximately forty years earlier as I was growing up. Matter of fact judging from the age of the imagery I would have to conclude I was witnessing them contemporaneously as a child. Without the context of outer space or NASA I had presumed I was watching some complex interactions of some sort of strange protozoal life from. I even remotely as concerned they had some how become infected to my cornea, so prevalent we’re the objects across my vision. So striking was their imposition upon my sight that more than four decades later their association was immediate and most assuredly certain. One less mystery to worry about. Yet the implications are troubling profoundly. Both of myself and the world at large, considering how maliciously the world's population has been lied to and manipulated. The ends of which are too shocking and horrible to ever discuss. Although in previous conversations at moments of weakness I have divulged a greater portion than may have been prudent.

Wednesday July 11, 2018.  – Killeen, Texas

You may right so wish to ascribe or diagnosis me as having a form of delusions inclusive of all types of hysteria, grandeur, psychosis with severe religious obsessions. For what passes for psychiatry today within the public ledger domain, you may be correct. I would offer in defense a extensive lifetime containing a ongoing accounts of a similar or even greater note. Although I am not a Moses, peoples of another time would recognize me as being touched by The All Mighty, as it were. I will at least own any such appellation. Am I some righteous man deserving of beautification unto sainthood, I would argue Not. At best I have tried to be a descent man, who speaks the Truth as much as possible. I am burdened by an additional commitment.

Back in my youth, being around nine years old. I had a singularly profound series of visions / dreams. I repeatedly dreamt my death, accompanied by the various permeations associated to reaching same. The process took several days (nights) between three to five. Being so young I didn’t think to take particular note of the days my dreams were thus occupied. They obviously had a unique feel with a equally sensational intensity, they still abide with me today. I distinctly recall a voice of sorts coming to me following the last night of witnessing this panorama of my life's end (as are the days accorded to the sons of man). Now this voice which came unto me, I presume it was within the precincts of my mind. Not that it would have mattered greatly since I was alone when it came unto me. Nor did I think to ask from whence or whom spoke. I knew and could feel the light of our Divine Home as I heard the intent along with the presumed words. It was a simple dialogue, stating; “this is how it ends, this is what you have come to do. You need not do it. You have the right to choose. However if you are to complete this task. You must choose to do so now.”. Being a precocious and arrogant child, I immediately presumed that if I had been sent to do such, than the obvious was that I was the best candidate to accomplish the prescribed task. Armed with such infallible logic, I whole heartedly accepted my calling understanding it would come at great cost. Now granted, an understanding of the true scope or magnitude or the enormity of the cost or suffering I fully lacked. I have spent my life preparing. I have come to know that even at the prescribed time I will lack of my own what is necessary. I shall present to the task my all, trusting in Our G-d to shore me up to complete that which I would do. Subsequent to acceptance of this appointment I am to keep in the near future, my sight / vision increased. The frequency and quantity began increasing dreams, visions, revelations, transparencies along with my general perceptions increased. I now openly own the fact that I see the world through the eyes of the mystic. Only recently was my sight dampened. A heart breaking topic the occasion of which surrounds losing my Love Tiffany. The subject of which shall also be laid upon the alter for examination by the modern day augers. Find what fault if you will, I care little. Only know that matter and its accompanying are for later. I must at present attempt to continue in this established vain of thought recounting events long past in my short life. Besides the notations contemporaneous to me and my circumstances or any of the other tripe I have need to spew forth. Believe this, if I could accomplish my foreordained task without sharing, discussing or placing ultimately for public review any of this – such would be my desire. Painfully I have had to come to terms with the ugly reality I must prostrate myself to assure I am able to do what needs be done. Onward thru the fog, as it were.

Without going into specifics too much, early on I displayed another aptitude. Sometime around first to second grade. My Dear sweet mother recognized I somehow had a hand in the going ons of the other children that back then composed the group of children who had commenced to being around. Now my mother was blessed with a keen intellect. Which included the wisdom to not over think somethings. Instead wherever possible if there was a direct and simple solution to apply one's efforts to the solution. Thereby allowing life to continue on as meant. Almost elegant in its simplicity, usually quite effective in solving any problem, a quaint provincial version of Occum's Razor. Consequently the solution was simple, as she noted; “son, I don’t know what you are doing. But it is wrong. Apparently you need my help understanding that.”. There after I regularly got my hide tanned. Until sometime around the age of seven plus the realization that just because you could do something; does not mean you should. And that everyone is entitled to make their own choices. Afterwards the occasion necessitating my tanning ceased as a consequence to those particular actions. By no means did I fail to earn other occasions of corporal punishment as befits a young boy trying to find his wings, so to speak.

Growing up making my way through our education system of public schooling. I never cracked a book. Now one should not presume schools and childhood were smooth sailing. Quite to the contrary, in second grade my school in southern California labeled me “retarded”. Lacking a separate facilities or classes you were simply shoved to the back of the class with similarly challenged children. Nor did they have to test the child or give notice to the parents. Following a few weeks at the back of the class I began to demonstrate “odd” behavior. Which my always observant mother was quick to question. She went to the school and raised holy hell. In actuality it was more of a racially motivated issue. My parents being divorced, the school only saw my Hispanic mother. Being profoundly dyslexic, their initial assessment was that I was a Mexican, and you know you can not teach their kind. I was going to a all white school at time. Not to mention kindergarten in Watts. During the riots in 1965. I had to have police escorts to school. While I still have very distinct memories of the entire family sleeping in the living room with all the doors and windows blocked and barricaded against the rioting blacks. A sort of difficult time growing up. Believe me I know what racism is like. I am not going to hold my tin cup up on that lame ass subject. The fact that there are those in this country that hold onto this issues as the reasons for all their troubles. Or that there are groups and individuals who exploit this history for their enrichment. All this does is allows an ever expanding rifts in our society. The age old axiom of divide and conquer. Yet we all seem oblivious to this, instead we rush to our own deaths.

Thursday July 12, 2018,. – Killeen, Texas

Aaagh, fuck, damnit…. I fucking swear. Why do I even try to help anyone. Generally they hold to their own practices of appeasing the least common denominators by which they live. What can I say. As gracious as my hostess and her son may be. I doubt if I can tolerate much more of their dysfunctionality sans any self realization or objectivity. And they wonder about Joey meeting someone (female). I can’t imagine the woman who would find any of this manner or lack of is appealing. I try to maintain perspective because I do recognize the roots of most of the antisocial behavior. Even if it expresses its self differently than one may anticipate. I just don’t have the tolerance I usually do. In my current condition of convalescing from my injuries, makes me subject to the vagaries that define the lives of normal people. Due to the obvious singular quality of my life I have had to come to terms with the fact that I do not process anything in like manner as my peers. An before everyone thinks I am trying to sound all superior or some such, please note that I am continually making stupid mistakes principally due to my own naivety. We all have this aspect wherein we judge our circumstance and that of others from the pigeonhole perspective. Everyone else's view though differing from each other falls within a given area, or a few degrees of each other. Mine falls a extreme distance outside of what could be considered the norm. Nonetheless being very human I continue in the belief I perceive “reality” much as the other person from a similar understanding and values system. Invariably this attitude finds opportunity to smack me in my face by its differences. Each and every time I am recalled that, oh I knew better because I am fully aware of the differences and should have factored accordingly. Even now at this more venerable point in my life I find one of my biggest failings is naive belief in the character of my fellow man. Yet if my assertions as to my last day as are allotted to the sons of man be True. For the greater part I will be doing so for the entirety of Our Familial Aggregation. Even for those who seek only to cause me and those I Love and care about, harm or maliciousness. Because that is the way of things in our Creation. Soon enough the vile evil shall reveal itself, the kid gloves shall come off and life will never be this peaceful again. If it be the will of he who sent me I will seek to balance many scales of injustice. Till then I must endure and prepare as best I can.

Well enough complaining about friends who do their best given the circumstances. I appreciate all they have done on my behalf. Especially since to a large degree they grasp what potentially may be the cost. Even if in some small ways they may have been influenced by the same malicious or “Bees”, that seek to be the cause of my failure. For such is the nature of things in the abyss. Especially considering the length of time I have elected to spend wrapped in the confines of twisting throughout what we commonly refer to as “reality”. I generally feel more comfortable surrounded by its miasma and ickor than anywhere else. As much as it may appear to be a contradiction it ultimately is fact. Sigh!!!

For the time being I guess I will change the temporal focus of my entries. I can seldom stay focused on any particular time frame for an extended period. Doing so usually causes me to shift to the associated memories which become very visceral in nature. Soon it begins to become a tad overwhelming. All the more so once framed in relation to the present context. I sincerely hope that suffices and is remotely coherent. I am usually deconstructing my conceptual models and ideas into a form more acceptable to being understood. Sometimes I become lost in the process to the point I know what I mean despite the fact that the words and or syntax are nonsense. In conversation I sometimes have to stop and ask if what I have postulated or presented in the dialogue makes sense. I know it all made sense and sounded good in my head. Aaah but I can’t always presume to have effectively communicated the same.

Saturday July 14, 2018.  – Killeen, Texas

Well here it is the weekend, somewhere in Who-ville are working stiffs cheering at the arrival of the ritual with its time off. It has been interminably long since I have have lived a life so constrained as to include the simple Joy of a defined weekend of days off. Hell I am usually engrossed in my vocation daily. With my ever prevalent purpose always driving me. For the most part I have become unfit to be amongst civil company. Yes I am conversant. I am genial enough when in mixed groups. I tend to empathic of those around me. I genuinely give a damn as to the well being of others. Even so, the inescapable Truth is that the darkness is too imbued into my being. Because of the darkness of my spirit, I have become rolled into the ubiquitous abyss of our “reality”. Though it does not effect me quite the same as others its taint has woven into my fibers. Not being much of a liar I lack the necessary tools to hide it from general view.

Wednesday July 18, 2018  - Killeen, Texas

Well damn, I sometimes really get fucking frustrated.  At one level I am perpetually detached from the day to day focus and obsessions of everyone around me. I can’t bring my mind to focus on the general ideological concepts propagated by the geopolitical theater. Which resembles an episode of the moppet show as far as I what it appears. Are the offenses and injuries less or non-existent to my sympathies or moral indignation; not in the least. They still represent injustices and crimes which need to be effectively dealt with and hopefully the scales will balance. Even so, I just can not seem to get all worked up over these slight daily travesties. All the more so since I tend to view all these for what they are within the larger perspectives and plans of globalist / occultic families. Typical divide and conquer, or simple distractions from their primary objectives. I can appreciate everyone’s sentiments and attitudes that the scenarios of what is to come are not perceived as real or likely. Hell even I given enough distance and time begin to feel as though none of it is possibly factual. Except for the fact that I have lived a life associated to these eventualities. Even when I was in the thick of things all those involved would tell me bold faced lies as to what was occurring. As if to make me question the obvious, because the obvious Truth of the matter was outside any social norms. I guess there are those for a convenient lie is preferred to Truth too extreme to accept. I have been at this life, spending the majority of my existence living in the abyss. Which is everywhere, it co-exists with whatever social or cultural conventions occupying our realities of the moment.  It is ubiquitous yet invisible to all but those who have had the misfortune to have grown up in its mists, or the uninitiated. Due to my unique occular abilities I am sort of self initiated. It took me a little while to come to understand the meaning of this subset of our world. I have always seemed to rub against this sub culture, even as a child. A odd fact which has taken me many years to come to terms with it. Even then it was a process of educating myself to be able to grasp the entirety of the concepts. Though outrageous beyond belief, it is nonetheless part of a larger pool of knowledge I have fought long and hard to achieve. We are a phenomenal expression of life, even across the multiverse. For all our uniqueness, we are seemingly determined to trivialize who and what we are. More importantly the processes and manner whereby we are to accomplish our purpose “here”.  Truly phenomenal!!!

Yet I digress. I am simply getting on my soapbox, whipping the horse, so to speak. Grrrrr…

How best to convey some of the basics back into the discussions and open forums in our sea of opinions. A perplexing problem one that has vexed my soul for almost three decades. I suppose the real source of my reservations has principally revolved around my own reluctance to be centrist to any reintroduction in a general dialogue. Much to my consternation it is plain that to accomplish this and thereby facilitate me being able to keep my appointment in the future, I must find the where with all and means to personally become directly a part of our social dialogues. I can freely admit to my own megalomania. I try not to buy into it myself. I shan’t feed such feelings or Mali-adpted inclinations. What ever a person's tendencies, we fail our own interests in doing so. To the point of it becoming a all consuming psychosis. Our histories are replete with the villains who are consumed by base desires at the cost of all else. Not that such is my fear. Rather I prefer to do what I can from a position far from the limelight. We don’t always get to choose how best to accomplish our goals. My non-object oriented way of thinking I suppose. Aaagh, this is an area I would deeply desire some assistance. Not to mention the realities of presently being impoverished. I had best get used to my condition, I fear I shan’t know any other for some time to come. I guess I need to find the way and means to broadcast my ugly mug on to the internet. I guess I will start some YouTube type of series. I need to really get my act together!

Amazingly as we and our solar-system has traversed the apogee of its elliptical orbit with its sister star. This having occurred back in December 2012. We are now accelerating towards our sister star on the side closest to our Galactic Center. We will soon be re-entering the flows of Magick. They are part of the natural order of things. Think of it as a higher order of physics. We conveniently suppose a posture of superiority over some earlier more organic beliefs or systems of interactions within our realities. Although witchcraft, paganism, shamanism, and various other practices have been collectively maligned for associated practices related to satanistic practices (which Are very evil). In many such cases we have throughen the baby out with the bathwater. I am not trying to condemn nor make excuses, only to ask for a broader open review of these strangely different beliefs and practices.  Many times they are simply corrupted versions of our Judaeo-christian thought, beliefs and practices. Sometimes I even find missing pages of our religious histories amongst these. An to borrow a quote;  “We are too hasty when we set down our ancestors in the gross for fools for the monstrous inconsistencies (as they seem to us) involved in their creed of witchcraft.” - C. Lamb.

Friday July 19, 2018.  – Killeen, Texas

Now as to my disjointed quaint manner of writing, I am recalled of yet another quote from Webster’s,  “Prolix, Diffuse. A prolix writer delights in circumlocution, extended detail, and trifling particulars. A diffuse writer is fond of amplifying, and abounds in epithets, figures, illustrations. Diffuseness often arises from an exuberance of imagination; prolixity is generally connected with a want of it.” [1913 Webster].  As to which, my confused manner may be likened, I leave such determination to those who due to some pathological compulsions decide to continue on through the disjointed tediousness of my log.  Excuse my quoting, it but appears the best and most eloquent descriptive means external to my own critiques. Wherein Webster provides what I believe is a more accurate description of my loquacious manner and style of communication. Bleck, ugh…

On to more relevant matters. As I continue to play my game of catching up to the current state of affairs in my existence. Jumping back to around August last year, at the time I elected to take my leave of the Long Beach / Wilmington area of the LA Basin. The majority of occurrences I previously wrote down in a contemporaneous log as I walked out of LA ultimately reaching Salt Lake City, Utah. With a brief momentary stay in Las Vegas, Nevada. My mind aches at the memories from that time. Regardless, there may in the retelling be wisdom or beneficial information for myself or others. Sorry if some of this has a choppy feel to it. There are mountains of unresolved emotional context and histories, which continue to elicit extremes within me. I hate sounding apologetic from the get go. Not that any of the vacillating diminishes the importance of the material or what I endured.

In July of last year, my younger brother was arrested and placed in presumably Twin Towers downtown Los Angeles. It was involving drugs and a handgun. I saw him and the P.O.S. , earlier that night. I already knew there were going to be problems. Additionally I had been indirectly informed my situation was about to become difficult. No more niceness regarding my treatment, operational dictums were changed. Initially I was was acutely aware my younger brother was not in police custody. I figured he was being held some where on or around the federal facilities of Terminal Island in the Port of Long Beach. Later parts of my sight of his circumstances were confirmed to me, though the exact location never has been (foreshadowing). Sometime during the second week of his presumed incarceration. He digitally appeared in the system with the appropriate arrest date, and information. To this day I am not convinced of the terms and conditions accompanying this purely “staged” event. No doubt there were days he was in the Twin Towers facility. Anything else is highly suspect at best if not solely manipulated data for the purposes of the Op. Nonetheless, I was sorely put upon. Due to the determinate fact that whatever had previously as well as on going to date are the proximate results of his being “my brother”. I was aware my brother was not my brother. I later would describe the fact as, “my brother was murdered on the mesas of New Mexico 4 (5) years prior”. I freely declared the fact, even with my younger brother present. At the time of his arrest I had invested two years trying to awaken and heal his soul. During this ordeal, he was on goingly conditioned (subject to various satanic trauma assisted by ultra high technologies deployed by our Shadow Government for the purposes of mind control). I can not escape a degree of culpability. Many may seek succor in the belief that I was not responsible, nor the individual inflicting these horrors to my younger brother. I acknowledge the physical reality as being so. However the moral reality is that, We are our Brother's keeper. An for myself it has a immense literal quality. We are all part of Our Larger Familial Aggregation, what we do, say or do not effects all. While in my particular case, he is my younger brother – same Mother and Father. I have known what to expect from the future all my life. I have even attempted to convey this knowledge in abstract to my brothers. Granted I did Not know that in recent times the evil practitioners of these vile satanistic rites had made a huge technical breakthrough. It use to be, if an individual attained adulthood free of these practices or influences, then they would die free of its chains. Obviously a person could freely elect to cultivate any base desires or perverse inclinations. By “choice” being the operative mandate, those chained to the MPD / DID minds of victims of Satanic Ritual Abuse (SRA) are forever robbed of any choice in the matter. Not even I can “set” them free or the chains forged in their infancy and childhoods. I can only unlock the gates and offer them the means to heal. The process is long and painful, requiring more years than anyone can live to hopefully heal. Sadly as each victim is considered chattel to the perspective heads of each “family”, who is in turn property of another. Hence there are functionally twelve Satanic Patriarchs seated at the heads of their “family”. Under Satanic Dogma they consider themselves “gods” of their worlds. According to their beliefs you exist as titled property, if not than you are of no consequence thereby you do Not exist. The worth of you and yours is less than the trash sent to the dump.

Sunday July 22, 2018 – Killeen, Texas

Continuing with similar point of fact as discussed, it may all sound or would be considered linear, a straightforward affair. Appearing almost orderly, locked in some strange perverse dance. When it is anything but. Take into consideration the matter of succession. You might be inclined to infer that being Patriarchal, it is a matter of patrialinacal father to son. The reality is far from such Familial Sensibilities. Simply put, upon the death of the head of any household. He, who inherits is the male gains control of his clan by right of arms, or force. Basically if you are not yet feared enough to demand your seat as the heir to the estate. The one who rules does so because he has murdered and killed all the opposition by blood rite according to Antediluvian Law. Meaning you not only kill your opposition, the action is inclusive of all males of immediate consanguinal association. The wholesale murder also removes any potential blood retribution by those who possess an immediate claim to do so. Secondly it demonstrates to clan members at large the vicious response dissent will meet. Terror then substitutes conditioned context within their trauma-based mindset vicariously confirming that male's natural right to head that Family’s Branch of the Larger Familial Group. If you can remotely rationale order from such chaotic slaughter. You more than likely were raised under such paradigms, or your values are perversely twisted and I recommend you seek professional help from any school of thought practicing a highly structured value system, preferably based on some well established benevolent religion. Notice I qualify said using the word benevolent. Cause if you use the most liberal definition to the concepts of religion you could quietly slip satanism or luciferinism in as established religions. The distinctions are sufficient as to invite debate. One I feel is much a waste of time for all parties. Generally I ascribe it principally to a matter of semantics shackled to vastly differing modalities of operations defining values. Our time can be better spent educating ourselves up and out of overly cerebral arguments designed to trap us in artificial concepts posing as reality. A overwrought process favored by Academia in defense of entrenched theories dressed in the ideology we refer to as the “Scientific Model”.  Yes, I have great disdain for what passes for education and schools of higher learning. They have long since been co-oped into the problems they were meant to free us from being slaves. I will tuck that soapbox away now, thank you for your indulgence.

What is even more incredible is the fact that this insanity is governed by their own set laws and rules. They even have a court system with defined jurisprudence. Not any sort you or I could consider properly legal. Rather it is more a system to maintain the “status quo” based on traditions, precedence, along with a strange quasi religious tones from Antediluvian Laws. Even known lies are acceptable if left uncontested but those who have standing and recognized Familial context. Elsewise the stated lie will stand as fact, enforceable to the fullest extent to which the system can accommodate.

Now if you followed that loose explanation, allow me to attempt to give an overview of some of the semi-societal interactive relationship between myself and these psychopaths. Especially above the standing rank and file victims constituting the entirety of the Families. I have a singularly unique interactive connection to them, their Families, their politics, traditions, religious dogma, technologies of the Shadow Government, including possible contingencies for what is to come. It is a chaotic and confusing dynamic paradox. Perpetually in a state of change, in recent times there has been much difference of opinion concerning how to acknowledge or interact with me. Technically I am a nonentity, because I exist outside the direct consanguineous relationship, nor am I amenable to joining their point of view. I remain in opposition to them, their practices, beliefs to the extent of being fundamentally adversarial to “them”. It is worth noting I have been at this so long that everyone I know or deal with daily belongs to this subset of our society. Almost all my friends, associates, girlfriends or anyone else comes from some blood occultic families. Some even to what capacity they are able seek to support me in my efforts. I am alive today because some evil bastards simply decided not to do as they were instructed. Knowing full well the consequences for siding with me. Try to understand these individuals have lived corrupt malignant lives, they hate themselves but are forbidden to take their own lives. There is virtual nothing they can do to truly cause those over them to flip out or take offense. Yet they do recognize that my stumbling about is upsetting. Having run around everywhere doing what I do. I have always done so without a net, so to speak. It is a source of boarder line amazement, more particularly they think I am “bat-shit” crazy! Nonetheless I am still here. You may know people who collect body art, fashionably tattoos these days. I sometimes joke of my own collection of scars and injuries to my body. Thankfully I heal exceptionally well. Most of my scars heal to the point of being almost unnoticeable, if you did not know my histories. It is an exhausting hobby, painful too! A frequent refrain I hear while being admitted to the ER or ICU has been, “Mr Williams, you are very lucky to be alive”.  “Yeah Doc I hear that allot. Do the best you can.”.  It has become somewhat of a ongoing joke, amongst friends and family. These days those groups have become ultra thin. Another reason I make this record of events in my life including improved contemporaneous writings. We can all hope for such. Believe me if it was up to me, no one would know much if anything about me, or my life. I have been, or more correctly I have allowed myself to be forced into a dreadfully unpleasant set of circumstances, as I have whined concerning previously.

Okay Sherman set the way-back machine to the 80’s and 90’ of the last century. Seeing patterns across the country in the minds of crazy ass bitches, now I do Not mean that in a bad way. I have a immense affinity for beautiful crazy ladies. Now as I was saying, the imagery within their minds was too consistent to be coincidence. The language of our sub- conscience is imagery, archetypal, motifs, iconography, mythical, dreams, visions, will of the wisps and whimsy. I believe we all “see” much more of one another than we choose to accept. The largest hurdle to understanding is this compulsion to read or understand what we “see” before the picture is finished assembling in our minds. This tendency has been increasingly pushed into smaller and smaller bits. Which as a negative exponential inverse function has become more and more confusing as to be nigh meaningless with each subsequent reduction. Hence at a time when we should be more connected to everyone. We find increased feelings of isolation and alienation. No matter how much we communicate with our neighbors next door or abroad we have less consensus or feelings of commonality. We sequester these feeling with their accompanying anxieties, less we inadvertently offend anyone. Like what the Fuck! It is part and parcel of the Adult World. Being offended or offending others is how things get done. Usually for the best interests of everyone. Granted we should strive to be engaging to achieve our goals, short of violence or intimidation. Yet as any honest government would gladly concede. Once negotiations by normal means come to an impasse then comes negotiations by “other means”. The debased conduct of sordid persons is best met with our best foot forward, right up their ass! Like most animals, immediacy tends to be the most effective in correcting Mali-adpted conduct. Back to the horse I rode up on, hahaha.

At any rate, over the years I began to solve the underlying issues. I actually came to my own work arounds prior to fully grasping the centralized source or the impact of its implications. Years later I did begin to hear limited bits of information over the internet. Although it did take me a while before I started to correlate the “conspiracy theory” data with what I was “seeing” in women throughout the country.  Largely because few had any real coherent information. Eventually, information concerning Project MK Ultra and our government's Psy-Ops programs sufficiently surfaced to flesh out the details. As a child, young teenager I was familiar with the government’s LSD experiments for a variety of reasons, mind control being one aspect. Frankly I can not believe there are people today who do not know or refuse to believe that our government conducted such experimentation on the populace. It was just common knowledge in the circles I travel. If you read the Program Outline for MK Ultra it has an extensive list of lines of “study” information was to be explored, accumulated with a focus of deriving paradigms of control on individuals, groups, countries, cultures, and from that to the world at Large. The Globalist, New World Order, G-7, Trilateral Commission, Illuminati the individuals and their constantly shifting panorama of institutions and foundations are continually sifting beliefs and cultures in an multi-generational game of Three Card Molly. Degree by degree all the world’s various societies and Cultures have been manipulated via global misdirection with large quantities of restructuring of values and beliefs. Till everyone on Earth thinks good is bad; and bad is good. I should think we have all heard these arguments before, usually framed as the delusions of conspiracy theorist. All rather convenient as a means explaining away any descent or even an open fair discussion. Our social structure has drifted far from where we should be. Starting in 2020, everything is going to change and never be this pleasant or nice again. Well at least not till after the Second Coming. Hahaha, despite sounding …...

[onestowatch]

What Is Your 2019 Summer Anthem? | Staff Picks

“Summer anthem.” The term is thrown around in music journalism and idle conversation with such a reckless abandon that even we here at Ones To Watch are undoubtedly guilty of calling a fair share of songs a “definitive summer anthem.” Yet in spite of the arguable overuse of the term, it endures, because what is summer without a said anthem? As we find ourselves in the midst of the summer of 2019, we asked ourselves that very question.

The soundtrack to trips to the beach, twilight escapades, locking eyes at the club, wasting the days away in bed, and so much more–summer is not summer without a soundtrack. So, what single song defines the summer of 2019 for those of us at Ones To Watch?  

Joji - “Sanctuary”

A great song always feels tailored to the moment, even one as visually hyperbolic as the ocean etched road shimmying alongside the Okinawan Coast. I always love summer songs years after the fact, when they become an ether, inhaled in nostalgia over drinks or gasping laughter, a form of mental “Sanctuary.” I can’t wait for Joji’s earnest vocals to be my one call away, igniting my sonic synapses and taking me back to a hot, languid summer bus ride back from Churaumi Aquarium.  

-David O’Connor

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keshi - “summer”

Summer days are waning, real life is creeping in, and keshi’s music is here to guide you through the inescapable nature of it all. “summer” is taken from the enigmatic lo-fi R&B artist’s recently released EP skeletons and plays out with all the fleeting beauty of watching a firework burn out in the night sky. It is the score to summer flings that are drowned by the fear of what happens when real feelings develop. This is your soundtrack to sad boy and girl summer.

-Maxamillion Polo

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BURNS, A$AP Rocky, Sabrina Claudio - “Energy”

This. This is the song that plays in the background when I lock eyes with my future ex-girlfriend at the day club. 102 degrees. Scorching hot. The woman that’ll break my heart in the worst way possible. But hey, it’s Summer 2019 and I don’t know that yet. I’m just trying to have a good time. But before we start dancing to “Energy,” let’s get A$AP Rocky out of Sweden.

-Green Lee

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SG Lewis, Clairo - “Throwaway”

Featured on the aptly-titled Dawn, SG Lewis’ sunrise-illuminated conclusion to a wild night out, “Throwaway” is akin to capturing the very initial spark of summer love. Yet, with that spark comes the fear of abandonment. It is an otherworldly collaboration that perfectly pairs Clairo’s ethereal vocals with SG Lewis’ immaculate and understated production. Grab your summer fling, look up at the night sky, and make a wish on a shooting star while you hum the melody to “Throwaway.”

-Jenna Singer

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BAYNK, Hablot Brown - “Simmer”

Two of my favorites decided to collaborate for this sexy number on BAYNK’s Someone’s EP II, and it contains all the sonic elements that make my heart flutter: sensual and smooth falsetto curtsey of Hablot Brown, subtle electronic enhancement courtesy of BAYNK, and a steady bass foundation that keeps you bobbing throughout. It’s the perfect addition to your next pool party DJ set, jor just the thing to alleviate the sunburn at your post-party wind-down. Simmer down, let’s go!

-Yasmin Damoui

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Dominic Fike, Kenny Beats - “Phone Numbers”

Summer is not without its fair share of overcast moments, and Dominic Fike and Kenny Beats’ impressive outing is here to give you the perfect sonic accompaniment to those less than perfect days. “Phone Numbers” is for anyone who has ever felt that at-times endless nature of summer can indeed be the birthplace of your loneliest of times, as Fike and Kenny Beats pair buoyant production with wistful lyrical feats. This is a summer anthem that hits different.

-Jeffrey Young

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Mark Ronson, Angel Olsen - “True Blue”

This unlikely duo has created a standout track that captures love, heartbreak, confusion, and lack of control all in one. "True Blue" is June gloom; it’s crying in the club. The song is filled with anticipation and power. It sets you in a haze that mimics those late summer nights where you contemplate all of your life decisions. This modern yet classic track is drinking banana daiquiris as you catch up with old friends who you have nothing in common with anymore. It’s clenching your jaw as you enter new uncomfortable situations in unfamiliar places. It’s dancing alone at the party, heartbroken or not, you’re alone and you accept it. I won't be able to listen to this track, or Markson Ronson’s stunning Late Night Feelings project without thinking of the summer of 2019.  

-Jess Myers

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Zack Fox, Kenny Beats - “Jesus Is The One (I Got Depression)”

Honestly, this song was created as a joke, but that seems to be the theme of hits this year. Zack Fox has been lighting up Twitter feeds with laughter for the past five years. Collaborating with rising hip-hop producer Kenny Beats organically has turned this parody into a viral TikTok hit. Name a better song about depression that came out in the past five years… I’ll wait.  

-Malcolm Gray

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Rosalía - “Millionària”

“Rosalía’s “Millionària” is the ultimate beach party song. Featuring the singer's iconic fluttering vocals, flamenco-inspired rhythms, and sun-drenched synths, this track will bring you right back to Barcelona’s sandy shores, drinking sangria with all the beautiful Spaniards during your semester abroad. Even if you can’t exactly live the lavish lifestyle Rosalía depicts in the song (because of, as she says, “fucking money man”), the track is sure to get everybody swinging their hips at your local barbecue, pool party, or summer soirée. Be sure to reapply your sunblock, because this song of the summer is extra hot.

-Brady Moses

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Emarosa - “Givin’ Up”

Let me ask you: You are poolside drinking and “Givin’ Up” comes on. What do you do? If it doesn't get you dancing you're most likely drowning in sadness, or just drowning in general. Can we get a lifeguard, please? Either way, saxophone summer is here and Emarosa's leading the charge.

-Jimmy Smith, Editor of our sister site The Noise

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Mahalia, Burna Boy - “Simmer”

With Hot Girl Summer in full-swing, Mahalia is bringing the perfect summer breeze to cool you down. “Simmer” sees the rising UK artist linking up with Nigerian star Burna Boy to deliver a track that balances a fervent passion with an effortless cool. Sampling Jeremy Harding’s infamous dancehall anthem “Playground Riddim,” which was, in turn, most famously sampled on Bennie Man’s “Sim Simma,” “Simmer” is the theme song to your Hot Girl Summer.

-Kendall Heyford

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Prince - “100MPH”

Admittedly, “100mph” is a track that was originally conceived by Prince sometime in the mid-‘80s. However, with this summer’s posthumous release Originals, we catch a glimpse of the tracks that didn’t quite reach the Purple One’s perfectionist standards at the time. After an intro that can only be described as “triumphant cheese” Prince snaps into one of his most infectious melodies to date. Accentuated by a staccato vocal harmony, ripping snares and a bassline that you can chew on, this track brings the funk to the summer of 2019 like no other release I’ve heard yet this year. If this is not a summer vibe, I don’t know what is.

-Alec Wing

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Johnny Utah - "Honeypie"

Within just a few seconds into "Honeypie," I could already predict that I'd be obsessed with this indie-funk masterpiece for months to come. Fast forward to two months later, and I still have this infectious tune on repeat well into the summer season. Not only does Johnny Utah gift us with his feel-good falsetto, but he crafts otherworldly funky pop melodies that'll have you dancing (or chasing your honeypie) in no time.

-Alissa Arunarsirakul

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Dreamville, Cozz, REASON, Childish Major - “LamboTruck”

Dreamville or TDE? Dreamville or TDE? Why not Dreamville and TDE? While we constantly try to compare the two, “LamboTruck” shows that these two can play nice–except for REASON threatening to rob J.Cole. You won’t be hearing this in the club, but it’s my song of the summer because it packs a punch and shows you how who’s up next in the rap game. After you bump this song, might as well go listen to all of Dreamville’s Revenge Of The Dreamers III.

-Chase Nathan

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PVRIS - “Death of Me”

Who hasn’t fallen down the rabbit hole by falling for someone… and no better time than summer to dive into something new, or realize that you’re already under the spell of a “sweet poison” and may need to get out immediately. PVRIS struts into this track woke to the precariousness of having such awesome yet powerful feelings. All wrapped up in a power anthem about becoming powerless, PVRIS gives us an outlet for the war between head and heart that we’ve all felt. It is a war that only gets worse at night, that we all fight, and that fvcks with our sense of wrong and right.

-Alexa Schoenfeld  

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Bastille - “Nocturnal Creatures”

My pick is off of Doom Days, Bastille's latest concept album which chronicles the various stages of the night. “Nocturnal Creatures” captures the thrill of being free of the stresses and responsibilities of the day to experience what nighttime has to offer. The song is perfect for a late, summer night drive as frontman Dan Smith melodically entices listeners to take control of the night and make the most of the few hours of freedom.

-Allissa Williams

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Megan Thee Stallion, DaBaby - “Cash Shit”

How could we even talk summer anthems without mentioning Megan Thee Stallion? Hot Girl Summer has taken over the world and Megan Thee Stallion is leading the charge. More than just the meme of the summer, “Cash Shit” illustrates exactly why the Houston rapper is the next big thing in rap. Unapologetic, sexually charged, and utterly infectious, Megan Thee Stallion and “Cash Shit” will be playing on repeat for many summers to come. 

-Miranda Hyman

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LAUNDRY DAY - “CHA” 

Well, my boss keeps blasting this from his office so that must mean it is a summer banger! The infectious project of five high schoolers out of New York, LAUNDRY DAY surely knows a thing or two about capturing the timeless energy of summers spent running around with friends, dreading the day when school rolls back into session. “CHA” is summer youth encapsulated.

-Hunter Halpert 

#megan thee stallion #dreamville #johnny utah #mahalia #prince #rosalia #kenny beats #dominic fike #keshi #joji #clairo #mark ronson #angel olsen #ASAP Rocky #sabrina claudio

[amandabct]

ITS - WEEK ELEVEN

Today we shared out PITCH ideas with the whole class.

UPLIFT - “raise the bar”

ITS?

I’ve looked into the general definition of ITS a lot through the semester so what does it mean for my PITCH idea? Let’s break it down into the three parts of ITS

Interactivity  - The incorporation and influence of digital technologies with exercise (Wikipedia, 2019).

Technology - The technological advancement that allows and encourages improvements (Men’s Journal, 2018).

Systems - The evolution of technology through a form of interaction (Wikipedia, 2019).The overall definition interaction between a person, digital technologies and exercise; step into the future.

So how and why does my idea relate to ITS? Why is it important?

It is digital virtual assistance, meaning it helps make daily tasks easier for the user.

It is an accurate progress tracker, meaning it reduces the bias, and room for error.

It is an improvement tool, meaning it is designed to benefit the user and their needs.

It calculates statistics, meaning it creates less work for the user with everything they need in front of them, even more accurate. (real time and post workout).

It creates less third-party involvement, no longer do you have to calculate rep maxes, percentages, weights - it does it all for you.

It is an educational advancement, it is a teaching tool more intelligent than anyone.

It incorporates the technology of the future, self-lacing shoes, wearable technology, this sort of technology is only starting out.

“Step into a shoe, designed to raise your lifting up.”

INSPIRATION

My inspiration initially came from my passion and love for the gym, sport, and fitness. I wanted my idea to reflect my character and I think a lot of who I am is based on my involvement in sport and exercise. Fitness is such a large avenue which is always being improved and new technologies added so where could I fit in. 

I originally looked into new technologies arising in the fitness industry and then looked at technology advancements that I personally used and this was the outcome. Then from there thought about what was missing to me personally in the fitness industry. 

Picture Number Three & Nine: Under Armour Hovr

Uses an embedded chip and the MapMyRun app to give runners real-time data on their fitness performance as well as post-workout statistics. (Under Armour, 2019).

Picture Number Four & Eight: Nike HyperAdapt

Built around the concept of an adaptive fit which basically means the shoe senses the contours of the foot and tightens the laces just enough to wrap it up snugly. It changes with the athletes changing needs. A cable tights the shoes when movement is detected. (Nike, 2019).

Picture Number Five: Map my Run

Is an accurate distance tracker that uses smartphones GPS. the app reports statistics in real time and can deliver statistics via voice prompts, letting the user know when they have hit predetermined kilometer markers without stopping to check a screen. (Map My Run, 2019).

Picture Number Six: Wodify

Is a CrossFit digital whiteboard system that registers athletes for classes, records workouts, results and remembers the past performance, all in the athlete's personalized profile. (Wodify, 2019).

Picture Number Seven: Reebok Lifters

Designed for weightlifting with a raised heel. They have a massive advantage, as it allowed you to squat deeper, a position through increased ankle range of motion. They are more stable than typically barefoot or minimalist shoes. (Reebok, 2019).

MY CONCEPT

An ‘intelligent gym shoe’ combined with data-driven coaching.

The ultimate gym shoe.

Designed for athletes, to track accurate progress and statistics around pressure, weight, agility and vital signs in real time and post workout. (Keller Sport, 2019).

It enables users to establish personal goal and share results in a 10km radius based on GPS.

FEATURES

Electric adaptable reaction lacing and a built-in sensor. These shoes can self lace themselves once the heel hits the sensor in the inside of the shoe. The lace engine is located in the cavity of the shoe. It electronically adjusts the lacing, pressure and fit the contours of the foot, using a lace cable to make such adjustments. (Nike, 2019).

Embedded chip. These shoes have a nano-sized chip. This sensor technology tracks movement, pressure through the heel, weight through the heel, blood pressure, overload and agility the body is under. It analyses and stores the information in the user’s profile inside the LIFT app.

USB - C charger. Technology needs charging in order to perform. They use and come with a common USB - C charger making it easy for the user to adapt. This follows the usability heuristics around technology which mean it sticks to normality and simplicity for the user. (Sullivan, & Lachman, 2017).

Battery percentage of shoes. The shoes have a small 15 x 25mm screen on the inner side of the right foot which with a double tap turn on. Connect to the shoes then display digitally the battery percentage of the shoes.

Ventilated upper. Keeps the foot cool and allows for breathability.

CMEVA molded sock liner. Adds compression within the ankle to stop the movement. Adds stability and control. (Keller Sport, 2019).

3D printed reinforcement. This enhances traction and durability of the foot.

Firm rubber heel and sole. Minimizes drag during lateral movements and adds support.

High abrasion rubber grips. Offers excellent traction and support.

Thin rubber outsole. Helps abrasion during activities. Lightweight yet covers high impact zones. (Reebok, 2019).

Drop in the midsole. This offers a stable heel with flexibility in the forefoot. (Reebok, 2019).

Company logo. 360 degrees reflectivity for increased visibility on low light nights.

Canvas material. Easy to clean and maintain while also being flexible, cushioning and versatile.

Couple other things Available in wolf grey, black or white. Weigh 290 grams. Women or men. 64 gigabytes

HOW IT WORKS

Firstly download the LIFT app - available for Apple and Android devices.

Bluetooth connects the shoes to the app. This takes a couple moments and all you do is open the app, turn-shoes on, keep them close together and wait for them to sync. Every time you turn the shoes on it will automatically connect with and open the app and start real-time collecting data.

In this, you can name the shoes, personalize your account with features like height, weight, previous results and statistics, add location and connect with friends nearby and see their results.

Next time you use the shoes, skip step two. Just double tap the 15 x 25 mm screen, located on the inner side of the right foot. For the duration of the workout, the screen will remain blue within white the battery percentage.

Put feet in shoes, once the heel hits the sensor they will automatically lace and increase and decrease pressure with movements throughout the workout. While the workout is taking place real-time data will be sent to the app which can be accessed.

Once the workout is complete, take shoes off. Double tap the screen to turn off.

Post workout statistics will be analyzed within a few seconds and will pop up in the app. In the app you can also see the statistics of other users in a 10km radius, using GPS.

APP

Here is a mockup of the app. It was created using https://app.moqups.com/

The default screen is the dashboard/home screen. This will have general information about gym related news/headlines/workouts for the user.

The profile screen is the personalized screen for the user to add with their details, goals, and achievements.

The statistics screen will display real-life data and post workout statistics from the most recent workout for 24 hours.

The location screen is like a discover screen, it will use GPS mapping to connect and share information with others nearby.

The saved screen will be store all post workout statistics for two months.

REFERENCES

Sources

Keller Sport. (2019). Under Armour Smart Shoes. Retrieved from https://www.keller-sports.com

Lunney, A., Cunningham, N., & Eastin, M. (2016). Wearable fitness technology: A structural investigation into acceptance and perceived fitness outcomes. Computers in Human Behaviour, 65(3) 114—120. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.chb.2016.08.007

Marshall, G. (2016). The Story of Fitbit. How a wooden box became a $4 billion company. Retrieved March 24, 2019, from https://www.wareable.com

Men’s Journal. (2018). The Beginner’s Guide to Weight Training. Retrieved from https://www.mensjournal.com/health-fitness/beginners-guide-weight-training/

Nike. (2019). Metcon 4. Retrieved from https://www.nike.com/nz/t/metcon-4-xd-patch-training-shoe-lfrB42

Nike. (20th April 2019). Nike HyperAdapt. Retrieved from  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uZJ2bq12JSI

Reebok. (2019). Lifters. Retrieved from https://www.reebok.co.nz/search?q=lifters

Sullivan, A, N., & Lachman, M, E. (2017). Behavior Change with Fitness Technology in Sedentary Adults. Front Public Health, 4(2) 82—105. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpubh.2016.00289

Under Armour. (20th April 2019). HOVR. Retrieved from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vnTrjU-4Ang

Under Armour. (2019). HOVR, Lifts you up. Retrieved from https://www.underarmour.co.nz/en-nz/HOVR-Collection.html

Wikipedia. (2019). Interactivity. Retrieved from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interactivity

Images

Campbell, A. (2014). 12 Reasons you Should Start Lifting Weights Today. Retrieved from https://www.womenshealthmag.com/fitness/a19983537/weight-exercises-women/

Turco, L, D. (2016). Why Heavy Weights Aren’t the Only Way to build Size and Strength. Retrieved from https://www.menshealth.com/fitness/a19531297/light-weights-build-muscle-0/

Under Armour. (2019). HOVR, Lifts you up. Retrieved from https://www.underarmour.co.nz/en-nz/HOVR-Collection.html

Nike. (2019). Nike HyperAdapt. Retrieved from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uZJ2bq12JSI

Mapmyrun. (2019). Own Every Miles. Retrieved from https://www.mapmyrun.com/

Wodify. (2019). Wodify Core: Gym management platform. Retrieved from https://www.wodify.com

Reebok. (2019). Lifters. Retrieved from https://www.reebok.co.nz/search?q=lifters  

Nike. (20th April 2019). Nike HyperAdapt. Retrieved from  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uZJ2bq12JSI

Keller Sport. (2019). Under Armour Smart Shoes. Retrieved from https://www.keller-sports.com

Why The Weights. (2018). The diary of an all-embracing oldie. Retrieved from https://whytheweights.com/

#ITS