#to crank up the 'how stoned will this make you?' factor of more than one thing up to

[itcannotbrain]

(( First of all, look at this amazing, gaudy Nautolan I made. I love him. :D ))

Many Acolytes would have loved for a Sith Lord or, even better, a Darth to notice them. That was one of the better ways to add to the chances that one might survive the Sith Academy. 

Pikxei,  however, was typically happy to not have them notice him or, at least, not notice him in a way that would make them do anything but sneer some comment about aliens or colours. Neither particularly bothered him; he could hardly change the fact that he wasn't human or Sith and many things that were either venomous, poisonous, dangerous, or a combination of any of those things were brightly coloured.

Unfortunately, there always was the risk that it would attract attention and the luck that had kept it from attracting attention beyond the superficial seemed to have just run out.

"Look at you!" Standing much more quickly than one might have expected from someone looking Bi'ev's age and standing rather a lot shorter than one might have expected for one of the Sith Purebloods, Bi'ev managed to do both, leaving his tuk'ata to raise its head lazily then lower it again, seemingly dozing off once more as its Master moved away. The Overseer that the much shorter Pureblood had been speaking with appeared to be momentarily shocked that their conversation had been so jarringly cut off by Bi'ev standing from his previous position of using the Qorit as a sort of reclining, living chair on the Academy floor.

"What are y--no, no, wrong question, wrong question, you're clearly Nautolan. A very colourful one at that..." Bi'ev trailed off, staring in a way that Pikxei couldn't easily determine, doubly so since it didn’t appear that Bi’ev was looking at him so much as sort of through him; if the small man with the large, hideous Sith beast was missing a few screws it was likely he was still well enough in terms of skill to be just fine with a few screws missing.

If it was an act, it was a good one, enough to make him vaguely nervous.

Pikxei had a passing thought that perhaps this Darth  might be on some kind of spice but he wasn't acting anything but a bit--scatterbrained, and that might have been nothing more than personality.

Pikxei stood, patiently waiting for Bi'ev to catch up with--Bi'ev, evidently.

"Name!" The metallic claws on the Pureblood's gloves made a sound that put Pikxei's teeth on edge as fingers snapped when Bi'ev...sort of remembered what he'd been trying to ask. Without a word, the snapping gesture fluidly moved into a sharp clawed shoving away of the Academy Overseer who had tried to re-insert himself into the conversation, though whether that attempt had been made for Bi'ev's benefit or Pikxei's, Pikxei wasn't certain.

"Yours, I mean. You were standing there long enough to have overheard mine before whichever Overseer's," the Overseer who was, of course, still standing well within earshot, "concerns I was pretending to take seriously."

The Nautolan blinked slowly, "Pikxei, my Lord."

"Pixie? Not what I would have expected, but--"

"No, my Lord," internally, he cringed at having just interrupted a Darth to repeat his name a little more slowly, "Pik-zae."

"It still sounds like Pixie, only with a z somewhere in it. You look like one--I--no, not really, you're a great deal larger, but you do look like the sort of person who would be called Pixie with all the angles and colours."

Whatever that was supposed to mean. Bi'ev's vague gestures to Pikxei in general didn't exactly give him any clues as to what in the hell he meant by that.

So, he just stood there.

And Bi'ev just stood there. Long enough, in fact, that Pikxei wondered if he'd somehow fallen asleep standing upright.

"Hey," Bi'ev lazily beckoned for the Overseer to step closer and join them, "anyone got their eye on this one?"

"Yes, my Lord, Lord H--"

Bi'ev cut him off, "I didn't really care, I was just asking as a formality. Go ahead and tell Lord Hhhh--whatever it is you were going to say that it's mine now and if that's a problem Lord Hhhh can feel free to scream at the walls of their house about it because my calendar is packed and I don't read mail from people who want to argue about which Acolyte belongs to who."

"Alternately," Bi’ev continued as he fished what looked to be a cookie out of a small bad and shoved it into his mouth, “Lord Hhhh can try and catch me at work but I'm just going to make them go and talk to Kosha about it because already dislike Kosha and now dislike Lord Hhhh on principle."

"Darth Aculeatus, you know full well that's not how it works..." The Overseer, rather than sounding angry or even annoyed, simply sounded very, very tired.

"Right, maybe, but if I go and start killing people like Lord Hhhh then I have to take on responsibility for everything of theirs and I don't want everything of theirs despite not knowing what all it is they've got, I just want the Pixie apprentice. Look at him! Why would you ever claim something like that then just let it wander around where any other Sith could just take it?"

"The alien is an Acolyte, my Lord."

"Overseer, do you ever get tired of being wrong every time you say words?" Bi'ev canted his head to one side, cheerful as he'd sounded the entire time.

Qorit, however, slowly and deliberately opened one eye to keep it on the Overseer. The old Tuk'ata never really cared to get up and move if he didn't have to but, if he had to, it wasn't bound to end terribly well for whatever caused him to be required to get up and move. This time, however, it was only Bi'ev that had given the indication and the beast walked past the Overseer, interrupting his attempts to circle back and not be incorrect by knocking him over.

"That's Qorit," Bi'ev carefully grabbed Pikxei's forearm and started just--walking toward one of the shuttle landing areas, "Probably should be guarding a tomb somewhere but there's not really anyone buried in it that I can say I particularly care for and there's nothing worth looting in there so why not let looters waste their time?"

The beast made some sort of sound that Pikxei couldn't determine; it sounded like it was a few words that were both an acknowledgement, and possibly a dry joke. He'd only ever seen the feral ones on Korriban, not one that had been kept and tended to or that didn't immediately lunge at the nearest living thing.

What he noticed, however, was that they'd passed the area where private ships would typically leave a shuttle and were at the one place the--public one between Korriban and Dromund Kaas ran. He must have made some kind of face about it because it elicited a response.

"Do you know how much fuel it takes to run even the smallest thing I've got that holds me, him," he patted Qorit's spiny head, "and at least one other relatively normal sized humanoid type creature? And how many credits that runs?"

Pikxei shook his head, "I--no, my Lord, I don't."

"More than I'm willing to pay for what amounts to commuting; plus, nobody will talk to you on the public nightmare ship if you've got either a lightsaber, a tuk'ata, or both. You can do anything you want, and they'll just pretend they don't see and won't try to strike up conversation at all--not that I do particularly much but sit there and read, but you know." Bi'ev shrugged.

"It's cheaper, and I don't have to drive! Or hire someone to do it for me.

There was probably a response to that that was correct. Somehow. Pikxei, however, had no idea what that might be and thought it best to sort of nod and follow the small old Sith and his comically large by comparison horror dog onto the shuttle to Dromund Kaas.

#swtor #Bi'ev used to be a Very Serious Sithy Sith #then something like 7 years of RP happened #and he just went the route of you're all insane and I can't deal with any of you people sober #and used the entire fact that he specifically works in the genetic engineering of plants #to crank up the 'how stoned will this make you?' factor of more than one thing up to #it'll make people wonder if a really old previously hair trigger tempered sith somehow #switched to jedi and didn't tell anyone #He's been consistently high as a kite for almost five years now #sith

[doitwritenow]

Supreme Super family gets sucked up into WandaVision(let's imagine Tony's alive in this or is from the multiverse). Ironstrange think they're married with a high school kid. Tony is a science teacher, strange is town doctor, and peter is a regular kid. No memories of they're real life. Rhody, Pepper, and Aunt May and Morgan could be added to this too if you wanted.

OHHO! Sorry it took me so long to reply to this; I had to finish the show, for one thing, and then my brain started going all sorts of places with the prompt... and well. I have on heck of a ramble coming, so buckle up! 

(Also, spoilers through the series, so watch out!) 

— — —

It starts with a question on Vision’s job application.

That’s all. So simple, so innocuous, so innocent. Vision is casually recording information that he doesn’t yet realize he can’t remember, and he arrives at a line that asks his family history. It’s nothing complex, left on the application only because Wanda’s subconscious had glossed over the question. So does Vision’s, as a result. But he wants this job. They want to fit in, and so they answer the question truthfully.

Vision writes ‘Stark’, unaware. ‘Tony Stark.’

And pop. Just like that. 

On the edge of Westview, there suddenly is and has always been a small, well-kept mechanic’s shop. It’s run by an aging man with a bright mind and a brighter smile. He’s lived here since he came back from the war, but no one knows for how long. And he has no memory—no memory at all—of what came before. 

Of the round scar in the center of his chest. 

He doesn’t need to know. No one needs to know; he’s just a side character, after all. Just the answer to a line on a job application.

Just so that something, anything, about Vision’s life here isn’t a lie. 

-

Yeah, so Tony gets manifested within the Hex—but because he’s one of Wanda’s creations and not someone being mind-controlled, he is able to exist with agency within Westview. He has no reason, however, to believe anything is amiss; he’s been resurrected only to play a character, and his memories and surface-level motivations only extend to the limits of that character.

But Wanda has other regret. Wanda has other anger and understanding and forgiveness and gratefulness, and she knew Tony Stark, once. 

She knew his worst nightmare—and it’s easy to craft a soul from that, really.

(But it’s fine, of course it’s fine. Tony has no reason to pull down the walls of that hidden spirit. He’s content in his role, just like Vision. So it’s fine. 

… Right?) 

-

Agatha stands at the base of a towering barrier with her hands on her hips. One side of her mouth is quirked up into a considering, scheming smile, and her magic probes out around her curiously. This is the source of the power she’d felt; she’s sure of it. The spell work… the instinctual, unconscious spell work is so intense she can almost taste it.

How is it possible? What’s the secret? 

Agatha must know. And besides; this is the most interesting thing that’s happened to her since the seventeenth century. 

She’s about to reach out, about to cross into the heart of the magic, when she hears it. A footstep. Quiet and dark and making no attempt at stealth. 

Agatha grips her magic. “Who’s there?” she demands. 

Someone steps out of the trees. A human, Agatha thinks, though you can never be sure nowadays. He wears a hood of green and his hands are dark where they hang at his sides. 

“Witch,” the figure declares.

Agatha raises an eyebrow. “Can I help you?”

“Yes,” says Karl Mordo. “I rather think you can.”

-

Okay, cut to New York. Stephen Strange is exhausted, wrung dry trying to keep the edges of the universe from deteriorating now that the stabilization factors of the Infinity Stones have been destroyed. One task runs into the next, one morning into the night. One future into all the others. 

But Stephen likes the work; it keeps his mind in one place. He’s always alert these days. Always listening. 

So when someone calls out to him from New Jersey, he can hear.

It’s Mordo luring him in, of course, but he doesn’t know that yet. After Dormammu, and certainly after all those futures, Stephen has too much experience for Mordo to hope to get the better of. The old Master is still dedicated to his ‘too many sorcerers’ shebangerang, though, so he’s employed help. Maybe he can kill two birds with one stone. Two world-threateningly powerful magic users with one stone. 

Stephen follows the call, because of course he does. It sounds like a call for help; what else is he supposed to do? The kelpie situation in the Thames can wait. Wong waves him off, tells him to be careful without much hope of Stephen listening, and takes over the Sanctum for the few hours Stephen intends to be gone.

(It’s not for a few hours.)

-

But there’s someone else we should mention before we see what Westview has planned for Stephen. See, a certain spider-kid has just had his identity outed, and his only allies once called themselves Nick Fury and Maria Hill.

Nick Fury and Maria Hill, Peter discovers, are not Nick Fury and Maria Hill.

“You’re aliens?” Peter demands, his hands warding the space in front of him. 

Of course they’re aliens, part of him sighs. Of course. Why wouldn’t one more thing just go crazy in his life? Why let him remember what ‘normal’ even felt like? Why the hell not? 

“Er, yes,” says not-Fury. “My name is Talos. But we do still want to help you.”

Helping Peter doesn’t go according to plan. See, the Skrull try to approach SWORD for Monica Rambaeu’s help regarding the kid who saved their lives, but Monica has disappeared. 

Talos only turns around for two seconds. Really, it’s only a moment. But when he turns back, Peter Parker has disappeared, too.

-

“Woah.” 

Stephen stops, a hand coming up to shield his third eye as he squints into the absolute maelstrom of power swirling in a hexagonal wall in front of him. It doesn’t feel like the Order’s magic—not like something of the Mystic Arts. It’s something far more human and gritty. Stephen’s perception can’t extend through it. He frowns.

He takes a step forward, the Cloak swirling around his ankles, and begins to stitch his mental walls into place. His wards are strong, even unconsciously.

That’s probably what saves him, in all honesty. 

Two strong, human hands plant themselves in the small of Stephen’s back and shove him into the barrier. Stephen opens his mouth to yell, raises his hands to cast a spell— but blue and red are surrounding him now. Devouring him, now. They lick at his mind, slamming against unbreakable walls.

But they are unbreakable too. 

Stephen disappears. 

-

(Mordo used a portal to get behind him and knock him into the Hex, btw.) 

It’s those hasty mental walls that keep Stephen from being completely consumed into the Westview spells. He is not fully mind-controlled, nor is he left half-animated and frozen like most people near Ellis Avenue. But there is one main rule of Wanda Maximoff’s Westview, and that, Stephen can’t escape completely. 

‘No one remembers outside.’

Stephen doesn’t. In fact, he doesn’t remember anything at all. 

-

Tony Stark finds the man lying on the side of the road. He’s just finished dropping his kid Peter off at the Westview high school (it hasn’t occurred to him that it’s weird how he never sees the boy’s classmates. Or that Peter never seems to have stories from school. Or that the kid is always waiting in the exact same place that Tony dropped him off at whenever Tony comes to pick him up. Tony has no reason to think too hard; he’s just a side character—right?). 

“Uh, hi?” Tony pauses, the car puffing it’s irritation when he stops it too quickly. He cranks down the window and leans out. 

The man blinks, slowly, at the sky. He sits up hesitantly, like he hasn’t noticed Tony, and rubs his hand across his face. He pulls it away after a moment and frowns at it. Tony wonders why he looks so confused—it’s not like there’s anything wrong with the man’s hand. No scars or anything. 

“Hi, sir,” Tony says again. “Are you alright?”

The man jumps. He looks over at Tony—and there’s something weird about his eyes. Something… really weird. (Color, says a voice in the back of his mind that he hasn’t heard for a very, very long time. That’s color.)

“Who are you?” Tony asks. He parks the car completely now. 

The man looks down at his hands again. “I’m—” he begins. He’s frowning again.

“Come on now,” Tony encourages. “How hard can it be?”

The man tugs at the scarf around his neck—and it must be windier than Tony thought, because the edges of it are swaying as if of their own accord— and swallows. 

“I don’t know,” he says.

-

So of course Tony brings Stephen back with him. He prods at the man until Stephen manages to blurt out ‘Doctor Stephen Strange’ for no reason either of them can remember. But it makes Stephen relax, a little, to have it on his tongue. 

Tony catches Stephen staring at him after that. A lot. When he asks him why, Stephen has no clear answer; just a vague “you remind me of someone.” For Stephen’s part, all he knows is that seeing Tony gives him an indistinct sense of relief. Like he’d been missing someone deeply, and has now found it again. 

Still. He can’t quite put his finger on it. Just like he can’t quite put his finger on why his hands don’t hurt when he tries to write…

-

Vision visits Tony, sometimes, whenever he remembers, or whenever someone in the town mentions the old mechanic. He brings Wanda. They have fun, but Vision always goes home feeling slightly baffled. And Tony always feels like something hurts, deep in the center of his chest. 

Vision likes his adopted younger brother. (And Peter gets along just fine with the twins, too, when they come along, so Wanda doesn’t change anything about it). But when the man with the bright eyes stares at him with just a bit too much calculation on his face, Vision starts to be reminded of… things. Of suspicions. Of Geraldine and how she had no home and no history. And he doesn’t quite look Wanda in the eye that dinner. 

“What do you do?” Wanda asks, her voice a little hard, a little suspicious. Vision tries not to wince. Whatever it is she’s not telling him, this man at his father’s dinner table reminds her of it. 

Tony flips his fork, balancing it like one might a wrench. “Stephen’s a doctor,” he says.  

Wanda’s face flickers. “That’s funny,” she says blankly. “Because no one in this town ever needs one.” 

-

For a while, Tony Stark didn’t see anything amiss here. He was created, was consistent, was emptily and vaguely pleased. But Tony Stark is Tony Stark, whatever character he’s been told to play. Tony Stark wants to help people. 

And this man, this strange doctor with the eyes that would sometimes go blank for long minutes and the tears that would stain sharp cheeks for a reason he claimed not to remember, needs help.

So Tony Stark begins to scratch at Wanda’s walls. 

-

 “What do you mean he’s here?”

“I mean your little plan didn’t work,” Agatha says. She stands on the edge of Westview, speaking through a mirror of magic to the man outside. She’s liking this sorcerer less and less the more she works with him—but he has been rather helpful so far, so she continues to put up with him. 

“Does he remember?”

“No,” Agatha says. “The dad that Wanda made up for Vision has taken him in. It’s kind of adorable, actually.”

“Hm.” Mordo’s mouth twists. “You’ll finish the job?”

Agatha shrugs nonchalantly. “Sure. When I get around to it.”

“You don’t want to wait. Deal with Strange now, before he remembers how to be a threat.”

Agatha laughs. It’s brittle, fully conveying her hostility. “Ha, my good sorcerer, listen. Unless you want to come in here and do the job yourself, you’ll let me handle this my way.”

Agatha’s way involves getting to the bottom of things, of course. And that’s rather convenient… because Vision has begun to try to do the same thing. 

— — — —

Okay that’s all I have for now? The other bits are still solidifying in my mind, and it’s basically all Horrible Angst. I hope this scratches a little of the itch of your ask, though! Feel free, anyone, to add onto this if you’d like! I really enjoyed the show, and I think it has some really awesome AU potential. 

Thanks for the ask!!!

#ask me anything #prompt #fanfic #ironstrange #stephen strange #tony stark #peter parker #wandavision #wandavision au #wandavision spoilers #supreme family #supreme family fanfic #ironstrange fanfic

[tcm]

The Makers and the Breakers: The Hollywood Studio System By Constance Cherise

From anecdotal tales to darker narratives of downright malevolence, movies about the Hollywood studio system are as prevalent as the subject is understandably intriguing. Films like A STAR IS BORN (‘54), THE BAD AND THE BEAUTIFUL (‘52) and, just for a bit of naughty camp, DAISY CLOVER (‘65), to name a few, all allow a voyeuristic gaze behind an enchanted curtain. The major Hollywood studios controlled all aspects of filmmaking, distribution and the lives and appeal of their stars.

A studio executive’s expertise was to home in on the "It" factor of an actor. Then the build-up of publicity would begin. A well-engineered system of perfectly timed pulleys and cranks, bells and whistles would turn, and it didn't matter whether stories about a star were the truth, embellishment or lies, from the studios perspective stars weren't actual people, they were commodities that were bought, sold, traded and used as pawns to the benefit of the studio system. (A thorough reference on this is Jeanine Basinger’s The Star Machine) But, if anyone had ill feelings about their treatment, only those that were the most daring spoke up. The cliché “You'll never work in this town again” wasn't just a catchphrase, it was wholly and utterly true. Speaking up too loudly about one's gilded cage could end a career faster than Eleanor Powell’s “machine gun” tap dancing. As quickly as the mechanism could build a pretty face to stardom, it could just as easily grind to a halt, meticulously dismantling at record speed.

The true genius of the studio system was its innate and pristine ability to create a persona around the most capable assets that their commodity had to offer. An exceptional dancer with buck teeth? No problem. Send her to the dentist for cosmetic surgery. A heartthrob of a man who was too short? No problem. Elevate his shoes and make sure his counterpart wasn't wearing heels. A knockout beauty who could dance but was too ethnic-looking? Change her hair color from jet black to red, perform electrolysis on her hairline, add luscious waves, put her on a diet and change her name from Margarita Carmen Cansino to Columbia Picture’s own Rita Hayworth.

The system found what was innately undeniable, played up the strengths and buffed, polished or cleverly disguise the flaws, a process still happening in media. But the studio system of the Golden Age was far-reaching. Its governance traveled beyond its inner sanctum into affecting contractors' personal lives. A moral clause was a standard part of an actors’ contract. Both law enforcement and mobsters were part of the studio’s payroll, a necessary tactic thought to keep its stars in line and to protect the industry's overall reputation. If a star found themselves in a compromising position, there was always a hired hand, such as in the case of MGM's Eddie Mannix, to respond, repair and refute, regardless of the cost. Studios further exerted control by means of inclusivity. By creating an insular studio with every conceivable notion at their fingertips, including health facilities and a police force (as was present at MGM), the studio system was privy to inside information by way of design and therefore able to thwart potential problems sooner rather than later.

Opinions amongst stars who were part of the system varied. Some found it confining and artistically stifling (United Artists was created as a direct result of the burgeoning studio system in 1919), while others enjoyed its protective embrace. Fred Astaire was not a particularly handsome man, but his virtuoso skill of dance was undeniable. By the time he made it to Tinseltown, he had already been a star on the stage and his elegant persona was well polished. Almost the same could be said for Gene Kelly, except that Kelly was quite handsome with his all-American chiseled features and athletic body. He too came to Hollywood bearing Broadway accolades. Anything else either star may have required was worth any level of contribution on the part of the studio. But most stars didn't come fully assembled.

Numerous classic musical fans are aware of actor and untrained dancer Debbie Reynolds’ account of bloodied feet while rehearsing “Good Morning'' for the film SINGING IN THE RAIN (‘52), a story she confirmed in a TCM interview with late host Robert Osborne. Reynolds would star in multiple roles where dance was required, and for someone who was not a professional, with training from expert choreographers, she fooled us all. Ava Gardner did not go looking for the fame that found her. She was discovered through a photo in a shop window. The daughter of sharecroppers, Gardner had no experience in acting to speak of, and in fact, had a free-spirited reputation of reluctance. She had to be trained out of her deep southern accent, but her naturally stunning features combined with her charm literally smoldered the camera.

For all the contract players who willingly or unwillingly accepted the exploitation of their assets, there were those few who refused to play by studio rules. One not to cower was Mae West, who solidified her autonomy by demanding and receiving one dollar more than the head of Paramount, Adolph Zuckor, as well as full script approval of her films. MGM’s Luise Rainer, after becoming the first woman to consecutively win two Academy Awards, turned her back on Hollywood due to its iron grip. "I did not like the superficial life that one is naturally forced at times to live,” Rainer stated in a TCM interview. William Haines, one time voted as America's top male star, refused to hide his homosexuality living an open life with his lover, defying the orders of traditional marriage by Louis B. Mayer and as a result was fired from MGM.

That's what the studio system did: take an inarguable asset, create an inflated persona around it, smooth the dents, add a little extra padding where necessary and package it to be received exactly how they envisioned for public consumption...or...destroy it. After all, with over 70% of Americans attending film theaters at least once a week, the public turned the film industry into a multi-million-dollar business during its Golden Age when the average price of a ticket was 25 cents. Studios were readily aware they held the power and used it skillfully to full advantage.

The studio systems tactics could easily be viewed as a calculated sleight of hand, however, it unequivocally delivered, and its final product was polished, pristine and precise. But for those that were plucked from obscurity, was it truly a sleight of hand? One could argue that you can't get blood from a stone, and if that statement is true, the studio’s techniques of engineered transformation couldn't possibly invoke aptitude that didn't already exist somewhere within, however miniscule. Perhaps, instead of the credit studio’s retained for creating stars, its genuine function was to awaken exceptional latent potential that was simply waiting to be discovered.

#Old Hollywood #Hollywood studios #Golden Age Hollywood #star system #MGM #Columbia #Mae West #Rita Hayworth #Fred Astaire #TCM #Turner Classic Movies #paramount pictures #Constance Cherise

[jordanstrophe]

The Veil: 2

At your mercy

CW: Kidnapping, gagging, restraining, kicking, manhandling, talk of killing, creepy caretakers

Masterlist

Steven shivered against the old rowboat, his eyes darting fearfully between the gazes of his kidnappers that loomed over him. The ocean wooshed against the boat with every wave, the creaking and clattering of each paddle stroked through the waters.

The only one who didn’t dare make eye contact was Virgil, the one who’s belt was gagged in his mouth.

He shifted his jaw uncomfortably against the leathery belt. He wanted to lift his head to try and see where he was being taken, but he didn’t want to risk his head getting dragged underwater again by Ryker, who sat next to him with his silver shotgun propped against knee reflecting in the moonlight.

“We’re almost to the veil.” Ralph murmured, grunting through another paddle.

Virgil finally looked down at Steven, noticing his shivering as he slowly pulled off his long coat. He draped it over him like a blanket as he looked up at him with a thankful look.

“What are you doing?” Ryker sneered.

“He’s cold and wet. It’s only going to get colder the further in the veil we get.” Virgil slunk back in his position as he crossed his arms as only Ryker rolled his eyes.

He wasn’t wrong. The air got colder and thicker as a mist crept along the ocean. Steven looked up at the stars as they became dim from the thick shroud of mist.

“How do you learn how to navigate this, Ralph?” Virgil asked.

“Been doing this through my whole fishin’ life! I know this ocean like the back of my hand.” He gave a proud smile with his missing teeth.

“It’s also a straight shot.” The old woman sassed.

“Shut yet yappin, Wendy! It’s skill to navigate the veil!” 

“Oh yeah? If it’s a skill to row a boat straight!”

‘’Silence! Both of you. Let's just get through this safely, then you're more than welcome to tear each other apart at shore.” Ryker’s voice boomed. His head snapped down to Steven when he saw him flinch, giving him a rough tap with the toe of his boot with a smirk.

Who...? Who on earth were these people? Where were they going? What was this veil?! 

A thousand questions swam through his head. All he could do was lay helplessly at their feet and shiver, slowly swaying with the boat that rocked back and forth. 

He was exhausted. He fought the urge to fall asleep on the spot as his eyes felt heavy. 

No! He couldn't fall asleep. Not with his life on the line. He had to think of something... Anything!

“Wake up! We’re here.” A hand gripped his ponytail as his head was wrenched up with a yelp.

“W-wake up? What did he mean to wake up? had he fallen asleep? 

He was drug to his feet as a hand slithered around his waist hoisting him off the boat onto an old dock. Virgil was there waiting as he took hold of his bound arm to steady him. 

They were on an island, the entire place was surrounded by mist like a snowglobe. Not even the ocean could be seen through it. The glass lamps had flames of torches inside lighting the way to distant building rooftops in the center.

His coat was harshly grabbed as Ryker pulled him along the path. The trail was made from stone as they came to the village, the center had a large opening surrounded by large dark well-built homes.

“Mother! Father brought something home!” A young girl called.

“He did? What did he-... An outsider!? Nancy, get inside this instant! It’s not safe!”

“No! I wanna see!” She snapped, wrenching her arm from her mothers attempts to drag her off.

Steven was roughly thrown to the ground as his knees dug into the dirt. He slowly raised his head as he found himself surrounded by the village, all standing far away like a plague. Their wide horrified eyes studied him up and down as he huddled low to the ground in an attempt to hide from their gaze.

“What is the meaning of this!?” A woman's voice shrilled as she showed no hesitation to approach. Before Steven even got a chance to see her, the sharp toe of her heel met his chest as he fell back with a grunt.

“Why have you brought an outsider into the village!?” Her voice boomed.

“He saw us loading the boat, we didn’t have a choice.” Ryker groveled with his head down.

The woman let out a disappointed sigh.

“Come now, Ryker, this was your responsibility. You have your one job, keep the group hidden and safe on the supply runs!” 

“I- I did, Mara! I staked out the place! He shouldn’t have been there, I don’t know why he was there, but he was!” Ryker’s boot hit Steven’s back as it ruined his attempts to crawl back onto his knees. 

“We followed protocol... We brought him here for you to decide his fate.” Ryker hissed. 

The village murmured amongst themselves with curiosity. "She should kill him. He’s a danger. He knows too much. He’ll lead the monsters to us! "

“SILENCE!” Mara shouted, as the air fell silent.

“I shall decide no one's fate.  You brought this mess upon yourselves, the houses shall be the deciding factor.” Her head cranked down a notch to make eye contact with Steven as he finally saw her. Her long black hair, her cold blue eyes, her dark red dress. 

“He’s your responsibility. So figure. It. out.” She murmured, not breaking eye contact as Steven could do nothing but let out a frightened whimper behind the belt between his teeth.

“Just kill him, Ryker!” A woman screamed from the porch.  “Mother no!” Her daughter pleaded, tugging her sleeve. “Father! Don’t kill him!” She cried out to Ryker, who only let out an exhausted sigh. 

Wait! No! No no no! Why... Why did everyone want me dead!? All because I saw a boat!? What was happening? WHY was this happening!?

“Aye, I say kill. It’s better to put him down then to have him escape and rat us all out. It'll be the end of us.” Ralph huffed.

"Wait! Wait wait wait, what are you all talking about?! There’s only one way in and out of the island, and it’s to pass through the veil! So long as he stays here, we are all safe!” Virgil cried, standing by Steven’s crumbled form with his hands raised in his defense. 

“Oh shut it, Virgil! Put your righteous vendetta away! We must put the village first!” Wendy hollered. 

“Ryker!... Please! Look at him, he’s just a kid!” Virgil begged, stepping aside to make him watch Steven cowering at his feet, his expression frozen with horror as he was forced to listen to them call for his head. 

He sighed, slumping his shotgun over his shoulder.

“I’m sorry. Unless someone is willing to keep the rat in check, it’s just too risky.” He sneered, his eyes low and cold.

“Then we’ll take him!” A voice sounded through the crowd. The arguments fell silent as a woman broke into the clearing, standing by Virgil's side.

“Marry! .. Are you sure?” Virgil whispered while taking her arm.

“I’m positive.” She smiled, her hand settling on his cheek.

“My husband and I will take him! We will be responsible for any action he may cause and keep him under control. If anyone has a problem with the boy, you may take it up with us!” She yelled.

They were met with angry bloodthirst stares, yet no one dared to go against them. 

“May I take the silence as an “okay?” She twisted her head to the side.

“Bah! Whatever!” Ralph tsked, waving his hands dismissively.

"If anything happens, it's on your household's head. He is at your mercy." Ryker warned.

“Wonderful...” She smirked as she turned and crouched by Steven, cupping his cheeks in her hand to get a look at him.

“Hey there.” She whispered as he looked up at her with pleading eyes, muffled whimpers escaping his lips. 

Please... Don’t kill me...

“Shh, sh sh... It’s going to be alright.” She smiled, unbuckling the belt tied to his face. Her eyes went skeptical as she studied the leather belt in her hand.

“Virgil.. Isn’t this...?”

“Yeah, yeah. It’s mine.” He sighed as she gave him a judgmental look before handing it back to him. 

“P-please..” Steven whispered, frozen from fear. Her hand met his chin as she tilted his head up. 

“Now now, It’s okay. What’s your name?” She asked. He tried to wrench his head away to hide a tear falling down his cheek, but her grip refused to let him move until he had answered her question.

“Ste-Steven.” He rasped. Her expression widened into a smile as she thumbed away the tear.

“Alright Steven. We’re going to take such good care of you. Mmkay?” She smiled.

“Just behave, and everything will be okay.” Her hand stroked the hair from his face.

“Be good for us, and you won’t get hurt...”

@milk-carton-whump @just-a-whumping-racoon-with-wifi @whumpasaurus101 @yesthisiswhump @as-a-matter-of-whump @kixngiggles

Wanna be added/removed? Give me a bonk

#whump #whumpee #whumper #kidnapping #kidnapped whumpee #creepy caretaker #gagged whumpee #restrained whumpee #whumpee held captive #creepy whumper

[bloodybells1]

On Specialization

I’ve never been comfortable with the term “bassist”. This may sound peculiar coming from a bassist, though not so peculiar if you consider that, as Whitman famously wrote, “I am large, I contain multitudes.”

First, a word about the pecking order of a typical rock band: often, the singer is understood, rightly or wrongly, as occupying the top rung, while the bassist will often come last. The zeitgeist supports this claim. For example, in one episode of Just Shoot Me, Wendy Malick’s character, Nina Van Horn, brags about having laid the singer of a band the previous night, but spits out her water when she’s informed by more sober members of the party that it was in fact the bassist she’d slept with.

In the broadest sense of the term, a rock band is kind of like a layer cake. The singer occupies the top layer, with the other instruments on down. Flashy guitar leads and sexy lyrics (“Come here, baby,” and so on and so forth) take center stage, followed by the drums, slamming and banging like an army coming from behind.

And at last, at the bottom of the cake, the bass guitar, which, to the untrained ear, most often presents a barbaric, low-frequency drawl. Often it’s made even more unintelligible by the music hall’s cavernous reverb. The end result is that the casual listener begins calling the bass player “the other guy”.

When I was active as a professional musician, as the band Interpol’s bassist, I obsessed over this totemic arrangement. It was difficult to ignore how recessive I could become with this instrument around my shoulder.

So, when the band stumbled onto the good fortune of fame and success, when cameras and journalists trained their gaze on us, I compensated for this “imbalance” with sheer braggadocio. Onstage I impersonated Nikki Sixx, while backstage, in interviews, I dropped outlandish statements, the better to have my words show up as pull-quotes. Sealing my public relations push, I scheduled extracurricular activities, such as DJ’ing and, well, coitus, because, hello, it was rock music.

It seemed I’d pulled a switch, that ropes were cranking open an underwater gate, and, before I could finish saying “Cocaine”, an inner Poseidon was releasing the Kraken. It felt as though I couldn’t possibly sate my appetite.

This was a survival strategy, of sorts. I had to find some way to course correct for the imbalance, to prevent my ego from disappearing under the bass guitarist’s fate, the opaque destiny of the bottom rung. I was (and still am) too much a narcissist to endure the role of “filling in the blanks”. I needed more, much more.

Many a fine bassist is perfectly happy to fulfill the humble dispensation of their craft. The best of them are masters of understatement, achieving great notoriety among aficionados (John Paul Jones, for example). But, for better or for worse, I was too much of a diva for that. I’m not exactly proud per se that I’m a diva, but this shouldn’t stop me from being honest.

I suppose this is why I now bristle when someone calls me a “bassist”. The word registers to me as a reminder, not only of lowly status, but also of an embarrassing rebellion against that status, which time has demonstrated as the sign of narcissism, not to mention immaturity.

But the word also implies a degree of specialization with which I have never been comfortable. Jaco Pastorius was a bassist. Bernard Edwards, of Chic, was a bassist. Cliff Burton, of early Metallica, was a bassist. Among the living, Billy Sheehan, of David Lee Roth’s band and Mr. Big, is a bassist. I will even concede that the chief influencers of my bass playing, Peter Hook of Joy Division/New Order and John Taylor of Duran Duran, are bassists, in the truest sense of that word.

But I? I was a gifted musician and composer who came across the bass guitar by way of a college band that happened to take off. Afterwards, I simply used that talent for the less than sincere objectives noted above.*

I don’t disparage the life of specialization, nor those who’ve chosen it. If anything, I envy their attention span. Encountering satisfaction, and even success, following a single career track strikes me as patently wise, to say nothing of the karma of furthering the conversation in a certain field.

But I would hate to detract from the more esteemed practitioners of this instrument, those who clearly set out to make it their life’s work, by welcoming this appellation without the caveat I am writing here.

In anything, one can’t start from a weak place. Otherwise, the foundation is shabby, having begun from an inauthentic proposition. “This is what I should do” is deplorable. “This feels truthful to me” is the better course, no matter the cost, nor the risk. Playing the bass guitar, over and over again to the exclusion of other pursuits, just didn’t feel truthful to me.

At every step on the One Path of Specialization, my gaze would inevitably fall on the alleys and byways fanning out on either side. I’d feel a piece of my heart break every time. At the end of each day, having successively stranded one part of me, then another, I’d go to sleep feeling much less complete than in the morning.

This is no way to end the day. So, in order to preserve my sleep, I decided my curiosity was too important to ignore, that the greatest failure I could envision, for which there seemed to be no justification in permitting, was lying on my death bed wondering what lay under the stones I’d passed my whole life.

Naturally, taking action was an agony. Procrastination was the order of the day. It took years to make headway, years of worrying what would happen to me if I quit, of the deep regret I might encounter. My therapist at the time, listening to the 124th hour of my pretzel-twisting, finally said, “Carlos, you have the right to fuck up your life.” That was the narrative game changer I needed to hear, and I made my decision right then and there to leave Interpol and pursue training in other fields of interest, mainly acting, but also writing.

This isn’t to say I don’t experience regret, agonizing distress even. How often have I stopped for a latte at the local café, overheard myself playing bass guitar through the speakers, and rued the impetuous decision to leave behind such glorious specialization! It’s the height of confusion to taste blessed freedom and bitter mediocrity in the same quaff.

But then I think of two of my heroes, who support their rejection of specialization with an ironic philosophical outlook.

Stephen Fry, on a recent airing of Sam Harris’ podcast Making Sense, explained to his host how he was able to produce the astonishing breadth of his oeuvre – novels, TV appearances, comedy specials, productions of Shakespeare, documentary films, influential tweets – with a humble confession: “Without sounding over paradoxical, it may be a result of having no particular talent.”

Henry Rollins, the punk rocker emeritus, admitted to as much on the multimedia web portal, Big Think, when he said, “I don’t have talent, I have tenacity . . . I have discipline, I have focus.” TV show host, lead singer, travel documentarian, actor, spoken word artist, writer, publisher, Rollins is not so much a great artist as a great “artwork of himself”. He exemplifies the truth that the sum total of mediocre talents equals a net gain of life excellence.

I always like to say: “There’s nothing wrong with being a jack of all trades, for the adage is incorrect: yes, you’d be master of none except that of being a jack of all trades.”

Thomas Jefferson’s epitaph reads: “Author of the Declaration of Independence [and] of the Statute of Virginia for religious freedom & Father of the University of Virginia." Notice the absence of his eight years as our third president. “Author of the Declaration” is certainly no secret, but the other two are generally not well known. Clearly, he was making a statement, despite what historians might prefer to emphasize, of what was truly deserving of remembrance.

Hedy Lamarr, a talented and beautiful mid-century Hollywood star, also co-invented a radio guidance system for Allied powers in World War II that Bluetooth technology incorporates today. August Strindberg, the dean of Swedish drama, was also an influential painter whose subjective landscapes, like the astonishing Wonderland from 1894, were ahead of their time.

Don’t get me started on Al Franken.

Rejecting specialization, because it affords multiple avenues and narratives, is a roundabout way to attain control, and therefore, if he’s feeling constrained, a control freak’s preferred modus operandi. What you lose in the area of expertise, you gain in control over the conversation, for at no point do you involve yourself so much as to permit outside narratives to latch (or leech) on to your pursuits.

At a certain point, I realized that my rockstar posturing in Interpol had an expiration date, past which it would be cute no longer, not to mention hazardous to my health and the emotional wellbeing of my colleagues. The history of rock music presents copious examples of this sequence of events.

But I still needed control. Therefore, I chose to reject the specialization of a successful career as a bassist.

Differences in career objectives meant that I would eventually have to leave the band. Of course there were other factors, more personal than I’m choosing to write here. I will cover that part in other entries. But the need to retain control of my own conversation, along with the desire to achieve that control through a kind of diaspora of artistic pursuits, is salient nonetheless.

I’ll close with a bit of a Marxist riff. Specialization is a capitalist construct (and I mean that with all the opprobrium that statement must sound like it’s making). Its origins lie in the Agricultural Revolution, the first time human labor was ever divided on a large scale, and the Industrial Revolution, which automated that division, created incredibly precise specialization, and amplified the labor force beyond anything previously imaginable.

This has given birth to a fetishization of “expertise” that has pervaded almost every industry. Today, we often ask someone we just met “What do you do?” One of the chief faults I could lay on modernity’s doorstep would be that this question, among all others, does indeed, sadly, provide the fastest track to a person’s core identity. “Trust the experts” sounds eminently advisable. People distrust non-experts the way they distrust when someone’s thoughts evolve, branding them as inconsistent, therefore untrustworthy.

But this is all optics. We are inculcated to believe in the unhindered progress of Capital and this presumes labor, specifically specialized labor, to fulfill its mandate. This makes us suspicious of those who do not specialize. We want someone to stand still, and “be someone”, meaning “be a specialist” in this, that, or some other thing. But this suspicion holds only if you truly believe that the end all of human civilization is the progress of Capital, a belief I am sure most readers, hopefully, at the least, of this blog, reject.

*There is an interplay between sincerity and artifice that permeates rock music, but I don’t wish to get into that here. Suffice it to say for the time being, that there are instances when a rock band suffers extraordinary reputational costs when pursuing a “sincere” style, and this happens, in my opinion, because rock music, in amplifying lifestyle, spectacle, and fashion, is inherently a post-modern art form akin to Pop Art and Dadaism, and therefore more ironic than sincere. This explains why it is so easy to make fun of Coldplay. But I’ll spare the reader the musicology lesson for another time. Yet, I write this to mitigate, perhaps only slightly, the disingenuousness of my “insincerity” as a bassist.

[mostlysignssomeportents]

#1yrago My RSS feeds from a decade ago, a snapshot of gadget blogging when that was a thing

Rob Beschizza:

I chanced upon an ancient backup of my RSS feed subscriptions, a cold hard stone of data from my time at Wired in the mid-2000s. The last-modified date on the file is December 2007. I wiped my feeds upon coming to Boing Boing thenabouts: a fresh start and a new perspective.

What I found, over 212 mostly-defunct sites, is a time capsule of web culture from a bygone age—albeit one tailored to the professional purpose of cranking out blog posts about consumer electronics a decade ago. It's not a picture of a wonderful time before all the horrors of Facebook and Twitter set in. This place is not a place of honor. No highly-esteemed deed is commemorated here. But perhaps some of you might like a quick tour, all the same.

The "Main" folder, which contains 30 feeds, was the stuff I actually wanted (or needed) to read. This set would morph over time. I reckon it's easy to spot 2007's passing obsessions from the enduring interests.

↬ Arts and Letters Daily: a minimalist blog of links about smartypants subjects, a Drudge for those days when I sensed a third digit dimly glowing in my IQ. But for the death of founder Denis Dutton, it's exactly the same as it was in 2007! New items daily, but the RSS feed's dead.

↬ Boing Boing. Still around, I hear.

↬ Brass Goggles. A dead feed for a defunct steampunk blog (the last post was in 2013) though the forums seem well-stocked with new postings.

↬ The Consumerist. Dead feed, dead site. Founded in 2005 by Joel Johnson at Gawker, it was sold to Consumer Reports a few years later, lost its edge there, and was finally shuttered (or summarily executed) just a few weeks ago.

↬ Bibliodyssey. Quiescent. Updated until 2015 with wonderful public-domain book art scans and commentary. A twitter account and tumblr rolled on until just last year. There is a book to remember it by should the bits rot.

↬ jwz. Jamie Zawinski's startling and often hilariously bleak reflections on culture, the internet and working at Netscape during the dotcom boom. This was probably the first blog that led me to visit twice, to see if there was more. And there still is, almost daily.

↬ Proceedings of the Athanasius Kircher Society. Curios and weirdness emerging from the dust and foul fog of old books, forbidden history and the more speculative reaches of science. So dead the domain is squatted. Creator Josh Foer moved on to Atlas Obscura.

↬ The Tweney Review. Personal blog of my last supervisor at Wired, Dylan Tweney, now a communications executive. It's still going strong!

↬ Strange Maps. Dead feed, dead site, though it's still going as a category at Big Think. Similar projects proliferate now on social media; this was the wonderful original. There was a book.

↬ BLDGBLOG. Architecture blog, posting since 2004 with recent if rarer updates. A fine example of tasteful web brutalism, but I'm no longer a big fan of cement boxes and minimalism with a price tag.

↬ Dethroner. A men's self-care and fashion blog, founded by Joel Johnson, of the tweedy kind that became wildly and effortlessly successful not long after he gave up on it.

↬ MocoLoco. This long-running design blog morphed visually into a magazine in 2015. I have no idea why I liked it then, but indie photoblogs' golden age ended long ago and it's good to see some are thriving.

↬ SciFi Scanner. Long-dead AMC channel blog, very likely the work of one or two editors and likely lost to tidal corporate forces rather than any specific failure or event.

↬ Cult of Mac. Apple news site from another Wired News colleague of mine, Leander Kahney, and surely one of the longest-running at this point. Charlie Sorrel, who I hired at Wired to help me write the Gadget blog, still pens articles there.

↬ Ectoplasmosis. After Wired canned its bizarre, brilliant and unacceptably weird Table of Malcontents blog, its editor John Brownlee (who later joined Joel and I in editing Boing Boing Gadgets) and contributor Eliza Gauger founded Ectoplasmosis: the same thing but with no hysterical calls from Conde Nast wondering what the fuck is going on. It was glorious, too: a high-point of baroque indie blogging in the age before Facebook (and I made the original site design). Both editors later moved onto other projects (Magenta, Problem Glyphs); Gauger maintains the site's archives at tumblr. It was last updated in 2014.

↬ Penny Arcade. Then a webcomic; now a webcomic and a media and events empire.

↬ Paul Boutin. While working at Wired News, I'd heard a rumor that he was my supervisor. But I never spoke to him and only ever received a couple of odd emails, so I just got on with the job until Tweney was hired. His site and its feed are long-dead.

↬ Yanko Design. Classic blockquote chum for gadget bloggers.

↬ City Home News. A offbeat Pittburgh News blog, still online but lying fallow since 2009.

↬ Watchismo. Once a key site for wristwatch fans, Watchismo was folded into watches.com a few years ago. A couple of things were posted to the feed in 2017, but its time has obviously passed.

↬ Gizmodo. Much has changed, but it's still one of the best tech blogs.

↬ Engadget. Much has changed, but it's still one of the best tech blogs.

↬ Boing Boing Gadgets. Site's dead, though the feed is technically live as it redirects to our "gadgets" tag. Thousands of URLs there succumbed to bit-rot at some point, but we have plans to merge its database into Boing Boing's and revive them.

↬ Gear Factor. This was the gadget review column at Wired Magazine, separate from the gadget blog I edited because of the longtime corporate divorce between Wired's print and online divisions. This separation had just been resolved at the time I began working there, and the two "sides" -- literally facing offices in the same building -- were slowly being integrated. The feed's dead, but with an obvious successor, Gear.

↬ The Secret Diary of Steve Jobs. Required reading at the time, and very much a thing of its time. Now vaguely repulsive.

↬ i09. This brilliant sci-fi and culture blog deserved more than to end up a tag at Gizmodo.

↬ Science Daily: bland but exhaustive torrent of research news, still cranking along.

The "Essentials" Folder was material I wanted to stay on top of, but with work clearly in mind: the background material for systematically belching out content at a particular point in 2007.

↬ Still alive are The Register, Slashdot, Ars Technica, UMPC Portal (the tiny laptop beat!), PC Watch, Techblog, TechCrunch, UberGizmo, Coolest Gadgets, EFF Breaking News, Retro Thing, CNET Reviews, New Scientist, CNET Crave, and MAKE Magazine.

↬ Dead or quiescent: GigaOm (at least for news), Digg/Apple, Akihabara News, Tokyomango, Inside Comcast, Linux Devices (Update: reincarnated at linuxgizmos.com), and Uneasy Silence.

Of the 23 feeds in the "press releases" folder, 17 are dead. Most of the RSS no-shows are for companies like AMD and Intel, however, who surely still offer feeds at new addresses. Feeds for Palm, Nokia and pre-Dell Alienware are genuine dodos. These were interesting enough companies, 10 years ago.

PR Newswire functions as a veneering service so anyone can pretend to have a big PR department, but it is (was?) also legitimately used by the big players as a platform so I monitored the feeds there. They're still populated, but duplicate one another, and it's all complete garbage now. (It was mostly garbage then.)

My "Gadgets and Tech" folder contained the army of late-2000s blogs capitalizing on the success of Gizmodo, Boing Boing, TechCrunch, et al. Back in the day, these were mostly one (or two) young white men furiously extruding commentary on (or snarky rewrites of) press releases, with lots of duplication and an inchoate but seriously-honored unspoken language of mutual respect and first-mover credit. Those sites that survived oftentimes moved to listicles and such: notionally superior and more original content and certainly more sharable on Facebook, but unreadably boring. However, a few old-timey gadget bloggers are still cranking 'em out' in web 1.5 style. And a few were so specialized they actually had readers who loved them.

Still alive: DailyTech, technabob, CdrInfo.com, EverythingUSB, Extremetech, GearFuse, Gizmag, Gizmodiva, Hacked Gadgets, How to Spot A Psychopath/Dans' Data, MobileBurn, NewLaunches, OhGizmo!, ShinyShiny, Stuff.tv, TechDigest, TechDirt, Boy Genius Report, The Red Ferret Journal, Trusted Reviews, Xataca, DigiTimes, MedGadget, Geekologie, Tom's Hardware, Trendhunter, Japan Today, Digital Trends, All About Symbian (Yes, Symbian!), textually, cellular-news, TreeHugger, dezeen.

Dead: jkkmobile.com, Business Week Online, About PC (why), Afrigadget (unique blog about inventors in Africa, still active on FaceBook), DefenseTech, FosFor (died 2013), Gearlog, Mobile-Review.com (but apparently reborn as a Russian language tech blog!), Robot's Dreams, The Gadgets Weblog, Wireless Watch Japan, Accelerating Future, Techopolis, Mobile Magazine, eHome Upgrade, camcorderinfo.com (Update: it became http://Reviewed.com), Digital Home Thoughts (farewell), WiFi Network News (farewell), Salon: Machinist, Near Future Lab, BotJunkie (twitter), and CNN Gizmos.

I followed 18 categories at Free Patents Online, and the site's still alive, though the RSS feeds haven't had any new items since 2016.

In the "news" folder, my picks were fairly standard stuff: BBC, CNET, digg/technology, PC World, Reuters, International Herald Tribune, and a bunch of Yahoo News feeds. The Digg feed's dead; they died and were reborn.

The "Wired" feed folder comprised all the Wired News blogs of the mid-2000s. All are dead. 27B Stroke 6, Autopia, Danger Room, Epicenter, Gadget Lab, Game|Life, Geekdad, Listening Post, Monkey Bites, Table of Malcontents, Underwire, Wired Science.

These were each basically one writer or two and were generally folded into the established mazagine-side arrangements as the Age of Everyone Emulating Gawker came to an end. The feed for former EIC Chris Anderson's personal blog survives, but hasn't been updated since his era. Still going strong is Bruce Sterling's Beyond the Beyond, albeit rigged as a CMS tag rather than a bona fide site of its own.

Still alive from my 2007 "Science" folder are Bad Astronomy (Phil Plait), Bad Science (Ben Goldacre), Pharyngula (PZ Myers) New Urban Legends, NASA Breaking News, and The Panda's Thumb.

Finally, there's a dedicated "iPhone" folder. This was not just the hottest toy of 2007. It was all that was holy in consumer electronics for half a decade. Gadget blogging never really had a golden age, but the iPhone ended any pretense that there were numerous horses in a race of equal potential. Apple won.

Still alive are 9 to 5 Mac, MacRumors, MacSlash, AppleInsider and Daring Fireball. Dead are TUAW, iPhoneCentral, and the iPhone Dev Wiki.

Of all the sites listed here, I couldn't now be paid but to read a few. So long, 2007.

https://boingboing.net/2017/12/29/my-rss-feeds-from-a-decade-ago.html

[thetrashbang]

PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds Needs A God

No multiplayer game gets to live in a void for long. No matter how hard you may try to bleed yourself of troublesome concepts like context, or backstory, the reality is that people like to speculate. People like to tell stories. Doesn’t matter how goofy or outlandish; the creeping tendrils of narrative eventually wrap around the foundations of even the purest, most context-free experiences. Why are we bombing these crates? Why are we stealing that flag? Why are we fighting? Why are we here?

Somebody will come up with an answer. It’s the human thing to do.

But for PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds, it feels like that answer has yet to come. One hundred players parachute onto a deserted island, where the average density of firearms per square meter exceeds even the most deranged fanatical NRA wet dream, and a slowly constricting hemisphere of crackling blue energy forces them to mercilessly gun each other down until only one is left standing. It’s an absurd, nightmarish premise; a theoretical scenario seemingly engineered to turn people into rabid beasts, fighting tooth and nail merely for the privilege of living a few minutes longer. Who would orchestrate such a competition, and for what purpose? Is it an experiment? A ritual? A blood sport? Is some Silicon Valley bazillionaire sitting in a darkened room somewhere, surrounded by monitors, cranking his sad rubbery hog to every rifle crack and arterial splatter? Nobody seems to know, or care.

Ordinarily, I wouldn’t either; PUBG is fun enough without framing. And yet, tonight’s winds bring an uneasy chill, carrying whispers of restlessness, indignance and fury. You feel it, don’t you? There’s a philosophical schism in how we approach Pubguh—the very concept of ‘battle royale’, even—and the hairline fractures are beginning to show. Players whine and gnash their teeth at the red zone, esports organisers desperately attempt to harness the format for views, and the proverbial chicken dinner seems to attain a more and more mythical, trophy-like status by the day; a reference to back-alley gambling now ironically viewed as a badge of ultimate prowess. This isn’t a healthy relationship. This isn’t a healthy attitude.

What Plunkbat needs, friends, is a god.

Well, okay, not necessarily a god god. Divine power is optional. I’m not asking Brendan Greene to start wearing a white toga and chiselling his patch notes into stone tablets, as much as it would set an entertaining precedent. The job requirements are flexible: I’m simply asking for someone vengeful and capricious, with unfathomable intentions, inscrutable thoughts, and—at least within the bounds of the playable space—immense, unassailable power. Like any god, you need not supply scientific proof of their presence; you merely have to attribute sufficient existing phenomena to them, and change people’s collective perception of the world. Ooh, got’em.

See, battle royale games represent an important shift to me. I’m a competitive person by nature. It’s etched into my mind, irreversibly chiseled by years of test scores and parental praise and all the other ego-stroking bullshit that you were subjected to if you were a certain kind of ‘gifted’ child. “You’re the best. You should be the best. You should be winning. Why aren’t you winning, what the heck is wrong with you?” So it bleeds over, into hobbies, work, and of course, online shooters, in which I regularly demonstrate that I have an innate… whatever the opposite of aptitude is. I react slowly, I zone out, I bean myself on the head with my own grenades, and if you exert the slightest bit of pressure, I’ll empty half the magazine into a wall and drop my weapon through a gap in the floorboards. I’m not good, and yet some unreachable, fundamental part of my conscious will never be satisfied with that knowledge.

You would think, then, that Pubby-G would only serve to exacerbate this mindset. And yet, in a world of delicately tuned esports that are built from the ground up to be pure, unfiltered tests of skill, it feels like the only game to grant a genuine absolution of responsibility; a kind of freeing fatalism. There’s a sense in a lot of classic multiplayer experiences—like, say, Counter-Strike—that every outcome is more or less deterministic; a product of a series of controlled variables and actions. With every failure comes the overwhelming impression that it could have been averted, given enough competence, foresight, and concentrated guarana. By contrast, a porridgey cocktail of chaos flows through the veins of battle royales, surrounding you with factors that are not only impossible to influence, but—in many cases—impossible to know at all. You are swept up by the gusts of a hundred butterflies’ wings, tossed to and fro by the whims of the random number generator, bombarded with unavoidable risks and squeezed into unmanageable situations. It’s easier to go with the flow, accept that at any given moment you may have your head unceremoniously taken off—by somebody lying flat on a distant hill, or hiding behind one of the game’s ten thousand trees, or concealed in a shrub on the far side of the Moon—and concentrate on all the minute actions you can make to ever-so-slightly nudge the odds in your favour.

But it’s not always clear that this is the reality of Puhburger. With its vast scale and often languid pacing, encounters can feel like isolated incidents, detached from the cascading series of events that led up to them, despite being anything but. Anyone can parse the map for circles of safety and non-safety, and understand that their arbitrary placement gives certain players an advantage; it’s less apparent that the figure in that upstairs window might have had their sights trained on the area, or seen you first, shot first, picked up a better weapon, obtained a better vantage point, or some other action, because of a dizzying permutation of astral alignments that neither of you could even begin to grasp. So we get futile attempts to establish a level playing field, find meaning in accomplishment, divine fair elements from unfair, and generally make things needlessly stressful for everybody involved. Except the infuriatingly smug yours truly, of course.

How do you make that clear, though? How do you concisely impress upon people that their fate is almost entirely out of their hands, in such a way that they adopt an attitude of acceptance? Blaming the roll of the dice doesn’t come to mind as swiftly when you never see them rattling around, nor the way their innumerable ripples propagate across the map. Furthermore, as current events have taught us all too well, it’s a lot easier to ascribe fault to individuals than to an invisible, fundamentally hostile system. So what do you do?

You give the system a name. And, if you can, a face.

Allow me to momentarily slam us into reverse. When Valve released Left 4 Dead way back in 2008 (oh god, it’s going to be ten years old this year?) they made quite a song and dance about the game’s AI Director; an invisible, unknowable entity that would dynamically dole out items and zombies in a manner consistent with the tenets of dramatic tension, ensuring players were subjected to a “fast-paced, but not overwhelming, Hollywood horror movie”. While the opacity of the AI Director’s machinations always made me a tad sceptical of its mechanical effectiveness, giving people a name to pin the blame for all their earthly woes on was a masterstroke. Notorious video game jokesman Yahtzee Croshaw—the one with the hat and that trendy 00s cynicism, remember?—reported that he once witnessed someone praying to the AI Director, and I bet you all the pipe bombs in the world that players’ personification of it didn’t stop there. Short of making a catastrophic error, I never saw anyone get chewed out for not pulling their weight, and when tones got heated—as they inevitably do, when you’re throwing yourself against the frigid slopes of the higher difficulties—they were directed in the vague direction of the director: for its expectations, for its lack of pity, for being unfair. Awareness of our lurking orchestrator changed our perception of the experience, even though we couldn’t entirely prove it wasn’t just somebody sitting in a black box, disinterestedly flipping a coin over and over.

So, why not do the same for a game that does? Put a face on the system that holds a fundamental grip on who lives and who dies. You don’t need to change a thing under the hood; you need only introduce the vague implication that the evolving state of the battlefield is a consequence of a thinking, feeling, mysterious overseer. A bloodthirsty oligarch watching from their lavish observation zeppelin, a dystopian TV network broadcasting a deadly future sport, an amoral team of government agents sealed away in a bunker control room, an inexplicably sapient Shiba playing with a selection of levers, or indeed, a literal deity. People will take the faintest contextual cues and run amok with them, ascribing everything they can to the will of the one who set this conflict in motion: item drops, circle position, all the way down to the subtle spread of their bullets as they sail through the air. Yeah, maybe it’ll start off as a running joke; an ironic indulgence, the “thanks Obama” of Puddlebounds. But that’s the thing about ironic behaviour: get enough people doing it at once, and you’ll cultivate sincere participants without even realising it. We will learn to absolve ourselves of responsibility, and engage in the unhinged pandemonium of battle royale with the mentality that befits it.

There’s just one problem: you need to be able to keep a secret.

I’m still working on that part.

#pubg #galaxy brain bullshit

[klancereads-blog]

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[localocksmithnearme]

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About Mercury key and lock structure

Mercury is a United States multi-country vehicle producer with an head quarter in Dearborn, Michigan, the United States Created in 1938 by constructing mainstream cars.

Mercury began adopting P.A.T.S chip keys in 1996. Some outmoded models keys could be easily copied using dashboard procedure, yet with majority of current cars the key code is coded and an exclusive diagnostic apparatus is a must.

Modern cars (since 2007) employs push 2 start electric ignition instrument and the Intelligent Access with push-button start as keyless entry.

Ignition cylinder repair

The Mercury ignition  use three phases that light up different instrument as the key is turned. The ignition cylinder will light up the electronic units on the 1st phase, light up the fuel pump on the second phase and kindle the car engine on the 3rd phase.

One of the most common question our agens confront over the phone for assitance with, is diagnosing ignition  problems. Whilst our agent are generally pleased to try and diagnose your scenario, it can be very hard to perform over the phone. Besides carrying proper Mercury diagnostic and lock bumping tools, an elemental knowledge of how car ignition  works is required, but before you call an ignnition lock smith try to check the options below:

</p> <h5>No lights on dash-board console</h5> <p> If you turn the ignition on and no lights come on on the dash board which means that no electrical power running from the car battery. It could be A deflated battery or some times a bad electronic wiring connection or alternator could be the reason for this. Light up the front lights, if they wont light up, it's in fact means the battery is dead which is a task for a  electrician.

</p> <h5>Ignition key wont turn</h5> <p> Nearly all vehicle accommodate a locking steering column that is being locked whenever you take the ignition key out of the switch  when you finish a drive. Sometimes, the steering column can lock in a position that employs pressure to the ignition , and prevents the key from turning (usually happens when you park up a hill) or when one of the front wheels is pushed against an obstacle (e.g. curb stone).

* Before you begin troubleshooting this problem, make sure that your vehicle shifting gear is on park.

Grab the  wheel and try to move the sized steering wheel to the sides right and left and left and right altogether with mildly jiggling the ignition holding the key - which might help in releasing the steering column.

The ignition cylinder is highly important element of any car and consisting manifold small components that can be difficult to diagnose by an incompetent hands, so the only thing a driver can do coming across ignition or key issues is to double-check you’re actually attempting to start your own car and call a car key smith to come down to your premise to repair, replace  reprogram the ignition or key which will priced as about $150–$350.

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Due to the high rates of vehicle theft two decades ago, approximately all vehicles starting at around 1995 employ electrical key and lock utilizing transponder, P.A.T.S or vehicle anti theft keys.

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By @Beschizza:  My RSS feeds from a decade ago, a snapshot of gadget blogging when that was a thing

I chanced upon an ancient backup of my RSS feed subscriptions, a cold hard stone of data from my time at Wired in the mid-2000s. The last-modified date on the file is December 2007. I wiped my feeds upon coming to Boing Boing thenabouts: a fresh start and a new perspective.

What I found, over 212 mostly-defunct sites, is a time capsule of web culture from a bygone age—albeit one tailored to the professional purpose of cranking out blog posts about consumer electronics a decade ago. It's not a picture of a wonderful time before all the horrors of Facebook and Twitter set in. This place is not a place of honor. No highly-esteemed deed is commemorated here. But perhaps some of you might like a quick tour, all the same.

The "Main" folder, which contains 30 feeds, was the stuff I actually wanted (or needed) to read. This set would morph over time. I reckon it's easy to spot 2007's passing obsessions from the enduring interests.

↬ Arts and Letters Daily: a minimalist blog of links about smartypants subjects, a Drudge for those days when I sensed a third digit dimly glowing in my IQ. But for the death of founder Denis Dutton, it's exactly the same as it was in 2007! New items daily, but the RSS feed's dead.

↬ Boing Boing. Still around, I hear.

↬ Brass Goggles. A dead feed for a defunct steampunk blog (the last post was in 2013) though the forums seem well-stocked with new postings.

↬ The Consumerist. Dead feed, dead site. Founded in 2005 by Joel Johnson at Gawker, it was sold to Consumer Reports a few years later, lost its edge there, and was finally shuttered (or summarily executed) just a few weeks ago.

↬ Bibliodyssey. Quiescent. Updated until 2015 with wonderful public-domain book art scans and commentary. A twitter account and tumblr rolled on until just last year. There is a book to remember it by should the bits rot.

↬ jwz. Jamie Zawinski's startling and often hilariously bleak reflections on culture, the internet and working at Netscape during the dotcom boom. This was probably the first blog that led me to visit twice, to see if there was more. And there still is, almost daily.

↬ Proceedings of the Athanasius Kircher Society. Curios and weirdness emerging from the dust and foul fog of old books, forbidden history and the more speculative reaches of science. So dead the domain is squatted. Creator Josh Foer moved on to Atlas Obscura.

↬ The Tweney Review. Personal blog of my last supervisor at Wired, Dylan Tweney, now a communications executive. It's still going strong!

↬ Strange Maps. Dead feed, dead site, though it's still going as a category at Big Think. Similar projects proliferate now on social media; this was the wonderful original. There was a book.

↬ BLDGBLOG. Architecture blog, posting since 2004 with recent if rarer updates. A fine example of tasteful web brutalism, but I'm no longer a big fan of cement boxes and minimalism with a price tag.

↬ Dethroner. A men's self-care and fashion blog, founded by Joel Johnson, of the tweedy kind that became wildly and effortlessly successful not long after he gave up on it.

↬ MocoLoco. This long-running design blog morphed visually into a magazine in 2015. I have no idea why I liked it then, but indie photoblogs' golden age ended long ago and it's good to see some are thriving.

↬ SciFi Scanner. Long-dead AMC channel blog, very likely the work of one or two editors and likely lost to tidal corporate forces rather than any specific failure or event.

↬ Cult of Mac. Apple news site from another Wired News colleague of mine, Leander Kahney, and surely one of the longest-running at this point. Charlie Sorrel, who I hired at Wired to help me write the Gadget blog, still pens articles there.

↬ Ectoplasmosis. After Wired canned its bizarre, brilliant and unacceptably weird Table of Malcontents blog, its editor John Brownlee (who later joined Joel and I in editing Boing Boing Gadgets) and contributor Eliza Gauger founded Ectoplasmosis: the same thing but with no hysterical calls from Conde Nast wondering what the fuck is going on. It was glorious, too: a high-point of baroque indie blogging in the age before Facebook (and I made the original site design). Both editors later moved onto other projects (Magenta, Problem Glyphs); Gauger maintains the site's archives at tumblr. It was last updated in 2014.

↬ Penny Arcade. Then a webcomic; now a webcomic and a media and events empire.

↬ Paul Boutin. While working at Wired News, I'd heard a rumor that he was my supervisor. But I never spoke to him and only ever received a couple of odd emails, so I just got on with the job until Tweney was hired. His site and its feed are long-dead.

↬ Yanko Design. Classic blockquote chum for gadget bloggers.

↬ City Home News. A offbeat Pittburgh News blog, still online but lying fallow since 2009.

↬ Watchismo. Once a key site for wristwatch fans, Watchismo was folded into watches.com a few years ago. A couple of things were posted to the feed in 2017, but its time has obviously passed.

↬ Gizmodo. Much has changed, but it's still one of the best tech blogs.

↬ Engadget. Much has changed, but it's still one of the best tech blogs.

↬ Boing Boing Gadgets. Site's dead, though the feed is technically live as it redirects to our "gadgets" tag. Thousands of URLs there succumbed to bit-rot at some point, but we have plans to merge its database into Boing Boing's and revive them.

↬ Gear Factor. This was the gadget review column at Wired Magazine, separate from the gadget blog I edited because of the longtime corporate divorce between Wired's print and online divisions. This separation had just been resolved at the time I began working there, and the two "sides" -- literally facing offices in the same building -- were slowly being integrated. The feed's dead, but with an obvious successor, Gear.

↬ The Secret Diary of Steve Jobs. Required reading at the time, and very much a thing of its time. Now vaguely repulsive.

↬ i09. This brilliant sci-fi and culture blog deserved more than to end up a tag at Gizmodo.

↬ Science Daily: bland but exhaustive torrent of research news, still cranking along.

The "Essentials" Folder was material I wanted to stay on top of, but with work clearly in mind: the background material for systematically belching out content at a particular point in 2007.

↬ Still alive are The Register, Slashdot, Ars Technica, UMPC Portal (the tiny laptop beat!), PC Watch, Techblog, TechCrunch, UberGizmo, Coolest Gadgets, EFF Breaking News, Retro Thing, CNET Reviews, New Scientist, CNET Crave, and MAKE Magazine.

↬ Dead or quiescent: GigaOm (at least for news), Digg/Apple, Akihabara News, Tokyomango, Inside Comcast, Linux Devices, and Uneasy Silence.

Of the 23 feeds in the "press releases" folder, 17 are dead. Most of the RSS no-shows are for companies like AMD and Intel, however, who surely still offer feeds at new addresses. Feeds for Palm, Nokia and pre-Dell Alienware are genuine dodos. These were interesting enough companies, 10 years ago.

PR Newswire functions as a veneering service so anyone can pretend to have a big PR department, but it is (was?) also legitimately used by the big players as a platform so I monitored the feeds there. They're still populated, but duplicate one another, and it's all complete garbage now. (It was mostly garbage then.)

My "Gadgets and Tech" folder contained the army of late-2000s blogs capitalizing on the success of Gizmodo, Boing Boing, TechCrunch, et al. Back in the day, these were mostly one (or two) young white men furiously extruding commentary on (or snarky rewrites of) press releases, with lots of duplication and an inchoate but seriously-honored unspoken language of mutual respect and first-mover credit. Those sites that survived oftentimes moved to listicles and such: notionally superior and more original content and certainly more sharable on Facebook, but unreadably boring. However, a few old-timey gadget bloggers are still cranking 'em out' in web 1.5 style. And a few were so specialized they actually had readers who loved them.

Still alive: DailyTech, technabob, CdrInfo.com, EverythingUSB, Extremetech, GearFuse, Gizmag, Gizmodiva, Hacked Gadgets, How to Spot A Psychopath/Dans' Data, MobileBurn, NewLaunches, OhGizmo!, ShinyShiny, Stuff.tv, TechDigest, TechDirt, Boy Genius Report, The Red Ferret Journal, Trusted Reviews, Xataca, DigiTimes, MedGadget, Geekologie, Tom's Hardware, Trendhunter, Japan Today, Digital Trends, All About Symbian (Yes, Symbian!), textually, cellular-news, TreeHugger, dezeen.

Dead: jkkmobile.com, Business Week Online, About PC (why), Afrigadget (unique blog about inventors in Africa, still active on FaceBook), DefenseTech, FosFor (died 2013), Gearlog, Mobile-Review.com (but apparently reborn as a Russian language tech blog!), Robot's Dreams, The Gadgets Weblog, Wireless Watch Japan, Accelerating Future, Techopolis, Mobile Magazine, eHome Upgrade, camcorderinfo.com, Digital Home Thoughts (farewell), WiFi Network News (farewell), Salon: Machinist, Near Future Lab, BotJunkie (twitter), and CNN Gizmos.

I followed 18 categories at Free Patents Online, and the site's still alive, though the RSS feeds haven't had any new items since 2016.

In the "news" folder, my picks were fairly standard stuff: BBC, CNET, digg/technology, PC World, Reuters, International Herald Tribune, and a bunch of Yahoo News feeds. The Digg feed's dead; they died and were reborn.

The "Wired" feed folder comprised all the Wired News blogs of the mid-2000s. All are dead. 27B Stroke 6, Autopia, Danger Room, Epicenter, Gadget Lab, Game|Life, Geekdad, Listening Post, Monkey Bites, Table of Malcontents, Underwire, Wired Science.

These were each basically one writer or two and were generally folded into the established mazagine-side arrangements as the Age of Everyone Emulating Gawker came to an end. The feed for former EIC Chris Anderson's personal blog survives, but hasn't been updated since his era. Still going strong is Bruce Sterling's Beyond the Beyond, albeit rigged as a CMS tag rather than a bona fide site of its own.

Still alive from my 2007 "Science" folder are Bad Astronomy (Phil Plait), Bad Science (Ben Goldacre), Pharyngula (PZ Myers) New Urban Legends, NASA Breaking News, The Panda's Thumb, and James Randi's blog,

Finally, there's a dedicated "iPhone" folder. This was not just the hottest toy of 2007. It was all that was holy in consumer electronics for half a decade. Gadget blogging never really had a golden age, but the iPhone ended any pretense that there were numerous horses in a race of equal potential. Apple won.

Still alive are 9 to 5 Mac, MacRumors, MacSlash, AppleInsider and Daring Fireball. Dead are TUAW, iPhoneCentral, and the iPhone Dev Wiki.

Of all the sites listed here, I couldn't now be paid but to read a few. So long, 2007.

https://boingboing.net/2017/12/29/my-rss-feeds-from-a-decade-ago.html

[tangtang7843-blog]

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I doubt he sits on the dinner desk together with his household appearing like the extreme, ardour dripping nutcase he does in his movies. After all not. He places on a present for you. He has fastidiously crafted a persona for us – he takes who he's, cranks it to stage 10 then provides a splash of swagger. Watch his stuff, don’t suppose for a minute he’s not entertaining you! As he ought to… as all of us ought to… that is the sport of gross sales – always remember you're being bought, and always remember to promote… and promoting is a efficiency.   Everybody Places On A Present     Watching Stone Chilly Steve Austin entertaining and fascinating 90,000 individuals at a reside WWE occasion made it crystal clear to me: Folks NEED to consider in somebody bigger than life. The notorious Frank Kern mentioned in an interview he had with Joe Polish a few years in the past that his public persona was crafted. He actually mentioned “My on-line persona is the embodiment of the individual my market needs they may very well be”.   Many individuals consider Frank is “simply Frank”, however what he exhibits you is deliberate, calculated, and strategically thought out prematurely. That is the reality of turning into elite on this sport, and also you higher begin taking part in by the true guidelines if you wish to get to the highest. Studying tips on how to good your persona is the lacking hyperlink it's good to SELL YOURSELF.Tony Robbins mentioned: “I constructed this fucking Tony Robbins man. I constructed him, I created him, he was me, however I constructed this motherfucker… I created this motherfucker standing right here.” On the subject of promoting ourselves and our companies, we're all the time placing on a present. You do it now, whether or not you understand it or not – we're all the time making an attempt to place our greatest foot ahead. The actual query is: How good of a present are you going to offer them? Your function fashions don’t let you know the entire little manipulations they do with the intention to management the best way you see them, and fact be instructed, many are too dumb to know they're even doing it. However earlier than I reveal the main points of this system Right here’s One other Fast Tip You Can Use Proper Now:   DITCH the enterprise playing cards. DITCH the laptop computer. DITCH the briefcase (do they even make these anymore?) The extra profitable an individual is, the much less “stuff” they carry with them to conferences and public gatherings. Give it some thought. Love him or hate him, Donald Trump ain’t strolling round with a briefcase. He ain’t carrying round his laptop computer laptop both. Low stage individuals lug round this stuff in entrance of different individuals. There are all the time uncommon exceptions, however go searching you, and research the greats – I'm telling you it’s true. So one secret for you proper off the bat, is to not be seen with issues that mission decrease standing! By exhibiting as much as a gathering, networking occasion, or seminar with nothing however your highly effective charisma and outfit (Which I talk about at size in this system), you convey energy and excessive standing. Taking notes in your head as a substitute of your telephone, exhibits you're excessive up on the totem pole, so keep in mind: No one seeks recommendation from the sensible man on the backside of the hill… It’s The Little Issues Dude. And one other “little factor” that makes all of the distinction, shouldn't be being accessible for random incoming calls. Once more, title a vital individual you may simply ring up? I dare you to strive it. Observe down somebody tremendous necessary and attempt to attain them. Go forward, name up Elon Musk… you ain’t getting via! They obtained like, issues to do. Standing is the whole lot on this enterprise. Folks MUST understand you being in excessive demand. Diamonds could be completely nugatory if the availability was better than the demand, and so would you. Use this common legislation to your benefit. Another factor Cease Answering Your Rattling Telephone!   Not answering will prevent time and permit you to serve your purchasers higher. I used to be going to attend till you acquire this system, however Would you prefer to know one other secret you may deploy proper now that may immediately enhance your standing and make purchasers start chasing you?Right here it's: Discover somebody of the alternative intercourse, and have them file your model new, excessive standing voicemail message.“Hello, welcome to _____. Due to the excessive demand for _____’s time, we're not taking incoming calls from non-clients. In case you are a present consumer, please go away your message after the tone and I’ll instantly guide you a telephone appointment with ______. In case you are contemplating turning into a consumer, please go to www.yourwebsite.com/software to fill out a easy questionnaire. If we predict there could also be a match, I'll guide a 15 minute appointment between you and ______. Thanks.” Increase! Do you see how highly effective that is? It says all the precise issues about you: You respect your time and theirs You're in excessive demand You rapidly handle present purchasers You're choosy and have an consumption course of You're making them chase you for as soon as The most typical objection I get to an method like that is “Received’t this truly scare away potential purchasers?” No, and right here’s why: Any potential consumer who doesn’t respect you as an authority WILL finally undermine your recommendation and experience anyway. I'm positive you've gotten handled this earlier than. I've many occasions. I imply, they rent you as their professional, then proceed to let you know precisely tips on how to do your job! It’s whacky, As a lot enjoyable as it's to vent and get pissed off, the reality is it’s our fault as a result of we haven’t set the precise tone from the beginning. You’re both the customer or the vendor my good friend. On this enterprise You Should Take Management   It’s not a 50/50 deal right here, don’t ever delude your self. They're hiring you as a result of they need assistance getting management over a selected space of their enterprise that's at the moment uncontrolled. Due to this fact to be of any assist to them, it's good to be the one to take management! Or they’ll simply go screw all of it up like they all the time have… It’s crucial you're the one which takes management. And one of many methods you do that is by dictating the phrases of the connection from the very starting. You Should Change into Their Most Trusted Skilled With a view to be trusted, it's good to be revered. With a view to be revered, it's good to be seen as highly effective of their eyes. The voicemail technique I gave you is a good begin.And pay attention, the largest, most “smack you within the face” logical motive you MUST implement a system like this in your online business proper now could be this:Being the one who all the time responds rapidly and on the drop of a hat shouldn't be sustainable long run. To begin with, it turns into a part of your repute that you're the man who is simple to come up with.This can be a good factor when you've gotten just a few purchasers, however what occurs as you develop into extra profitable?Nicely, the extra profitable you get, the much less you will be accessible.Fairly quickly you can be found much less and fewer, and folks begin to get pissed off and aggravated. Why?Since you created an expectation that you could’t reside as much as the extra profitable you get… that’s not sensible.The key is to create an expectation from the beginning that enables you leeway. It’s okay to purchase pants which might be a bit massive on you – you’ll develop into them. It’s the identical with the way you conduct enterprise. You wish to act extra necessary than you actually are so you may develop into it and preserve your repute intact alongside the best way.The rationale my whole method is to do the alternative of everybody else shouldn't be as a result of I'm a prick… positive, that’s a part of it.My method simply works higher than the choice.   No Extra Grunt Work…   Simply do the precise issues, and let your new energy positioning do the heavy lifting for you.I don’t wish to give away too many secrets and techniques right here, I need you to spend money on my program, however I'll rapidly share just a few common truths about human habits that may clarify precisely why it's good to start doing these radical issues I'm speaking about.   Three Legal guidelines Of Consulting   Similar to the legislation of gravity, there are specific legal guidelines of positioning and consumer getting that may do the laborious be just right for you, and listed below are just a few to consider: 1. Folks need what they'll’t have 2. Folks need what others need 3. The tougher it's to get to you, the extra they want to get to you Ask your self – Have you ever been utilizing these legal guidelines to your benefit, or have you ever been appearing too accessible and needy similar to everybody else? Most individuals stroll round begging for enterprise like some pathetic shell of a advisor, hoping individuals wish to work with them. I say fuck all that. Since when did following the bulk ever give us a breakthrough?   It’s Time You Begin Residing The Good Life Proper Now   I really consider nearly everyone seems to be doing it improper. In the event that they have been doing it proper, we’d have much more success tales on the market – however what can we see as a substitute? Failure. Most individuals fail to achieve their enterprise targets actually. And like I mentioned earlier, it’s all of the little issues that add as much as sink your standing and significance available in the market… Do you continue to give “proposals”? If that's the case, there may be nothing extra silly. As a substitute, use the phrase “motion plan”. Certain, it’s only a play on phrases… however it is going to make all of the distinction in your capacity to shut offers. Why? Bear in mind, you wish to be the trusted professional. Like a health care provider… Does your physician suggest something to you? No… he diagnoses and prescribes – he doesn’t suggest jack shit, and neither must you. You're the professional, what is correct – so cease proposing and begin prescribing! And proper now I'm prescribing my course to you, and listed below are the main points…     How To Journey The World, Dwell Like A King, Be Extra Revered, And Different Common Badassery     The course is damaged into Three sections. 1. Making ready your self for domination 2. Self promotion and getting purchasers 3. Taking part in the sport and shutting the deal I share lots of my commerce secrets and techniques together with: Methods to develop into a trusted and fashionable authority FAST The four Massive Consulting Traps That Will Preserve You Broke (Don't fall into these) The Soiled Little Secret Of Superiority (Why it's good to really feel “above” your purchasers to also have a likelihood at serving to them) 7 Artistic And Sneaky Consumer Getting Methods To Deploy If You're low on Cash How To Have Rock star Stage Charisma (Command consideration and respect in all places you go) Growing Your “Character” and setting up your public picture How To Take A Highly effective Image Of Your self (Images and video recommendation) Integrity, morals, and ethics – When to play truthful, when NOT to play truthful Fame 101 (Uncover what a repute is definitely manufactured from (I GUARANTEE it’s *not* what you suppose it's) How To Design Your Fame And Create Your Personal Legendary Standing Seeing By means of The Matrix – How To Use Your New Fame To Bend Actuality (and purchasers) to your will How To Survive A Media Scandal Or Bashing From Your Trade     If You Should Get Purchasers Chilly Proper Now… Right here Is EXACTLY How To Do It. Uncover the key of Self Aggrandizement, and Circus Considering How To Make A Massive Deal Out Of Small Issues (By no means be fooled once more by individuals doing it to you) The “Pizza Boy Technique” to getting any necessary individual to speak to you     My Step By Step Information To Writing And Publishing Your Personal Guide (and releasing it on Amazon) In A Brief Weekend Perceive Pretend Media VS Actual Media and how one can be talked about within the information very simply The “Hire A Superstar” Technique The “Schwarzenegger” Technique How To Train Energy And Management Over The Consumer Understanding Body Management And The Hidden Recreation Of Frames The Magic Of Takeaway Promoting Superior Takeaway Promoting Recommendation How To Shut The Deal – My six step system together with actual phrasingAll Doable Objections You Will Get And Precisely What To Say To Overcome Them What To Do If Your Consumer Resists Your Recommendation How To Value Your Companies correctly so that you get massive cash and get it UPFRONT Price Presentation Errors (What NOT to say – odds are you're throwing away cash proper now…) When to know to fireplace a consumer, how To Fireplace Purchasers, and precisely what to say so it’s not awkward   SalesPage (extra information) Mitch Miller – Lazy Advisor System Comprises: Movies, Audios MEMBERS ONLY Signal As much as see all our obtain hyperlinks and hidden content material. 100% Satisfaction Assured Obtain as a lot as you want You may select from two membership choices: Lifetime or Month-to-month Begins at $23.95 What individuals say... 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[psychotropicplague]

Let me start off by saying; if you’re not ready to try it, don’t do it.

Part of the experience is to be completely at ease and go into it with an open, positive mindset.

I can’t stress it enough that it can change your perception in the matter of hours— and if we’re being honest: it has been years since I’ve had it.

This was also the first time I had a joint in over a year. Everything leading up to the trip was completely dry from anything and the clarity I obtained whilst clean was undoubtedly the best I’ve felt in a long time..

But you’re probably wondering how it went...

I took one, my friend took three— mainly because he didn’t believe it was real, in-fact the first half hour after he had his first two, he kept telling me he didn’t feel anything, i warned him that it would creep-up on him and it would only be a matter of two hours before he’d peak.

Mind you, we’re going through Daylight Savings Time, so time itself was going really slow, I guess he got impatient and took another one.

I took mine with a swig of orange juice around 9:35pm and within minutes I started to feel a bit of a glowing sensation. Like a small spike in my awareness of what was going on— no introspective thoughts but aware that if I took two, I would not be going to work the next day (I had work at 11am the following morning) and I told him that it would be a strong sensation that would come up gradually. Believe it or not minutes after I had taken my first and only tab of the night, I took two small puffs of a joint and got baked instantly, it was somewhat overwhelming because it was as if the synapses and receptors in my brain usually occupied with fueling my medication (Lamictal 100mg, Invega 3mg and Vyvanse 50mg) was now slowing down and now combined with an unknown amount of THC, I felt stoned but at the same time kind of sore, naturally one should take into account that cannabis is a depressant and the combination of two mood-stabilizers (antipsychotic) and a stimulant with a hallucinogen is bound to make anyone feel kinda sluggish especially if they haven’t done anything like this in a really long time. It was only 9:45pm when we were talking, my voice sounding like I was balancing a coin in my mouth, but he was on the phone most of the first half-hour so we weren’t talking directly to one another but an occasional snide-joke was to be expected from him because he’s facetious as hell.

By 11pm, I could tell he was peaking— he was smiling and laughing, we were giggling because our voices were ridiculous sounding with his dissolving on his tongue. The thing that might’ve thrown him off thinking it was bunk was because sometimes in rare cases, you’ll get the kind that doesn’t have that distinct chemical taste that makes up the compound. For a first-time, you’re going to have to expect the unexpected.

My friend had turned on blue Christmas lights on in his room, which gave everything a bit of a sharpened outline, if you stared at something too long and closed your eyes you’d see the imprint of it on your eyelids and that’s how I know I was already gone. Not only did I see the imprint of these objects but at the same time I was also feeling like Jello, my body loosened from its tenseness it felt a half hour before but my heart was pumping quicker, I couldn’t really lay still and I wanted to cuddle something or someone because it made my tactile senses feel incredible; his bed felt like a cloud since it was memory-foam and I started to sprawl out and close my eyes to enjoy the closed-eye visuals which had a kaleidoscope-effect now. I grabbed one of his pillows and held it at arms length and tried to wrap one of my legs over it, it legitimately felt like I was cuddling another person because my breathing felt like someone else was in my embrace.

By 11:35pm, he turned off the blue-light and turned off all-lights in the room which amplified his trip tenfold; he tried to get up off the recliner he lounged in but couldn’t— just like me he felt very Jello-like and was both comfortable and taken by surprise by how it hit him like a ton-of-bricks. At this time I grabbed a blanket and wrapped it around me because he had his window-open and the cold breeze was coming into the room or maybe it was just my hypothalamus unsure of what temperature I was feeling because I went from cold to warm to cold to hot. I decided this was the opportune moment to play some trippy music, I picked Merriweather Post Pavilion by Animal Collective— which is PERFECT to play when you’re on any kind of trip, I had the volume on my phone set to two-clicks above silence, which normally wouldn’t be that loud (I mainly did this as to not stir my friend’s step-dad and to be respectful) but even two-clicks made the music sound like an amphitheater and really time-stretched it, a few minutes into one song felt and sounded like an eternity where you could truly appreciate the amount of work that went into making their album as mindblowing— as I laid on his bed, my brain disassembled some of the synthesizers and other sounds that made the song and could feel their unique distortion. I wanted to listen to the entire album but after a while with how time stretched it was, I had to turn it off because it only intensified and became almost too mellow.

We sat in silence for a while, maybe like another hour or so. I had brought my PlayStation 4 over his house and asked if we could play it, because I have never tried playing a video-game whilst tripping (I still haven’t) but he said no because he made it pretty clear to me he didn’t want to be staring at a screen all-night which partially made sense as it would’ve consumed a lot of time and the blue and white-light would keep us awake longer than we needed to be which would’ve ultimately made us completely sleepless— he just wanted to relax and so he asked if he could lay down on his bed, I let him lay down and I’d sit in the recliner he sat on for the past three hours and he sighed of relief when he got onto his bed, I tried to get comfortable on the recliner but it was difficult; to go from a really tranquil bed to sitting upright was by no means producing the same blissful effects as laying down flat.

I tried to get relaxed but it wasn’t easy, I laid my head on the pillow he gave me but as you can imagine, reclined on one of those chairs plus resting your head on a pillow on one of the arms of it is quite awkward and trying to find a way to curl-up isn’t pleasant either but this didn’t give me a bad-trip, I’ve never had a bad-trip.

Eventually I found my comfortable position and took a few hours nap while my brain basically started thinking about my life— what I’ve accomplished before all of this, a year of sobriety which now had to reset, but I somehow felt okay with that— to take a year break from cannabis and LSD didn’t seem to bother me, my brain thought of this trip and toke as a reward but I also thought about how some of my friend’s I’ve known for years are now doing alright for themselves and not doing this kind of thing which kind of made me feel sad and hopeless, I wanted nothing more than to have my own space where I could be cuddling and making love to someone passionately and slowly, bonding over the hallucinogen as you should— yes this is one of those things where it’s setting and individuals that factor into how much fun you’re going to have and how relaxed you’ll feel, if you’re tripping with someone you genuinely love and appreciate romantically, those feelings will be cranked to the max-level they can be; but sadly I’ve never experienced that either— and I really want to but it’s not easy at all to find it and you may or may not get opposition.

The next morning, literally around 8am, I had literally what felt like two hours of sleep— but I didn’t, I had six hours— I felt extremely deflated and sluggish as all hell; virtually no uplifting energy as I had the night before and even before I embarked on my trip. I had work at 11am, so I started packing my belongings and drove home— which surprisingly had no negative effects on my driving, if anything I was driving the posted speed-limits and didn’t make any mistakes, that alone kind of made me feel accomplished that I somehow managed to pull that off despite being lethargic and foggy-headed.

When I got home, I took my morning medication, took a shower and hoped for the best— that I’d go to work feeling fine and go about my day as normal as possible— but it didn’t go nearly as well as one would hope, because on-top of feeling the comedown and afterglow of the substances, my mind kept racing about things that were going sort-of awry in my life, I thought by doing what I did last night made me a failure in my family’s eyes— it’s bad enough that I had to hide behind the guise of a strong anti-smoke scent spray so I would come home and go to work inconspicuous but I couldn’t shake these thoughts and when I did finally get to work (earlier than scheduled) I got there at 10:15am, I decided I’d relax in my car for a while and try to meditate these racing thoughts into more composed ones, but I still felt scattered and drained of any kind of rational thinking.

I work at a bowling-alley which for the most part is pretty quiet until leagues or open-bowlers occupy the lanes we rent out. Around the time I clocked in, I paced around some to see if there was anything that needed to be done, we had a children’s party being held in an hour or so which occupied four lanes; while I was looking to see if there was anything I could do I still can safely admit, I was underperforming, nowhere near my seemingly manic energy that I had the week prior; my manager must’ve had some idea something was-up so she set me up with a challenge— to rearrange all of the balls on the floor in size-order, which is really counterproductive because no matter how you’d organize it, anybody who does open-bowl will almost never put them back where you organized them. I was with another coworker when my manager made us do this which required a lot of exertion and moving back and fourth between lanes and memorization, something my brain could not quite compute because I’m being told several different ways to organize them and we have so many different weights that it felt futile but I still tried my hardest, while this was all going on, the first league started coming in on the low-side of our building which began slowly increasing my anxiety so I stopped and began doing another task— degreasing any glass we had (usually the pictures we have hung-up around the center and the arcade machines and windows) but even then I’m told by my coworker that it isn’t necessary to do that: “We do that once a month” yet I do it mostly every shift I’m scheduled just so I can occupy any idle time I have because I know part of my job is to not stand-around and you have to be constantly moving...

Then the party came in, holy hell, this is where the center went from slow to now becoming gradually packed with patrons so I was stuck just doing tedious things like “mopping” the approach which is basically spraying alcohol on the wood approach and moving a rag attached to a stick to-and-fro, I tried doing so but I couldn’t quite grasp that either, my anxiety was getting in the way of doing anything right and it really began to become obvious something wasn’t right and I felt like my manager knew that— she offered lunch to me but I politely declined, something I wonder now if it would’ve had any effect on how I felt, she didn’t really have much to say— I think it might’ve made her upset to be honest.

After that I went into each of the rooms we have mats where my coworker suggested we power-wash them which was a much easier task and didn’t require nearly as much effort as you’d think— but still the center itself was packed with people and even when I finished doing that task I couldn’t quite figure out what to do next, so I waited some, took the garbage out, set-up some ramps and sat down to take a breather— it was only 1pm and 5pm felt like eons away— as soon as I stood up my manager startled me because she was right behind me, she claimed to have radioed me “5 times.” But the radio she gave me had a busted antenna and only gave me static, I explained this to her and again she had nothing to say, so I also explained that I was feeling anxious and overwhelmed about what truthfully has been troubling me— my father, which is partially true, he had gotten seriously injured by burning his hands on November 2nd and hadn’t told anyone, I brought him to the hospital on my birthday and he isn’t really doing too well mentally. Presently, he’s in a rehabilitation clinic recouping but I can see that he’s making small progress, this alone was a lingering thought all throughout the day.

My manager told me to clock-out and go home— “Maybe I’ll take you off the schedule for a few weeks..” she threatened, which would’ve been terrible given the fact that I have just started working here fairly recently and the last thing I’d want is to go without any income for a while.

So, all of that aside— today I feel somewhat more level-headed then I did yesterday and I’m hoping I can perform better at work today, I had two cups of coffee and I feel like a 7/10, which is waaaayy better than I did yesterday, I mean literally yesterday I felt like a 2/10.

My advice to anyone— if you’re going to do anything like this, make sure you don’t have work the following day.