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violetcuriosity · 4 years

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LFRP - Violetta Fierlane ---

The Basics ––– –

Age: Late 20′s/Early 30′s

Birthday: Early spring.

Race: Duskwight Elezen

Gender: Female

Sexuality: bisexual

Marital Status: Single

Physical Appearance ––– –

Hair: Naturally a dusky grey-blue, often dyed to more pastel and cheery hues to fit her mood and the current season.

Eyes: Pale foggy blue

Height: Relatively average for an elezen, about six fulms three ilms tall.

Build: Soft. dramatically curved. There is an underlying strength to Vio, one borne of a life filled with the work of keeping hearth and home far from most settlements in order,but otherwise hers is a frame untested by battle-borne adversity. (She’s about a US size 16-18, for reference!)

Distinguishing Marks: A small beautymark under her left eye, a pink birhmark on her right palm that looks sort of like a flower.

Common Accessories: Enjoys whimsical baubles and bits of jewelry - colorful beads shaped like hearts and skulls and bits of candy. Always keeps a messenger style bag slung over one shoulder made entirely of various scraps of leather and fabric, though purposefully pieced together into homespun pattern covered in embroidered. Often has an embroidery hoop with her, as well as various tins - figuring out of they hold cookies, sweets, or more alarming components to her spellwork is...a game of trial and error.

Personal ––– –

Profession: Head of Mortuary Services for the Ashen Enclave. Mortician & Conjurer, Medium, Creator of Charms. Accidental Necromancer.

Hobbies: Weaving, gardening, taxidermy

Languages: Common, relatively uncommon dialect of Old Elezen.

Residence: A cozy cottage tucked away deep in the Shroud, though these days she can be found frequently in the Goblet.

Birthplace: The Shroud

Religion: Undefined to most, keeps to old Gelmorran tradition

Patron Deity: Nophica

Relationships ––– -

Spouse: None currently.

Children: None.

Parents: Raised largely by her grandmother from a young age, Violetta knows little about her parents - except that they left the Shroud to pursue a life as Adventurers.

Siblings: None. (That she knows of!)

Other Relatives: Various cousins, aunts, uncles scattered about the various duskwight settlements and encampments in the Shroud.

Pets: Gertrude, a very good,and undead, cat.

Traits ––– -

* Bold your character’s answer.

Extroverted / In Between / Introverted

Disorganized / In Between / Organized

Close Minded / In Between / Open Minded

Calm / In Between / Anxious

Disagreeable / In Between / Agreeable

Cautious / In Between / Reckless

Patient / In Between / Impatient

Outspoken / In Between / Reserved

Leader / In Between / Follower

Empathetic / In Between / Apathetic

Optimistic / In Between / Pessimistic

Traditional / In Between / Modern

Hard-working / In Between / Lazy

Cultured / In Between / Uncultured

Loyal / In Between / Disloyal

Faithful / In Between / Unfaithful

Additional information ––– –

Smoking Habit: Never / Sometimes / Frequently / To Excess Drugs: Never / Sometimes / Frequently / To Excess Alcohol: Never / Sometimes / Frequently / To Excess

RP Hooks ––– –

The Faithful Departed~ As a mortician Violetta has frequent comfortable contact with the dead. She officiates lasts rites, oversees funerary ceremony, as well as the care and interment of those passed. Avidly curious, she also studies the funerary tradition belonging to other locales and cultures...and is quite skilled as a taxidermist.

To those in the know, she claims to be a medium - able to contact the deceased in order to provide closure, care, and succor to loved ones and friends. As 'speaker of the dead' she carries on long forgotten traditions and rites for the various duskwight encampments and settlements scattered in the deep shroud. The truth is somewhat more complicated. Capable of magics most dangerous and forbidden, Violetta's work often brushes upon necromancy, occasionally raising the dead, both purposefully and accidentally, making it her personal mission to see to their last wishes and unfinished business.

No stone left unturned~ The women of Violetta's family have been known, for generations of those living in the deep Shroud, as those to turn to in troubled times and ill health - carrying on traditions lost to most after the fall of Gelmorra. She is the last of her line, maintaining the knowledge to the best of her ability. Hexes for one's enemies are sold as freely as remedies for a cough or incense for one's prayers, at least for those proving to have proper motivation and intentions. Her methods are esoteric and strange.

Any Safehaven in a Storm~ Lost souls seeking refuge from the elementals or Gridania's wrath (or increasingly elsewhere, these days) have a funny way of showing up on her doorstep without ever seeking the place out, finding a warm hearth and a hot meal for as long as needed... so long as one is willing to help her around her garden.

Grimly Whimsical ~ Despite a list of interests, calling and inclinations that could seem morbid to many, Violetta is a brightly cheerful and friendly sort, exuding a friendly (if not somewhat eccentric) demeanor to most she meets. This carries over to her aesthetic choices, favoring pale pastels and playful motif rather than that bordering on the darker. She is eager to speak with others with similar interests, enthusiastic to debate the merits of various funerary belief and tradition, or just another friendly face to have a cup of tea with.

What I’m looking for ––– –

I am looking for connections of all sorts for Violetta! As a relatively new character/alt, I am looking for all sorts of new adventures and experiences for her - from friendships, to rivalries, to those perhaps skeptical, concerned or hostile to all that she is and does. Romance isn’t off the table (I am a sucker for shippy rp afterall) though be prepared for a slow burn.

OOC info ––– –

Hi! I’m Dani~ I’ve been RPing for a really long time now! As in, started back on AOL, long time ago.

I’m a really laid back and patient RP partner, and I prefer the folks I write with to be the same. I run an RP FC that holds regular events and plot as well as work full-time for myself, so my availability can vary a whole lot. Discord RP frequently works better than in-game for me! While my timezone is currently EST, from Late November - May I will be in ICT, aka 12+ hours ahead of US time.

I enjoy all sorts of RP! Darker plots are as welcome as slice-of-life scenes. I value communication with those I am writing with, in order to make sure we stay on the same page and nothing gets thrown at me entirely out of the blue.

Contact Information ––– –

Ingame - ‘Violetta Fierlane’ , Discord: snarksonomy#1313 @mooglemeet @balmungrp @ffxiv-crystal-rp

#ffxiv rp #crystal rp #balmung

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yasmeensh · 5 years

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Zelda II: The Adventure of Link - The lore

I know this is an art blog but i can’t contain myself and I need to talk about zelda2 lore. Why? You all heard about the botw sequel being darker, much darker. And people made connections to Majora’s mask, because it was a dark sequel. But you know what? Zelda 2 was also a dark sequel. Nintendo are doing it for a THIRD time and I'm proud. Sit tight and maybe grab a snack because this will probably be a long passion essay. Here we go.

Most of you MIGHT be familiar with the storyline of Zelda2, but in summary, here is how it goes: Princess Zelda from an ancient time has been put to spell by a curse. Only the power of the full triforce touched by a pure heart can wake her. Finally after hundreds of years, the chosen one came along (Link). Link must place 6 crystals in 6 palaces to break the spell on the Great palace where the Triforce of courage is enclosed. Once there, he takes the triforce, completes it with the other two pieces, and wakes zelda up. The End.

And Here is the story in MORE detail (unless you are in a hurry , I recommend you read it. The top summary is just for people who have no clue what the story is:

The king of hyrule always passes down the power of the triforce to his son next-to-be-king. This time however, he wants to give it to his daughter, Zelda, because he believes she is wiser and more considerate than the son. The son was very upset about it and has summoned a wizard to scare the princess and give up the triforce to him. The wizard however, overcome with hatred towards zelda, uses all his magic to put her to an eternal sleep, and he dies (only recently in the hyrule historia has the identity of the wizard been revealed: he is a follower of Ganon, or an embodiment of ganon himself (sort of like ghost ganon in oot or blight ganons in botw. So in this case he might have not died but just extinguished all his powers)). The son, overcome with grief for his sister, promises that every girl born into the Royal family henceforth will be named Zelda. He locks the triforce of courage far away, so only those worthy of it will be able to access it, and leaving the remaining two in the castle, unable to use its full power.

Hundreds of years have passed by and no worthy hero came by, until now. On his 16th birthday, Link noticed that a mark resembling the triforce glowed on his left hand. Worried and Confused, he goes to seek information on it from Impa. She tells him that he is the hero chosen to save the sleeping princess Zelda. She gave Link a scroll written in ancient text that only the true hero can read to ensure that he is in fact the chosen one. Link was able to read it despite never seeing that language before. The Great Palace where the triforce of courage lies is locked with a spell. The spell comes from 6 different temples, and he must break part of the spell at each temple so he can open the gates of the Palace. To do that, A crystal must be placed in each, and that is exactly what he does.

While Link is going on his journey, the minions of Ganon are going after him, trying to capture him and use his blood to revive Ganon (It’s unclear if they want him alive or dead, or simply his blood. All we know is they want to use Link’s blood in a sacrifice to bring Ganon back from the dead). If Link dies, Ganon will be revived, so he must remain alive. At the end of the trial to the triforce of courage, Link was made to fight his own shadow by the triforce keeper. After defeating his shadow, he made the triforce whole again, wished for the curse on Princess Zelda to break, and she woke. The End.

Now that is my extensive summary on the official story. Obviously I will fill in now MY theories on some points. My biggest point is Link fighting his shadow. Why did Link have to fight his shadow? Why was Link not ready to touch the triforce? He already went through ALL the trials, so why this now? My theory is that Link’s heart was not pure. Only a pure heart must touch the triforce. A corrupted heart will corrupt the world when the triforce is touched, no matter what the wish is. Link was most likely the chosen hero, but he is not completely pure. I believe Link was made to fight his shadow as a final step to touching the triforce; to cleanse his heart from any evils that are in it. Why would Link be evil and corrupt? I don’t know, but that’s hella dark. Another point, that can be connected to BoTW, is Link’s death, and the revival of Ganon. If you played AoL before, then you are familiar with the red screen of death and Ganon’s evil laughter. Well, if Link dies, that means Ganon will return. That means Link should NEVER die. But he is not a god or eternal deity. He will die at some point during his journey after the events of the game or simply from old age, or whatever. He will die. At this point, if the people of Hyrule really want Ganon to remain dead, then Link should simply disappear once he dies. If he were to be buried, they have to hide his body somewhere the monsters will NEVER reach. I have no idea where that could be: the dungeons of hyrule castle? Something similar to the Great Palace? Maybe. The better option is to burn him, but I don’t know if people in Hyrule do that (they probably should in this case because yikes Ganon)

Where am I going with this? I’m not sure, but It vaguely reminded me of Ganon(dorf) coming back to life in the new BoTW trailer. Who was he even? A new ganondorf? Or one we already know?

Lets go back… what about AoL Link’s death? Another option for keeping Link out of the hands of Ganon’s minions is for him to never die. To be absolutely safe, protected, and strong enough to protect himself, and to live eternally. And I know the people of hyrule (at some point) will have that technology available, because BoTW Link was revived after his death. Link can probably die countless of times and still continue to live because of that shiekah tech. Now about the tech, AoL seems too middle ages, right? WELL… this is going to sound dumb but the temples in AoL have elevator thingies in them. Shiekah technology? Maybe. It could be a manual pulley system. Or pure magic. We don’t know, but we are a step closer at least.

BASICALLY i see a lot of similar points between these two games and idk if nintendo accidentally did that or took inspiration from aol but its cool that these two games share the concept of the kind of tragedy hyrule will go through if link dies and the idea of Ganom coming back to life. Why am I even getting into BoTW… let’s get back to AoL lore! If you played AoL, you might be familiar with the Link dolls. Dolls that save Link from death (i.e extra lives) those dolls are pretty creepy and they look like a tiny hunched over limb Link. They are scattered throughout all of hyrule, and you find them in random weird places, like at the beach, in a swamp, inside a temple, in a cave, near a graveyard, forest, etc. They are everywhere. Who put these dolls there? No one knows. But someone is totally trying to save Link from dying on his journey. If he dies, Hyrule is screwed. Could it be Goddess Hylia? The fairies? A magician? Link Dolls are extremely strange and Nintendo could have gone more in depth on them because they provide some super cool dark lore.

Also we can’t forget about Kasuto Town. All the inhabitants of the town went to camp in the forest because their town was destroyed. Why? No one knows, again (everything in this game is shrouded in mystery). There is only a single man living there in old Kasuto. Kasuto town is entirely destroyed, all the buildings are decaying and crumbling, the air looks nasty and the sky is purple. There are ghosts EVERYWHERE. And if Link didn’t acquire the cross before entering, he will not see the ghosts at all and will just die from being hit by what looks like air. Now the civilians! The civilians are hiding in the forest! In-game, you will never be able to find them unless you hit a random block of grass with the hammer, and then it will appear. They are well hidden. Something must have destroyed their town, something terrifying, and they are hiding from it. The entire population has gone to hide in the depths of the forest. Now I have a theory that these people COULD be related to the shiekah. Those people are magic experts. You learn something called The Spell in old kasuto. And in new kasuto, you use this spell to raise a small temple from the GROUND to get the key in it (idk man but reminds me of the shrines) You also receive the final magic container there. So, yeah, those people definitely have a magic obsession or *super powers*. (i’m hinting at it but these people could be the shiekah). Also one more thing, these people are begging Link to save hyrule. They are the only people who are begging him to do something. They know HE will save hyrule. In all other towns, it only seems like Link is asking for advice and they answer Link is a random nobody. However, the people of Kasuto are AWARE. (shiekah much? idk)

This is not too lore-y but it’s about how dark this game is: there is so much red in it. Game over screen is red. The lining of the triforce on Link’s hand is red. The windows in the temples are stained red (blood?). The Tinsuit sprites have fresh blood dripping down their swords. Also, sleeping Zelda’s dress is red. I can’t brush that off. Whenever I think of AoL I think of the colour red. There is so much to say about AoL... But what I want to say is that this game is HELLA dark. I hope Nintendo uses its lore in future games, and adds references, because it can totally work if they try to. This game has a lot of lore material to work with. Nintnedo should consider expanding on it (and botw was inspired by loz1, it would only make sense if the sequel will mirror the original loz sequel too :3)

PLEASe share your ideas! I’d love to hear what you all think! There are many ideas to go around so share your thoughts! And one last thing, AoL is very difficult. If you want to try it, be prepared to see the colour red a lot, cry a lot, and rage quit a lot.

Thank you for reading my very long post! Enjoy your day <3 <3 <3

#spent 3 hours of precious exam studying to writing this #loz #legend of zelda #the legend of zelda #zeldaii #zelda2 #aol #adventure of Link #botw #breath of the wild #botw 2 #long post #text #essay much?#maybe #i had to let it out I'm sorry i love this game too much

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homosociallyyours · 4 years

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Hi Megan! Re: your ao3 related reblogs: hard agree with “don’t like, don’t read.” But sometimes it hits me that I literally don’t know what it’s like to be a minor on the Internet: I was 18 the first time I watched my friend log on to AOL. So I wonder how to balance my belief in the importance of intellectual freedom with the fact that kids now have information access that didn’t exist when I was young. I know parents have the main responsibility here, but? Do you have thoughts on this? 💜

HI!! I meant to respond to this when you sent it, but I didn’t wanna do it on my phone so. here we go now...

I absolutely get what you mean by this! I am an xennial, born in 1980. My family didn’t have internet til I was 18, and even when we did it was an AOL free trial from one of those CDs you’d get in the mail. I think we used someone’s old cast off computer. I had used one before turning 18, though-- I distinctly remember going into chat rooms when I was 16 and at a sleepover at a friend’s house. We knew we weren’t supposed to be there, but that did not stop us from trying to chat with people. Yike.

So-- I suppose that’s the thing. The youth will do what they do. And the best thing I feel we as adults can do is to tag everything appropriately and tell them that they really shouldn’t be there. In a perfect world, that would be backed up by parents who talk to their kid about difficult and questionable content and encourage them to ask questions and talk about the shit that upsets them.

I know it’s not a perfect world, of course. But it doesn’t change our responsibility to young people, which is not to keep them from challenging or mature/explicit material, but to be very clear about what they’re going to see and hopefully help them steer clear of stuff that is not for them.

I’m saying this knowing that my niece, who’s 16, is on ao3 and tumblr and is part of a couple of fandoms. We’ve talked a bit about it, and at one point early on I basically said-- “i hope you’re being careful about what you read on ao3 and checking tags, and if you ever feel upset about something you can come talk to me about it. and hopefully you’re not choosing to read stuff that feels too intense for you, but I trust you to make good choices.” Since then she’s told me a bit about the kind of fic she likes (fluff) and the stuff she avoids (a popular ship that has an age gap and het ships).

It’s sad to me that more people don’t have this. But I really do think that tagging is what makes the most difference. It gives young people the respect they deserve (your brain doesn’t stop developing till you’re 25!! but that doesn’t mean you can’t reason at all) and teaches them a fundamental truth about the world: it’s important for you to read/know the rules and signs around you, and to figure out how you want to deal with them (follow them, question them, push the button/don’t).

this is sooo rambly! I’m sorry! but hopefully it makes sense!

tl;dr: we have to give young people the tools to learn about the world and hope they do the best they can (but also recognize they won’t, always, and so hopefully we can be there for the young people we do already know to support them irl)

#i don't wanna tag this in any way that will attract the disco horse #so uhhh #yeah i'm sorry #but i do want it in my own tagging system #so #um #here are some random tags #to fill the space #i really liked this ask #i hate that i was so rambling tho #purity wank #halfahundredcats #answers

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randomslasher · 5 years

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How do you navigate being a minor on this site and setting proper boundaries?

I assume you’re asking me because you’re a minor, not because you think I am. Truthfully, the main advice I would give you is guard your personal information religiously. I’d say that to anyone, really, but especially if you’re a minor. Do not give out your real name (other than maybe a first name if you really want to, but I’d go with a nickname personally), your address, your phone number, your facebook, anything that could lead someone to finding out who you actually are IRL. It’s not worth the risk involved.

Otherwise, I can’t really tell you how to set your boundaries. I don’t know you, how old you are ( “minor” could mean anywhere from 13-17, and that’s only assuming you’re following tumblr’s age restrictions, so in theory you could be even younger. I’m not asking you to disclose your age, just saying I can’t give out blanket advice about managing yourself online with that big a potential age range, even if I DID feel qualified to do so, which I don’t). I don’t know anything about you, therefore I really am not in a position to tell you what you can and can’t handle.

What I will say is this: be cautious. If something feels wrong, err on the side of safety. Don’t let anyone manipulate you into telling them anything you don’t want to tell them, or into doing anything you don’t feel right about doing. If something feels off about a situation or a person, trust that instinct. If they’re a decent person, then they’d rather you be safe than put yourself in a potentially dangerous position. If they act offended that you don’t trust them, let that be a red flag. I will say as an adult that if a minor gave me any indication they didn’t feel comfortable interacting with me, I would advise them to unfollow and block me immediately, and I’d do the same for them, because I would so much rather they feel safe than that they take chances they don’t feel right about taking.

Basically though, like I said, I can’t make any calls for you, or really give you much advice, because I don’t know you or your boundaries--only you can find those. When I first ventured into the world of the internet as a teen it was still dial-up and AOL free trials, and none of us had any idea what we were doing. I found my own boundaries through trial and error, and not without some grief along the way. But no one’s experience is ever going to be the same.

All I can tell you is what I already have: be cautious, be careful, guard your PII, and start working to figure out those boundaries based on your own age, experience, maturity, and comfort levels.

(Oh,and as a side note: please, please heed warnings when consuming content. If you see something in a tag or a warning that you don’t think you can handle, then don’t read it. If you’re online without supervision, then you need to take responsibility for what you choose to consume. This isn’t saying you wouldn’t or anything, just a general piece of advice that I often see getting forgotten by a lot of people online these days :-/ )

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tracyk13 · 4 years

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36 and what a world I have seen

Honestly I’ve been terrible at journalling lately. Love handwriting in quill and ink style, but my current life leaves me exhausted after work and most of my time spent in education. But currently the Covid-19 pandemic made me consider the important world events I have witnessed.

Born in 1984 I lived in a world of rapidly changing technology but still being forced outside to play. We always had an Apple computer in our house for as long as I can remember. Played the Oregon Trail in black and white, then in color. That was the standard computer game of my childhood. Mom got us Mario Teaches Typing, probably the only “video game” I ever played at that point. AOL was a thing. All those CDs in the mail with updates. I never really got into it, but my twin sister did.

Also a child of the Disney Golden Age of animation. Dramatically influenced my life to the point I went to work for Walt Disney World after college. Still a Disney fanatic to this day.

Apparently my family visited Yellowstone National park (age 4? too young to remember anyway) then not too long after the park had the fire.

Was alive though not conscious of world events when the Berlin Wall fell. Watch the birth of CNN during the first Desert Storm when my dad was there overseeing some of the first drone flights. The military required a pilot on hand for those flights. He told us later how some Iraqis would surrender to the drone plane, not that it was ever one of the ones he supervised. And according to my mom I frequently asked to NOT watch the 24 hour stream of news because it was too depressing and I knew that’s where dad was.

Really started to pay attention to news (not that l enjoyed it but that’s the timeline for how chidden develop) during the O.J. Simpson trial.

By that point I had lived on both coasts of the USA, crossed country twice, lived in many different environments from Washington’s cold wet seasons to California’s deserts California’s coast to landlocked suburbia of Georgia.

Where I learned to drive, had a single Nokia phone for me and my twin in our tiny Cabrio convertible (I hate convertibles). Got a personal computer for the first time, where before it was a single family computer. The iMacs were coming out right when we were heading to college. My sister got the desktop, I got the laptop and have never looked back. Still have my gumstick shuffle iPod floating around and it still works.

Got to watch the insanity of Indecision 2000 and appreciate political humor for the first time.

I’ve been to 9 different schools for 12 years of school, not including college. That would make it ten. Was a freshman in high school when the Columbine shootings happened. Some weeks later we had a pipe bomb threat at our school which forced all the students out to the football field. From the top of the bleachers we could see the bomb squad and their dogs entering the school. All I could think of was if someone really wanted to kill at lot of people, there on the bleachers would be the place to do it. Then at some point in my adult life someone did it at a movie theater showing The Dark Knight.

Saw the images of the Oklahoma City bombing. Heard about the Unabomber. Watched the Waco Texas incident.

But my senior year was the time of 9/11. My math class was out in the hallway doing a math related science type experiment, can’t tell you what it was. But that day was the only day I have ever heard a school of nearly 5,000 students absolutely silent during class change. Thus Desert Storm part two happened.

Right before I headed off to college. So I wasn’t super savvy about applying to colleges. I only applied to one. Didn’t have a clue as to what I wanted to do with my life. I’ve done a wide variety of sports, been writing fiction since at least 10 years old, drew and painted fairly well, thought about doing animation or architecture (did a semester learning thing with a local firm, decided it wasn’t for me).

Ended up getting a degree in two foreign languages but not fluent in either. It did greatly improve my understanding of the English language. And I had the privilege of an exchange program for a school year to Japan, plus of study abroad summer to Germany. Would never regret any of that. Even if it didn’t get me a degree that got me a job.

Instead I went to Disney World as part of their internship program. Been in foods and hospitality for a significant portion of my life (thus far). Loved working there. Got to work with the Characters and it was fabulous. Even with the frustrations of all work environments.

But it couldn’t last. Minimum wage was raised, but the cost of living out stripped the earnings for a single person living alone. Prompting a move back home with parents to get another degree. Then the Housing bubble burst, loans defaulted, mortgage crisis, resulting in the Great Recession. It did get me a house in my name but basically an income property for my mom as her inheritance from my grandmother. All the while I’m going to school to be a nurse.

Now let’s not forget about the many weather crises I’ve witnessed via the news. Hurricanes Katrina, Sandy, Harvey, Maria to name the ones I easily remember. The Class 5 tornado that wiped out a midwestern town. The volcano in Iceland rerouting planes. The tsunami in Indonesia and Sumatra. The massive earthquake in Haiti. These are only the ones that easily come to mind without researching what happened during the years I’ve been alive.

Not to mention the diseases that I’ve seen via the news. First to mind was the Ebola outbreak while I was in nursing school. Saw the hype on the Swine Flue, SARS, Avian flu to name a few easily remembered. Those never reached me personally. Now it’s Covid-19 unfolding. Called SARS-CoV-19 now, but that later.

But its not all disasters. Went to the Atlanta Centennial Olympics still have the t-shirt. Was alive during the first black president.

Took part in the massive phenomena that was Harry Potter and still love it to this day. It showed me that fiction/fantasy could be a mainstream genre to write for. I started writing FanFiction at that time to fill in the long spaces between books. Started when fan fiction.net had the 7or 8 main characters to choose from for tagging. It was like the Wild West of figuring out what you were about to read. Learned about Slash, yaoi, lemons and such the hard way. But being exposed to it that way did open my eyes to what goes on in other people’s heads. Knew immediately that just because I didn’t like something didn't mean I had to hate on it. I left it alone once found and kept going. Really helped increase my tolerance to other cultures and thoughts.

Met my best friend on a role playing site and we wrote nonstop during our college years. Went to her wedding, have a lovely Renaissance style dress as a bridesmaid gift. Still am in touch with her. We don’t write together any more as we have moved in our lives with adulting. But I still have all those stories and hope to turn them into something.

Had my first camera cell phone in Japan as just a basic free phone. Was shocked to find cameras in the States were not standard. One of my friends in Japan kept doing selfies before they were called selfies. Blind positioning of the camera for pictures. Then came the iPhone and the world never looked back.

Joined Facebook when it required a college email. Used MSN messenger and Yahoo messenger to communicate with people around the world. Didn’t join the Twitter or Tumblr movement until after they became established. Saw the boom and bust of the Dot.Com bubble. Watched the Dow Jones numbers increase without the income to invest the way they said to.

Lived right above the poverty line during the Recession. Not knowing if I could make it the next month. Never being able to claim poverty on the tax forms. Caught in the income dead space of not being able to afford health insurance from the markets but in a state that didn’t allow for Medicaid expansion.

But I do not have the worry now thankfully.

Jobs wise I’ve been a telemarketer, dishwasher, a line cook, a hostess, server, janitor, assistant manager, and now I’m a nurse. I started on med/surg, ED, Cardiac, and ICU. In a small rural hospital getting smaller in a time when rural were shutting down because of no funding. They serve areas with a high rates of unemployment, uninsured, drug and alcohol abuse.

Worked at a busier hospital were no bed was left empty. Sicker patients. Work in a mid-size place. Some days super busy, some slower.

Covid-19 had the affect of somehow doing both. First few days was almost empty, now it fluctuates. Mostly rule outs. And the protocols are changing hourly which makes life frustrating for us. It’s the constant unspoken threat of going into work not knowing if you’ll have the right equipment to do the job. I’m not scared of the virus itself, not even of the collapse of the economy. I’m scared of the surge that will put my coworkers at risk.

I live alone (my little sister lives with me now) so very little contact with others. But they have kids and a much closer physical distance to their older parents. I know I will add days to my weeks if they have to stay out for any length of time.

So this is the first time a world event as truly affected me. It is a terrifying time which prompted this summary of my life so far.

I went into a restaurant and saw no one. I never thought I’d see that day. I don’t want people to loose their income, but if people were to go about their daily activities we would loose so many in one go. All I can do is my job.

The more I watch the more depressed and stressed. At work is worse.

I’m teaching myself a new craft because of this. I have taken up leather working to make masks. It helps the creativity outlet. I started drawing class early in 2020 and was set to continue drawing and add painting when the social distancing started. I admit it felt overblown in the beginning. Now the numbers are changing rapidly and we are really seeing what happens in close communities. Just keep working. It’s part of life now. No matter how much if feels like a movie plot line.

But back to other things I’ve seen.

LGTBQA and others coming into the forefront of society. Saw legalization of gay marriage. Quite thrilled with that.

Didn’t hear the term Asexual in reference to a sexual preference until my early 20s. Immediately recognized similar stories to me. Never had an interest in sex or having a partner. A name did make things more relatable, but I will never fully understand people who seem to base their entire existence on their sexual preference.

I’ve been call sir many times based on how I dress. I still sound like a female. Can’t fault anyone for using the appropriate pronoun for what they see in front of them. But that’s a culture that’s growing. Preferred pronouns. But I have to admit that an online friend referred to me as “they” despite a lady being in my username and it felt nice. So in honor of the Special Snowflake term that floated around, I’m an nonbinary aromantic asexual. Probably with a fem-romanitic leaning.

Saw the rise of the Millennials. I’m caught between Gen X and the Millennials. Now that all the Millennials are of age to vote, perhaps change is underway?

I’m back in college for my 3rd and then 4th degree. In nursing. Online. Watching the world combat a virus.

A US that is split down the middle politically. A world with more pollution problems than we can handle. Governments preferring to coverup mistakes and corruption than help their citizens. The term Public Servant is obviously not taken seriously in some places. See Flint, MI and their water. Lobbyists creating bills that benefit corporations rather than people. Politicians that never retire and keep getting lucrative reelection donations from those very corporations.

The rise of narcotic drug use, prescription drugs. Pill mills.

Sex scandals taking center stage in the news rather than things that actually affect daily life. Among things I will never understand is the fear of Transgender women in the women’s restrooms when it was always a straight conservative man who was the center of all these sex scandals.

Asexual brain at work. I simply do not understand. Conclusion: If you look like a certain gender, you’ll most often be treated as that gender.

What I do miss were the kid shows and cartoons in the 90s. They were super progressive with great literature themes. I knew the story of some of the greatest classic literature simply by the references in those shows.

Also the era of War on Drug commercials. Recycling promoted.

My favorite: Captain Planet. Not only was it pushing for a cleaner earth it had different nationalities. Stereotypical, but a far better representation than what I am seeing in kids shows today. It was diverse in that multiple skin tones were seen on screen together rather than specific skin tones marketed to that specific demographic. Now I do like how many more cultures are represented, I just want them shown in ways where color and culture is not the primary focus.

It also surged a desire to protect the planet. The knowledge that we need clean water and air. Educational shows like Magic School Bus and Bill Nye explained what is happening in the environment long before Global Warming became political. With the global shut in we see the world cleansing itself.

Now the marijuana legalization issue. No one has died from overdosing on weed. Unlike Alcohol. Yes smoke isn’t good for your health like cigarettes, but the complications are not as prevalent, well studied, or as life threatening with what is known. The disconnect of state legalization and national illegalities is mind blowing. I hope to see that break so we can study it.

Overall I know I have seen a lot of historical events and I hope to live another 36 plus years to see more. 3 decades, the change of a century and the change of the millennia. Y2K hysteria included.

The world is changing. The outcome is unknown. Peace be upon us all.

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savegraduation · 5 years

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“But being a minor is only temporary!”

On the old Fourth Turning forum one day, a teacher who called herself TeacherOfMillies ("Millie" being a diminutive of "Millennial" popular on the board) started a thread in which she wrote about telling her son that he needs to "respect adults". Adina, a Millennial on the board, accused her of ageism. TeacherofMillies' response was:

Adina: Recognizing that minors have different capacities from adults and therefore do not deserve the same rights cannot be put in the same category as racism or sexism. A minority group is a group (such as sex, race or religion) whose membership is normally permanent. People who are born black stay black for life. Adolescence is not permanent. There is no discrimination here.

Then there was the old Pagan message board at AOL, where Brocéliande, a Joneser Wiccan with a 12-year-old son, told me that teens were not a minority group, because a minority group was by definition permanent, with the implied reasoning that discrimination on the basis of age was therefore acceptable.

It happens again and again when youth rights is brought up. Someone will bring up the -isms: sexism, racism, classism, ableism, and by extension, ageism. Someone will then bring up Murray and Herrnstein's The Bell Curve or other ostensibly scientific claims that some demographic groups are statistically more likely than others to be wise or have a higher IQ. Someone might say, "Statistics show that Asians are, on the average, worse drivers", or "Simon Baron-Cohen showed that men are better than women at systemizing tasks and women are better than men at empathizing tasks", or even, turning the tables, "Statistically, women are less likely than men to start wars; does this mean we should deny all men the right to positions of world leaders, even the gentler men, so the world will be safe from the risk of blowing ourselves up?" And then she or he will ask, "If it's not right to deny freedoms to deserving ethnic minorities, or deserving women, or deserving men, just because a large number of other people in their demographic aren't qualified -- it would be discrimination -- why is it OK to deny a mature 17-year-old the right to vote or drink just because some other people her/his age are immature?" And then some defender of the anti-YR position will fumble to defend it by arguing, "Being a minor is only temporary, so age is different from race, gender, or religion!"

Before I go any further into rebutting this argument, let's play this on an honest ground with our terms here. I prefer the term "demographic group" to "minority group". A group does not have to be a minority group to be discriminated against. Males are not a minority group, and the draft discriminates against males. Blacks are not a minority group in South Africa, where only 10% of the population is White, and apartheid discriminated against the Black majority. But males and Black South Africans are demographic groups, and prejudicial treatment against them is discrimination. Discrimination simply means treating someone wrongly differently because of her or his demographic group. And no one can argue with the fact that teens are a demographic group (as are seniors, for what it's worth!) When you say "minority group", you're really saying "demographic group that has traditionally been at a social disadvantage in the society/civilization in question" (in this case, the United States, or the West). So it's not "minority group", but "demographic group" that's the relevant concept here.

The first problem with this argument is that the impermanence of being a minor ("An American who was born Black could never wake up one day and be White all of a sudden!"), while making this different from other forms of discrimination, is not really relevant to the issue of whether discrimination is justified. One can pull up interesting differences when comparing two things, but just because those differences exist, it does not necessarily follow that said differences are relevant to right and wrong. For example, one might argue that in England, committing murder with a knife is different from committing murder with a gun because knives are legal to own in England, just not to use for murder, whereas guns are outright illegal to so much as possess. While this as a fact in and of itself is true, is this difference in any way germane to whether an Englishman killing someone with a knife is morally acceptable, or whether it should be legal to murder someone with a knife in England? Exactly how does the temporariness of membership in a group make discrimination defensible? I don't think that if that person became White one day and was finally allowed to vote because of it in the pre-1860's world, he or she would forgive and forget all the needless discrimination in the past!

Secondly, being mistreated during one's teen-age years will stay with a person for life. Your world does not become a clean slate again once you reach the legal age to do something; rather, the pain of discrimination from the past carries on.

A butterfly that flaps its wings when you are 13 will still have the ripple effect going when you are 40. For example, if 15-year-old Rachel's parents restrict her from taking the courses that competitive colleges like by refusing to sign her course selection form until it is whittled down to the dumbed-down classes that satisfy their anti-intellectualism, Rachel will have a very hard time getting into the colleges she wants by the time she's applying for colleges her senior year. As an adult, her opportunities will be limited against her will because of the choices her parents made for her against her will as a teen-ager.

In 2016, a 16-year-old boy named Gary Ruot was diagnosed with Leber hereditary optic neuropathy (LHON), an ocular disease that causes rapid degeneration and ultimately leads to blindness. The only hope for Ruot was a treatment called gene therapy, for which GenSight Biologics was running a trial for the treatment of LHON. However, the FDA had only approved the gene therapy LHON trial for patients over 18. By the time Ruot would turn 18, it would be too late, and he would be blind. Ruot's relative, Avery Wilson, posted a petition on Change.org, demanding the FDA lower the age for this trial to 16. Less than three months later, the FDA did the right thing and lowered the age for the trial, and Gary Ruot was saved. But what if the FDA had not reduced the age to 16? By the time Ruot was 18, he would be blind, and it would be too late for the gene therapy to save him. He could turn 21, 25, 30, 50, 75, and 100, and he would still be blind.

And what if your parents take you to get a circumcision before you are old enough to legally say no to an operation? Your foreskin isn't going to magically grow back once you reach the age of medical consent (which, in the U.S. varies depending on your jurisdiction, from 15 in Oregon to 19 in Alabama). Judging by the arguments ageists use against 12-year-old boys being allowed to say no to circumcision, you’d think they were convinced a boy’s foreskin will magically regenerate on his eighteenth birthday! Similarly, we're now hearing news stories about teens who live in states where under18s may not get vaccinated without their parents' permission researching vaccination on the Internet and often driving (or, if under 16, being driven by a friend) into states where minors do not need parental permission to be vaccinated. If some teen's Christian Scientist parents say no to a vaccination, and then s/he is exposed to the bacterium Bordetella pertussis or the rubella virus at 16, and catches pertussis or rubella, the teen will most likely die before her/his eighteenth birthday of a preventable disease -- are you seriously then going to defend this with the "But being a minor is only temporary!" argument?

The emotional enscarment that comes from being hurt by age-discriminatory laws will also last for the rest of one's life. If someone goes through a gulag school where he is subject to waterboarding, electroshock therapy, straitjacketing, and sensory deprivation, he may eventually be out of it as an adult, but by then the damage will be done. He will suffer the trauma for the rest of his life. Survivors of conversion therapy may be past conversion therapy, but by now they're 8.9 times as likely as their peers to consider suicide. Since I was 6, I suffered from a mental disorder called logaesthesia, where I taste words and have the sensations of swallowing them. The words I don't like I have to "purge" out by scraping my nails against my groin and then "vomiting" them up by carrying my nails over my abdomen, chest and throat. All the "socialization" I received in high school, all the being forced to do things, all the fascist comments that my behavior was "inappropriate" or "socially unacceptable", haunt me to this very day. I'm 39 now. Every day I still think back weekly to run-ins with authoritarian teachers that happened during my school years over both logaesthesia and other conflicts that came up. I have flashbacks, I bite myself, I slam my fist against my head, and punch my abdomen as if slicing open a watermelon, I yell. If I had only been given the chance to stop going to school, to live away from my parents, to move to Berkeley, I may have been able to get away from it before too much damage was done.

People who have been arrested under status laws may feel the effects of the arrest for the rest of their lives. Many employers would not hire a 30-year-old if they dug in his records and found he had been arrested for underage drinking at age 19. In California, where Proposition 21 eliminated the automatic sealment of one's juvenile record upon reaching 18, a conviction for breaking a city's curfew law at age 15 could put off potential employers. And the social stigma will attach to the arrested ex-minor from many people who know, firsthand or secondhand, about the arrest.

And what if you die during your teens? Then your adolescence will indeed become permanent. If you die before age 18, you will never have the chance to vote for or against a president. If you abided by the law stating no one is to drink alcohol until his or her twenty-first birthday, then you got drafted and went to war rather than dodging the draft, and got killed in war at the age of 20, you would die without ever having the chance to try alcohol. You think a belated "sorry" is going to make that OK?

The choices adults make for minors may even last beyond their terrene life and carry beyond the grave. For example, a recently deceased 17-year-old may have his organs harvested for donation against his consent. Or imagine that Blebdahism is the one true religion, that God is a Blebdahist and believes anyone who betrays Blebdahism is sentenced to Hell. But one young person who believes in Blebdahism deep down in his heart may have parents who are Sporgalists. In the United States, the parents may, by law, force their child to practice Sporgalism even though it is wrong, which would thereby condemn not only the parents, but also their child, to Hell for refusing to practice the rituals of Blebdahism. Since no one knows God's exact sentiments, one could not promise children that God would understand if they betrayed their religion only because they were forced; it could very well be that God thinks conforming to parental force is no excuse for not following Blebdahism, even for part of one's life, and still refuses to let those youth into Heaven, regardless. Of course, it may very well be that God understands people who betray their religion because of coercion by authority, that several religious paths lead to "Heaven", or even that Heaven does not really exist . . . but what if those aren't the case? Or suppose, arguendo, that God does let people into Heaven who practiced Sporgalism as minors but converted to Blebdahism as adults, but not people who were still practicing Sporgalism when they died. What if the child of Sporgalist parents who wants to practice Blebdahism gets hit by a truck at age 15? She'll never get another chance at practicing Blebdahism, and will be stuck spending an eternity in Hell. And the Blebdahist child of Sporgalist parents will probably be buried, in accordance with her parents' wishes, in a Sporgalist cemetery, where her body will lie forever . . . and ever . . . and ever.

Thirdly, lost time is never found again. Everyone only has a finite time to live -- at least until human life extension technology is invented, and we don't know how soon that will be. If the first 18 years of a 90-year life are spent in chains, that's one whole fifth of your life -- lost forever. Say a girl named Danielle wants to wear dreadlocks starting at the time she begins high school in September of 2016, at the age of 14 years and 6 months, but her school clamps down and forbids her to wear dreadlocks because they are against the dress code. Danielle graduates in June of 2020 at the age of 18 years and 3 months. She is then free to wear dreadlocks, until she dies the day after her eightieth birthday. She got 61 years and 9 months to wear her dreadlocks, but if her high school hadn't disallowed them it would have been 65 years and 6 months of her life. God is not going to magically add 3 years and 9 months to her life, allowing her to live to 83.75, to make up for the years she could have spent dreadlocked but was wrongly denied the right to.

An election only comes once. A person born in 1980 would not get to vote until 1998, and the thousands of decisions voted on in 1996 and 1997 did not have that person's say. He may get to vote on 1998 propositions or in the 2000, 2004, 2008, 2012, 2016, and 2020 elections, but it is already too late for him to vote in the Clinton-Dole election of 1996, which is lost forever in the annals of history. For any of the bad decisions of voters leading up to the current day, there’s a possibility it could have been avoided being passed had more young people, those who were 16 and 17, been allowed to vote.

Fourthly, ethnicity is the platonic prototype of a demographic variable and racism of discrimination, and every other demographic variable about humans has something about it that makes it different from race and unique from other demographic variables.

Take gender and sexism, for instance. Gender is a universally recognized trait; the gender someone is assigned at birth would be the same across the world in more than 99% of cases. Someone's race may be labeled as Mulatto or Mestizo or Black in Cuba but Hispanic in the United States. In one society, having sex with another person of your gender automatically makes you gay, whereas in another society, it is viewed as natural to experiment even if you are straight, and a third society may have no concept of "sexual orientation” whatsoever. The legal ages for things differ from country to country. Someone with epilepsy is viewed as disabled in modern countries but as having special, supernatural powers in the Hmong culture, and what is seen as ADD in the context on one culture is "normal" in a traditional nomadic culture. But everywhere around the world, someone with a penis and testicles is assigned male at birth and someone with a vagina and ovaries is assigned female at birth. (Defining someone by their karyotype -- XX vs. XY vs. various trisomies and polysomies like Klinefelter's syndrome -- is a twentieth and twenty-first century development, and even then, fewer than 1% of births are ambiguous or "intersex" when external genitalia, gonads, and chromosomes are taken into account.) Some people turn out trans, and there are some special gender categories, such as the berdaches/Two-spirit people in Native American cultures or the Thai kathoey, or ladyboys, in some cultures, but even then the person's biological sex is still acknowledged. Even in the relatively trans-friendly United States, the Selective Service system still has laws on the books requiring transfemales to register but denying transmales registry, because gender assigned at birth is so hardwired into the law. In 2002, in the case of In re Estate of Gardiner, the Kansas Supreme Court ruled that a man and a transwoman could not marry, because the transwoman was male before the law and Kansas did not recognize same-sex marriages at the time.

Religion and religious discrimination are unique because unlike other demographic variables, people choose their religion. No one chooses to be male, or Chinese, or gay, or 23 years old, or disabled (unless they deliberately stab their eyes out or jump off a height to make themselves paraplegic). But people have control over what religion they practice, and this makes religion different.

Sexual orientation and homophobia are different because sexual orientation revolves around certain behaviors, and behaviors that certain factions and individuals believe are immoral at that. No one gets arrested for the mere condition of being African-American, or female, or teen-age. No one believes that blind people will burn in Hell. But many nations still have sodomy laws on the books making gay sex illegal (this included several U.S. states as late as 2003). Many churches teach that LGBT people will burn in Hell after they die. There are no controversial behaviors that are defining of Blackness, or defining of womanhood, or defining of adolescence. But sexual orientation is about what someone does just as much as what she or he is.

Disability and ableism are different because a disability can render someone by definition unable to do something. An example would be paraplegics being unable to do work that requires you to walk on feet. Men are generally stronger than women, but there are amazonian women and plenty of weak men. Stating that 20-year-olds are too immature to drink but 21-year-olds are mature enough to drink is a loose generalization. Some psychologists, most notably the White Charles Murray and the Jewish Richard J. Herrnstein, in The Bell Curve, make claims that average IQ of African-Americans is lower than that of Whites, which is in turn lower than the average IQ of Asians. There are disputes as to whether these statistics come from culturally biased IQ tests written by upper-middle-class White males, and many people believe there is no difference in intelligence among ethnic groups at all. Others believe that different ethnic groups and different genders have different tendencies towards strengths and weaknesses, such as Dr. Simon Baron-Cohen's theory of female empathizing and male systemizing. Whether the Bell Curve statistics are legitimate or not, though, no one can deny you find bright people and dim people -- even a few autistic savants with extremely lopsided abilities -- in all racial/ethnic groups. But blind people driving? This form of discrimination based on disability is recognized as "bona fide discrimination", and actually is legal in certain cases in many jurisdictions across the world. On the other hand, forbidding an epileptic to become a lawyer or refusing to let someone with cerebral palsy into your cake shop would most certainly not be bona fide discrimination, and pointing out this way disability is different from other demographic variables would not be an acceptable argument.

Socioeconomic class and classism are different because class is mutable (yes, possibly temporary!) in some societies but not in others. If you live in present-day Nashville or Los Angeles, you can rise to the top echelons just by being a great singer or actor. If you lived in Edwardian England, on the other hand, being a prole pretty much meant you were stuck being a prole, all your lower-class ways and mannerisms hard-wired into your identity. Rising in social class was very difficult.

Every rights movement has its own hurdles to overcome, and people who shout, "But this is different!" cause every rights movement to have to start at square one. A good example is Martin Luther King's niece, Alveda King, who fights against the gay rights movement and argues that homosexuality flies in the face of "family values" and therefore cannot be compared to the Civil Rights movement. Youth rights, like women's rights, LGBT rights, disability rights, and civil rights for ethnic and religious minorities, are human rights, and human rights supporters today don't say that being free from anti-Islamic discrimination isn't a human right because people choose their religion, or that being free from sexism isn't a human right because sex is a biological reality instead of just a social construct.

Finally, the transience of temporary pain or damage has never excused hurting people. As someone on the forum for National Youth Rights Association (NYRA) once wrote about people you argue that discrimination against teens is acceptable because minority is temporary: "Someone should give them a hard punch in the face. After all, it will only hurt for a little while". Damage can be temporary (even though damage caused by ageism is NOT always temporary), such as the 7-year-old who gives his baby sister a bad haircut, knowing it will grow back. But, as Martin Luther King famously stated in 1963 in his Letter from Birmingham Jail, "Justice too long delayed is justice denied". Perhaps no infliction of suffering should be illegal because life itself is only temporary, and therefore all of a person's suffering will one day come to an end?

"But!", you say, "What about the definition? You can't deny that a minority group is a permanent group, like female, or Chinese, or lower-class, or Hindu, and therefore teens are not a minority group!"

Putting aside the "minority group" vs. "demographic group" issue, the problem is this: what you've got here is an ad hoc definition. It's what logicians call the definist fallacy. Let's look at the definition of "minority" (definition 3a) in Merriam Webster's Webster's Unabridged: "A part of a population differing from others in some characteristics and often subjected to differential treatment". No mention of the membership in that group being permanent. Next, Wiktionary defines "minority group" as: "A group that forms only a small part of the population, whether it be for ethnic or other reasons". Still no mention of being permanent. Finally, for something different, let's look at the Collins COBUILD dictionary's definition (definition 2): "A minority is a group of people of the same race, culture, or religion who live in a place where most of the people around them are of a different race, culture, or religion". This excludes age, but this definition is so narrow that it also excludes such undisputed minorities as lesbians, transgender people, and the blind! Does that mean the U.S. government should feel free to round up gay people or people with bipolar disorder, since they're not protected by the definition of "minority group"?

As a matter of fact, some published, professional authors have referred to youth as a minority group. In 1971, Edward Sagarin edited a book titled The Other Minorities, which consisted of essays concerning the minority status of non-ethnic minorities: there are essays on women, gays, teens, the elderly, the disabled, criminals, and even intellectuals as minority groups. From pages 95 to 107 is Edgar Z. Friedenberg's essay "The Image of the Adolescent Minority". In it, Friedenberg writes: "In the most formal sense, then, the adolescent is one of our second-class citizens. But the informal aspects of minority status are also imputed to him. The 'teen-ager', like the Latin or Negro, is seen as joyous, playful, lazy, and irresponsible, with brutality lurking just below the surface and ready to break out into violence. All these groups are seen as childish and excitable, imprudent and improvident, sexually aggressive, and dangerous, but possessed of superb and sustained power to satisfy sexual demands. West Side Story is not much like Romeo and Juliet, but it is a great deal like Porgy and Bess." Friedenberg recognizes how facile stereotypes of teen-agers are about as respectful as the old "minstrel show" stereotype of African-Americans.

"But!", you object, "I'm just saying teens aren't a minority group!" Then if the question of whether teens are a minority group isn’t relevant to whether anti-youth discrimination is acceptable (and it isn't, given all the other problems with the "temporariness" argument), then why are you even bringing it up?

Teens are a (very often) oppressed demographic group. Discrimination against teens is still discrimination. The fact that unless you die before your twenty-first birthday you will not be underage forever does not justify your parents dictating what high school courses you will take, or you being denied the rights to medical consent, or you getting arrested for breaking curfew or underage drinking, or you being denied the vote at 16. So please don't use this argument.

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elizbethfitzgibb-blog · 5 years

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Be Half Of MP3, Merge MP3, Combine MP3

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Direct MP3 Joiner is a straightforward and fast audio instrument to combine MP3s , in addition to merge or join MP3 files. With Direct MP3 Joiner, you possibly can be a part of a number of music MP3 information into a larger MP3 file in a break up second. You may merge, combine and be part of MP3 audio recordsdata with blazing pace, with out recompressing and with out high quality loss. Our MP3 Joiner works with audio information straight and the joined MP3 song will be prepared almost immediately. With our MP3 Merger, you'll be able to be a part of your separate audiobook chapters into one huge audiobook or combine multiple music tracks into one non-cease audio CD.On the online discussion board for MakeItOne it was discovered this system is intended for streams between ninety six and 320 kbps. This was fairly a shock as a result of 100s of mp3s have been previously joined at 64 kbps and at 32 kbps, all with 100% success. Sign up for a free version or free trial to see how a service works. It is easiest to start out on a pc. Seek for artists you like, and save songs and albums in your music library. Playback is simple. The "buttons" look like those on a CD player or iPod — play, skip forward, skip back, repeat and shuffle. After that, download the service's app to your telephone; log in, and all the music you saved will present up there, too.

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jdujorja3128-blog · 5 years

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Musical.ly Merges With New Video App TikTok, Creating Single Global Platform

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After that, enter and join songs you ripped with Free Merge MP3. In order so as to add the second file to the first monitor click the black arrow below the Open button on the Residence tab and select the Open and Append chance inside the emerged drop-down menu. The opposite good factor when you merge mp3 files is that transferring it to completely different transportable system and devices is now less complicated and additional handy, examine to transferring particular person observe that may take a while to perform. You may as well get really specific with these playlists. Just choose a setting from the drop-down menu, set the parameters, after which click on the "+" button to add more. You can add as many as you need, and the top result's an extremely specific playlist only for you. For instance, as you can see within the image above we have made a playlist with the necessities: "Songs similar to Jeff Buckley about 96 BPM, wish a tragic mood, a really low danceability, in C minor, and with very low vitality. AOL was one of many early pioneers of the Web in the mid-Nineties, and the most recognized brand on the net within the United States. It initially supplied a dial-up service to millions of Individuals, as well as providing a web portal , e-mail , instant messaging and later a web browser following its purchase of Netscape In 2001, on the peak of its reputation, it bought the media conglomerate Time Warner within the largest merger in U.S. historical past. AOL quickly declined thereafter, partly because of the decline of dial-up and rise of broadband 3 AOL was eventually spun off from Time Warner in 2009, with Tim Armstrong appointed the brand new CEO. Beneath his management, the corporate invested in media manufacturers and promoting applied sciences. All the strategies above will certainly profit you in accordance to your need. The first free audio joiner is very recommended for it is simple and effective, and has no limits. It is special acceptable for many who don't like to put in extra packages. Freemake Audio Converter will appeal to the customers with its intuitive interface and a variety of supported codecs. For Mac clients, Fission possibly a reliable alternative for it may presumably merge MP3s on any Mac operating programs with ease.

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cmhoughton · 6 years

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This interview by Karen (the Site Admin for Diana’s pages on the LitForum and previous CompuServe forum) is split up into two pages. It’s been ten years since she started her blog, so this interview celebrates that. However, since the pages took FOREVER to load I will spare everyone the frustration and post them both here.

However, since this is long, I will put it behind a cut:

In celebration of the 10th anniversary of Outlandish Observations, I'm very pleased to bring you my first-ever interview with Diana Gabaldon! Frankly, the idea of interviewing Diana Gabaldon was a little nervewracking for me at first, even though I've known her online since 2007 and we interact almost daily on TheLitForum.com (formerly the Compuserve Books and Writers Community). I've never interviewed anyone before, and it took me a while to decide what questions to ask. I did my best to come up with questions that are somewhat different from the usual things people always ask her. I'm just DELIGHTED with her answers, and I hope you'll enjoy them as much as I did! (The photo above is from my first meeting with Diana, at a book-signing in Maryland in 2009.) You've published a number of novellas and shorter pieces in the last few years. What do you see as the advantages of the shorter format, for you as a writer? They're shorter. <g> I.e., I can finish one in much less time than the four to five years it takes for one of the Big Books. Basically, it's a bit of a mental vacation to deal with something that's very interesting, but on a smaller scale--and offers a quicker gratification in completing it. The novellas offer me the opportunity to go explore the byways of minor characters and interesting storylines that lie outside either the temporal or the logistical reach of the Big Books. Do you still write in "pieces" when you're working on a novella or short story, or is it more of a straight-line process? I always write in disconnected pieces, no matter what I’m writing; that’s just how my mind works. (I had one interviewer recently pause for a long moment after I’d answered one of her questions--obviously thumbing down her list--and then say, “I had a lot more questions, but you seem to have answered most of them already, while you were answering the one I asked you.” I apologized <g>, and explained that I inherited my digressive story-telling from my father--he’d begin (usually at the dinner table) with a recollection of someone from his past, and would start telling you a story about them--but every second paragraph or so, something he’d said would start a digression that added social context or personal opinion or associated history or data on location, and then without missing a beat, the story would swerve back onto its main track--until the next digression a minute later.) As I always tell people, “There’s a reason why I write long books; it’s because I like digression.” You've made very effective use of Twitter and Facebook in recent years, and many fans are addicted to your #DailyLines. How has the rise of social media affected the way you interact with your readers and fans? With your busy schedule, where do you find the time? Well, social media has sort of grown up around me. Back in 1985, I first went “online” (a concept that really didn’t exist in the popular consciousness yet) when I got an assignment to write a software review for BYTE magazine, and they sent with the software a disk for a trial membership with CompuServe (aside from government services like DARPA, “online” in the mid-80’s basically consisted of three “information services”: Delphi, Genie and CompuServe), so I could poke into the support forum the software vendors had set up there, and mention it in my review. After writing the review, I had a few hours of free connect time left (in a time when you were charged $30 an hour for using CompuServe—at 300 baud, dial-up), and so I started poking around to see what else was available. I stumbled into the CompuServe Literary Forum. This was not (as people sometimes assume) a writer’s group. It was a group of people who liked books. There were a few writers there, of course, both established and aspiring, but the main focus was simply on books: reading, impact, thinking in response to reading--and it was also just a fertile ground in which enormous, digressive and fascinating conversations could flourish (there was one truly remarkable conversation that became known as “the Great Dildo Thread,” that went on for months…). Anyway, that was where social media (which didn’t exist as a concept yet, though plainly it existed in fact) and I met. The next step was my website, established in 1994 (I think I was the first author to build a website for readers--and my eternal thanks to Rosana Madrid Gatti, who generously did the hard work of making and running the site; I sent her material and she’d post it for me (this was a looong time before WordPress and other blogging software made it possible for anybody to communicate directly with the world online). I did the website mostly in response to reader’s enthusiasm; I got a LOT of mail (regular letters) about the books, from people being complimentary, asking questions, taking issue with various aspects--but all of them wanted to know more: why did Claire do this, where did I find out about botanical medicine, did people really do that…and most particularly--when was the next book coming out. So the website was a means of answering reader questions--both for the readers who had asked those questions, and for the entertainment of other readers who perhaps hadn’t thought of those questions, but would be interested in the answers. The benefit of only having to type an answer once (many people naturally ask the same questions) was obvious--as was the benefit of being able to inform people of pub dates, book-signings, etc. So, knowing the benefits of such a channel, when other channels became available--AOL, for instance--I’d use them, at least briefly, and see whether they seemed helpful. Some were, some weren’t--I never bothered with MySpace, and in fact, it took some time for me to try Facebook (which I still use sparingly; I never go anywhere on Facebook other than my own page, and it’s what they call a “celebrity” page, which means that I don’t take “friend” requests. Nor, I’m afraid, can I read the private messages that people kindly leave me there--at the moment, the page has more than 700,000 members (or whatever you call regular visitors), and if only one percent of them send me messages…that’s 7,000 messages. There’s no way I can even read that many messages, let alone respond to them. Twitter also proved to be very useful; it provides instant access to a lot of people--and more valuable than that, it provides organic replication. If you post something interesting, many, many more people will see it, beyond the people who actually follow you. And it’s very good for making short-term announcements or asking urgent questions, because somewhere in the world, the person who can answer that question is awake and reading Twitter. <g> What's the most challenging, or frustrating, or difficult part of your role as consultant on the TV series? (I understand there are things you can't talk about, but can you comment on this in general?) Well, frustrations are of two types: 1) when a scriptwriter has done something that I think is not consistent with a character’s…er, character, and I can’t get them (“them” meaning not just the scriptwriter, but the production team in general) to change it, and 2) when they’ve shot something absolutely beautiful, in terms of acting, honesty, emotion, etc.--and then cut it out of the finished episode. What's the most fun part? The fun lies in seeing something remarkable evolve from a huge number of component parts, day by day by day. It’s like watching a forest grow in stop-motion time that speeds everything up. Would you be interested in writing another script for the TV show, after BEES is done? Yes, I would. It was a deeply interesting (if occasionally frustrating) experience. Script-writing is a very collaborative process, in which the script writer ultimately does not have complete control over the final product, which may have been rewritten several times by different people. That’s a very different experience from being a solitary god, as novelists are. <g> But it’s a fascinating experience, both in the consultation and writing (and revision and revision and revision…) and in the eventual final result: the filming. Filming is long, tedious, hard work--but very entertaining. As the OUTLANDER TV series approaches its fourth season, we're starting to see many more readers who've found your books as a result of the TV show. Aside from the effect on book sales (which must be considerable <g>), I'm interested to hear what you think about that. Do you find that people who found the TV show first tend to have different expectations, or different reactions to the books? People who’ve read the books first definitely have different reactions to the show <g>, but I don’t think the reverse is really true. I haven’t heard a lot of show-first people express any sense of shock or disapproval as to things happening in the books--they expect to see an expanded version of the story, with a lot more detail and more storylines, and that’s what they get. Many OUTLANDER fans, including myself, have re-read (or re-listened to) your books many, many times. Do you have a favorite author or authors whose books you re-read often, and if so, what is it about those books that makes them stand up well to re-reading? Yes, dozens. Right now, I’m re-reading all of Dorothy L. Sayers’s Lord Peter Wimsey novels, for probably the twentieth time. (I continue to enjoy them, but to be honest, I’m re-reading them now because I can put them down easily in order to work.) James Lee Burke would be another one, though I haven’t re-read his Dave Robicheaux novels as often as Sayers. And then there are Patrick O’Brian’s Aubrey/Maturin novels--I’ve read the series maybe three times, but listened to it on audio probably twenty times, at least--the reader, Patrick Tull, is fantastic, and the story always holds my interest while dog-walking or gardening. Like these, all the books I feel are worth re-reading depend on unique and engaging individuals. I like to spend time with these people (and on a lower level, I enjoy seeing just _how_ the author did what they did; knowing as much now as I do about the craft of writing, it’s hard to avoid seeing the techniques in use--a book that can suck me in sufficiently that I _don’t_ notice the engineering is definitely one I can re-read).

Part 2:

I'm not a writer of fiction, but I love it when Diana explains various writing techniques. So I thought it would be interesting to explore this particular one. I was astounded, and very grateful, that Diana replied in such detail! Be sure to click on the links about halfway through this post to read the examples from the text. *** SPOILER WARNING!! *** If you haven't read WRITTEN IN MY OWN HEART'S BLOOD (Book 8 of the OUTLANDER series), you may encounter spoilers below. I was listening recently to the section of MOHB that deals with the Battle of Monmouth. It must be quite a challenge to write a complex series of scenes like that, with so many moving parts and different characters involved. Are there specific techniques that you use in writing battle scenes in particular, to give a sense of immediacy or heighten the dramatic tension? Managing a complex situation in fiction comes down essentially to Point of View. You have to know whose head you’re in, and stay firmly there. Until you change to a different point-of-view character, that is… Who the point-of-view character is determines what kind of detail will be available to you, and guides the shape and flow of those periods of the text that belong to that specific character. For example (as you mention the Battle of Monmouth section of WRITTEN IN MY OWN HEART’S BLOOD), the first thing I considered was whose viewpoint(s) to use in depicting it. I’d read several accounts of the battle, including a very detailed step-by-step description provided by one of Osprey’s Men-at-War books, so I knew the general character of the battle: it was a huge military encounter, involving more than 10,000 troops on either side, multiple commanders, and a ragged, rolling terrain that didn’t accommodate the standard eighteenth-century military formations and positioning At All. (No one chose the ground on which to fight; that particular stretch of farmland was just where Washington’s troops caught up with General Clinton’s troops, who were retreating from Philadelphia with a large number of fleeing Loyalists (and their property) under the army’s protection.) It was also a very long battle, fought from slightly before daybreak until well after dark, on one of the hottest days known (temperatures were estimated--ex post facto--at over a hundred degrees during the hottest part of the day). And it was an indecisive battle: neither side “won”--the British withdrew with their dependents and baggage trains and retired toward New York (which is what they’d been doing when the Americans attacked), and the Americans staggered back to their camps to recover, tend the wounded, and bury their dead. The significance of the battle, though, was subtle but Very Important--the Americans didn’t lose. This discomfited the British extremely, and heartened the Americans to an equal degree, enabling Washington to pursue his campaign. OK, so we have a very complex mess to describe. Obviously, no one person could possibly see enough of the battle to have any idea how it was going, let alone what strategy was in use. So I knew from the start that I’d need more than one viewpoint character, and could then switch among them as needed to give their separate takes on what was happening to them, and the reader would get both the necessary information as to what was happening overall, and the sense of chaos and struggle that marked the day. Obviously, Jamie Fraser had to be one of those characters; he’s a central figure of the story, and he’s a trained and very experienced soldier. So I contrived a way for him to be in command of a sizable (though informal) company of militia during the battle. Militia companies were normally fairly small bands of thirty to fifty men, who signed up for short enlistments and returned to their farms or businesses when the enlistment period ran out, and a great many militia companies joined the American army just before this battle--not all of them were documented, and thus it was entirely plausible for the temporarily-appointed General Fraser to be in command of several. So, Jamie would naturally see combat, both personally and as a commander. He’d be in communication with other commanders, and would know the proposed strategy, as well as specific moving goals as the battle was going on. And he’d be interacting with the soldiers under his command and responding to emergencies. [NB: Notice, through these examples, the sort of details that each character is conscious of and how they respond to them.] Example #1 (Jamie in the cider orchard) Then, of course, I wanted Claire. Both because she’d never leave Jamie on a battlefield alone again, and because as a surgeon, she’d have a completely different view of the battle. She’d be handling the wounded who came off the field, in a series of medical procedures/emergencies, but would also have a general sense of the battle as a whole, gained from the things the wounded men told her while she was treating them. Example #2 (Claire tending the wounded at Tennent Church) But we can’t overlook the other side of the conflict. What’s going on, on the British side? Well, we have a choice of POV characters on that side: William, Lord John, and Hal. I used both William and Lord John (Lord John’s thread has been running through the whole book and the punch in the eye Jamie gave him at the beginning is affecting what happens to him throughout the battle and its aftermath). But while Jamie and Claire are carrying out fairly orthodox roles in the battle--a general in command/soldier on the field and a combat medic at a static aid station on the edge of the conflict--William and Lord John aren’t. William’s been relieved of duty and Lord John is essentially trying to stay alive long enough to reach the British lines. Both of them, in storytelling terms, can drop in or pass through just about any situation I need or want. They aren’t compelled to follow orders or fight through a set conflict; we get a revolving set of pictures of the British side of the conflict and its various personalities from them. And finally, there’s Ian Murray, Jamie’s nephew. He’s a scout for the American side, so is not fighting on the ground, but--like William and Lord John--can occur just about anywhere during the battle. And like William and Lord John, he’s fighting a personal battle (whereas Jamie and Claire are fighting the more usual kind of battle involving troops and military movements). So Jamie and Claire are providing a more or less structured view of things, while William, John and Ian are giving us the smaller, vivid glimpses that add both to the overall picture of the situation and to the encompassing sense of chaos. Or at least we hope that’s what happened… And to close this exegesis <g>--note that each character involved in this battle has his or her own arc within the battle: how they enter the battle, what happens to them, what decisions they make and what actions they take--and finally, how (and how altered) they emerge at the end of the fight. -------------------------------------------- Many thanks to Diana Gabaldon for taking the time for this very interesting interview! I really appreciate it.

It’s always interesting to read Diana’s comments on her own process, and I like what a fan of books she is.

#diana gabaldon #outlander #book quotes

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taxiappdevelopment865 · 2 years

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Uber

Is leading tourist taxi services proivder in amritsar. You must ensure that your account information (that is, the information you provided when you registered for or subscribed to a service) remains current, complete, accurate and truthful. Verizon media complies with applicable federal communications commission rules and regulations regarding the closed captioning of video content. U.S. Users: these terms contain a binding arbitration agreement and class action and jury trial waiver clauses in section 14.2 below, which are applicable to all u.S. Users.

South australia: apply for south australian driver accreditation with the sa government 35 then complete training with a registered training provider. You may not reverse engineer or attempt to extract the source code of our software, unless applicable laws prohibit those restrictions or you have our explicit written permission. And all of its brands listed in section 13 (including yahoo and aol brands) and the corporate entities listed in sections 13 and section 14 (collectively, verizon media”, us,” we” or our”) are part of the verizon family of companies.

We, in our sole discretion, may change, discontinue or terminate any or all aspects of a fee-based service without notice, including access to support services, taxi app development company content and other products or services ancillary to the fee-based service, subject to providing an appropriate refund for any portions of a specified but no longer available term.

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We provide our services as-is,” with all faults,” and as available.” your use of the services, including content within the services, is at your own risk and we do not represent, promise, or warrant that the services will be uninterrupted, timely, secure, or error-free. As an alternative to arbitration, you may bring an individual action in small claims court in your county of residence (or if a business, your principal place of business) or santa clara county, california provided that your dispute meets the requirements of the small claims court.

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aion-rsa · 3 years

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I Think You Should Leave Season 2: Ranking Every Sketch

https://ift.tt/eA8V8J

How on Earth did we survive two years without new episodes of Netflix’s brilliant sketch comedy series I Think You Should Leave with Tim Robinson? The first batch of six episodes premiered on April 23 of 2019 and proved instantly iconic.

Contained within the season’s roughly two-dozen sketches was absolutely hilarious and essential comedy that provided ample memetic kindling for the internet’s conversational fire. For the focused enough mind, it’s entirely possible to communicate with one’s friends exclusively in I Think You Should Leave memes. Lord knows, I’ve tried it.

Thankfully, ITYSL season 2 has finally arrived on Netflix after its COVID-19 delay. It features 28 sketches that range from “pretty funny” to “I can’t stop laughing. Oh God, I can’t stop laughing. It hurts, surely this is the end. Surely, I will die.”

Check out our rankings below and then begin yelling at our chances like Spectrum is dropping your network.

28. Credit Card Roulette

If nothing else, Tim Robinson and I Think You Should Leave co-creator Zach Kanin are incredible comedy scouts. Through two seasons, the show’s sketches have been a who’s who of up-and-coming comedic talent, like the wonderful John Early who is featured in this sketch. Unfortunately Early is not served well by the material here, which doesn’t rise to the same ludicrous heights as season 2’s other sketches. The best moment is Early’s immediate resolve that he’s not paying the bill, but the sketch doesn’t go too far after that.

27. Dave’s Poop Double

The sketch that serves as the cold open of season 2’s final episode doesn’t get things off to the best start. The concept of Tim’s “Luka” hiring a guy who looks just like his coworker Dave to take monster shits every time he gets up is certainly fun but missing an important layer of added absurdity. Luka is probably the best name for any of Robinson’s random characters yet though.

26. Little Buff Boys Pt. 2

Season 2 features many more callbacks to previous sketches than the first season did. This followup to Little Buff Boys is the worst of the bunch but still quite funny. Perhaps the only thing more absurd than a Little Buff Boys competition is someone being proud of running “one of” the biggest LBB competitions in the Greater Cincinnati area. This sketch also passes up an easy Cincinnati Chili joke in favor of creating the truly vile “cherry chuck salad.”

25. Detective Crashmore Trailer

This trailer for action thriller Detective Crashmore is funny enough on its own but doesn’t reach another comedic level until the AOL Blast interview two sketches later. Still, I unironically want to see an action film with a lead character whose main quip is “Eat fucking bullets, you fuckers. You fucking suck. You fucking SUCK!”

24. I Should Have Got That

I Think You Should Leave deserves a big spread in AARP magazine. No other sketch show revels in the talents of older comedians quite like this one. After 81-year-old comedian Ruben Rabasa stole the show in season 1, season 2 ups the ante with many more sketches letting old folks shine. It’s Bob McDuff Wilson’s turn this time around and his child-like obsession with his student’s burger kills right up until the shockingly dark kicker.

23. Office Surfing

“I almost killed myself, Jullliieeeeee” is one of the best line-reads of the season. The sketch it’s built around isn’t too remarkable but man, does Robinson knock that one out of the park.

22. “No, I Don’t Know How to Drive”

This is a quickie but a goodie. Robinson’s characters break down in tears quite often this season and this is one of the better occasions. How far have Tim’s characters come – from reveling in the existence of four-wheeled motorcycles to looking at the inside of a car and weeping “I don’t know what any of this shit is and I’m fucking scared.”

21. The Capital Room

Speaking of top tier comedic talent, thank God Patti Harrison stopped by another season of I Think You Should Leave. This time around, we get two heaping doses of Patti. This one, the first of the two, is the inferior but still quite great. In the span of roughly 30 seconds, Harrison unveils the saga of a woman who A. Got sewn into the pants of the Thanksgiving Day parade Charlie Brown float, B. Hates all bald boys, C. Sued the city and won a fortune, D. Is now helplessly addicted to wine, and E. Is tragically self-aware that her money will run out soon.

20. But It’s Lunch

Just like last year’s opening sketch, “But It’s Lunch” (this is probably a good time to mention, that I’m naming all of these things myself. You could very easily call this the Hotdog sketch but that would confuse it with last year’s hotdog sketch) sets the perfect opening mood. The sight gag of Robinson’s Pat trying to stealthily eat a hotdog is wonderful, and the fact that things so quickly escalate to hotdog surgery and puke is just sublime.

19. Carber Hotdog Vacuum

The follow-up to “But It’s Lunch” occurs a full two episodes later and proves to be a hell of a pay-off. Robinson’s unnamed character (who is obviously Pat) very quickly reveals that there is one very specific reason he made this hotdog vacuum invention and you’ll never guess what it was. We all make mistakes. We shouldn’t be fired for them.

18. Insider Trading Trial (Stupid Hat)

This sketch somewhat mimics the experience of trying to explain what I Think You Should Leave is like to someone who has never seen it. “So, this guy took too small a slice of toilet paper…” or “…and then he has to have to have sex with his mother-in-law.” “Insider Trading” rotely describes the bizarre behaviors of one of Robinson’s deeply strange characters, Brian, as it’s being read into the court record. Brian and his stupid fedora with the safari flaps is in attendance to provide a visual aid. As are some hilarious flashbacks in which Brian attempts to roll the hat down his arm like Fred Astaire and instead encounters only wheelchair grease.

17. The Ice Cream Store is Closed Today

Before he was a criminal lawyer, Bob Odenkirk was one of the most legendary sketch writers of all time. It’s only fitting that he stop by ITYSL season 2 to provide his comedic blessing. Odenkirk is great from the get-go but this one doesn’t really get rolling until the end when Robinson finds himself truly immersed in the fictional life of this sad old man. “His wife’s sick but she’s gonna get better” is a shockingly emotional moment amid pure farce.

16. Barbie and the Blues Brothers

This is the sketch that climbed the most in my rankings upon a second viewing. What first seemed to be a waste of Conner O’Malley’s manic comedic energy became a semi-classic once I submitted to its strange vibes. I don’t even know what to call this one but Robinson’s character refusing to stop dancing as Barbie the dog melts down is hilarious. O’Malley is better served by last season’s “honk if you’re horny” sketch, still he gets some bangers in this time around like “She thinks he’s a whole new guy because of the glasses and the hat” and “it’s her house, she’s doing what’s right!” Robinson once again closes this nonsense out with some well-earned tears. “It’s just me, Barbie. I’m not the Blues Brothers.”

15. Jaime Taco (I Love My Wife)

“Jamie Taco” is a prime example of just how rapidly (and how well) I Think You Should Leave is able to veer into pure nonsensical genius. At the top, this sketch comes perilously close to making an actual statement about how men are too quick to pretend like their wives are horrible nags. This sketch, however, has its sights set on something much dumber…and therefore better. Our hero (played hilariously by Richard Jewell’s Paul Walter Hauser) loves his wife because she helped him through his darkest moment, which just so happens to be when snotty young actor Jamie Taco refused to let him say his Henchman lines in a play.

14. Comos Restaurant

All hail the return of the great Tim Heidecker! Heidecker, of Tim and Eric Awesome Show, Great Job! fame, is one of the few comedians with a strange enough sensibility to be reasonably seen as an I Think You Should Leave forerunner. His season 1 turn as a walnut-obsessed jazz douche is a classic and this one reaches similar heights. This time, Heidecker’s character, Gary, and his lovely date, Janeane (Tracey Birdsall), have good reason to be annoyed by their date night at the sci-fi cosmos restaurant being interrupted by some hacky jokes. Of course, they use this opportunity to reveal that Jeannine’s mom used to drink puke for the Davy and Rascal radio show to pay for school supplies. It’s oddly refreshing to have a Heidecker character given a game partner and Gary and Janeane make one great team.

13. Detective Crashmore Interivew

While the Detective Crashmore trailer is the setup, this interview with AOL Blast is the punchline. Detective Crashmore is played by Santa Claus, because why not? Actor Biff Wiff’s gruff, nasally Midwestern timber is the perfect accent to accompany this lunacy. This is a Santa who in one breath demands to be taken seriously as an actor (Billy Bob Thornton-style) and in the next admits to seeing everyone in the world’s dick.

12. Sloppy Steaks (I Used to Be a Piece of Shit)

From here on out, it’s nothing but absolute homeruns. “Sloppy Steaks” could very well have been number one on this list and few would have batted an eye. The setup here is amazing as it gives Tim Robinson a reason to essentially have beef with a baby. The baby cries because he knows Robinson used to be a piece of shit. But don’t babies understand that people can change? That’s funny enough to begin with, but the real gut-busting moment here is the reveal of what “being a piece of shit” really means. In this case it means slicking one’s hair back and dousing the steaks at Truffoni’s with water to make sloppy steaks.

11. Johnny Carson Impersonator

Just a quick rundown for those who are confused…

Johnny Carson = Can Hit. George Kennedy = Can’t Hit. George Bush = Can’t Hit.

10. Driving School (Her Job is Tables)

This is the rare I Think You Should Leave sketch that actually provides an answer to all the lunacy. As Robinson’s character’s Driver’s Ed class watches Patti Harrison’s actress in some dated videos, they can’t help but wonder what she does for a living. “Tables,” Robinson answers over and over again. This would be funny enough on its own but the reveal that Harrison provides tables to Monster Cons is a rare and valuable moment of “Ohhhhh that’s why” for this show. Equally as valuable is Harrison, who really sells that those tables are her lifeblood.

9. Claire’s Ear-Piercings

One has to wonder how much time goes into choosing the perfect “order” for the sketches in I Think You Should Leave. Two seasons in a row now, the show has selected pitch perfect opening and closing sketches. This closing number is oddly melancholic as the Claire’s orientation video for girls who want to get their ears pierced somehow gives way to one 58-year-old man named Ron Tussbler’s existential dread. If we really get to see the “highlights” after we die, forcibly fake laughing every ten minutes to make the voyeuristic experience all the richer sounds like a good strategy and not sad at all. Hang in there, Ron.

8. Little Buff Boys Competition

What. A. Crop. It was a virtual certainty that ITYSL season 2 would feature a spiritual successor to the classic “Baby of the Year” sketch in season 1. Thank God “Little Buff Boys” is up to the challenge of replicating that magic. This one has all the right elements to be another hit: Sam Richardson (in a wig this time, no less), a grand pageant hall, and some precocious youths. Troll Boy also joins the canon of young ITYSL characters who everybody instinctively hates alongside Bart Harley Jarvis.

7. Tammy Craps

There’s something weirdly nefarious about this commercial for a poisonous doll that doesn’t have farts in her head anymore. It’s a criticism of late stage capitalism crossed with the cursed nature of the Annabelle movies…while not being like either of those things at all. In reality, this is just another absurdist concept sprung from the terrifying inner depths of the writing staff’s mind. It also happens to be a particularly great one. The girl weighing her clothes down with rocks so she can hit the magical 60-pound threshold to safely play with Tammy Craps is one of the best gags of the season.

6. Karl Havoc

“Little Buff Boys Competition” and another upcoming sketch are likely to produce the lion’s share of memes and quotes from this season of ITYSL. But the one quote that’s stuck in my mind most aggressively comes from this hilarious episode 1 clip. The sight of Robinson’s Carmine Laguzio posing as the dead-faced freakshow Karl Havoc and muttering “I don’t want to be around anymore” is quite simply one of the funniest things I’ve ever witnessed. This is a marvelous, unnerving, utterly hilarious sketch. That there are somehow five better sketches speaks to how strong this season is.

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5. Dan Flashes Pt. 1 (Office)

I Think You Should Leave is now two for two in introducing the most cutting edge items in men’s fashion. Season 1 featured the arrival of the highly practical TC Tugger shirt. Now season 2 ups the ante with the stylish Dan Flashes. This sketch succeeds because it takes a simple question “Why is Mike laying down during a business meeting?” and divines the most outlandish answer possible. Mike isn’t eating because he’s spending all his money on Dan Flashes shirts.

4. Dan Flashes Pt. 2 (Hotel Menu)

It’s one thing to introduce a hilarious concept, it’s another thing entirely to put it into practice. This second entry into the Dan Flashes canon is amazing. Back in part 1, it seemed as though the intricate patterns on the Dan Flashes shirts have a hypnotic effect on men who look exactly like Tim Robinson. Seeing the reality of that – pasty men battling one another to get their credit cards to the cashier before the other – is truly hilarious stuff.

3. Coffin Flop

This is the second sketch of the entire season…the second! And holy shit, does it set a strong precedent for what’s to come. This impassioned message from the Corncob TV CEO for Spectrum to save his network and its precisely one television program is a masterclass in shock humor. Watching body after body busting out of shit wood somehow never loses its grim luster. Somehow, in a sketch that features dozens of naked corpses flopping to the ground unexpectedly, it’s Robinson’s monologue that hits the hardest. “This world is so fucked up. And people are mad at me because I showed a bunch of naked dead bodies with their spread blue butts flying out of boxes? Really?”

2. Calico Cut Pants

Every episode of I Think You Should Leave season 2 features five sketches save for episode 4 which has only three. And that’s because episode 4 is dominated by a near 10-minute epic called “Calico Cut Pants.” In many ways, Calico Cut Pants is the platonic ideal of an ITYSL sketch. It takes place in a nightmarish world where every bizarre action only leads to an even more bizarre reaction. Nothing ever cools down. There is always something stranger on the horizon.

In this instance, Mike O’Brien (longtime SNL writer and the creator of the terminally underrated comedy A.P. Bio) plays an office drone who enters into a living hell merely because his co-worker helps him out of a mildly annoying social jam. Robinson’s character introduces him to a website that advertises pants with piss stains on them. That’s all well and good but once you know about Calicocutpants.com you Always. Have. To. Give. It’s like PBS, but more demonic. This remarkable sketch includes everything that’s great about this show, right down to characters with inexplicable idiosyncrasies like Tim Robinson’s adamance that doors must always be held open for him.

1. Ghost Tour

The funniest moment in ITYSL season 2 (and maybe the funniest moment in the history of the world) occurs in this sketch. Tim Robinson’s character has been admonished for his potty mouth during a ghost tour over and over again. The tour guide even said he’s ruining his job. But this poor man sincerely cannot understand why he’s in trouble. This is a tour for adults and he’s following the rules by using adult language. Like any good Robinson character, he truly believes that he’s the sane one and it’s the rest of the world that’s taking crazy pills.

So in his darkest moment, the man musters up his strength through tears and delivers the following query:

“Not trying to be funny. Not trying to get a laugh. I don’t want anybody to have the worst day at their job. But. Do any of these….fuckers….ever blast out of the wall and have, like a huge cum shot?”

Cue: riotous, damn near apocalyptic laughter. What a treasure and blessing this whole show is.

I Think You Should Leave season 2 is available to stream on Netflix now.

The post I Think You Should Leave Season 2: Ranking Every Sketch appeared first on Den of Geek.

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shirlleycoyle · 3 years

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The Many App Stores Before the App Store

A version of this post originally appeared on Tedium, a twice-weekly newsletter that hunts for the end of the long tail.

How much credit does Apple deserve for introducing its App Store concept to mainstream consumers? I mean, how obvious is the idea, anyway?

This is a question that seems worth asking as modern app development has become so centered around building applications that exist in digital storefronts like Apple’s App Store, the Google Play Store, Steam, and numerous others. What about app stores that existed when the proverbial dodo was still around? There are more than you think.

“A trip back in time reveals at least one popular one-click store which predates Apple’s attempt by at least 5 years. I know because I built it.”

— Michael Robertson, the software developer best known for his creation of MP3.com, in a blog post discussing his work on “Click-N-Run,” an early attempt at creating a digital download store along the lines of the App Store in the early 2000s. Click-N-Run (CNR), which was an aspect of the commercial Windows-like Linux distribution Linspire that Robertson helped build, was a commercial GUI-style interface for Debian’s apt package manager. It was eventually made available to other distros to much interest, though the results were reportedly a mixed bag. While no longer made, Linspire’s work on CNR (one of a few stabs at the GUI-based software distribution interface in Linux) likely inspired the graphical package managers now commonly offered with many Linux distributions, which largely work the same way.

The question around what an app store actually is probably starts with shareware

Let’s play a game: If you were to access a piece of shareware circa 1991 and wanted to unlock the full version of that application with your computer alone, how would you do it?

No web. Perhaps no Windows. (Perhaps GeoWorks.)

Sure, there were probably lots of ways to download an application, if you had the tools to do so—as in, a modem. Perhaps you might grab it on a BBS, or through a service like Compuserve. Maybe Usenet binary groups were your preferred strategy.

But still, you’d be stuck with a nag screen. Your copy of WinZip would just be annoying you every time you started it.

See, the issue with the distribution of software via computer was never about the download part—that part was figured out relatively quickly. It was the paying part that proved difficult.

Think about how it might work compared to a store: You choose a physical object of interest, you give a physical object of value (i.e. money) in exchange, an intermediary (i.e. a cashier) confirms you bought it (by scanning a barcode), and you walk out, without an object of value but with an object of interest.

Which is why every time you read a story about some shareware pioneer, like the developer of Paint Shop Pro or Tim Sweeney’s efforts to sell folks ZZT, it’s always paired with a story about these developers literally taking checks in the mail, despite the fact that it was entirely possible to purchase things fully electronically with a credit card by this point.

Without the retail element, people were kind of stuck distributing software without a way to easily purchase it. (What’s the big deal, the open-source folks say.) There was no way to secure the process, so therefore, fraud was prevalent. And if people are distributing through multiple systems, the experience of downloading becomes annoying, because it feels wildly inconsistent.

This is the problem a few entrepreneurs worked to solve starting in the mid-to-late 1990s, with varying levels of success.

1993

The year that Tucows, a well-known repository of downloadable software, first went online. The repository was built by Scott Swedorski, a technology enthusiast in Flint, Michigan, who spotted a need for a central resource for basic internet software. Swedorski’s work, while not initially intended to be commercial, proved the basis of a long-running company that came to prove an essential part of the early internet. After all, we needed software to get on the internet, right?

An example of the Electronic AppWrapper, a program for NeXT computers that could be used to distribute software digitally. Image: JohnWayneTheThird/Wikimedia Commons

The first “app store” on a Steve Jobs-operated platform involved a CD-ROM and an email-sending mechanism

The app store that generally gets the nod for being first dates to the early 1990s, on a platform that was responsible for a lot of software firsts. I’m, of course, talking about NeXT, the platform on which the World Wide Web came to life and whose object-oriented approach to programming became a big part of what has made iOS so successful.

That software is called the Electronic AppWrapper. (See, it had “app” in the name way back in 1993!)

It did not exactly have the same kind of distribution method that one might expect for a modern app store, however. Really, what it did that is incredibly clever was that it took the shareware CD-ROM and made it into something that allowed for trials.

NeXT was a good platform for this in part because of its initial target audience—since the NeXT Cube tended to focus on educational and research settings, those settings were often networked well before PC and Mac equivalents, so people were able to purchase software online before other markets.

In fact, Electronic AppWrapper developer Paget Systems, which initially built a print version of the AppWrapper, made this very point in a 1992 article first proposing the idea:

The NeXT community is a perfect testbed for electronic distribution. The market is still small; we know where almost all of the computer owners are, and the community is more fluent with networking than most. And we have more than our share of creative people willing to tackle problems in new ways.

Also helping matters: Since NeXT systems were rare, users of this platform didn’t really have the advantage of being able to go to Radio Shack to purchase software, so it was either do everything through the mail, or go electronic.

Paget Systems’ great gift to the app store concept was the process it enabled. A 1993 issue of NeXTWORLD described the benefits of the tool like this: “To order by e-mail, just click a button; the application automatically displays an order form, asks for your credit-card number, and sends an encrypted message to Paget.”

That sounds pretty simple, right? It was, and it's not all that dissimilar to how we do things today.

(Side note: Jesse Tayler, who helped develop Electronic AppWrapper, has put up an informative documentary website highlighting the history of NeXT and the innovations the company helped to enable—including this. A highlight is Tayler’s discussion of successfully demoing the Electronic AppWrapper to Steve Jobs.)

“Since virtual shelf space is much cheaper than a storefront, Online can represent thousands of products. We can carry Microsoft Word and hundreds of related add-on products, while traditional re-sellers can barely find shelf space for mainstream software.”

— Tim Choate, the president of the firm Online Interactive, discussing the company’s atOnce online software store, which was one of the first examples of a traditional app store for Windows computers. As NetworkWorld explained in 1996, the atOnce software store was something of a test, complete with Microsoft’s blessing, to see if application distribution of commercial software over network mediums was even possible. The process required a more secure approach, at Microsoft’s behest. It should be noted that atOnce provides an interesting case—as it was effectively the app store for the AOL era (along with a very early web presence), though it quickly went away.

The Digital River website, as it appeared in 1998. Image: Internet Archive

The guy who realized that downloadable apps were going to be a really big deal in 1994

Joel Ronning probably doesn’t get the credit he deserves in the grand scheme of things, but he is a figure in this discussion that matters.

In the 1980s, he spent time focused on the Macintosh market, selling software and distributing white-label accessories as well. This gave him an understanding of the digital market, so he could see all the flaws of the retail approach up close.

Around 1993 or so, he had a revelation that proved prescient: downloadable commercial software was going to be big. Really big. Big enough that he should spend the next few years developing processes for making the ideas around secure downloadable software workable, and patenting them. And building a company around them. And turning them into something that other companies would likely want to use.

Ronning’s work led to the creation a dozen patents—and a company called Digital River that could handle the encryption and distribution of applications. Not that anyone knew how to properly contextualize the idea at that early stage. In a 1997 profile with the Minneapolis Star-Tribune, columnist Dick Youngblood tried, and came up with this:

What Digital River has created is an enormous virtual warehouse containing tens of thousands of software products offered by hundreds of developers and retailers through their individual Web sites.

In simple terms, the system gives customers the ability to download their software choices with a minimum of fuss and a maximum of security for the credit card numbers and other personal data required for the transaction. I like to think of the operation as sort of the Supervalu of electronic software wholesaling.

Imagine having to describe something that people do over the internet on a daily basis without being able to use the terms “app store” or “cloud,” nor the frame of references that come with those terms, and that’s probably what you might come up with.

A patent drawing by Digital River that showed an early example of its digital-distribution technology, which included encryption functionality. Ronning has a lot of patent filings to his name. Image: Google Patents

The approach Digital River took in this early stage is actually quite similar to what we think of as an app store today—including the idea that the middleman is going to take a cut. (Digital River took just 20 percent, rather than Apple’s infamous 30 percent cut.)

But one difference is that the company represented a provider of purchasing services—i.e., it built the tools for individual companies to create their own storefronts, rather than becoming an app-store player itself. This model worked for them. By the year 2002, Digital River (a still-active company!) had more than 32,000 customers according to NetworkWorld, with roughly a third of those representing three quarters of Digital River’s sales.

“Year over year we continue to see more products purchased digitally.” Ronning said in a NetworkWorldinterview. “People are getting more comfortable with getting a digital file than they were one, two or six years ago. That’s good news because it allows us to deliver a product halfway around the world in a matter of seconds.”

And hey, because the company was in a position to provide the technical know-how of running an app store, there was at least one case where Digital River was tapped to manage someone else’s app store—the creation of Research in Motion’s Blackberry App World in 2009.

Download Warehouse, a.k.a. what app stores would look like if we made no changes to our approach between physical and digital distribution. Fun fact: This is what the atOnce website evolved into. Image: Internet Archive

Not every site was a winner, of course: When looking for info about app stores, I ran across this website on the Internet Archive that literally sold digital software as if it was still in a shrink-wrapped box, which made me crack up so hard. The backend? Digital River.

In many ways, the success of the app store was just as much about the packaging—i.e., the way consumers were pitched about the idea, rather than the shrink wrap—as the commerce itself.

1996

The year StarCode Software, a developer of software for the BeOS operating system, was formed. The company built PackageBuilder and SoftwareValet, which combined together to become one of the first graphical package managers purpose-built for an operating system—and one Be acquired in 1998 and integrated into the operating system.

Stardock Central, a digital distribution service produced by the customization-focused company Stardock. Image: via the Stardock website

Five mainstream examples of app stores that predated the Apple App Store

Steam. The digital distribution service started by Valve in 2003 was effectively the app store that proved the model to the world in a big way. There’s a reason why Steam remains so dominant in the PC gaming space, and it’s because they nailed it the first time—to the point where many of its competitors directly mimic the service.

Windows Marketplace. This circa-2004 online store, targeted at consumers, was an attempt by Microsoft to centralize the often-confusing app distribution options for Windows software. It wasn’t successful, but it helped set the stage for later digital storefront successes for Microsoft.

Club Nokia. This online store for Nokia’s early mobile phones provides a really interesting example of a service that was essentially a direct analogue to the modern iOS App Store, but in a situation where the carriers, rather than the phone-maker, holds all the power. This service, founded in 1997, became controversial as ringtones became more popular, and Nokia eventually folded to pressure from mobile carriers and scaled back its service in favor of the mobile providers’ options. Could you imagine Verizon and AT&T doing this to Apple today?

Xbox Live Arcade. Launched in 2004, this represented an important formative effort in the attempts to bring digital download services to a large group of people. One secret to the success of Xbox Live Arcade was its piggybacking upon what Microsoft was doing elsewhere; it leveraged the existing Xbox Live service to sell people more simplistic games. (Apple later replicated this by using its mechanisms for the iTunes Store to sell apps.) It later proved the starting point for the company’s Xbox Live Marketplace, which could distribute full shrink-wrapped games to consumers.

Stardock Central. I’ve mentioned them in Tedium before, but Stardock is an interesting company historically because of the fact that it was early to a number of important trends that have become even more essential today. One of those trends was customization; another was digital distribution, which it first dipped its toes into with Stardock Central, an app-distribution service from circa 2001. It worked particularly well for Stardock in part because it offered apps in a variety of verticals, including games.

The NTT DoCoMo NEC N904i, a phone that supports the formative i-mode network, is considered the first mobile app store ecosystem. Image: Wikimedia Commons

The turning point of the app store concept, honestly, is the mobile phone

Thinking less about the maker of the phone itself or its general functionality, the mobile phone represents something about technology that a regular desktop computer doesn’t—it is intended as a full package, one that is hermetically sealed and managed by its maker and distributor.

Because it started from a different place, the expectation is different. That expectation creates tension for power users who wish that their phones or tablets worked a little more like their laptops, but on the other hand, the devices aim broader for a reason.

And one can point to the reason for the expectation that applications would be managed by the provider. After all, the first mobile app store that feels like what we got with the modern App Store or Play Store came from a mobile company—Japan’s NTT DoCoMo released i-mode, a service that offered access to digital services through their phones. It worked particularly well in Japan because home internet was rare at the time when i-mode was first released in 1999, meaning i-mode was many Japanese users’ first experience with an internet-style service.

As The Japan Times noted in 2011, the reason i-mode succeeded (and spawned many imitators) was the tight integration of payments and software:

For those of you who may not know, i-mode is the mobile Internet-access service built into cell phones from Japanese communication giant NTT Docomo. It costs ¥315 per month to use and includes the i-mode network, which is Docomo’s closed system, separate from the Internet at large. Within this network there are “official” i-mode sites, which are only accessible from an i-mode enabled cell phone. On sites such as these, users can purchase goods and services and have the payment appear on their cell phone bill. This cell phone-integrated-payment is what makes the i-mode system so special.

Other companies tried to do this same thing during the early 2000s, including firms like Nokia, to mixed levels of success, but the connective tissue was that the phone was treated like an integrated experience of purchasing, distribution, and usage, rather than a vessel for applications.

Perhaps this integration explains, in the present day, why Apple has ramped up attacks against sideloading (or allowing the installation of external applications outside of an App Store experience), something that nearly other mobile platform (including Android) has long allowed. As it wrote in a white paper it recently released:

Allowing sideloading would degrade the security of the iOS platform and expose users to serious security risks not only on third-party app stores, but also on the App Store. Because of the large size of the iPhone user base and the sensitive data stored on their phones—photos, location data, health and financial information—allowing sideloading would spur a flood of new investment into attacks on the platform.

Mobile phones have been built with this expectation that the whole experience is seamless and managed by the hardware developer—and at one point, the mobile provider even played a significant role. In some cases, it still does.

But one wonders how strong Apple’s case against sideloading will actually be, given that, y’know, it also sells desktop computers that allow sideloading … or as we call it over that way, downloading and installing apps from the Web.

It’s long been said that Apple, when it released the iPhone, launched a device so compelling that it made people forget that there was years of prior art that predated the moment.

In many ways, the App Store made people forget about app stores. It was such a brilliant concept, idea, and execution that when Steve Jobs announced it in 2008, people basically ignored the nearly two decades of prior art that wasn’t even particularly well-hidden.

In some ways, the move to centralization was arguably disappointing, because it wasn’t perfect, and it put a middleman in control. Apple’s approach to the digital storefront had flaws—most notably the size of its cut (which companies like Microsoft are now explicitly counterprogramming against) and the weirdness of putting a single company’s moral compass in charge of the apps that people downloaded.

But we can look at the positives of their approach as well, and sort of the element that they nailed that few others were able to in quite the same way. The integration of the App Store into the operating system made both better; the integration of commerce into the App Store using a common system solved the problem of having to give a credit card number out every time you wanted to download an app; and the integration of a development strategy that worked in tandem with the App Store gave (and still gives) Apple a reason to constantly improve its programming interfaces so they remain at the top of their class.

No developer of a prior app storefront had been able to nail down quite this mix (with Steam possibly getting the closest), which explains why it was so effective when Apple did it.

But prior art is prior art, and one hopes that the technology industry takes a step back to learn the lessons from both the Apple App Store’s strengths and weaknesses going forward. After all, so many others got there first.

The Many App Stores Before the App Store syndicated from https://triviaqaweb.wordpress.com/feed/

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Big Business Takes on Anti-Asian Discrimination Corporate America takes on anti-Asian discrimination Top business leaders and corporate giants are pledging $250 million to a new initiative and an ambitious plan to stem a surge in anti-Asian violence and take on challenges that are often ignored by policymakers, Andrew and Ed Lee report in The Times. Donors are a who’s who of business leaders. Individuals who are collectively contributing $125 million to the newly created Asian American Foundation include Joe Bae of KKR, Sheila Lirio Marcelo of Care.com, Joe Tsai of Alibaba and Jerry Yang of Yahoo. Organizations adding another $125 million to the group include Walmart, Bank of America, the Ford Foundation and the N.B.A. The initiative has echoes of the recent effort by Black executives to round up corporate support to push back against bills that would restrict voting. Anti-Asian hate crimes jumped 169 percent over the past year; in New York City alone, they have risen 223 percent. And Asian-Americans face the challenge of the “model minority” myth, in which they’re often held up as success stories. This shows “a lack of understanding of the disparities that exist,” said Sonal Shah, the president of the newly formed foundation. For example, Asian-Americans comprise 12 percent of the U.S. work force, but just 1.5 percent of Fortune 500 corporate officers. The group’s mission is broad. It is aiming to reshape the American public’s understanding of the Asian-American experience by developing new school curriculums and collecting data to help influence public policy. But its political lobbying efforts may be challenged by the enormous political diversity among Asian-Americans, Andrew and Ed note. HERE’S WHAT’S HAPPENING India’s Covid-19 crisis deepens. The country recorded nearly 402,000 cases on Saturday, a global record, and another 392,000 on Sunday. A business trade group is calling for a new national lockdown, despite the economic cost of such a move. The C.E.O. of India’s biggest vaccine manufacturer warned that the country’s shortage of doses would last until at least July. Credit Suisse didn’t earn much for its Archegos troubles. The Swiss bank collected just $17.5 million in fees last year from the investment fund, despite losing $5.4 billion from the firm’s meltdown in March, according to The Financial Times. Verizon sold AOL and Yahoo. The telecom giant divested its internet media business to Apollo Global Management for $5 billion, and will retain a 10 percent stake. It’s a sign that Verizon is giving up on its digital advertising ambitions and focusing on its mobile business. A third of Basecamp employees quit after a ban on talking politics. At least 20 resigned after the software maker’s C.E.O., Jason Fried, announced a new policy preventing political discussions in the workplace. The company isn’t budging: “We’ve committed to a deeply controversial stance,” said David Hansson, Basecamp’s chief technology officer. Manchester United fans are still mad about the failed Super League. Supporters of the English soccer club stormed the field yesterday, forcing the postponement of its highly anticipated match against Liverpool. They called for the ouster of the Glazer family, United’s American owners, over their support for the new competition meant mostly for European soccer’s richest teams. Succession hints and other highlights from Berkshire’s meeting At the annual meeting of Berkshire Hathaway on Saturday, Warren Bufett and Charlie Munger spoke out on a typically broad range of topics, from investing regrets to politics to crypto. (They also picked fights with Robinhood and E.S.G. proponents, for good measure.) Buffett watchers also got their clearest hint yet as to who will succeed the Oracle of Omaha as Berkshire’s C.E.O. when the 90-year-old billionaire finally steps down. It’s Greg Abel. CNBC confirmed with Buffett that Abel, the 59-year-old who oversees Berkshire’s non-investing operations, would take over as C.E.O. “If something were to happen to me tonight it would be Greg who’d take over tomorrow morning,” Buffett said. Charlie Munger, Buffett’s top lieutenant, dropped a hint on Saturday, saying, “Greg will keep the culture.” Buffett took on Robinhood. The Berkshire chief said the trading app conditioned retail investors to treat stock trading like gambling. “There’s nothing illegal about it, there’s nothing immoral, but I don’t think you’d build a society around people doing it,” Buffett said. Robinhood pushed back. “There is an old guard that doesn’t want average Americans to have a seat at the Wall Street table so they will resort to insults,” tweeted Jacqueline Ortiz Ramsay, the company’s head of public policy communications. And Buffett got blowback on E.S.G. Berkshire shareholders followed his lead and rejected two shareholder proposals that would have forced the company to disclose more about climate change and work force diversity. But each proposal got support from a quarter of Berkshire shareholders, a relatively high percentage. And big investors spoke publicly about their backing for the initiatives: BlackRock, which owns a 5 percent stake in Berkshire, said the company hadn’t done enough on either front. Other highlights from the Berkshire meeting: Munger let loose on crypto. “Of course I hate the Bitcoin success and I don’t welcome a currency that’s so useful to kidnappers and extortionists,” he said. “I think the whole damn development is disgusting and contrary to the interests of civilization.” Ajit Jain, who oversees Berkshire’s insurance operations, and Buffett traded quips about whether the company would insure Elon Musk’s trip to Mars. “This is an easy one: No, thank you, I’ll pass,” Jain said. Buffett said it would depend on the premium and added, “I would probably have a somewhat different rate if Elon was on board or not on board.” “We will not be anywhere near as focused on buybacks going forward as we have in the past.” — Intel C.E.O. Pat Gelsinger told CBS’s “60 Minutes” that in the future the semiconductor giant would focus less on buying its own shares and more on expanding production capacity to alleviate severe chip shortages. Ted Cruz rejects ‘woke’ corporate money Ted Cruz has sworn off corporate donations, and he used an op-ed in The Wall Street Journal to tell executives about it. The Republican senator from Texas criticized company chiefs for what he said were ill-informed criticisms of Georgia’s new voting laws. “For too long, woke C.E.O.s have been fair-weather friends to the Republican Party: They like us until the left’s digital pitchforks come out,” Cruz wrote. These companies “need to be called out, singled out and cut off,” he added. Cruz’s rejection may not make a big difference. After the Capitol riot on Jan. 6, many corporations pledged to withhold donations from lawmakers who voted against certifying the election results, at least for a period of time. Cruz, who is viewed as a key player in the efforts to reverse the vote, could be shut out for longer than others. But he’s not strapped for cash: He brought in more than $3 million in campaign funds in the three months after the riot, largely from individual donors. It highlights a new schism between Republicans and corporate America. Those ties were already fraying under President Trump’s unpredictable administration. President Biden’s proposed tax hikes and regulatory push would have typically driven companies into the arms of Republican allies, but Cruz, for his part, said he’s no longer interested in what the corporate donors and lobbyists have to say. “This time,” he wrote, “we won’t look the other way on Coca-Cola’s $12 billion in back taxes owed. This time, when Major League Baseball lobbies to preserve its multibillion-dollar antitrust exception, we’ll say no thank you. This time, when Boeing asks for billions in corporate welfare, we’ll simply let the Export-Import Bank expire.” An epic antitrust case begins Today, Apple and Epic Games meet in court for a trial that could have implications for the future of the App Store and the antitrust fight against Big Tech. DealBook spoke with Jack Nicas, a technology reporter for The Times, about what’s at stake. Why is Epic suing Apple? Many companies, including Spotify and Match Group, have complained loudly and publicly about the control that Apple has over the App Store, and the 30 percent commission it charges. Epic basically set some bait for Apple: It began using its own payment system in Fortnite, a very popular game, which meant Apple couldn’t collect its commission. It knew how Apple would react: Apple kicked Fortnite out of the App Store. Then Epic immediately sued Apple in federal court, and simultaneously launched a sophisticated PR campaign to paint Apple in a bad light. [Epic is suing Google for the same reason.] Why do businesses that aren’t Epic or Apple care about this case? If you’re a company that sells any digital goods or services, whether a game, music or a dating platform, you likely pay a large share of your revenues to Apple. If Epic wins here, that could eventually put an end to Apple’s commissions, or at least cause Apple to loosen its control over the App Store. So it really would upend the economics of the app industry. And beyond that, an Epic win would boost the push for antitrust charges against some of the biggest tech companies, including Apple. Now on the other side, if Apple wins, it’s really only going to bolster its already strong position. Who is expected to win? It’s certainly unclear at this point, but there is a thinking among legal experts that Apple has the upper hand, and that’s in large part because in antitrust fights, courts are more sympathetic to the defendants. But some legal experts think that Epic’s case could be strong. What will you be watching for? The C.E.O.s of both companies, Tim Sweeney and Tim Cook, will be testifying at the trial. Sweeney will likely have to explain why Epic is suing Apple and Google, but not Microsoft and Sony and Samsung and Nintendo, which charge very similar commissions and have similar rules. And Cook will have to answer some very pointed questions about how Apple does business, and how it potentially creates rules in its App Store to hurt rivals. I think there’s an opportunity for the lawyers on Epic’s side to elicit some interesting answers from him. Read the full report about the case from Jack and Erin Griffith. THE SPEED READ Deals Legendary Studios, the producer of movies like “Godzilla vs. Kong,” has reportedly held talks to either merge with a SPAC or buy another studio. (Bloomberg) Politics and policy Why investors have largely shrugged off President Biden’s proposal to raise capital gains taxes. (NYT) As the head of the nonprofit Venture for America, Andrew Yang pledged to create 100,000 jobs nationwide. The group created about 150. (NYT) Tech An internal Amazon report warned management that its sales team had gained unauthorized access to third-party seller data, which may have been used to help its own products. (Politico) Tesla is reportedly stepping up its engagement with Beijing officials as it faces greater pressure from the Chinese government. (Reuters) Best of the rest “Has Online Retail’s Biggest Bully Returned?” (NYT) How remote work is decimating Manhattan’s retail stores, in pictures. (NYT) Eli Broad, the billionaire businessman and art collector who reshaped Los Angeles, died on Friday. He was 87. (NYT) We’d like your feedback! Please email thoughts and suggestions to [email protected]. Source link Orbem News #antiAsian #Big #Business #discrimination #Takes

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