Jean Shorts Try On Haul

Another small haul review after trying everything on. Picked up a Porsche jacket, Stone Island pieces, a couple Bape items, and some sweats and shorts. Overall theme is pretty consistent. Most stuff fits true to size, but a few pieces like the Bape tees and ALO sweats run a bit small so sizing up helps. Materials across the board are a bit lighter than retail, which is expected, but nothing feels terrible. The Porsche and Stone Island jackets look especially clean on body, even if they are not as heavy. Ksubi jeans fit nice and skinny like retail, just less rigid. Sweats and shorts are solid for everyday wear. Comfortable and easy to throw into rotation without worrying too much. Overall pretty satisfied for the price. Let me know if anyone wants more detailed pics or fit info. submitted by /u/Agile_Veterinarian_6 to r/AwesomeReps [link] [comments]

Another small haul review after trying everything on. Picked up a Porsche jacket, Stone Island pieces, a couple Bape items, and some sweats and shorts. Overall theme is pretty consistent. Most stuff fits true to size, but a few pieces like the Bape tees and ALO sweats run a bit small so sizing up helps. Materials across the board are a bit lighter than retail, which is expected, but nothing feels terrible. The Porsche and Stone Island jackets look especially clean on body, even if they are not as heavy. Ksubi jeans fit nice and skinny like retail, just less rigid. Sweats and shorts are solid for everyday wear. Comfortable and easy to throw into rotation without worrying too much. Overall pretty satisfied for the price. Let me know if anyone wants more detailed pics or fit info. submitted by /u/Agile_Veterinarian_6 to r/fashionrepsv2 [link] [comments]

I just got a haul of shorts and a couple pants from American Eagle. Almost all of these (except a pair of white shorts) are size 0 (25) although I tried a 00 to see if that would improve waist gap (sort of). If any of you are looking to try shorts from this brand maybe this will be helpful for you! I’m trying to figure out what to keep and what to return (budget is 2-3 items at most). In order: Next Level High Waist Shortie (black) Next Level Curvy High Waist Shortie (black) Next Level Low Rise Midi Short (Blue) Next Level Low Rise Midi Short (White) Stretch Midrise A Line Short (white) Stovepipe Crop Stovepipe Pants Ok here are my goals and intentions with this purchase: I don’t own any white shorts (I returned those LOFT ones I posted a couple weeks ago due to the rise being too high), but also I don’t own any denim shorts yet or white pants. I’m a mom in my late 30s and don’t want my shorts to feel toooo short so I’m leaning a bit to the longer inseam, but I also don’t know if that’s the most flattering. I have the hardest time finding that are loose enough around the thighs. I do need more dressier shorts eventually to pair with blouses, these lean more casual. I am also anti-“distressed” look on any denim as well. Note: I didn’t notice much of a difference between the “Curve” and the regular black shorts. If anything the Regular felt a little tighter in the leg hole and more roomy in the upper hip, but neither had a difference in waistband gap (they both have an extra 1” that should be tailored.) Almost all of the shorts had a slight bit of loose waist gap in the back. Update: OK it seems like the verdict is that I look really good in white, and “looser” styles seem to be in right now. The tighter styles really emphasize muscular legs which could be a plus, but also given I’m a really solid inverted triangle that going looser helps balance. Apparently the cropped stovepipe jeans are a hit with me (I wouldn’t have thought, I would hem them up to where I folded them so they end at the smallest of my ankle), and I should explore more A-line styles. AE Jean pockets are ginormous in general. I’m not as a fan of the large pocket of #6 A line shorts so I will hold onto those until I find other short that might fit better. Keeping #7 cropped jeans but getting them hemmed. #8 returning just due to keeping 7 instead and they are very similar, hoping to look for a more lighter summery feeling pair like white linen instead. The tighter jeans I realized after a bit of walking that they ride up a little so I’m returning them. submitted by /u/powersofthesnow to r/PetiteFashionAdvice [link] [comments]

So I just got back from Japan and I want to vent about my experience being out “in the wild” in kimono. Sorry this is a bit of a vent/request for confidence boosting 🙈 One of the things I really wanted to do while I was there was go out to one of the gardens we were visiting wearing kimono. I had just picked up the denim kimono I ordered from Kurashiki Kimono Komachi which is my first custom ordered kimono and was excited to wear it out and take pictures at Korakuen in Okayama. My friend I was traveling with was waiting for me to finish getting dressed so we could check out of our hotel, and I knew I needed to change the position of my koshihimo because my ohashori was too long and my hem a little too short, but I felt bad making her wait while I basically redressed when I knew my obi was going to take time too. I kept trying to convince myself I was being hyper critical, and just because I know I can do a better kitsuke doesn’t mean I have to do it now. But the proportions bugged me all day long and I feel like I look goofy in most of the pictures we went out of the way to take at Korakuen and Yumeji art museum. (Included a couple I do actually like... for reassurance.) At the end of the day at Okayama station I walked past a bunch of high school girls that I swear I heard talking about me when I was leaving the bathroom (嘘でしょ。あんな似合わない人は着ないで欲しい。”you gotta be kidding me. I wish someone that looked that bad wouldn’t wear that” which maybe they weren’t talking about me but I also heard something aboutジーンズみたい “like jeans” and I was wearing a denim kimono. So.) The last part of this long day was to take the Shinkansen from Okayama to Tokyo and check into our hotel there, and I didn’t know where I’d be able to change clothes, so I also wore my kimono on the Shinkansen and hauling my luggage to our hotel in Tokyo, sweating all the way because it was way too hot on the Shinkansen… this hanhaba and obijime stayed tied so well through all of this! Then in Tokyo while trying to find our hotel I had to listen to a bunch of probably drunk guys walking behind me like なんで着物？！どこから来たんだろう？！着物？？(“why is she in kimono?! Where the heck did she come from? Kimono??”) i kept resisting the urge to turn around to tell them that if they were curious they could just ask me like a person and I’d answer, but I didn’t actually want to engage them. I expected kimono police, not kimono mean girls and rude young adult men. I know I was probably over sensitive already because I didn’t like how my kitsuke turned out, but has anyone experienced this kind of negativity, especially people who wear kimono in their daily lives? I know especially by the end of the day I probably didn’t look my best and was being weird by modern standards by hauling a suitcase in kimono, but if they’re just clothes and I want to incorporate them into my life as clothes I should be able to live my life in them… or at least, that’s what I kept telling myself. The lady in the cafe at Yumeji said I looked nice and two college aged girls in a vintage store in Okayama that we were chatting with also said my look was おしゃれ (stylish) so that’s really what I should dwell on, because just like back home in the US the rude people probably aren’t my people. But for better or worse I’m always more sensitive about how I’m being perceived in Japan, and the voice I hear in my head when looking at my pictures is the high school girls, whether they were talking about me or not. Just wanted to vent about this experience since it’s been really bugging me 😩 Once I get over jet lag I’ll try to style and post some pictures of the other pieces I bought in Japan because I found some really cute stuff and I did talk to a lot of lovely kimono sellers who were very happy that I was interested in kimono during my shopping journey across the country! submitted by /u/eyyuen to r/kimono [link] [comments]

Forget the carefully polished fairytale, the one dripping with manufactured innocence. She's cemented her throne in Bollywood, and that's not up for debate—she's here to stay, damn the consequences. But the truth about who birthed her? That's the real fire, and for too long, the Bollywood PR machine has smothered it. Welcome to the one place where we can finally tear down the velvet curtain and expose the raw, unedited family album without some puppet master forcing a takedown. Brace yourselves: the real father's ghost is about to materialize. (More info on the real father is in this post, below.) First, let’s gut the bullshit narrative. This pathetic, pity-baiting gossip about a childhood starved of cash, a life propped up by skeevy modeling gigs, maybe even a rumored dip in the digital filth of adult films, or some psycho cult membership? Pure, unadulterated fantasy. Yeah, a divorce rips a kid apart, and she had a "colorful" upbringing, a euphemism for being hauled across continents. But let’s get real: her mother was an alleged lawyer from Bath, England, who then pivoted to social work. That isn't "struggle"; that's a wealthy, upper-crust bohemian life. Her mother, still doing the saintly work with her partner, Jessie Joseph Tincher, was clearly not scraping pennies. Homeschooling by private tutors because you're a global nomad? That screams money. Every single sibling—except maybe poor Isabelle, who merely studied theatre—is highly accomplished, holding down advanced degrees and proper careers. No cult survivor is that well-adjusted, damn it. They’d be basket cases. The Kaif clan's trajectory is infuriatingly normal. Look, the official story, the one she feeds the press, goes something like this: The father is an untouchable phantom. "No. I have no idea where it is. My mother and my father – when they split, we were very young. And for reasons my mom would like to keep private, they went their separate ways and the contact after that was very, very bare minimal. So my dad, unfortunately, and not out of choice, has had no influence on our upbringing, on our religious or social or moral bearings. Whatever it has been – it’s just been my mother. https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/entertainment/hindi/bollywood/news/Im-not-dumb-Katrina/articleshow/7162203.cms" This is the line. Yet, this is a family so ferociously tight-knit—look at Christine's wedding, or Natacha's August nuptials—they don't carry the stench of deep-seated trauma. They're all over-educated and thriving, a colossal middle finger to the "troubled youth" narrative. She even admitted she was a "perfect daughter" until the ripe old age of 15, introverted, a child her family pegged for a doctor. Source: https://youtu.be/SLAKEAEHurs?t=179 That’s not a low-income kid hustling for scraps; that's privilege. She even stumbled once, mentioning “if there is ever a family get together,” quickly covering her tracks because her PR bible dictates a story of perpetual motion across Europe (France, Poland, Belgium—all easy for a British citizen) and a short, convenient Hawaiian layover. Her mother, the lawyer, was "successful," by Katrina's own account. The only thing "wild" was maybe a few amateur modeling snaps between 15-17 in London, her brief, rebellious teenage flush. (And let's be absolutely clear, the porno rumors are garbage; she was a minor, and their friend Terry Stephen’s is a legitimate producer. That's a serious crime, not a celebrity gossip footnote.) But the real insult is the heritage lie. As recently as 2019, while pushing the ridiculously titled Bharat, she doubled down on the deceit: "This election, as with every election, citizenship was a hot topic and Bollywood celebrities with foreign citizenship saw their patriotism being questioned. Katrina too holds a British passport, while her upcoming film is ironically titled, Bharat. She says, “I am an Indian and my father is Indian. I have an Indian heritage. There are many actresses who hold different passports. One could hold a different passport due to various reasons. But my father is Indian and that is my origin,” and adds, “Although my mother is British, India has always been my home. It has been my home since the time I was 17. This is the country in which I live and work.” https://www.asianage.com/age-on-sunday/010619/my-father-is-indian-thats-my-origin-katrina-kaif.html" She nods along in this clip, confirming the Indian/Kashmiri father: https://youtu.be/gratZDAQ2sI?t=878. There was that convenient "Uncle" in Bangalore, a civil engineer, we only heard about once, right as her career took off. She sold the whole, beautifully manufactured story to Indian Express: She is "hundred per cent Indian," a world traveler whose mother was a "Harvard graduate, a very successful lawyer who gave it up to join a charitable organisation." She came to India with only Rs 4 lakh, she claims, a desperate gambler betting on her career. Ayesha Shroff spilled the name-change tea, and Katrina's defense? "Her father, Mohammad Kaif, lives in America and is quite a well-to-do businessman, she says, who has no interest in reaching out to her. She claims he is a Kashmiri, though it is a most unusual name in those parts. 'It's a closed topic for our family,' says Katrina. 'My mother's been married twice. It's a common thing, even here in India. She deserves her privacy. Why is there this constant questioning of my parentage?' https://www.indiatoday.in/profile/story/the-rise-of-bollywood-beauty-katrina-kaif-126985-2011-01-28" The legal name shuffle? "My last name is Turquotte, which I have taken after my mother’s name. I don’t understand this constant scrutiny about my last name. There are other actors too, such as Ajay Devgn and Akshay Kumar, who have got different names on their passports. I wonder why the media doesn’t ask them the same questions!” https://www.hindustantimes.com/entertainment/do-you-ask-for-akshay-s-passport-asks-katrina/story-iMr8rmbNUYkfkyNBzKSsAO.html AND “And for people wondering, yes, my passport name is Katrina Turquotte. I changed it because it'll be easier for people to call me. Nothing more." https://www.timesnownews.com/entertainment/news/people/article/do-you-know-why-katrina-kaif-changed-her-surname-mohammad-kaif-find-out-here-bollywood-news/286774 The unspoken punchline? She claims to have changed her legal name from her white mother's surname, Turcotte, to her supposed Indian father's surname, Kaif. But that's the smoke screen. That's the lie that allows her to be the beautiful desi heartbreak she's sold herself as. The Turcotte Line: The Eight-Barrel Shotgun of Truth Let's dissect the family tree she tried to bury: They're all alarmingly close in age. Stephanie (b. 1977, now in Atlanta, running a slick dog care operation: https://www.mawnpaws.com/), Michael (a.k.a. Sebastian Turcotte, b. 1978, building bespoke furniture: https://sebastienbespoke.blogspot.com), Christine (b. 1981, married, UK, slinging lashes: https://www.instagram.com/christinelashes/—followed by Nadiadwala, hilarious), Natacha (b. 1982, getting hitched in August, gorgeous), Katrina (b. 1984, the main event), Melissa (b. 1985, a goddamn Mathematician from Imperial College: http://www.imperial.ac.uk/news/75083/imperial-maths-students-sweep-board-science/#maincontent), Sonia (b. 1989, London-based Designer, chasing a master's: soniaturcotte.com), and the youngest, Isabelle (b. 1991, the other actress). They all use the Turcotte name (barring Christine's married name) like a damn shield against truth-seekers. BUT HERE IS THE BOMB. The picture that blows the "Mohammad Kaif" farce to smithereens. Originally posted by Melissa, it shows her standing with the man we are confident is the real father: Ronald Turcotte. The eldest, Stephanie, is right there in the comments, casually calling him “Dad” and noting he “still looks young.” Melissa is pictured with her half or step siblings, Kevin and Nicole, whom Ronald is raising with his wife, Beet Turcotte. Wait. Beet has the surname Turcotte. That is the key! It means Turcotte is Ronald's surname, not merely Suzanne's maiden name. Which means Katrina is 100% Caucasian—French/Canadian on the father’s side, British on the mother’s. No Kashmiri spice. Just pure white. The photo of Melissa and Ronald Turcotte's family The evidence is overwhelming: There is no Mohammad Kaif. Ronald Turcotte is the father of all eight children, and he was absolutely a part of their lives, maintaining contact even after his divorce and marrying Beet. He is not a Kashmiri businessman who vanished into the American wind; he is a man on Facebook, in Montreal, Quebec, Canada, with a wife and kids, and all his relations are publicly visible. The whole Jean Louis Duran rumor? It's cheap, made-up drama designed to sell the "bohemian, multiple-partner mother" lie, all to soften the landing for the "Indian father" deceit. Suzanne was likely married only once to Ronald, and she’s now with Jessie Joseph Tincher, her NGO partner since at least 2007. Stephanie's comment on Beet's photo is pure, unvarnished proof. Christmas fun. Finally, the nail in the coffin: Roland is friends with all his children online. Stephanie, Christine, Natacha... and look closer: "Ann Roberts" is actually Isabelle Kaif, the younger sister. They all share a damn father. Let's see the PR jackals try to delete this. It was all public data, you just had to pull the thread. This is the Kaif family. No mystery, no Bollywood spin, just the brutal, riveting truth. submitted by /u/Jeetchat to r/bollynewsandgossips [link] [comments]

Hello again r/TrueFilm. I watched One Battle After Another a few times and posted this review to Letterboxd. As someone who loves cars, this is my favourite PTA film by a mile. Below you can read why: Most directors become disillusioned by politics later in their lives. Especially the Italians. Just take Bertolucci or Pasolini, both committed Marxists and Catholics, who made radical films up until the 1970s. Then they pivoted, became more critical of both the left and the right. For Bertolucci, “he fell out of love with politics.” But for Pasolini, it was more personal, arguing that consumer capitalism destroyed class consciousness. Pasolini’s bleakest and most nihilistic political film was also his most infamous: Salò. It became well-known for its depravity, moreso than its political critique. And yet, two years before its release, Pasolini admitted in an interview with Le Monde: “I can no longer believe in revolution, but I can’t help being on the side of the young people who are fighting for it.” It’s a line that captures the core contradiction of so many post-revolutionary artists: the loss of belief, but not of allegiance. Which is what makes Paul Thomas Anderson’s latest One Battle After Another both an exception to the rule and a reflection of it. He never made overtly political films like Bertolucci or Pasolini did. Maybe because he belonged to a generation shaped not by the fire of revolution but by the ashes of its failure. By the time Anderson was discovering cinema, the era of militant auteurs had already receded into history. This generational distance explains, partly, why the Gen-X wave of filmmakers were considerably more skeptical, allergic to dogma. PTA's contemporaries, Tarantino and Nolan, didn't inherit the revolutionary fervor of their European predecessors; they inherited its collapse. It also might explain why both auteurs represent a return to the apolitical craftsmanship of studio-era Hollywood, closer to Howard Hawks or William Wyler than to Godard. Their politics, if present at all, were sublimated into style and genre. The message was no longer the manifesto. It was the medium. Which makes Anderson's choice for his revolutionaries' name, the French 75, so loaded with historical irony. The cocktail appears in Pynchon's Inherent Vice, but transforming it into the name of a radical ANTIFA-adjacent group is pure Anderson. The name is perhaps a nod to the French countercultural movements championed by filmmakers like Jean-Luc Godard, who between 1968 and 1972 abandoned commercial filmmaking entirely to produce agitprop with the Dziga Vertov Group—from La Chinoise (1967) through Letter to Jane (1972). By 1974, the collective had dissolved, and Godard retreated from Maoist militancy into what he would later call his "wilderness years." In naming American pseudo-revolutionaries after a champagne cocktail with French military origins, Anderson encodes the entire trajectory: revolutionary cinema as imported commodity, radical politics as intoxicant, and the ultimate effervescence of both. The French 75 isn’t exactly resistance. It’s a retreat into aesthetics. Rather, it was what you ordered after the revolution failed. And in both this Gen-X reckoning and Tarantino's Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, Leonardo DiCaprio becomes the vessel for something darker: someone whose exchanged his dreams with the drink. Where European auteurs once believed cinema could ignite revolution, these films offer a drunken revision for the author’s own reckoning with their complicity in Hollywood's machinery of myth-making, the very apparatus that anesthetized whatever revolutionary impulse the counterculture once possessed. In Tarantino's revisionism, he takes aim at the bullshit liberalism the hippy counterculture curdled into. Anderson’s target is more formidable: the military industrial complex. It’s a fairer fight, or at least a more honest one. As Hollywood's collaboration with the Pentagon and intelligence agencies deepened throughout the 2000s - Zero Dark Thirty, the Marvel military partnerships, the CIA's script consultations, Gen-X irony started to look less like detachment and more like complicity. The nihilism that seemed like coked-out swagger in the '90s needed some re-evaluation. Anderson's film, arriving amid this cozy arrangement between entertainment and empire, reads less as political cinema than as confession: here's what we were too stoned, too cynical, or too drunk to fight when it mattered. Bob, then, is a great surrogate for the director. It’s a self-deprecating creation that embodies the kind of apolitical aimlessness of his works pre-There Will Be Blood. In both that and Licorice Pizza, you saw the politics edging into his canvas. But both also touched upon a different revolution: the industrial revolution and America’s oil empire. There Will Be Blood traced how that empire was born in California dirt and blood, while Licorice Pizza showed it already fossilized into the 1973 gas crisis, the moment most Americans realized their entire way of life ran on someone else's oil. Perhaps this is why so much of One Battle After Another runs on deliberately similar motifs. Take the first image of the film: Perfidia Beverly Hills (Teyana Taylor) running along the interstate highway in the opposite direction of massive long-haul trucks, a roaring echo of the truck Alana Kane has to reverse down a street in Licorice Pizza, as it crawls on empty. One Battle closes with Perfidia's daughter Willa climbing into a compact sedan, racing toward a revolution her mother was exiled from. Between these two images - flight and pursuit, mother and daughter, the same California highways - Anderson maps the distance between generations, and the shrinking space left to move. Or consider that PTA locates his white-knuckle climax set piece as a trilateral car chase set against the Borrego Springs in California. There is a comedic paradox, undoubtedly known by PTA, about writing a film about a revolution in the car-loving capital of Hollywood. As a car guy (embarrassing I know), that scene homages some of the greatest vehicles ever put to screen: The white Dodge Charger - Introduced in 1966, immortalized two years later when the hitmen in Bullitt drove it chasing Steve McQueen through San Francisco. Pure American muscle, the villain's car. The blue Ford Mustang - McQueen's ride in Bullitt, the earlier fastback model. American-born and bred, the hero's weapon. The purple Nissan Tsuru - Iconic in Mexico, where it reigned as the most popular car for decades and became the default taxi of Mexico City. A working-class standard, beloved and utilitarian, that barely registered north of the border. For Anderson to stage this chase with two icons of American cinema mythology - the Charger and Mustang, locked in their eternal Bullitt dance - against the Tsuru is to encode the entire geopolitical subtext. The American muscle cars carry Hollywood's fantasy of rebellion: beautiful, loud, built for the chase scene. The Tsuru carries actual revolution: a Mexican guerrilla in a car designed for survival, not spectacle. It's the French 75 paradox in automotive form. American radicalism as performance art versus the real thing crossing the border in a taxi. It’s even more exacting in that message when you consider the fate of those American muscle cars. One ends up rear-ended into destruction and the other’s front fender is mutilated. That the only surviving car is the Tsuru is hilarious. The icons of American cinema, the very vehicles that taught us what rebellion looks like on screen, don't make it. They're too heavy, too mythologized, too built for the wrong kind of fight. The Tsuru survives because it was never performing revolution; it was simply doing it. In Anderson's hands, this climax becomes the film's central indictment: how can American political cinema be taken seriously when, for over a century, its grand battles have been little more than sieges for oil? Furthermore: how can a revolutionary film be produced in the country’s second-largest consumer of oil? A culture so entangled with extraction and consumption cannot help but aestheticize revolt instead of enacting it. Its entire industry packages dissent as genre, as myth, as marketable style, while the very material conditions it critiques are sustained by its own production apparatus. The contradiction is total, and Anderson makes sure we feel the weight of it in that scene. It’s so integral to consider just how cars became central symbols of American mythology in this context. From Bullittto American Graffitti to the Fast franchise today, America's iconography is cemented by its cars and cinema. Coppola understood this when he made Tucker: The Man and His Dream, recognizing the automobile industry and cinema as twin mythologies. Both built on innovation, both ultimately strangled by corporate protectionism. On the press tour for Tetro, he said: ”It was about the very thing that we now see so evident in the automobile industry. Sometimes the executives in this industry tend to overly protect the way things are and the way things are done. You see that with film executives. Hollywood is the next Detroit, in my opinion.” Talk about a prescient fucking quote. But also a diagnostic key for One Battle After Another. Every man in Anderson's film reeks of this terminal over-protectiveness. Bob is pathological in his need to shield Willa. Colonel Lockjaw obsessively guards his valor and reputation among his White Supremacist peers. Howard "Billy Goat" (Paul Grimstad) - who bears an uncanny resemblance to a young Coppola - paranoiacally protects the French 75's code words as if they were scripture. When he sits behind his CB Radio, twisting dials, it’s like Coppola and Harry Caul from The Conversation collapse into one anxious figure: the artist as surveillance obsessive. This paternal protectiveness saturates every frame, and Anderson treats it as the film's original sin: not revolution's failure, but the masculine impulse to guard, control, and ultimately suffocate it. Where Detroit's executives protected market share until they had nothing left to protect, these men protect themselves from a revolution and for a revolution. But to what end? Nostalgia? There’s a great image of Bob that feels in conversation with the now-famous meme of Rick Dalton in Once Upon a Time in Hollywood pointing at his TV set in recognition of himself. It’s Bob trying desperately to keep his roach cherry lit while watching Battle of Algiers. Both are a man glimpsing into the past for self-identification. Both men (and directors) are defined by their relationship to screens, and both can mistake consumption for participation. While Rick's delusion is almost innocent: he really was on that TV show, he really did throw those punches (however choreographed). Bob's delusion is sadder, a longing for a fight he once fought alongside his love. While Rick pointing says "that's me"; Bob lighting up says "that could be me." A nostalgia for a revolution that never did. Tarantino's joke is about Hollywood eating itself through the television but Anderson's is darker. It's about American Hollywood radicalism as pure affect, revolutionary identity built entirely from myth. The roach goes out. The film keeps playing. Another revealing paradox that both Pynchon and Anderson recognized was America's most radical revolutionary movements and the societies that tried to thwart them, incubated in California, the very state built on oil. The Black Panthers, founded in Oakland in 1966 and serving as the clear template for Anderson's French 75, arose in the East Bay. The Bohemian Grove (one of several models for the film's Christmas Adventurers), a secret society of presidents, oil executives, and defense contractors was created in Sonoma County. California's geography literalizes the contradiction: revolutionary Oakland and establishment Bohemian Grove separated by a few hours' drive along highways built by Standard Oil money. This isn't coincidence, but causality. Oil, like movies, made California what it is: the freeways that enabled white flight and suburban sprawl, the petrochemical plants that poisoned poor neighborhoods, the economic boom that created both massive wealth and the underclass that would revolt against it. The Panthers emerged in Oakland not despite the oil infrastructure but because of it, organizing in the shadow of Richmond's refineries, recruiting from communities devastated by the very industry that powered California's myth of endless expansion. And the Grove? It's where the architects of that oil empire retreated to congratulate themselves, to perform their mock-pagan rituals, while planning the policies that would crush the movements gestating an hour away. It feels deliberate that the film is bookended by car chases. First, through the busy streets of an unnamed California city. This sequence feels in direct homage to New York’s The French Connection and Night of the Juggler. While the final one, through the long stretches of the hilly desert landscape, are right out of Spielberg’s West-Coast debut Duel or James Cameron’s West-coast chase in Terminator 2. Wedged in the middle of the film is a rooftop chase on foot between the police and Bob. That particular chase, for me, punctuates Bob as surrogate for PTA. Here is an older guy trying to keep up with the youth who now run on foot and skateboards. It is the arthouse equivalent of How Do You Do, Fellow Kids?. Here is Anderson humbly establishing his place in the New World. That he should end that sequence homaging the great rooftop falls of, say, Buster Keaton in Three Ages (1923) is really exposing the master's age. But also the timelessness of cinema's oldest gags. That, yes, there is something kinda cringe about an older director trying to hold onto the ledge of his past triumphs in contemporary culture, but that revolutions, like that rooftop fall, are cyclical. The old gag resurfaces in new contexts, the artist lands hard but gets back up, and the chase continues. Since its release, critics have been chasing PTA down about his cultural clout in surfacing such politically heated subjects. And fair enough. You can't help but feel Anderson get defensive when Bob gets in an argument with Comrade Josh about being "nitpick-y” about the answer to his passcode. It's the director forecasting the reviews critical of his political maneuvering, but also perhaps the auteur poking fun at his own reputation as a meticulous formalist: the filmmaker accused of caring more about tracking shots than social justice, more about period detail than present urgency. To have portrayed revolutionaries in the most accurate light would actually sap the paranoid comedy of its juice. Bob's exasperation with Josh mirrors the criticism lobbed at Anderson himself: that his films are beautiful but “he ain’t that guy.” But the self-awareness becomes the argument. By letting Bob fumble through these confrontations, by making him the butt of the joke rather than its teller, Anderson admits what his critics have always suspected: that he might not have all the answers, that he “doesn’t know what time it is.” It’s at this moment when Bob has to go above ranks to get some recognition. Here, like other moments, you see Anderson create these disturbing mirrors between the military rank and file and the revolutionary rank and file. When Bob calls for his “superior,” it’s ultimately the joke at the expense of Bob, but also at the expense of the Leftist navel-gazing revolutionaries. These kids who scorn authority structures have simply rebuilt them with different titles. It's Anderson's sharpest observation: that every movement, no matter how radical its rhetoric, eventually reproduces the systems it claims to oppose. The irony isn't lost on Bob, or on Anderson. Both are asking permission from people who theoretically don't believe in permission. Both are navigating bureaucracies that insist they aren't bureaucracies. And both are discovering that the New World looks suspiciously like the old one. This is, perhaps, also Anderson reckoning with his own fate, of becoming the establishment that the new generation of filmmakers seek to destroy. It feels like a film centred around a child being stuck in between the military industrial complex and the burnout pseudo-revolutionary is about the tug of war between tradition and revolution, between the old guard and the insurgents, between the canon and its would-be destroyers. If you were to take account of every film made with revolutionary ideas versus films that galvanized and glamourized the military, the latter would win by a landslide. Cinema has always been more comfortable with the aesthetics of power, rather than with the messy work of dismantling it. It's probably why Bertolucci exchanged the radical fervour of Before the Revolution for the sumptuous majesty of The Last Emperor. Anderson knows this. Even his own filmography leans toward the powerful: oil barons carving up California in There Will Be Blood, fashion obsessed Woodcock in Phantom Thread, cult leader Dodd in *The Master.*He's made a career out of rendering American ambition. What interests me about One Battle and, to some extent, Licorice is that here is a director trying to traverse directory into a weirder route, an action comedy as directed by Robert Downey Sr. We also bear witness to Anderson tackling action terrifically. Say what you will about the politics, you really can’t argue with the technical prowess of the chase sequences. Anderson takes the formal chops from those Pentagon-vetted (CIA-funded) Mission Impossible films and supplants them into the counter-operative. But then he has enough self-awareness to know he can’t pull that shit off when Sergio calls him Tom Cruise, shortly before Bob just hits the road with a pathetic tuck and roll. Folks might argue Anderson satirizes the revolutionaries unfairly. But, I mean, the villains are literally called the Christmas Adventurers. This is like something out of William Klein’s Mr. Freedom. And again, with that Christmas Adventurers club, we find the lower ranked member played by the heir to Hollywood royalty, Tony Goldwyn, grandson to the legendary film producer Samuel Goldwyn. I don't think PTA is casting the guy who literally tries to chase Willa down and blow her head off with a shotgun by accident. Willa, like the film itself, becomes the target that old Hollywood, as embodied by Goldwyn's lineage, wants to destroy. Legacy cinema, is always threatened by something scrappier and less polished (see: 1970s New Hollywood), and takes aim. Willa isn’t just taking control of the Dodge Charger (the past), she’s destroying it in bloody spectacle. Anderson casts Hollywood royalty as the executioner chasing down his own messy, unruly creation. The fact that Virgil (Goldwyn) drives a Blue Mustang GT, the modern equivalent of Steve McQueen's chariot in Bullitt, and nearly kills himself at top speed of that chase is brilliant. The establishment appropriating the iconography of rebellion, turning countercultural cool into a weapon against the actual counterculture. This is fascinating filmmaking disguised as a stoner comedy. Undergirding all of the comedic spectacle, there is tragedy within One Battle. I think it's unfair to say that political movements don't, by necessity, mirror the institutions they oppose. In various accounts within the Black Panther Party - which was 2/3rds women, by the way - you had Elaine Brown who wrote in her autobiography, A Taste of Power: Ericka, my daughter, who, at seven years old, had never lived with her mother. There was a disturbing unfamiliarity in having her close. I had been a Black Panther all the years of her life-not her mother, in any meaningful way. Perhaps it was that in the apartment there was space to finally look at myself after thirty-four years of living with others. All of it seemed strange and uncomfortable. Revolutions kinda demands the same sacrifice as the empire: the erasure of the personal, the subordination of family to a cause, the sublimation to the collective. Then sometimes that collective betrays your sacrifice. Lockjaw sacrifices his life and gets brutally betrayed by his Christmas club. His final cremation echoing the infamous “Cremation of Care” ritual at Bohemian Grove . Perfidia sacrifices her comrades and, ultimately, her daughter. In her wake, Bob lives in lingering grief, but Willa is a constant reminder of Perfidia’s sacrifice. No wonder he doesn’t want to lose her..Thus, another paradox emerges in the story. Sometimes we get overly protective of the people (and things) we love because we know what was sacrificed in order to keep them alive. It’s why that dad rock needle drop of Steely Dan’s Dirty Workto Willa practicing Karate brought me to tears upon 2nd viewing. It is Anderson as his most personal as a father, and as his most crucially sensitive as a Cancerian filmmaker. When Bob is at a teacher-parent interview, he tries to hold back his tears of pride by politicizing the classroom. Pointing out the flaws of American History academia. Politics are the personal, sure. But the scene begs a better question: how do we use politics as something to guard against our emotions? How do politics sublimate the personal? We laugh at Bob, but we also kinda want to cry. This is the formal chops of a master and ultimately why I think this is one of those “once in a generation” films. I don’t say that lightly. The great European political filmmakers of the 60s and 70s didn’t so much abandon politics as they did understand their limits. Their filmmaking bent toward the private and the interior. Bertolucci gave us The Dreamers, where the revolution of 68 are already remembered through an intimate bedroom. Godard retreated into personal video essays about memory. In other words, they moved from the political to the personal. What Anderson does here isn't retreat from the political or the personal but a head-on collision of both, with a twist of that good ol’ American spectacle. The spectacle doesn't negate the politics. It's the only language Anderson has left. As an American, as a Hollywood director, he can’t escape the fact that his politics arrive packaged in car chases and needle drops, in the aesthetic fetish of VistaVision. This is what makes it generational. Not because it solves anything or “gets it right” but because it's the first American film in decades willing to show the seams, to let the contradictions breathe, to admit that he’s kinda caught in the vines of a revolution that’s he both started and is too late for, yet still somehow trying. Like traversing those hilly canyons, not knowing what's ahead but catching glimpses of what's worth chasing, even if - like drunken Bob in a Tsuru - you never quite catch up. submitted by /u/ace_666 to r/TrueFilm [link] [comments]

Note: Several of these sources are in French and I have no skill for languages, so I used google translate to translate them. Apologies for any errors. Chapter One - A Novel Idea In medieval times, most books were written by hand, by monks in monasteries, in halls called Scriptoriums. By the 12th century, the process had become commercialised and most book writing was done by guilds and workshops. Then Johannes Gutenberg invented the mechanical printing press in the mid-15th century, and nothing was ever the same again. The books that were printed on the earliest printing presses are known as Incunabula: Incunabula are books, pamphlets, and broadsides that were printed in Europe before the year 1501. Incunabula represent the earliest age of printing, and they printed in two distinct ways. Incunabula were printed either by block book printing style or by typographic book printing. The block book printed incunabula were carved or sculpted into single wooden "pages", and the typographic book printed incunabula were made with pieces of cast metal movable type used on a printing press. The Gutenberg Bible of 1455 and the Nuremberg Chronicle are both examples of incunabula, and both are highly valuable pieces of literature. Because of their origins, Incunabula are valuable. Very valuable. Many of them sell for thousands of dollars, and the most valuable ones can go for hundreds of thousands, and even millions- in 1987 an original Gutenberg bible sold for 4.9 million. By the end of the 16th century, hundreds of millions of books had been printed, due to the printing press having spread to towns and cities all across Europe. Most of these books are not worth as much as Incunabula. However some of them, such as the first editions of works by scientists such as Copernicus, are just as valuable, or even more valuable, than many Incunabula. Nowadays, these early books are prime targets for enterprising thieves. Most of these thieves either worked at libraries or institutions with rare book collections or were antiquarian book dealers. Opportunistic thieves- who are unconnected to the world of rare books - are far rarer. Chapter Two – He Booked It Mont Saint-Odile is a 7th century picturesque monastery nestled in the Vosges Mountains in Alsace, in Northern France. By the 21st century, it had become a tourist destination, with a hotel and restaurant. Oh, it also has a large library, full of old books. Some of them are very valuable: In the 1990s, an amateur historian started drawing an inventory and had found ancient editions of works by Aristotle, Homer, and the Roman playwright Terence. Especially valuable were 10 incunabula — rare books printed before 1501, during the earliest years of the printing press. Sermons by Augustine, bound in sow skin, from 1489. Three Latin Bibles, printed in Basel and Strasbourg. Works by the Roman poet Virgil, printed in 1492 in Nuremberg. A Bible commentary by Peter Lombard, a 12th-century Italian scholar. https://preview.redd.it/uzvy4x33r3rf1.jpg?width=1320&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=d74ab396af30f37afd6587af7987172b310a4313 In August 2000, books started to go missing. The door to the library was often left unlocked. The thief had just strolled right in and taken several books off the shelf, including one of the library’s priceless Incunabula. The monastery staff filed a police complaint, but the theft was dismissed as one-time incident. Then suddenly, in November, the rest of the Incunabula disappeared. This time the authorities sprang into action: The gendarmes began an investigation and soon roamed the area. License plate numbers were noted; tourists spending a night in one of the guesthouse’s 110 rooms, scrutinized; personnel, screened. “It was like looking for a needle in a haystack,” says Jean-Pierre Schackis, the main investigator on the case, 51 at the time. More than one million people visit Mont Sainte-Odile every year, and the surveillance cameras at the site entrance didn’t even work properly. The locks on the library door were changed, and signs were put up. The thefts stopped…for a while. In April 2002, a housekeeper, Véronique Buntz, noticed that many of the shelves were suddenly empty. Hundreds of books had gone missing. There were no signs of forced entry. Everyone was flummoxed, especially the new librarian, Alain Donius. “It was particularly disturbing,” says Donius. “The atmosphere was tense,” recalls Gabriel Dietrich, a janitor, now retired, 52 at the time. “It was surreal,” remembers Buntz. “One thinks: It’s impossible! How can books disappear when the windows aren’t broken, when there’s no sign of break-in? Fr Alain was in despair as gaps widened on the shelves in the vaulted stone chamber. The thief appeared to be particularly keen on removing 15th century treasures that pre-dated the invention of the printing press. "There was no sign of a break-in, yet our library was gradually being emptied," he said. "I thought to myself, 'One day I'll come in and there'll be nothing left'." The locks were changed twice more, but books kept disappearing. Suspicion enveloped the monastery. At the time, it had 50 employees- including three priests and four nuns. Everyone had to sign a form stating they were not responsible for the thefts. Véronique even gave up her own key to the library to prove she was not the thief. Donius became afraid to enter the Library: “I didn’t dare to go back to the library anymore,” says Alain Donius. Since no one knows how "he" comes in or "he" goes out, who can say that "he" is not there at this moment? How was the thief getting in and out of the room? He must be some sort of extraordinarily gifted escape artist, or a literal magician, able to materialise through walls and pilfer books in the dead of night. Chapter Three – Lit-terally the Worst Thing Ever After several successful thefts, the thief left Donius a taunting message: a single rose on the steps of the Library. The police suspected they might be stealing the books to sell them, so they checked all the auction houses and antique bookshops in France and Germany but found nothing. In the end they realised that there was only one way that the thief was entering and existing the library: "It was really a perfect mystery," Ms Simoncello (public prosecutor in the nearby town of Saverne) said. "The convent had the locks changed once, then a second and a third time, and the windows sealed. The thefts stopped for a while, then started again this Easter. That's when we started thinking seriously about the possibility of another entrance." In May, after three devastating thefts in a row, the police changed tactics. They searched the library from top to bottom and found something: Only when a a local gendarme put his weight against the wall behind a bookcase did a section swing smoothly back to reveal a small room in which a rope ladder gave access to the roof space above. From there, a narrow corridor led to a workshop in another wing of the monastery that had been turned into a hotel for tourists and pilgrims. "The library was once the chapter room of the nuns in the convent here," said Fr Alain, tapping on the wall beside the secret entrance. "Maybe the passageway was installed so that someone could spy on them." Yep. The thief had been using a secret passage to enter the library at night and steal books. What a twist. The police *finally* realised they could put up CCTV cameras and catch the thief in the act: "On Sunday, the gendarmes noticed the library had been visited again," Ms Simoncello said. "A number of items had been removed from the shelves and placed in a pile waiting for the thief's next visit. We installed a video camera in the hotel workshop - and he was caught in the act that same night." The thief was finally revealed…it was just some ordinary guy who really loved reading. Specifically, a 32-year-old engineering teacher from a town near Strasbourg, named Stanislas Gosse. Chapter Four – The Folio of a Thief When they arrested Gosse, he had been carrying nearly 300 books in two suitcases. He had discovered the secret passageway by reading an article in a history magazine called ‘The Alsatian Notebooks of Archaeology, Art and History’ in the Strasbourg University library: That, the prosecutor said, was the last element of the mystery to be solved. "It seems it is mentioned in a highly specialised review," she said. "This particular issue dealt with some of the oddities of Mont Sainte-Odile. The suspect, who quite clearly adored the abbey, came across it in Strasbourg University library." The magazine had pretty clear instructions on how to find the secret passageway: This is very precisely described, with its dimensions ("about 3.13 meters in length and 1.87 meters in width"), its location ("on the first floor between the choir of the church and the floor of the chapel of the Cross built in the 12th century"), its access ("a small bay allowing communication with the floor of the chapel of the Cross is hidden since 1860 by a cabinet of the library") and three pages of plans (longitudal and transverse sections) This is a map of the secret passageway: https://preview.redd.it/sv2ndntwr3rf1.jpg?width=1000&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=91972caa3de9e27fb2466df38b53070bf482ab00 And here is a map of the monastery from 2011: https://preview.redd.it/q6d2u4ksq3rf1.jpg?width=2000&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=0976d32bba8bcc3ccf09043c40621bc6def958c8 Here is Alain Donus himself showing off the secret passageway: https://preview.redd.it/iivkmz9uq3rf1.jpg?width=1000&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=858d8395671b7ee6f755cfba98281f775de24e36 https://preview.redd.it/rpx56zauq3rf1.jpg?width=1000&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=87fd76f2ea1ecae4fa2cfd7d716ed4019f4b8e63 https://preview.redd.it/1h7ibmauq3rf1.jpg?width=1000&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=bc55d475b7a159c3740d6e5e36cdbd9529eb9548 This was Gosse’s modus operandi: He brought ropes, three suitcases, gray plastic bags and a flashlight. Once inside the main courtyard, he headed straight to the second floor of the Sainte-Odile aisle of the guesthouse. He walked down a corridor, opened a door using a key pinched during a previous trip, and found himself in the church’s bell tower. He tied the ropes to a wooden beam above a trapdoor in the floor and climbed down into a dark, windowless room of about 10 feet by 10 feet with a short 7-foot ceiling. Through an opening in the wall, he slipped into a second, narrow room. A dim light filtered through cracks in the lower part of a wall. The thief gently slid two wooden panels open, revealing rows of neatly lined up books on two shelves inside a cupboard. He took the books off, then one shelf, before sneaking inside the library. Gosse selected a few books, wrapped them in plastic bags, then crawled back inside the cupboard. In the second room, he flipped a wooden crate, climbed on it and hauled the bags through the hatch onto the attic. He climbed up the rope, moved the books to a nearby table to clear the hatch, and climbed back down. He repeated the operation eight times throughout the evening. By the time he was done, more than a hundred books were stacked up in the attic. Around 2 a.m., he stuffed the suitcases with books and left them behind, planning to pick them up later. Incredibly, he hadn’t sold a single book that he had stolen: A search of his home revealed the rest of the stolen artefacts, carefully stored and undamaged. Nothing had been sold; the suspect had hoarded everything for himself, said an assistant prosecutor, Simone Soeil. "He was an amateur student of Latin and he had a passion for these ancient books, but I'm afraid he didn't have the right to take them," she said, adding that they would have been almost impossible to sell on the open market without being detected. He’d even personalised some of them: At his apartment, they found about 1,400 books wrapped in plastic bags. There was no official estimation of the total value of the loot, but each incunabula was estimated to be worth around €2,000. On most of the books, Gosse had glued a custom ex libris bookplate stamp bearing his name in Gothic letters, as well as a drawing of a heart. He confessed to the thefts. “I have a consuming passion for ancient books,” he told the investigators. He had gone as far as recreating entire tomes he couldn’t find at Mont Sainte-Odile, photocopying archives from the Strasbourg library. He offered to donate them to the library he had so heartily pillaged. https://preview.redd.it/eko7tihqq3rf1.jpg?width=1384&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=74740789ddefef88169c21cd9abad4e4feea80d6 All in all, he had stolen a third of the books in the library. However there was yet another twist: Not long after the police swoop, Fr Alain received an apologetic telephone call from the thief, who could face a prison sentence of up to five years when the case comes to court later in the year. "He said he was blinded by his passion for the books and had ignored the consequences of his acts. "Then, blow me down, he told me that I had instructed him in the catechism when I was still a country curate." Here are all the books back in the library: https://preview.redd.it/3jyyiotyq3rf1.jpg?width=1749&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=46541ba893055a47a9a6f57eb0454b63fca89a85 Chapter Five - A Long Overdue Punishment Gosse at court: https://preview.redd.it/n5imvz68r3rf1.jpg?width=486&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=2c953e5e5aac51de312f8b1f38ac77e306ca6d8a At his trial, Gosse was repentant, but claimed he had been trying to save the books: Grosse enjoyed reading the books and claimed he was preserving them: He had found them covered with dust and bird droppings. “I know it can seem selfish, but I was under the impression that those books had been abandoned,” Gosse said at his trial, according to news outlets covering it at the time. He had found himself a mission. He would save the texts from decay and oblivion. “I wanted to have my own personal library,” the teacher later told the police. Luckily, because he had stolen from Catholics, they forgave him: The public prosecutor, Jean Dissler, said the archbishop of Strasbourg and Father Donius had forgiven Gosse and they wanted him to continue as a teacher, a request granted by the court. They have also told him he can come back to the library - but only through the front door. He was given a suspended prison sentence of 18 months and was sentenced to community service instead- helping the library re-catalogue all the books he had stolen . But the judge didn’t let him off completely, ordering him to pay a large fine as well. Gosse's counsel, Cathy Petit, said her client had taken great care of the books and even restored some of them. She requested he got a community service sentence to help the monks catalogue their treasures, but the judge added fines and damages of 17,000 euros (£11,835) to the suspended prison term. 6,000 euros went to the state, 10,000 to the monastery, and a 1,000 to the archbishop of Strasbourg. Twenty years after the thefts, the French police still have fond memories of Gosse: Close to 20 years after the thefts, the investigators still speak about Gosse with awe. He was no ordinary thief, after all. He stole out of passion, and the books were safely returned to the library in 22 boxes (it took two volunteers six months to sort them out). "He was our Arsène Lupin,” says Shackis, referring to a fictional thief of the early 1900s who terrorized well-heeled Parisians in popular short stories and novels of the day. As of 2019, Gosse was still living in the same small town outside of Strasbourg teaching at the same engineering school: Former colleagues at the engineering school where Gosse still teaches are more guarded. What kind of example had he set for the students? They described an aloof, reclusive man with no appetite for social activities whatsoever. He is now 48, single, and lives with his mother. It’s likely that he suffered from sort of untreated mental illness and felt compelled to take the books. I hope he’s getting the help he needs now. edit: I also just realised that he likely left the rose on the library steps as a sneaky reference to 'The Name of the Rose', a medieval murder mystery. Thanks for reading. P.S. I hope my puns made you groan in torment >:) submitted by /u/Tokyono to r/HobbyDrama [link] [comments]

We've got enough lore of our walnut queen and from our subs detective work in the past year that we felt it was time to make a dedicated post to educate all our new recruits joining the walnut army. For newbies or any OGs wanting a refresher or to discuss please see the summary of our Big D below..... Any new information that comes to light will be updated here so please comment away. Big D Basic Info Age - She is 32. Her bday is is in November and she will be 33 in 2025. We know...she doesn't look 32 (more like 40s) but it has been proven. Nickname - We call her Big D because she frequently says she is tall and that she is "5'7, 5'8" and based on references in her video and spottings in the wild, she is most likely a 5'7 girlie which is not that tall for the average American woman. So we lovingly refer to her as Big D, Big & Tall D, Walnut Queen or Delusionelle. (Delusionelle is self explanatory right yall?) Location - She has a basement condo she owns in San Jose that she bought partly with an inheritance from her grandmother. It is grey and basic. She rents an apartment in SF (the wallpapered Dollhouse) which is approximately 50 minutes away from San Jose, depending on traffic. BOTH of these cities are still in what is known as the Bay Area. She grew up in San Jose, went to college in San Jose and has lived there ever since. We estimate her SJ mortgage to be about $3k and her SF apartment $4k conservatively so she's spending $7k a month on housing. Family - Her dad is alive and well. Her mom passed away when she was 16/17 in high school. Her brother has also passed away, in 2015 from an overdose (she would have been 22/23). Her dad remarried to a nice woman who is very sex positive and they seemingly have a great relationship for a while now. Big D refers to her as her bonus mom. Her Dad lives in SJ area and she seemingly has a great relationship with him. He is a nice man and we do not snark on him. Because of the trauma of losing her mother at an impressionable age - we believe this led to her issues with relationships. Charlie - is her blue pitbull that she herself has admitted has anxiety in the car and does not like stairs yet she frequently subjects Charlie to both of these. She never talks about Charlie and she is hardly featured in her content. She has subjected that poor pup to anxious environments in the city or out with lots of random people. She also drowns her in perfume and sunscreen she sprays inside. Charlie also wears an "e-collar" that emits vibrations/tones via remote and use used to communicate with the dog for behavior corrections/recall/etc. That dog absolutely has no desire to do any of the things she subjects it to except to sleep at home and go for solo walks or solo fetch in the park. She treats Charlie as an afterthought and us dog moms (cat moms and any animal lovers) in the walnut army hate her for it. She has ZERO Style - As evidenced by her tacky wardrobe and decor, this woman has zero personal style. She flits between grandma chic, temu fashion of the moment, EDGY girl and harlot. She consumes way to much clothes and material decor and insists she has style and some unique interior designer skills. Other than her hideous wallpaper another example is the empty picture frames above her enormous bed in the SJ basement. She needs to throw it all in the bay! "Walnut Army" Origins Sub Inception - Our fearless leader Money Elk created this sub after the chaos that was Big D's NYFW escapades....jumping into cars with stranger man she just met, her terrible outfits, etc. There was no where for snark to go since Big D deletes negative comments and so she started the sub. The Walnut Army - This nickname came from a vid where Danielle referred to her audience as "walnuts". She also has used nicknames for her followers like potatoes, little squish, lil snail, poopsie pops, etc. Walnut stuck and became Walnut Army to refer to our snarkers here in the sub and that's what the sub is themed off of now. Her Pre-Influencer Career "Tech Sales" - She worked in tech sales for her whole career post college. "Tech sales" makes it sound WAY more glamorous than what it actually was. She sold a software service to businesses for AP invoicing. Skills - She herself admitted she was terrible at it and needed a lot of training from her boss to become a better salesman. Salary - She claims to have made over 6 figures ($100,000k+) either right out of college or shortly after college, she was vague about this but tried to make herself sound uber successfully (she wasn't). This is A. not a lot of money for the bay area. B. since she was in sales a large portion of compensation would have come from commission. Quit August 2024 - She quit her job summer last year to go full time influencing because she claims God told her to become an influencer. Her entire income right now relies solely on her income from social accounts and brand deals. Her "Influencer" Career Pre Full Time Influencing - While she still had a full time job she was posting GRWM, outfit hauls, gym, advice, etc. Your typical tiktok/ig girlie stuff and nothing ever really hit. Desperate to be Famous - She has always wanted to become famous and has tried a lot of different things and her dating content is what finally went viral. Virality - She went from 500K to 1M in the fall/winter of 2024 due to her viral dating series BUT ALSO because she bought followers on IG. Which is why her IG following is higher than her tiktok. She continues to buy followers on IG to this day. Low Effort - Since going full time influencing, she has floundered. She herself has admitted to struggling with routine and organizing her days. She has mentioned this multiple times. Yet she also has said she studies what goes viral and had some venn diagram for finding her niche and what works. She hardly ever interacts in comments on her vids. She frequently does question boxes to engage people and hardly ever shares any follow ups from those question boxes or polls. She is not engaged with her followers. She has a "big sister" channel that includes no extra content, simply reposts of what she puts on reels or stories. Inconsistent - She frequently ghosts her following by not posting for DAYS at a time, up to 4-8 days consecutively. Most of her reels are hardly ever in real time and not because they are delayed a day or two for privacy but delayed like weeks, months. Because she is really lazy. ZERO Follow Through - Because of her low effort and inconsistency she literally never follows through on anything. Prime example was her 30 day gym challenge which stopped on day 8. She frequently says she will do things and then literally doesn't do them. Her whole points of moving to SF was to find her husband and she was staying cooped up in her apt ordering in food and netflixing and not going out to make a new community like she literally said she would. She never posts reminders on time. Hypocritical - She has put out tons of advice videos about how to date and how to be single and love life and then WILL DO THE COMPLETE opposite. Any of her advice videos should be taken with a grain of salt because she is very much of the mind "rules for thee not for me". She wants to claim she is some fount of big sister advice that she lives by but it's all just chatter to go viral. Management - She signed with an agency last year after gaining her viral traction. She herself said that she would rather make 80% of way more with the help of an agency than 100% of the little she was making before. Her agent switched agencies at the end of Spring 2025 and Big D followed her. Because of her low effort and inconsistency we have no idea why any management would want her and that they clearly aren't doing anything to guide her to have good content. Failed Podcast - She launched a podcast back in 2023 and 2024, Who is She. Then brought it back early 2025 that she said she was going to commit to. She published 4 vids in one chunk before her move to SF and then another chunk of 4 vids end of May/early June. She used ChatGPT for the 2nd chunk and in general the pods are insufferable to listen to and are just her droning on and on. Dating History College Boyfriend - she herself has discussed college boyfriend and that she always went to his frat and his parties but he never came to hers. Whenever he wanted her around that he would go up and seemingly appears to have been a long term situationship or something that she was way more invested in than he ever was. We also know she prioritized this guy over her sorority sisters and did not have strong bonds with them cause she was always running to the bf. Christian Coworker - she herself has discussed a coworker she was madly obsessed with around pre-covid times, end of 2019. He went to a mega church and this is where her "Christian" journey began. She seemingly pined over this guy for a long time and finally "bagged" him. But from the get go he told her he wasnt looking for anything serious and she thought she "could show him how good she was" and that he would change his mind. Again, seemingly a situationship where she was very invested in him and he most likely was using her for a covid hook up situation. Ultimately he was offered a job to move to East Coast and she offered to go with him if he wanted her to. He said no. Thumb No Upper Lip Guy - she herself has described this man as someone she "should have known 3 weeks in wasn't going to work out". Yet, they dated for I think 6+ months, she introduced him to her parents, they went on vacations together and company parties, etc. They broke off because he was not okay with her blasting their private life on social media and she wouldn't give it up. He was tall, he was not very gorgeous, very all american white guy looking. There are vids of him on her page. I think this guy was 2023. 2024-2025 Viral Dating Vids - we've seen the sagas of her viral dating videos of Pilot Man, Ritz Cracker Man, Marathon Guy, Zocckr, Singer, Teacher, Philly Man etc etc. All seemingly normal men that she finds SOME issue with and claims to her audience that it ended for some misalignment. WE in the walnut army believe most of these men probably figured out she was a lunatic and dumped her but for her narrative she always makes up some story about why it wouldn't work. We also believe most of these men she was never actually legitimately interested in or found attractive. Even though she frequently describes them as tall and gorgeous. And the one off vids that happen we believe are mostly fabricated or heavily embellished because she seemingly is always getting hit on or asked out by tall gorgeous Christian men everywhere she goes and if you've been single in the year of our Lord 2025 you know it is a swamp and this just does not happen. Pick Me Energy Body Obsessed - She constantly body checks and puts her body on display. Which no shade, we love a confident queen, BUT she seemingly only gets value out of looking hot or being perceived as hot by men which is why she shows off her body. She constantly has her cleavage out, even at "church" and wears clothes that are too small and tight. She is very smug and has said "what if your body was the least interesting thing about you" and proceeds to do the exact opposite and make everything about her body. No Friends - She has one friend, Shelah, who is a actor, producer, etc that lives in LA with her partner Roth. These two are the only consistent friends we ever see her post about. Our guess is she is insufferable as a friend and self centered so she probably does not have very many strong friendships. Not a Girl's Girl - She has frequently mentioned wanting to be "the prettiest in the room", is rude and orders others around in videos she actually posts to her channel, and other cringe narcissistic behaviors that lead us to believe she sees other women as a threat to her dominance and thus probably has no real long term girl friends. "Relateable" - She sprays way too much perfume, eats turkey like an animal, reminds us about her deoderant (Men's deodorant as always) waxes and dermaplanes right before make up, doing awkward turkey gobbles and zoom ins to her face, talks about her bowel movements all the time as a way to seem like a down to earth relateable girl. When it's all manufactured rage bait. Narcissist - She frequently chastises her followers, accepts no responsibility when called out for bad behavior (lottery ad, exposing Charlie to her toxic cloud, love bombing, etc). Her favorite thing to say is "I don't wanna hear it" because she literally does not care what anyone else thinks. She believes she's God's gift to influencing, can do no wrong, is a know-it-all and will remind her followers at any turn that she couldn't care less. When she does comment she can be very combative or in stories trying to prove her followers they are wrong (like with her "drastic" hair color changes). It comes off very smug. Her "Christian" Journey Finding Religion - Per her Christian Coworker relationship, this is where she first began going to "church". She did not grow up going to church. She only began going because the coworker she was obsessed with went and she thought if she went then he would like her more. Mega Church Cult - I use "Christian" in quotes because she attends a mega church in SJ led by a pastor that has a suspicious and problematic history. Ultimately, this "church" is led by the pastor's teachings and is not rooted in biblical teachings and is basically a money grab feel good concert motivational speaking cult. She sings in their choir but is literally a part of the background choir and never has solos because there is a major worship band that performs out of this mega church. The "church" is very casual, members wear sneakers, jeans, graphic tees, ball caps, it is nothing like a traditional organized Christian denomination. Uses God - She frequently invokes God to explain why she's doing something or to prove why something she's doing is better than secular teachings. For example, for her move to SF, she said God told her to go to SF to find her husband and blessed her with an apartment with a bay window and rooftop. She has said she's celibate dating Little L and that God will bless them because of that. It's really insulting to those of us that are actual Christians and follow biblical teachings and also those that were former mega church attendees understand the cult mentality she is hooked into. "Celibacy" - She herself states almost constantly that she is "celibate" as of about summer 2024 when she is actually allegedly abstinent. She doesn't even use the right word. She is abstaining from sex because A. She believes God will bless her for it and B. because she doesn't want to be used. In actuality, we believe she is using this abstinent thing as a way to prevent herself from anxious attachment and getting in to deep with men she herself has admitted never liked her. Probably because they just wanted to use her for her body even though she puts her own body on display and gets a lot of value out of it. She does not practice abstinence in a Godly sense though as she is frequently in clothing that is no where near modest and never explains her choice of abstinence any deeper from a biblical point of view. She has broken her abstinence but conveniently hid it buried on a random pod episode because she said "it would go viral". Apparently not all the way but in some way she broke it with a man shortly after moving to SF and sought council from her "church" for it. submitted by /u/mariemarie8790 to r/daniellewalter_snark [link] [comments]

https://preview.redd.it/of9dkn7v0rmf1.png?width=3096&format=png&auto=webp&s=5ae5cea6edbcf38897ad2ebf387ba135f42fd446 Cowboys Offensive Playcaller - Brian Schottenheimer Cowboys Defensive Playcaller - Matt Eberflus Cowboys Offensive Impact Players - Dak Prescott, CeeDee Lamb, George Pickens, Tyler Smith Cowboys Defensive Impact Players - Osa Odighizuwa, Trevon Diggs (Ques), DaRon Bland Of course, this is week 1, and we don't know much about teams' tendencies, but I'm going to give it the good ole "college try." New Cowboys Head Coach Brian Schottenheimer comes from an old-school football family. He talks about the importance of playing a physical style of football (specifically mentioning this when you are playing elite defensive linemen, and how important it is to marry the run and pass game. He has had years where his offenses were near the top of the league in run rate, but also near the top of the league in pass rate (both in Seattle). He likes to go up-tempo when they are moving the chains. Schottenheimer says, "I’m a big believer in shifts and motions to distort things.” I expect to see quite a bit of this on Thursday night, and it will test the communication skills of the Eagles' "new" secondary members. They will primarily use two receivers to motion/shift: CeeDee Lamb and KaVontae Turpin. I wrote about how last year, the Cowboys nearly telegraphed Lamb's route based on alignment/motion tendencies. Wide in 2x2 = short hitch/deep comeback Stack/bunch = screen/crosser Slot in 2x2 condensed = hitch/over the ball Slot in 3x1 condensed = deep crosser/over the ball Slot in 3x1 spread = screen/crosser Iso in 3x1 condensed = speed out/slant Motion into condensed 2x2 = speed out Shift into 2x2 slot = option route Motion out wide 2x2 = slant Press Man vs. weak corner = *Alert* Go Schottenheimer talked about how the language of the offense was about 70% the same as last year, but they are adding more flavor. I expect that to, in part, translate to extensive use of motions and shifts for Lamb, which can garner more favorable matchups, win leverage on defenders, and provide coverage clues to Prescott. Last season, Lamb would often motion from the slot in 3x1 across into a 2x2, many times running an option route or speed out. When the Eagles run coverages from the Quarters family (see Fangio's Quarters Masterclass), they will often ask the Nickel and opposite LB to reroute a receiver and then play the flats. To avoid getting outleveraged by Lamb's motions and shifts, they can place tags on defensive calls that will mutate the coverage based on which receiver goes in motion, while others can be communicated in real-time by the back 7. That said, his most dangerous plays tend to happen on crossers, of all depths. Lamb is a master at crossing the face of defenders and creating separation with his elite "turn of foot" (a term from horse racing used to describe the ability to accelerate quickly). In football, certain players can maintain full acceleration and speed as they run in an arcing path. Puka Nacua and Lamb are both great examples of this trait. Everyone knows Lamb has an uncanny ability to catch a pass in full stride and transition into a quasi-RB instantly, gashing secondaries for long gains. Fangio's best tool against this threat is TRIX, a tag often used in Quarters/Split-Field Coverages, which has the weak safety (away from 3x1) cross-key a vertical crossing route from the inner-most receiver (or the #2 if he's the only vertical threat). This would translate to Blankenship "stealing" a deep crosser from Lamb coming from the opposite side of the field. HonestNFL has some great diagrams illustrating how TRIX Quarters will match various route combinations. https://preview.redd.it/eo25ble9crmf1.png?width=502&format=png&auto=webp&s=896e7317231800815c9f0f26e8360ea73a65f25f If Lamb is either #2 or #3, but detached from the formation (this diagram shows a TE), the FS will match him on any vertical/crossing routes. But.... that was last year. With Schottenheimer at the helm, all signs point to the Cowboys attempting to establish the run and marrying it with a large diet of Under-Center play action. The problem? The Cowboys have a patchwork quilt offensive line and a less-than-inspiring group of RBs. Even if they scheme up a great run play and block it well, there's minimal chance of an explosive gain outside of Jaydon Blue, who may not even see many snaps. Additionally, Dak Prescott struggled last season on Under-Center play action (see film). There have been years in the past when he excelled there, but as the offensive line became worse, his mobility diminished, and the running game became less potent, Prescott has struggled mightily on these plays. If his first read isn't open, he often would frantically search for a second option while drifting from the pocket, often firing it late into danger. If Prescott does have an interception in this game, I would wager it would be on one of these concepts. https://preview.redd.it/lr83cgh7yqmf1.png?width=599&format=png&auto=webp&s=4f8af03636d9d37cb697caaa1cff253e24019a72 Matt Eberflus, new DC of the Cowboys, is tasked with overcoming the loss of one of the league's most disruptive forces in Micah Parsons. Historically, Eberflus has been a coach who changes his defensive tendencies based on his personnel. Typically, he has leaned on a 4-man rush with zone coverage behind, including a lot of Tampa 2 and its offshoots. He has preached a physical style of play with an emphasis on generating turnovers, which he has done successfully in the past as a DC (not as much with Bears). Eberflus has said "the 3-technique is the engine that drives the D-line, and it drives the whole defense." The Cowboys just acquired Kenny Clark (a former Pro Bowl DT) to go along with their budding star pass interior pass rusher Odighizuwa, who I'm sure he will unleash on a variety of stunts and twists. Odighizuwa will have a chance to cause disruption in the Eagles' backfield, as he plays with a tremendous pad level and has great lateral agility. Steen (and whoever replaces Dickerson if he doesn't play) will have their hands full with him (and Clark). Their LB corps with Kenneth Murray Jr. and Marist Liufau doesn't inspire much confidence. Murray Jr. is a former 1st rounder who was drafted on athleticism but didn't show much growth with his football instincts, while Liafau is a thumper with a throwback style of LB play. On the back end, it appears DaRon Bland will move back into the slot, where I believe he excels most. Trevon Diggs has a 75% chance of playing (according to hiself), and if he misses it would vault either former 7th rounder Trikweze Bridges or 10-year special teams player C.J. Goodwin into a starting role. I imagine the Eagles would attack those players heavily. Kaiir Elam is another former 1st rounder, who they acquired from the Bills. He was exposed by the Chiefs last season when he had to replace Christian Benford. He is certainly a player that AJ Brown could feast on. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Eagles Offensive Playcaller - Kevin Patullo Eagles Defensive Playcaller - Vic Fangio Eagles Offensive Impact Players - Jalen Hurts, AJ Brown, Saquon Barkley, Lane Johnson, Jordan Mailata, Landon Dickerson (Ques), DeVonta Smith, Dallas Goedert Eagles Defensive Impact Players - Jalen Carter, Quinyon Mitchell, Zack Baun, Cooper DeJean, Nolan Smith The Eagles return nearly the same offense, replacing Mekhi Becton with Tyler Steen at RG, but more importantly, they have a new Offensive Coordinator. While Kevin Patullo is familiar, he is also an unknown. What we do know is that he has talked multiple times about constraint plays, which are counters to your staple plays that can catch the defense out of position. This is a strong indicator that the Eagles offense will not swap out all their staple plays, and rather make small tweaks and sprinkle in a few counters. It's a pragmatic approach, as the Eagles were an efficient offense that was able to elevate in the playoffs last season. Hurts took the governor off and was gashing teams on the ground, but remains to be seen how often they will "let him" do that in the regular season. It would make sense for the Eagles to utilize a demolition derby-style power run game vs. the Cowboys' soft interior, utilizing gap scheme runs with combo blocks up to the 2nd level, generating a ton of vertical displacement against their box players, who are ill-equipped to defend a blistering Barkley running behind 5 behemoths. https://preview.redd.it/d3b02y8byqmf1.png?width=820&format=png&auto=webp&s=4a5ccfb58452c1027987b9fd5524f9b028f910f1 In the pass game, it's notable that the trio of A.J. Brown, DeVonta Smith, and Dallas Goedert only shared the field on 18% of plays last season. Having them all at the same time should help improve the consistency of the passing game, which sputtered for chunks of games last season, even against the easiest opponent passing defense schedule. The Eagles often would run vanilla route concepts that destroyed man coverage, but struggled to attack two-high zone coverage -- a coverage family that specifically gave the Eagles' passing offense trouble. A concept it seems they ran a few dozen times last season was "Follow" aka "72" or "China". https://preview.redd.it/h1zzw40dyqmf1.png?width=400&format=png&auto=webp&s=150c7785d9a7355e1328e55949e1a6f1ab8902d7 You would often see this with Goedert running the corner and AJ Brown running the in. Could you see a constraint play where they turn the corner into a corner-post? How about turning the in into a Sluggo? These are the type of counters that work disproportionately vs. opponents with the best film study habits. Vanilla concepts are no problem whatsoever, if you execute perfectly. If you're a tick late....the window vanishes and you're left to make tight-window throws or start scrambling. So far in his career, Hurts has been more dangerous running the ball than throwing on the run; it is no secret that the Eagles struggle in the "scramble drill." That said, the Eagles have a significant personnel advantage on the outside and should be able to attack Elam (and the other corner if Diggs is out) without hesitation. Granted, they likely won't need to rely on their pass game much because the Eagles dominate the trenches even more. https://preview.redd.it/uad2pzaeyqmf1.png?width=820&format=png&auto=webp&s=ebcced9489e5dd55f1c020055e189912ae759791 Going to the other side, the Eagles will be replacing 5 starters, suggesting that it's likely to take some time to start firing on all cylinders. A major question about the Eagles' defense is: What will change with the departure of Slay/Rodgers at CB2? Occam's razor would suggest that the Eagles will provide more help to the CB2 than they did last year, when they often left Mitchell/Slay on an island, allowing the rest of the back 7 maintain a numbers advantage over receiving threats, no matter how they aligned. The Cowboys have two primary weapons: CeeDee Lamb and George Pickens. Lamb does most of his damage out of the slot, while Pickens does his outside. In fact, Pickens led the NFL in catches over 20 air yards last season with 15. He's a bona fide deep threat who can haul in passes even when guarded tightly. That said, the engine of their offense will still be CeeDee Lamb. As mentioned, Lamb does most of his damage from the slot, often shredding defenses on crossing routes and turning quick stop routes (hitch/comeback/etc) into longer gains with his all-world YAC ability. Fangio has several ways to slow down a potent receiving threat, but Zeus may be one of the most pertinent in this game, as it will morph the coverage based on where a designated receiver lines up. https://preview.redd.it/mnxh5nmfyqmf1.png?width=820&format=png&auto=webp&s=7000166b69f2c7f96f765ae0a0452d38624ce8ae In Lamb's case, when he's in the slot, he will receive a triangle-type coverage, with DeJean on the outside, and Baun/Campbell on the inside, with a safety capping vertical routes. If Lamb is outside, they will play Cover 2 to his side, with a bump at the line to disrupt his release, and then play Squat technique to stop any short hitches/comebacks, and then release any vertical route to the safety. Pickens certainly complicates things, as you definitely want a fast corner on him (Mitchell), or a safety capping vertical routes. If Lamb is on the outside vs. Adoree Jackson, look out -- Jackson has shown early signs of playing with a fairly large cushion, and that's a bad idea vs. Lamb, who will catch an underneath pass with space to operate and easily get past Jackson (a mediocre tackler). Depth of cushion will be something I'm closely monitoring throughout the season. We saw last year how much better the Eagles' corners played when they went from playing 8-10 yards deep to closer to 6-7. I talked about how I would guard CeeDee Lamb based on tendencies from last year (which could certainly change): When he’s outside in a spread 2x2 look, bail the corner & drop an EDGE into the flat, Dak tends to be robotic when making reads and may throw it directly to EDGE When he’s the #2 in 3x1, press up on him with inside leverage When he shifts/motions across into a condensed alignment, play CONE (nickel outside/safety inside) When he’s the ISO opposite 3x1, play “Stuffing #88”, which plays cover 2 to Lamb’s side ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- For predictions, I'm focusing on how I think the teams will approach the game and which players will have the most significant impact on the outcome, as opposed to score (but I'll take a shot since I was fairly accurate last season). Going into a hostile Lincoln Financial Field with a shaky OL, a potentially rusty QB, and a lackluster RB committee, I expect the Cowboys to heavily lean on Under Center Play Action, which can temporarily freeze the pass rush and give extra time for Lamb and Pickens to find voids in the coverage. Specifically, I expect a shot play to Pickens when he's split wide in an under center formation, as well as trying to get Lamb open on a deep crosser, like you would use in Yankee (Pickens runs deep post). https://preview.redd.it/thntgsrhyqmf1.png?width=820&format=png&auto=webp&s=fa4d1891121f7071e7da69e0918837b140e08af8 I expect them to throw a few hitch/comeback routes to help Prescott's rhythm and take advantage of a potentially deep cushion from Adoree Jackson. The Eagles will be keen to have a DeJean/EDGE defender alert to these concepts when Pickens/Lamb are spread wide. If you press, they will often alert a Go route on the outside, which has been a throw Prescott has loved to attempt throughout his career. Additionally, expect a few screens, which can go to Lamb (generally from stacks), Turpin, a RB, or even their TE Jake Ferguson, or perhaps a gadget play like an endaround to Turpin, all of which can help mitigate the problems of an overmatched OL. The Cowboys defense will likely play with 7 in the box on neutral downs, as the Eagles led the NFL in EPA/play when rushing against light boxes. I still don't think that will be enough to slow down Barkley, as long as the Eagles don't lose quickly to the elusive interior gap penetrators of the Cowboys. The Cowboys have the choice of using their safeties, who are better in the box than in the post, as an attacking duo, or have them help overtop their shaky corners on the outside. It seems more likely that an Eagles passing game would take more time to gel than the running game, as it requires more precision and timing (especially when you have Saquon Barkley and a strong OL) to function properly. This may dictate the box count for the Cowboys. The Eagles should identify the advantage in the trenches and bludgeon the Cowboys with a series of gap scheme runs, and then hit them deep down the field when you get Brown or Smith 1-on-1 on the outside vs. at least one suspect outside corner. Look for Goedert to beat the Dallas LBs, especially on corner routes, mesh, and deep crossers. https://preview.redd.it/ryxxj4hz4rmf1.png?width=820&format=png&auto=webp&s=eed7dd5dbf71571fcb694338d6c84cbd00e1cf9f The Eagles should try to get the ball out quickly, as the plays where Hurts held the ball longer than 4.5 seconds rarely bore fruit. I made a chart comparing Hurts and Prescott's Time to Throw Distribution last year. On defense, the Eagles will have all eyes on CeeDee Lamb underneath, and George Pickens deep. Expect a steady diet of split-field coverages that play under/overtop of Lamb and Quarters to Pickens' side. The Cowboys would be wise to use Pickens and Lamb in stacks & bunches to shrink the Eagles' coverage menu. The Eagles' defense is poised to slow down the Cowboys' run game, even from a light box. Jordan Davis' and Jalen Carter's ability to cancel gaps in the run game and create lanes for Zack Baun and Jihaad Campbell to run through makes it seem as if they have an extra player in the run game, while still maintaining an extra player in coverage. If they can pressure Prescott on his play-action attempts, prevent Pickens from beating them deep, and recruit extra resources to slow down Lamb, the Eagles have a straightforward path to success on defense. Conversely, if the newer members of the back 7 struggle with communicating coverage checks, there could be some rough patches. Prescott, with these two receivers, can hurt you. Ultimately, the Eagles overcome some early-season hiccups and follies by asserting their physical dominance and championship pedigree: Cowboys - 17 Eagles - 30 Throughout the season, I invite you to checkout www.nfloasis.com for an upgraded version of Expected Points Added (EPA) I created. OASIS accounts for opponent strength, situational leverage, and consistency, and will have a weekly percentile score for the offensive/defensive units of each team each week, giving you context on how truly good or bad their performance was (relative to all games the last 2 seasons). As always you can follow my work on Twitter @ EaglesXsandOs. https://preview.redd.it/aimv57blyqmf1.png?width=820&format=png&auto=webp&s=917d4222eccd47375a0acb192f73690410338752 Each Tuesday night it will refresh, showing you the data with the most recent game included. submitted by /u/nbaphilly17 to r/nfl [link] [comments]

I was born a burden. My parents said it jokingly, but I could tell it’d always been on their mind. Even as an infant, I had bronchiolitis, hypersensitive skin, and several infections. My mother used to say that I was made as if God was tired of looking out for me, and handed it all over to my parents. “He couldn’t be bothered anymore,” she’d half-joke. I was a sickly child in a healthy family. I had three older brothers and two younger sisters. And while one affliction would disappear, it would just make way for another. Bronchiolitis gave way to asthma. Infections gave way to allergies. Sensitivity gave way to eczema. Add a mix of violent migraines, bad eyesight, and car sickness, and you have 8-year-old me. I grew up near a vineyard. If you continue east from Toulouse, past Gaillac and Albi, you find this long stretch of road piercing through a sparse forest, opening to the colorful rolling hills of southern France. A lot of people just think “Champagne” when they think of French wine, but there is so much more to it. My father used to say that before we had a country, we had wine. Now, while we didn’t live on the vineyard itself, my family owned it. My father had worked those lands since he was a boy, and me and my brothers were expected to do the same. My sisters too, but in another way. But this isn’t like in the movies, where we bike down some road with a half-cocked beret and baguettes in our baskets – this was hard work. We’re talking chemicals, heavy machinery, inspections, quality testing. Traditions have to evolve to satisfy a modern market. So when I say hard work, I don’t mean leisurely strolls down lanes of grapes. I mean dragging boxes of equipment, filling out paperwork, loading up trucks, sitting in meetings with suppliers, paying taxes, and reaching seasonal work quotas. Now, I couldn’t do all that. I wanted to, but I couldn’t. I couldn’t run very far, and I couldn’t lift heavy things without running out of breath. I’d get headaches from staring at screens. My mom had to do my laundry separate from the others, or my skin would break out in hives from the softener. I had to use special shampoo, and I had to get special buttons and zippers. I had a nickel allergy, and wouldn’t you know it, most zippers and buttons use nickel. But I think I could’ve lived with all of that if it wasn’t for my allergy to fur. All my siblings wanted was a pet, but my allergies were too strong. If they were at a friend’s house, and that friend had a cat, I could get a reaction. It got so bad at times that I had to stay in the car while they went grocery shopping, in case someone at the store had a dog. I did have some medication for it, but it made me sleepy and nauseous – not a good combination for longer car rides. I remember once when my brother, Maurice, snapped at my parents. He was five years older and had just crossed the line into teenager. We were all sitting down for dinner, and I was having a reaction to something in the soup. My parents argued whether it was the tomatoes or the spring onions. My mom had aired out the house earlier that day, so it might just be pollen from the garden. Maurice couldn’t take it. “Every day!” he yelled. “Every day there’s something new! Why do we even bother keeping him alive?!” Of course, my mother scolded him, but it didn’t matter. He was furious. “We would be so much better without you,” he continued. “We could have so much. We could go anywhere, do anything. Now we’re all stuck with you.” He stormed out, screaming all the way up the stairs to his room. “I’d rather have a dog than you as my brother!” Thing is, he wasn’t wrong. He was just saying the quiet part out loud. I suppose that’s the worst of it. That night, I went out into the woods. I’d taken one of my allergy pills so I wouldn’t get sick from the trees, but I could feel my legs dragging from the side effects. I had filled my pockets with a small pharmacy – the standard kit for leaving the house. I wanted to find Maurice a dog. It was a stupid idea, but I really wanted him to like me. Of course, there aren’t many stray dogs roaming the French countryside, but I didn’t think that far. I was upset, and I didn’t want to be a burden anymore. I wandered through those woods for hours, calling out for something to find me. Something I could show everyone. I just wanted to do good. It got too dark to keep going, so I decided to head back. I was disheartened. I’d made a fool of myself, again. Then I heard a splash. There were puddles in the woods from the afternoon rain, and something was splashing around in it. Something small. A frog, perhaps. I got down on my knees, letting the mud soak into my freshly cleaned jeans. Sorry, mom. I felt around with my hands and touched something poking against the tip of my finger. I recoiled. “Sorry,” I said. “I don’t want to hurt you.” I felt around a little more – carefully. Something the size of my thumb was moving around in the mud. Not a frog, but something equally slimy. I held my hand flat, inviting it to be picked up. “What are you?” I asked. “You’re not a frog.” It crawled into my hand and lay there. I held it up to my face, trying to see what it was. It didn’t move. Something black, with a ridge along the spine. “You wanna come home with me?” I asked. “Or you can stay, if you want.” I put my hand back down, but it didn’t leave. I couldn’t help but to smile. I think that was the first time something willingly chose to stay with me. But it was late, and my parents were out looking for me. I hurried into one of the storerooms and got a jar. I filled it with some rainwater and dropped my new friend in. I left the jar open if it wanted to leave, apologizing profusely, and promised I’d be back in the morning. I hid it on the far side of the house, near a pile of raked leaves. My parents were furious, of course, but mostly just worried. Maurice got a severe talking-to, which didn’t make things better. Not only had I been a burden to him, now he got in trouble because of it. I was probably in for a beating. I had trouble sleeping that night, trying to imagine what my friend in the jar looked like. Maybe it was a frog, after all. Like a really cool, black, punk rock kind of frog. The next morning I hurried outside to check on the little creature. I picked up the jar and noticed how it had curled up in the bottom of it, trying to submerge itself completely in the water. I hadn’t filled the jar that well, and hadn’t considered that it might need more water. Was it some kind of fish? Strange. I remember standing there in my flip-flops and jammie bottoms. Fog was rolling off, giving way to the early morning sun. My hands were chilly as I filled the jar with water from a garden hose and held it up against my face to get a better look. The creature was about as long as a middle finger, and blacker than coal. I could clearly see the spine of it, where little spikes poked out, but I couldn’t make out what kind of creature it was. It had the head of a trout, but the body of a snake. It had gills with long tendrils coming out the side. As soon as I filled the jar up, it came to life, twirling and rolling around the jar. Almost like a dance. Then it looked at me with dark, expressionless eyes. “I’ll call you Milou,” I smiled. “And we’re gonna be best friends.” Can you tell I was a Tintin kind of kid? I decided to keep Milou hidden from my siblings. Maurice was still a bit salty about getting yelled at, so I figured it was best not to show him something he could use to hurt me. I’d never had a pet, and chances were, I’d never get one. So I decided to keep Milou hidden away. I fed him little bits and pieces. Grapes from the vineyard, of course. Ants. Flies. And little bits and bobs I could squirrel away from my dinner and breakfast. He took his time with it, but seemed to like all of it. He also enjoyed having little things to play with, so I’d drop in little plastic soldiers and rocks and stuff. I would imagine him as a sea monster, towering over the little soldier guys. My own little kraken. After a couple of days, I noticed a weird smell coming from the jar, so I decided to take it inside to clean. I waited until no one was home, got a fresh jar from the storeroom, and hurried into the kitchen. My heart was pounding as I opened the jar, only to feel this eye-watering burn in my nose. I was having an allergic reaction to something. I filled the fresh jar with water and tipped Milou into it before pouring the old water down the drain. I hurried back outside and almost dropped him. I had to sit down and take my asthma medication, wheezing for air – apologizing between coughs. “I’m sorry,” I cried. “I’m sorry, I don’t know what-“ I looked down at Milou. He’d pressed his little fish head against the glass, looking at me with eyes wide open. Even without a single muscle to express emotion, I could tell; he was worried. There was something in that discarded water that got my allergies flaring up, that much I figured out. I tried running the tap in the kitchen to get rid of the smell, but I could still feel it. By the time my mother got back, I was scared she might notice it. Instead, she walked in with a smile. “Did someone pick flowers?” she asked. “It smells wonderful.” As my secret routine turned from days into weeks, I picked up on a few things. Milou would do something to his water. Something I was very allergic to, but that others seemed to enjoy. If I got some of it on my hands, I’d get this terrible rash, but the smell was, to others, wonderful. There was one time when I was cleaning out the jar when my dad burst through the front door. He was probably just home to get his lunch. I hurried out the back door, leaving the dirty thing on the kitchen counter. It was free from rocks and twigs this time, but the smell was as powerful as ever. It made my insides itch. But dad wasn’t reacting like that at all. I saw him from the kitchen window, lifting the jar. Turning it over, looking it up and down. Sniffing it. Tasting it with the tip of his tongue. Then downing it in six big gulps. Of course, Milou grew. The tendrils extending from his gills got longer, and his jaw grew into a sort of underbite. His scales looked stronger and had a bit of a shimmer to them. I had to upgrade him from a jar to a pot. We had a couple in storage, but I realized he didn’t enjoy it. He wanted something transparent. He liked to look. He’d float around, wiggling his tail, keeping his head upright. And he’d just sit there, for hours, observing. We had an old fermentation jar in the garage. My grandfather once used it to make preserves, but it hadn’t been used for a while. It was larger than my head, so there was plenty of space for Milou to grow. It also helped that it was entirely made of glass. It also had a tap, so I could get some of the wastewater out without having to rinse through the entire thing. It was good enough. There was a corner in one of our old sheds where I knew no one ever looked, and I tried placing Milou there – but he objected. He’d tap his head against the glass, pointing me back outside. “I don’t know where to put you,” I said. “I have to keep you safe.” He tapped his head against the glass again. He was right – I couldn’t keep him locked in the dark. There’s a hill overlooking the property, right by the edge of the forest. The ground there was softer and covered in moss. I found a spot near one of the trees and dug a hole. I put Milou’s jar in it, but not all the way up. I left part of it above ground; like a window. I covered the rest in leaves and moss. I sat down next to him. No more tapping against the glass – he was happy. “I’ll try to get you a cricket tomorrow,” I said. “And maybe some other stuff.” Milou did a little spin. Dark eyes looked up at me from the back of the jar. “Do you need anything?” I asked. I wasn’t expecting a response, but he tapped against the glass. He’d done so many times, but now it seemed more deliberate. I thought about it for a moment. “Do you really understand me?” Tap again. I leaned my head down close, coming up eye to eye with the creature. He never blinked and only moved enough not to sink to the bottom. “Do you know you’re Milou?” Tap. He knew. “Do you like me?” I asked. He stopped for a moment to look at me. Turning its head side to side, as if to get a better view of me. My heart sunk a little. Then, out of the blue, he tapped again. It was clear as day. We were friends. A couple of days later, I went back up there to change the water in his jar. It started out well enough, but I ended up spilling a whole jar of wastewater on me. I had to put him back and hurry back to the house to change my clothes before my throat swelled up. I ran through the kitchen. My dad was sitting down with my sisters, talking to them about homework. As I passed by, he called out to me, then followed me into the washroom. I changed my pants and tried to hide the stains, but he was right behind me. “What’s that smell?” he asked. “Where’ve you been?” “Out,” I said. “In the forest. I didn’t go far, I wasn’t by the lake or anything.” He took the stained pants from the laundry basket. To me, it smelled like an asthma attack waiting to happen, but to him it was something different. “Is that… wildflowers?” he asked. “Some kind of… melon?” I didn’t answer. I just washed my hands. I could feel a rash coming on. Dad leaned down and looked me in the eye. “Did you make that lemonade before?” he asked. “The one in the jar, on the counter?” “It’s just water,” I said. “It’s not lemonade.” “Everything is water,” he smiled. “Even wine. But did you make it?” “Sort of.” He smiled at me and gave me a pat on the shoulder. I think it was the first time I saw him really approve of me. “You should make more,” he said. “It was fantastic.” I went back to Milou every day, having little chats about everything and nothing. I told him about what my dad said, and he seemed excited. Milou didn’t seem to mind at all. I was a bit skeptical – I didn’t want anyone to find Milou, or to ask questions. So the next time I cleaned out the jar, I saved his water in bottles and filled them with wildflowers. That way it looked authentic, like I made something. Dad had never really encouraged me to make things on my own before. I wanted to make him proud. I’d seen my parents make everything in that kitchen for years, so I knew where everything was. I cleaned the bottles up, added some honey and fennel, and made my own label. I was kinda clever. I was afraid I might slip up the name Milou someday, so I made it the label. That way, no one would bat an eye if I mentioned it. That night, as my family gathered around the dinner table, I took out every bottle of “Milou” that I’d chilled during the day. Everyone got their own bottle. I told them that dad liked it, and that I hoped they would too. They didn’t know what to make of it at first. But they opened their bottles, and it fizzed a little like a light sparkling wine. And after that first sip, their frowns melted away. For the first time, there were smiles all across the table. And not just any smile – they were smiling at me. They loved it. They loved me. All summer and well into autumn, I kept up my secret routine. Milou was large enough to have an entire meatball for dinner by then. He was longer than my foot but still had plenty of space to grow. I’d feed him, talk to him, clean his jar, and give him things to play with. But he was getting tired of toys and rocks – he wanted something new. He’d tell me with little taps on the glass. I did this thing where I took old newspapers and cut out pictures. I’d lick them and stick them to the glass for Milou to look at. He loved them. Especially pictures of people, those were the most interesting to him. He always lingered a little longer on pictures where they smiled. I continued to make my bottles of “Milou” about once a week. I told them it was my secret recipe. My father would bring home honey and fennel for me to use. Sometimes he’d bring cherries, or some fruit. We’d spend some time together making up recipes, and he encouraged me to experiment. To me it all just smelled like burning acid, but feeling useful made my heart swell with pride. I wasn’t just taking – I was finally giving back. I told them I couldn’t drink it myself, and that it burned me. They didn’t even question it. But they all enjoyed it nonetheless. Even Maurice. This kept going for an entire year. I had the best birthday of my life, where my family whole-heartedly celebrated me. It wasn’t just an obligation, they were happy to. I was getting invited into conversations. They asked my opinion on things. On New Year’s Eve, I even heard my dad drunkenly brag about my drink to a neighbor. I wasn’t just a sick boy – I was in the family business. There was some tension though. I’d often find Maurice out in the fields, or in the kitchen, trying to replicate my recipe. He couldn’t make it, and it frustrated him to no end. He explained to me, in no uncertain terms, that he would make something better. He wouldn’t be beaten by someone who could die from goddamn fabric softener. But dad was thinking of other things. Bigger things. So come spring, we made our first bottle of wine using water from Milou as dilution. It’s usually done to balance out the sugar levels, but dad thought it could give it a ‘colorful musky tone’. Not that I knew what the hell that meant back then. “Mineral water might not change the taste,” he said, “but it can change the way it feels. And with this?” He held up my bottle, giving it a cheeky little shake. “With this, it will feel like a mother’s kiss.” I remember the day we finished the wine. Dad poured it into a small glass. He let it rest a little. We sat quietly around the kitchen table, waiting patiently. He smelled it. Twirled it. Observed the color and the consistency. And when he finally tasted it, his eyes went wide. He put down the glass and smiled at me like he’d won the lottery. He swept me up on his shoulder and hurried outside, holding the bottle as he went. He called out to my mom to try the glass in the kitchen. He put me down and we ran all the way out to the field workers. Two of them were off to the side, having a cigarette. Dad handed over the bottle. “Tell me,” he said. “Tell me that isn’t the best thing you’ve ever had.” The worker, Claude, had a sip straight from the bottle. He thought about it. Then something just clicked. A smile melted onto his face, and he laughed. He handed the bottle to the other worker with a loud ‘whoo!’. Others came to look. Everyone got to try it. All the while, my dad went around to them, one by one. “My son made this!” he laughed. “My son did!” There were pats on my shoulder. They ruffled my hair. They lift me up and cheered. They passed the bottle around, emptying it sip by sip. “Best damn thing I’ve ever tasted,” someone said. “It’s soft. How can it be so soft?” “It melts me. I love it!” After that, things were wonderful, but complicated. Dad really wanted me to give him the recipe. He wanted to put it into production. But of course, I couldn’t do it. He couldn’t understand why, and I couldn’t blame him. I was just a kid. I hated lying to him, but he’d be horrified if he knew the source. He wasn’t mad about it. Just disappointed. Maurice, on the other hand, had plans of his own. One day, as I finished cleaning Milou’s jar, I noticed Maurice. He’d been following me. I thought I’d been clever, hiding the empty bottles in my school bag, but he must’ve heard the clinking. He hadn’t spotted Milou and the jar yet, but it was just a matter of time. He walked up to me with a smug smirk. “You hide them up here?” he asked. “What are you using?” He looked around, kicking some leaves. I didn’t say a thing or move a muscle. It felt like facing a predator – like movement might trigger him. “I don’t get it,” he continued. “Is it mushrooms? Roots?” He picked up a rock and looked at me. I didn’t meet his gaze. That was, apparently, the wrong thing for me to do. He threw the rock at me. I ducked, he missed, and it hit the side of Milou’s jar. It didn’t break. Didn’t even get a scratch. But it made a noise. Maurice pushed me aside. “No!” I yelled out. “Please, don’t!” But that just spurred him on more. He pushed the moss and the dirt aside, finding the top of the jar. He grinned as he twisted the lid. The moment it popped open, I’d pulled out a bottle from my pack and held it like a club. “Stop it!” I said. “Or else!” He stopped. He dropped the lid. He turned to me. Older, stronger, healthier. He was better in every way – and yet, I’d threatened him. He wasn’t having it. He wrestled me to the ground and beat me. I’d never been in a fight with him before. Not like that. It was just malice, through and through. He was enjoying himself, showing how powerless I was. As I lay with my face in the mud, I looked over at Milou’s jar. I saw something peak over the edge. Dark, expressionless eyes. The long face of a trout, opening its mouth in a silent scream. And then he began to shiver. Maurice rolled off me. He was having a seizure. It’s as if he was mirroring Milou’s shaking. His eyes rolled back in his skull, and his fingers were making these weird twitching movements. He was frothing at the mouth – and the bubbles smelled like Milou’s water. I went from relieved to terrified. I rolled Maurice over, slapping him on his back. He kept coughing up this white foam, gasping for air. His eyes had turned an unnatural black, mirroring the color in Milou. “It’s okay,” I waved at Milou, trying not to think of my broken lip. “It’s okay. It’s okay, Milou.” He stopped shivering. He just rested his head at the edge of the jar. Then, Maurice spoke. “Are you alright, friend?” It was his mouth, but not his voice. A deep, croaking rumble. I could see a tremble in his throat, like something was about to emerge. Something pushing against the skin. My eyes went from Maurice, to Milou, and back again. “Are you doing that?” I whispered. “He will not hurt you,” Maurice said. “I will make sure.” Maurice wasn’t moving. I couldn’t even tell if he was alive. Was he breathing, or shaking? “How do you do that?” I asked. “I go swim,” he answered. “I can swim very far.” I didn’t have to say thank you. Milou just plopped back into his jar. As he did, Maurice’s eyes returned to a cold natural gray. He bent over, screaming from a stomachache, and couldn’t stop throwing up. He had no idea what’d happened. But he knew he’d lost. I felt like the king of the hill. Maurice had to stop bothering me. I felt confident. I had a friend looking out for me, and he was stronger than everyone. So the next time my dad asked me to help with the wine, I said yes – but on my terms. He couldn’t touch the dilution tank. No one could. Just me. He agreed. It was mid-July when we got the tank set up. It was like a small swimming pool. No one was around when I dropped in Milou. “You can’t look out” I said. “But you’ll hear people all day. Is that okay?” He tapped his head against the metal siding. He was okay with it. He had so much more room to grow. He was already the size of my leg. I had a stupid idea. I borrowed a beach ball from the shed and climbed into the tank with Milou. It was cold and dark, but I trusted him with every fiber of my being. He was my best friend, and he would never hurt me. The water was fresh, so I wouldn’t get a reaction. Instead, I blew the ball up and passed it to him. He passed it back. And before I knew it, we were playing catch, bouncing it back and forth, my laugh echoing against the hollow steel. Things would progress from there. Dad would make a trial batch using Milou. He’d hand the bottles off to his workers and took a couple to a sommelier in Marseilles. It was a hit. That first test run, tentatively named “Ami de Milou”, ran out almost immediately. This was turning from a passion project to commercial sales. The whole thing was getting out of hand. I had to yell at workers to not investigate the dilution tank. My dad would wave me off. He kept his promise to leave me in charge of the tank, but I could tell he was about to budge. I could see it all slipping between my fingers. I was getting pushed out of the equation. Then again – why wouldn’t I be? You can’t rest an industry on the shoulders of a child. One night, I saw my dad climb up to check the dilution tank. He wanted to grab a sample to have it analyzed. He had promised me a hundred times over that he wouldn’t do it, but he did it anyway. I didn’t understand that he needed to make sure there were no pollutants, and that it was safe to drink. You can’t put mystery recipes on store shelves. But I didn’t care. I felt betrayed. So I let him open, and look. The moment he opened the water tank, his eyes glazed over. He stumbled down the ladder, as if learning how to walk. He wasn’t shaking, like Maurice had done. It’s as if he had climbed down a new person. Like a new new person. Someone who didn’t know how to use his body. My dad’s new dark, expressionless eyes settled on me. He smiled. “Friend,” he gargled. “Best friend.” Over the next few weeks, I noticed things. I saw Claude putting down a crate of filters just to stare at the sky. I saw my sister’s eyes turn dark as she watched the TV, forgetting to blink. My brothers would sit on the floor next to the fridge, tasting jams and sauces straight from the jars. Milou was using his newfound strength to look beyond the tank, using the eyes of anyone who had drunk from his waters. I remember my father coming home with dark eyes. My mother had them too. They started kissing in the hallway. But not, like, nice kissing. I’d never seen them like that before. They were pushing, biting, grabbing. I’d never seen adults act like that before. They hurried up the stairs and I didn’t see them for the rest of the night. We missed dinner. But it wasn’t all the time. Most of the time it was normal. Until it wasn’t. I remember my 10th birthday. It was quiet. I stepped downstairs and into the dining room. They were all sitting in a circle. My mom and dad. My sisters. My brothers. All their eyes dark, with smiles plastered across their faces. Like they didn’t know how to smile, but tried their best. It looked more like snarling wolves, biting down so hard their jaws trembled. ‘Happy Birthday’, they said as one. I got the seat of honor. All eyes on me. There was a carrot cake. My dad got up with a kitchen knife. He pushed my sister out of the way so hard she fell off her chair, still smiling. He leaned over the table, smashing his hand down on a plate like his joints were too stiff. It’s a miracle the plate didn’t crack. He leaned in with the knife, putting his entire weight on it – and cutting off the tip of his index finger. He didn’t seem to notice. He didn’t even cut up a slice. He just cut into the cake because that’s what he’d seen in the pictures. They don’t move in newspaper clippings. With both his hands, he grabbed the cake and pushed the whole thing across the table, dragging the tablecloth along. Every glass was spilled. Every plate rolled onto the floor. Spoons clattered as my siblings toppled over like fallen chess pieces – smiling all the way down. “Happy Birthday, friend,” dad gargled. “Best friend.” “Thank you, Milou,” I stuttered. “Thank you.” “I love you.” “I love you too, Milou.” Dad sat down on the floor, looking up at me like a curious dog. The one remaining spoon on the table was mine. They all stared in awe, waiting for me to approve. I took a bite of the carrot cake, and their teeth began to chatter. They were so pleased. So, so, pleased. I didn’t know what to do. Milou kept reaching further and further away. I’d see people around town walking around with dark eyes. Bus drivers, fruit vendors. I’d see them smelling flowers, running their hands across blue sunflower petals at the shop. Sometimes there’d be groups of them. They wouldn’t even bother speaking like people, they’d gargle amongst themselves, exploring new and visceral sensations. I’d see them at the library. Ten people reading ten different books at once. I’d see it at school, with our music teacher clumsily slamming their hands on the finely tuned piano. And I’d read about it in articles, where dark-eyed fishermen would disappear on long hauls, only to come back with mysterious barrels. Barrels that would make their way to our dilution tank. Milou knew what he was doing. He didn’t trust anyone but me, and it served him well. One night, I climbed back up the side of the tank. I opened it, holding my breath as to not choke on the fumes. Milou had grown. By then he was at least twelve feet long. He’d spun himself into a spiral, resting at the bottom of the tank. All around him were these little black things, no longer than a nail. His kin, from the barrels. I didn’t know what to say. Just opening my mouth made the fumes burn. Milou uncoiled and raised himself out of the water like a cobra. His eyes were bigger than my fists. The spikes along his spine were thicker than my fingers. Just like with everything else, he’d gotten away from me. He was no longer my pet. I was his. He leaned his head in close. I could see his fangs. Translucent, like glass. He put his mouth against my forehead, as if giving me a tender kiss. It was cold, and it burned. Whatever he was doing, I was still allergic to it. “You’re hurting me,” I said. He leaned back. Now, like then, he understood. He coiled back into the bottom of the tank apologetically, and I climbed back down. It all came to a breaking point in late September. I woke up one night to cheers and the pitter-patter of running feet. Looking out into the field, I could see torches. They’d started the tractor. They were dragging the tank out into the open, using chains wrapped around the side. It made this long track in the ground, thoughtlessly toppling over grape vines. I put on my shoes and hurried down the stairs. My siblings were already outside, flailing with their arms and gargling at the night sky. They’d completely abandoned trying to look and sound like people. They even smelled like Milou. They were all busy. Pushing, chasing, dancing, jumping, and yelling. One of my sisters were on her knees, just staring at the full moon. Claude was playing with a torch, running a blackened hand through the flame. But I couldn’t see mom and dad. And then I did. They were coming out of the storeroom, holding something between them. After a couple of seconds, I could see a head. They were holding someone up, carrying them on their shoulders. A stranger, it seemed. He was waking up. “Let me… go!” he yelled. “Who are you people?!” Everyone threw things at him. Grapes. Tools. Gloves. He was bleeding from his forehead. And when he got closer, I could see a gash across his forehead. They’d hurt him. “What are you doing?” he asked. “What is this?” There was no response as they led him up the side of the tank. The moment he looked down, he started screaming, and he couldn’t stop. He was trying to beg, and fight, and run, all at once. But his body was betraying him, and the gathering crowd held him back. I protested, but my voice was too weak. They didn’t hear me. Or maybe they didn’t care. They threw him into the water tank. His screams turned from panic to pain. I could hear his voice whip around, as if he was suddenly tugged and pulled in different directions. They celebrated. Cheering. Gargling. And as the screaming grew louder, a hand pulled on my finger. My youngest sister, looking up at me with dark, expressionless eyes. “We want to try,” she said. “To taste. To see.” “You’re hurting him!” I cried. “Please, you have to stop!” “I’m just hurting him,” she said. “Not you. Never you.” “No!” I protested. “This hurts! This hurts me too!” That made her pause. For a moment, the movement inside the tank stopped. She held my hand, thinking. Then, a plastered smile returned to her face. “I have a solution, friend. Best friend.” She hugged me. Others followed suit. Mom. Dad. Maurice. The screaming in the tank resumed. They pulled me to the ground, wrapping me in a hug. Stroking my hair and cheek. Caring for me. All the while, the screaming in the tank was cut short; replaced with the snapping of bones, and the tearing of flesh. “I love you,” they whispered. “I love you.” I lay there all night, listening to a man being eaten alive. The following morning, there was a bag outside the front door, and a stranger with a white car. He had covered his eyes with sunglasses. My dad took me by the hand and led me away from the others. “If it hurts, you can’t look,” he said. “I will take care of you.” “Wait,” I said. “What are you doing?” “Taking care.” They put me in the car. They tossed Maurice in there too. He looked at me with dark, expressionless eyes. “I don’t like this one,” he said. “He goes too.” They took my things, and they sent me away. I stayed with a stranger in Marseilles for a while. Weeks, maybe. Maurice eventually returned to his normal self, but we couldn’t make heads or tails of it. Any of it. We were just kids, we couldn’t do anything. But we had a place to live. People that came and went; giving us food, washing our clothes, and giving us as large an allowance as we ever could’ve wished for. We could play any game. Go anywhere. See anything. And I wish I could say we fought. That we figured out a clever trick. That we were smarter than a strange frog from the woods. But we didn’t, and we weren’t. This was a long time ago. Ami de Milou has a different name today. I’ve tried posting it here, but the post gets removed. I think it’s filtered. I am almost 22 years old. I’ve never worked a day in my life. I have a nice car, and a big apartment. Most people think I come from trust fund money. When I say the company name, they always gasp. I’m sure you’ve heard of it too. I can say what I want, no one will believe me anyway. I’ve sent letters, but they have disappeared in the mail. Calls get disconnected. They sometimes hides the dark eyes behind sunglasses, but I can still tell who has them. They move a certain way. I can’t pinpoint the moment Maurice and I gave up. Maybe it was the moment we realized we could have ice cream for dinner. Maybe it was when Maurice moved out and got a dog. Or maybe it was on my first birthday away from my family, when a dark-eyed man handed me a birthday card. There were two boys playing with a beach ball on it. “I love you,” it read. They run other companies now. I know the logos. I see them on fishing boats. On trash collectors. And lately, I’ve sensed a familiar smell coming from the water in the shower. Perhaps there’s a familiar logo at the water treatment plant as well. I’ve gone back a couple of times, but there’s not much I can do. There are so many to stop me from trying anything. I never get closer than that hill, overlooking what used to be a vineyard. Now there’re walls, and barbed wire. Mostly around the new artificial lake they’ve dug. But I suppose, in a way, I’m lucky. Wherever I go, someone cares. Someone watches, and listens. And if I ever feel lonely, I just walk into a crowd. “I love you, Milou.” That’s all I have to say. And someone, somewhere, will whisper it back. submitted by /u/Saturdead to r/nosleep [link] [comments]

Thank you to u/SpacePaladin15 for the NOP Universe. Hello all, hope people are having a good time. It's the 50th chapter of Terran Zoology and the speeps are finally getting to meet a sheep! I hope everyone enjoys. [First] [Previous] [Next] - Character Bio's Memory transcription subject: Rysel, Venlil Environmental Researcher Date [standardised human time]: 12th September 2136 As the disarmingly bizarre look-alike plodded into the enclosure I realised that I was staring at like an idiot, mouth partly agape and ears lolling absentmindedly. A feeling of wrongness crawled out of the far reaches of my mind, icy tendrils tingling along my shoulders the more I gazed into the creature's eyes, eyes that were familiar yet undeniably alien; devoid of the consciousness I’d recognise in the pupils of my own species. Ugggh! This is so weeeird! It was strange enough seeing Earth animals that looked like Mazic, Yotul, and Sivkit, but meeting one that looks like me makes me feel so… so… Icky! Though a juvenile choice, icky was the only way to describe the experience. If it weren’t for the fact it was on all fours and lacked a tail as long as our own, I could honestly see myself mistaking the sheep for a venlil at a distance. Stars, I might even think it was a particularly funny looking venlil from up close if I’d had too much to drink. Seeking an escape from the unsettling sensation assailing me I tore my eyes away from the sheep and onto Bernard, only to see that he was doing his best to hide a smirk as he watched the class’s reactions with thinly veiled amusement. For a moment I was baffled by how he could be finding anything humorous about the situation, but I quickly remembered how he’d acted when he found out that many of the Federation’s species appeared to have a doppelganger or two courtesy of Earth’s cornucopia of animals. He’s definitely patting himself on the back thinking he’s been so funny to turn that info around on us like this. Well I’ll show him. Pride adequately stung by our mischievous teacher’s plotting, I responded in the only acceptable way. False bravado. Subtly as I could, I tried shaking off the vestiges of discomfort still stuck to my wool. I batted my ears at the unseen forces surrounding me, hopefully playing it off as nothing more than a casual ear flick, while simultaneously doing a little casual stretch to shed the tension wound throughout my torso. If Bernard or anyone else noticed they didn’t say anything. Heh, flawless. Wanting to avoid getting caught up again in a spiral of ickiness, I hastily moved my attention past the sheep to my other classmates in the pen. Vlek and Kailo were in a similar state to me, their expressions a mix of confusion and unease as they regarded the sheep warily. In contrast, Sandi didn’t seem fazed at all! There was a tiny twitch in her tail that might have alluded to similar feelings as the rest of us, but it was so slight that it was really difficult to tell. Stars, does nothing spook her anymore? I need to ask her what her secret is. Although if I’m honest, rampant enthusiasm has been working out for me so far. “First thoughts?” Evidently done savouring our gobsmacked looks Bernard extended his arms out to the class, inviting us to share our impressions of the latest animal he’d trotted out. I half expected the room to explode with shocked bleats and calls for immediate explanations into the sheeps appearance. Surprisingly however, the responses were far more tepid than I’d anticipated. Sure, ears and tails aplenty still haphazardly flickered this way and that restlessly, but not one coat in the crowd seemed particularly moved by the alien double; something our teacher was quick to realise. “Really? Nothing at all? Goodness me, and after I went out of my way to choose a breed of sheep I thought bore the most resemblance to you,” His admission turned a few ears but he waved them off with a cheeky smirk, “Oh don’t look at me like that, I thought it’d be a funny comparison to jump off of. Thought you’d appreciate the change from my usual jokes. That said, if this didn’t put a smile on your faces, I have plenty of sheep puns to shear you all up!” The hall instantly filled with a chorus of groans, punctuated by several variations of “Noooo…” or “Come on!” as the herd was unwillingly dragged out of their stupor by another of Bernard’s puns*.* Even the assembled humans couldn’t help but shake their heads in dismay, though I caught Alejandro smirking; the pun apparently providing a whisker of reprieve from his building stress. Bernard didn’t give us any time to recover or push back on his humour. Galvanized by finally getting a reaction out of us, he leapt into teaching with gusto and a self-satisfied grin painting his face, “Behold, the humble sheep. Another animal that has stood by humanity's side for millennia! These wonderful wooly bovidae played a pivotal role in assuring our species early development. Now, I will do my utmost to be sensitive as we go, but I wouldn’t be being fair if I didn’t mention that we simply can’t talk about the sheep without verging into territory that you will find disturbing. I’ll avoid the more unpleasant details, but I also feel it’s better to rip this band-aid off right from the jump so to speak. I’m talking of course about farming.” If the sheep reveal had been a mild ripple in the pond that represented the herds collective emotional state, then the mention of farming was akin to slamming a building sized boulder into it. It wasn't like we didn’t know about it, it likely would’ve been the very first thing most of us thought about when humans were first introduced to the galaxy. It was just that, so far, we’d not had to hear about it in class. Only vague allusions to the practice had ever been brought up, yet the cloud of its existence remained ever present; hanging silently above just waiting to break. With the flick of a switch Bernard had changed the mood from ‘resigned acceptance of his jokes’ all the way to ‘stunned gut-twisting foreboding', and no one was left unscathed by him abruptly raising the topic. Every set of ears was either pinned back or left twitching nervously while at least half the tails in the room found their way wrapped tightly around the legs of their owners. All the humans bar Bernard were similarly affected, sporting uneasy looks and shuffling nervously on the spot as they avoided looking at any nearby venlil. Even Sandi was unable to disguise her wool frizzing out as anything other than reactive anxiety, and I wasn’t faring any better. My tail had gone limp while clutching dread squeezed my chest, all as horrible imaginings of cattle farms began to manifest and play across my mind like some sick malformed pantomime. No, no, no! Stop that! It’s not like that, it can’t be like that! Humans aren’t like that! But they still eat meat. They slaughter animals and eat them. Just like the Ar- NO! …no. Humans do eat me- …that*, but they’re nothing like* them*.* …It’s not the same. Remember what he said about the horses. Even if humans- even if they use or kill other creatures they do care about them. I need to remember that. That’s a HUGE contradiction. …Yeah. Somewhat catching myself from completely plummeting into a much darker place than I already was, I turned an eye to the sheep that was utterly indifferent to what was going on around it. I watched its face, reminding myself that the animal before me was just that, an animal. As distressing as I might find their reality to be, I at least took some comfort in the knowledge that humans would never treat a sapient person as cattle. At least, that was what I was telling myself to convince the disturbed side of me to quiet the brahk down; it was making it difficult to think clearly let alone rationally. Breaking the tenuous hush with a light cough, Bernard pulled everyone's attention back to him, “I can see you’re all a bit frazzled so it’s probably best if we move on quickly. I think sitting with your thoughts for too long will do more harm than good in this instance.” Judging by the immediate jittering tails and desperate ear flaps it was clear that the rest of the herd readily agreed with the sentiment; all of us eager to get through this segment of the lesson as swiftly as possible. “Okay then,” Nodding sympathetically Bernard turned away from us and walked up to Dolly, giving them a pat on the back as the sheep snorted, “Much like horses, humans also domesticated the ancestor of the modern day sheep. This occurred over eleven-thousand years ago and they were called Mouflon. Incidentally it has a modern day relative that shares the same name, and it’s a distinct species from the animal here today despite their shared heritage. As I intimated, humans kept sheep for what we could get from them in order to help us survive. It goes without saying but that means slaughtering them for their meat, however we also collected their milk and wool.” …What? My head was buzzing from the mentions of slaughter so I wasn’t quite sure I’d heard him right, and I wasn’t alone. Several sets of ears perked up, cocked in bemusement over what they’d just said rather than stay flattened against the backs of their owners heads. It was our resident insect enthusiast who eventually mustered themselves well enough to try and get some clarity from our teacher. “Uh… excuse me Doctor. Did- Did you just say milk and wool?” Solenk piped up, ears twirling in bewilderment as he looked between Dolly and Bernard. Without missing a beat Bernard twirled around to face Solenk while bobbing his head yes, “Indeed I did. Milk and wool were, and to an extent still are, invaluable resources to the communities that owned sheep. Milk served as a vital source of nutrition that could sustain us when others ran dry and wool could be sheared and refined into fibres. These in turn were used to produce clothing, blankets, and insulation to shield us from the elements. It can even be used to create artworks! You’d be amazed at what the mind can envision and the hands can make with a pair of knitting needles and a ball of yarn, haha.” As he chortled away to himself, Bernard clearly missed the fact that his answer hadn’t really helped lift the air of confusion. Though the tension from earlier had dissipated somewhat, we were still left pretty befuddled. The part about humans using wool for clothing made sense if you thought about it for more than a moment. Lacking their own protective coats it was understandable that they’d seek out another source to keep warm and dry; having lived my entire life covered in wool I was fully aware of the benefits. What was really throwing me through a loop was the fact that they took and drank milk from another animal. Humans are mammals aren’t they? Shouldn’t they produce milk for their infants? He said ‘us’ but surely he meant their young. Right? Sandi apparently had the exact same thought, taking a step closer to Bernard and the sheep with a curious tail wag, “Sorry if this is an insensitive question Doctor, but you said milk was a source of nutrition. Are human females not able to produce milk for children?” Bernard’s brow creased briefly before his eyes widened and his mouth broke into a half-laugh half-gasp of realisation, “Oh-Ha! That’s right, silly me. I suppose given that we haven’t discussed this before then there’d be no reason for you to know unless you sought out the information elsewhere, my apologies for any misunderstanding. Humans like all other mammals are able to produce milk for babies. Unlike other mammals however, we can consume milk and milk-based products well into adulthood.” A scattering of shocked and even mortified beeps and bleats flared up throughout the class, with some looking as if they’d just bit into a spewmelon. Personally, with how many surprises Bernard constantly threw at us, this was down there with the least stirring ones. I definitely found it strange, and the thought of drinking milk at my age absolutely made my stomach churn a bit, but this really didn’t seem like something to get your tail in a knot over. Humans already break every known mould we had, this really isn’t that much of a stretch. Similarly to me and in complete indifference to the reactions of our classmates, Sandi was instantly intrigued by this new information, “But how can you do that? My understanding is that pups can digest milk due to enzymes that eventually deteriorate as they grow and make the move to other forms of nutrition like solid food. Did humans somehow retain these enzymes?” Bernard’s face lit up in a beaming smile, clapping his hands atop his cane excitedly, “Very astute Sandi, you’re absolutely correct! The enzyme you’re thinking of is called lactase and it allows the stomach to break down the sugars within milk, called lactose. Through chance mutation several thousand years ago, certain humans began to retain the enzyme which in turn allowed them to consume dairy well past the stage that other mammals would be able to. As I mentioned earlier, milk is highly nutritious so this development opened up a whole new food source for our species, though I’ll hold off on talking about the specifics for now. By the looks on some of your faces the thought of drinking milk alone is a bitter pill to swallow.” There was palpable relief on the snouts of those who found the conversation less interesting than Sandi, though the woman herself seemed a tad miffed at having to move on from her questioning so quickly. Among those eager to change the subject was Vlek, his own query ready to go as he sought to turn away from how sheep were kept for food, “Doctor, could you please tell us something about the animals themselves instead of how they are used by humans? Their behaviour and social dynamics perhaps.” Before Bernard could answer, Lokki cut him off with a cheeky beep, “Oh come on Vlek, don’t be like that. I think it’d be fun to hear more about how humans apparently have an affinity for wool. If the gossip from the couples' exchange is anything to go by then they must really love our locks.” A wave of giggly beeps and whistles and a few knowing human chortles escaped the crowd at Lokki’s not so subtle assertion. Vlek was hardly amused over being interrupted but Bernard was more forgiving, a wry smirk spreading across his face as he shot a lighthearted glare at Lokki, “Now, now, let’s keep things professional here. As for what you were asking about Vlek, I’m happy to talk about it with you. Dolly here is a Border Leicester sheep, one of the couple-hundred breeds of domesticated sheep in the world. They are grazing herbivores which live in flocks, the size of which varies wildly from relatively small groups all the way up into the high hundreds. Being herbivores they of course eat vegetation, preferring grasses, legumes, and several types of flowering plant. They’re diurnal so will eat throughout the day with breaks for relaxing and then sleep through the night. Shepherds, people who keep and watch over flocks, will cycle their sheep through different pastures if available to ensure they don’t overgraze and deplete their food source.” “If they live in a flock then why is this one here alone? Is something wrong with it?” With a hint of suspicion in his voice Kailo spoke up, scrutinising the sheep while moving slightly in front of the rest of us in the pen, “I’ve heard about wild herbivores being ostracised before for being… afflicted with issues.” My tail stiffened and I frowned at the exterminator, not that he noticed or would even care. While he didn’t outright say it, it didn’t take a genius to figure out what he was alluding to. Predator disease. The illness that caused prey to exhibit predatory behaviors was straight out of the exterminator playbook, just like their position on taint; which I well and truly doubted now considering how close I’d been to humans this last herd of paws. Unlike taint however, I couldn’t deny that PD was a serious problem. There were simply far too many examples of individuals being affected by the disease and being hauled away to facilities for rehabilitation. It was a topic I absolutely wanted to avoid talking about with a human. Even Bernard, as understanding as he was, would likely struggle hearing about how behaviours that were natural to them were seen as proof of sickness in other species. Star’s I think I’d go bald from stress if I had to have that talk. “No, Kailo. Nothing- Nothing is wrong with Dolly,” Bernard replied, an unexpected tightness in his voice that sent a jolt along my tail. In the next instant it was gone, his usual upbeat attitude springing back into the fore, “Dolly didn’t travel alone. We’ve also got Bubbles, Lulu, and Fleece Lightning with us. No prizes for the humans in the room who can guess which of those names is my favourite.” I had my suspicions but glancing at the wooden expressions of said humans confirmed that at least one of those names was definitely a pun of some sort. Thank the Star’s that translators aren’t foolproof. Snickering quietly to myself I returned my attention to Bernard as he continued. “Being highly sociable flock animals, sheep can become fairly distressed when they’re separated from their peers for any length of time so we brought a group of them along to see to their social needs. The rest are staying in the back for now since four sheep would be a bit much to handle in this space. Sheep can form extremely strong bonds within their flocks, with related sheep tending to be closer with one another than those that are unrelated. Also, their inclination to flock together is typically determined by whether or not they have natural predators. What I mean by that is that, while sheep exist all over Earth, not every region has predators that pose a threat to sheep. Therefore in some places you’ll see a flock of sheep spread out across a field whereas in others they’ll be clumped close together for protection.” Huh… does that mean they lack prey instinct? I waved my tail to grab Bernard's attention, “Have some sheep lost their fear of predators?” “Oh no, absolutely not,” he shook his head, taking a beat to look at the still perfectly calm Dolly, “Regardless of where they live, sheep have certainly retained their instinctive responses. It’s just that the ones in places without predators have also learned they can be a bit more outgoing but if they felt threatened they’d definitely react on instinct. Sheep will often choose to run away from danger but if you back them into a corner their aggressive side will come out. Charging, hoof stamping, and headbutting are all common threat displays. In fact this aggression also rears its head when sheep compete for dominance within their flocks. Additionally in some breeds, male sheep called rams can grow horns and their size can be a determining factor in the hierarchy. Our Border Leicester here is a breed that doesn’t grow horns though, and their hierarchies are less stringent than other breeds.” As usual it was slightly discomforting to learn about the violent tendencies of Earth born prey species. I thought I’d be used to it by now given what we’d seen and how far my beliefs had already been upended, but there was always that tickle of alarm upon hearing how different they were compared to what I was accustomed to. Oh well, it’s not that bad. It’s nothing compared to finding out that predators and prey on Earth don’t fit the physical expectations. Now that was upsetting. “Doctor?” I was pulled from the memory by Rova calling from beyond the fence, “I know it’s silly to compare ourselves to animals but I just had a thought. Do sheep get rid of their wool or does it stop growing at a certain point? For venlil it differs a lot. We shed a little but otherwise have to shear it, and people historically from the nightside tend to have larger coats than those from the dayside just due to adaptation. Are they the same?” Smiling gently Bernard let out a light chuckle as he answered, “It’s not silly at all, Rova. I think it’s good to see ourselves in other animals from time to time. To answer our question though, domesticated sheep don’t shed their wool and it doesn’t stop growing. It’s up to us to ensure they are regularly sheared or they can suffer things like heat stroke or strain from their coats being too heavy. Just like horses, the domestication of sheep has resulted in enormous changes to the species. Ironically it is by human intervention that we have made them largely unable to live without that same intervention. This is why, as I said before, I feel it is imperative that we take responsibility for these animals wherever we can.” The mental image of being so weighed down by my wool that I couldn’t move flashed through my mind, the mere thought being enough to incite the sensation of warmth beneath my wool. In the whisker that passed, I silently thanked the stars that I was living in a world where a fur salon was rarely more than a short walk away. I could do with a shear soon actually. A little touch up and pampering would be a lovely way to spend a rest paw. Plans for a paw of selfcare would have to wait for now, as the lesson was not done and Bernard was picking up pace; spitting out facts left, right, and centre as he sought to share everything that he could think of. “Now we’re a bit pressed for time so why don’t I do the same thing I did for the horse? A few quick facts. Firstly, food and clothing aren’t the only things sheep represent for humans. They feature in countless elements of folklore and religious iconography, being symbols of everything from innocence and renewal to warnings about following the herd just for the sake of following. Next, counting sheep is a method people use to lull themselves to sleep. Don’t ask me why, I’ve no clue but it works. What’s another one? Ah yes! Though often derided as being stupid, sheep are very clever animals. They can memorise the faces of other sheep over long periods of time and can even recall human faces too, as well as solve complex mazes. Last one for now, and this one’s a doozy. Dolly here is named after a far more famous sheep from about 140 years ago. That older Dolly was the first mammal to be cloned from an adult cell. Not really a sheep fact per say, but an interesting one regardless!” I’m sorry, did you say clone*!* For what had to be at least the third time with this animal alone, Bernard dumped a sizable chunk of information on our heads without any further clarification. Ears shot up astonishment as jaws dropped in equal stupefaction. Kailo looked like his brain had shorted out while Sandi’s was in overdrive processing this new data. Before anyone had a chance to push him to explain himself, Bernard began ushering Viktor and Hazel out of the enclosure, “If you don’t mind taking Hazel back now please, give us a bit more room for Sergeant Gallo. Oh no it’s fine Jean, you and Dolly can stay, I’d like them to see how she reacts to Bella.” Instruction given to his assistants he focussed back on us with a gleam in his eyes, “Ok then, it’s time for the last large animal of the day. You four are welcome to stay but you should know that the next specimen is another predator. I will stress again that you are perfectly safe, but this animal is almost the same size as you so if that’s too much then you can of course leave.” Now, Wiggles had already been a test of my bravery. Despite how small he was and how excited I’d been to get into the enclosure once Sandi proposed it, it’d still taken a fair amount of willpower to cross the threshold to meet the tiny predator. Of course once I actually met and petted him all that fear melted into nothingness. However, the alarm bells had returned louder than ever with the prospect of another, bigger predator soon to be in the pen with us. Ok, ok, ok… it’s fine. Everything’s been safe so far, Wiggles, the birds, even Kailo and that tarantula were safe. I trust Bernard. If he says it’s safe then it’s safe. Ugh. I’m going to regret this. Shush! Worries suitably quelled, I stood my ground, waiting with anticipation for the Sergeant to return with whatever animal he’d brought with him. I didn’t have to wait long for the human to return from the backroom, a rope trailing behind him that presumably led to the animal in question. Despite being warned it was our size it was hidden behind the other exhibits, leading me to the conclusion that it was also a quadruped and wasn’t particularly tall. As it finally rounded a corner and came into view my assumption was proven correct, but any other possible observations hastily flung themselves from my head as it made direct eye contact with me with a piercing stare that cut right through me, causing my breath to hitch as body locked up all while the predator prowled closer on its clawed paws. Oh. My. Stars. Though it was tough to pull my eyes off the creature I managed it, glancing at Sandi, Kailo, and Vlek to gauge how they were doing. Vlek was almost catatonic with fright, the older venlil’s shivering ears being the only parts of him that still seemed to be moving. Kailo was trying to put on a brave face, breathing deeply in what I assumed was an effort to shake off the fear instinct spiking through him. Out of all of us Sandi was unsurprisingly coping the best, but her tail and ears were still wagging erratically and her full unwavering attention was glued to the approaching predator. If Bernard noticed our reactions he didn’t comment, and he took the opportunity to announce their arrival; not that anyone was unaware. “Now then everyone, let me once again introduce Sergeant Gallo from the London Metropolitan Dog Support Unit, and his trusty canine companion Bella, the German Shepherd.” Brahk! I trust Bernard. I trust Bernard. I hope staying here wasn’t a mistake. submitted by /u/Still_Performance_39 to r/NatureofPredators [link] [comments]

Did a clothing order for my BABs and they came last week! I picked 4 of my bears to be the first to try them on! Pic 1: full haul Pic 2: Petunia modeling the pride shirt and black jean shorts Pic 3: Frida modeling the kimono Pic 4: Lily modeling the bandana top and flare jeans Pic 5: Lilac modeling the romper an jean jacket submitted by /u/MegWaters012502 to r/buildabear [link] [comments]

I am NOT OOP, OOP is u/Cheap-Cucumber8223, account now deleted Originally posted to r/AITAH AITA for telling my step kids I'm not their mom? Trigger Warnings: verbal abuse, emotional abuse and manipulation, miscarriage, possible parental alienation   Original post: February 24, 2024 My husband (40M) and I (36F) have been together for 8 years now and our marriage have been rocky. When I met him he had twins, boy and girl. I love them like their my children, since it's hard for me to have kids they are mines. My husband and I tried for a baby last year and I became pregnant but had a miscarriage but I think I'm just not meant to be a new mommy. The kids are 16! The husband kids haven't seen their mom in years because she left them for a guy in New York which is so sad because they didn't get to have a relationship with her. The twins call me mom and everything, we do everything like a little family I always wanted. When I was younger I always use to tell myself not to date a single father because theyight be messing with the mother of their kids but I took the leap of faith. The other day my son and daughter wanted to go to the mall with their friends, which was fine because they go to the mall a lot with them. The argument started because of what she was wearing, she wore and very short skirt with a crop top and a jeans jacket. I immediately told her no and to change her clothes because I didn't feel comfortable with her going out side like that, I don't even know where she got the skirt from because anything she gets from the mall she gives me a haul. Her brother didn't even care what she was wearing and just rolled his eyes at me. She was pissed and upset, at the top of the step she screamed and told me I wasn't her mom so I should stop acting like it, her brother laughed and that made me feel even worse so I asked him why it was funny to him and he said that it's true, I'm not their mom so I need to stop acting like I can tell them what to do. This felt like a slap in the face because I basically raised her and this is what I get? The past months they've been saying horrible things to me, my daughter even told me it was might fault I lost the baby and she's happy I did. But the next day I toughen up, I acted like nothing happened that day. I would usually wake them up for school and make them breakfast but this time I didn't, I made myself breakfast because like they said I'm not their mom. My son had a basketball game that day and I would be the mom to bring snacks for the team but I wasn't going, my daughter had a cheer competition 2 days after but I wasn't going and I know y'all might call me petty for this and I wouldn't disagree with you. I've been getting up and ignored everyone, I could feel them staring at me everytime. Last night my daughter came up to me and asked me why I didn't show up to her competition and I told her I wasn't her mom so why would I? I can already see the yta and I raised my husband kids and stuff. I told my husband what they said but he brushed me off. I don't think our marriage is working out and I've been thinking about a divorce. I feel unappreciative in the place I call home, when I slave in the kitchen to make them food they order out instead so I am the only one eating the food. Was that too harsh? AITAH has no consensus bot, OOP had mixed reactions based on the top comments RELEVANT COMMENTS originalgenghismom NTA What did your daughter say when you told her why you didn’t go to her competition? OOP: She said she was upset with me and that the whole time at the competition she thought about our argument and that's how she messed up in her routine placing her team in fifth place. She said if I didn't mention what she was wearing she wouldn't have lost. InsideRationalA INFO: how your stepkids reacted when you said you're not their mother? OOP: I could tell by their body language that they didn't like what I said and they were shocked I said it. They've been quiet these days, we're basically strangers. TOP COMMENT cultqueennn Nta They knew what they said, but are now facing the consequences of their mouths.   Update: February 26, 2024 I know everyone has been spamming to know the update and sorry I didn't make this sooner, I had to think about what was my next move. I tried sit the kids down and talk to them along with my husband, my Step daughter was basically on her phone the whole time not even paying attention to what I said. Her brother surprisingly was listening and he apologized for laughing at the comment he and his sister made, I asked her if she can apologize for what she said about my baby but she brushed me off and again said the baby deserved it. My husband didn't do a thing when she said this, he sat down looking into space and I felt embarrassed so I knew what I had to do. I told him wanted a divorce if he wasn't to act like I'm a stranger and disrespect me. At this moment this was my first time getting his attention, he told me that wasn't the right decision and that we could go to therapy but when I mentioned that to him before he didn't care. I know this is not the decision you guys thought I would have chose but I'm trying to figure out what I want for my life. He begged me to not take it this route and I wanted to fold but I know it will happen again. This is really hard, you won't even believe who cried. My step kids had tears coming out their eyes, I dont know if they were faking it or was being serious. it broke my heart but I can't keep living in a place I am not wanted, I'm staying with my mom for the mean time so I can get a break and clear my head because all this is too much. If I have anything else to say I will update you guys over here! It was a shock to me when my stepdaughter changed her demeanor and started saying sorry out of nowhere, I don't know if it's sincere or she's just ready for me to leave. TOP COMMENTS LadyIceis I am so sorry you are dealing with this! Please know this is the right decision. The kids and hubby are only crying because they lost their maid. Now they have to do everything themselves. You need to get out. Sending much love and hugs! Mountain_Internal966 This is actually what I think a lot of us hoped for because you deserve so much more. Aside from stepson apparently, your feelings were still not being considered and continued to be disrespected up until you mentioned divorce. The fact your husband has no reaction to the cruel thing his daughter said about your miscarriage (even when she doubled down) is mind blowing but says a whole lot. I know this will be hard at first, but you will come out on the other end so much happier. I wish you the best, OP. Buttered_Crumpet09 You've made the right choice. You've been their reliable punchbag, always there to be whacked when they wanted to. Your husband didn't care because as long as they were whacking you, he remained unharmed. Now they are realising that you are an actual person with feelings, but it's too late. Your husband should have had his kids in therapy after their mum left. The armchair psychologist in me thinks that they've taken their rage at their mum leaving out on you, trying their best to push you away because if their mum left, why wouldn't you? I think your stepdaughter also was projecting with her vile comments about your baby (and I'm sorry for your loss). Mums aren't great in her eyes, so she put the blame on you for losing the baby. Your stepson has stuck by his sister, and they both took it for granted that you would still be there no matter what, which is why it bothered them when you stopped showing up to their events. Now they hopefully are realising that they've successfully pushed you away, and they're realising they've thrown away the only mother they've had for so long because they're angry at the mother who left them behind. None of that excuses them. None of it justifies them treating you like dirt. And not a single bit of it justifies your husband being a useless jellyfish. He's now worried because he'll actually have to parent his kids and look after the house, and because all that shit that's been thrown at you is about to be aimed at him. He could have put an end to this, but he didn't because he couldn't be bothered. That was also his child who was lost, and he let his daughter spout that poison. Only now that things may become inconvenient for him does he want to fix things. Only now you're leaving do the kids actually seem to care. It's too little, too late. Maybe one day, your stepchildren will get the therapy they so clearly need, realise how badly they've screwed up, and come to you to apologise. Only you can decide if you can ever forgive their hateful comments, and there's nothing wrong with you if you can't; in your place, I'm not sure I could ever forgive all that. But your marriage was dead the moment your husband decided not to stand up for you. He wasn't a partner, he was a passive spectator who allowed his kids to abuse you. Good luck, and I wish you happiness and peace.   THIS IS A REPOST SUB – I AM NOT OOP submitted by /u/Choice_Evidence1983 to r/BestofRedditorUpdates [link] [comments]

Part 0 Part 1 Part 2 Part 3 Part 4 Part 5 Part 6 Welcome to the final post! We've come a long way together. But before we can get to the fun stuff, I have some outstanding business. I've been caught red-handed trying to skip the Holiday EP. Here are my thoughts. The Taylor Swift Holiday Collection IT'S A COUNTRY CHRISTMAS ALBUM??? Oh no, and she's adding verses to Last Christmas. This is truly bizarre. If I knew about this from the beginning I would have expected that her label was full of assholes. They totally convinced her to put out a holiday album to pump up her sales numbers, I'm certain of it. If it was her idea, let's pretend it wasn't. Christmases When You Were Mine is certainly no Christmas Tree Farm. I can't believe she wrote a Christmas break up song. I personally abhor Santa Baby and can't believe I've been coerced into listening to it. I'm disappointed that someone spilled a tractor and a dirt road into my Silent Night. Oh, finally! Someone has asked the life-defining question, "what would happen if God never let it snow?" Playing violin in a rendition of White Christmas is like playing the slide whistle in Fire and Rain by James Taylor. I should've listened to everyone who told me to skip it. RANKINGS Y'all were vocal about wanting to know these rankings so I spent a whopping SEVEN HOURS on refining my opinions here. I hope you see some placements that delight and shock you. Albums 5) reputation The first time I listened to this album, I thought it was signaling my death. If this is what Taylor Swift was turning into, I wanted to ghost everybody and fail my bet. Then, a very helpful Parsnip suggested I watch the tour video instead of relistening to the album. Once I saw it on stage, I understood what I was missing. The album is great, but the performances are gold. If this was a ranking of live performed music, this would be at the top. 4) Lover Yeah, I know! But I really like it, because it has the attitude of rep with a sound that clicks a little better for me personally. 3) Evermore & 2) Folklore I almost considered these two albums as one piece, but I wanted to make this a top 5 list and I didn't mind formally writing that I do like Folklore better than Evermore. Great albums, super relaxing and meditative for me and they took me to some emotional places that I'm still wandering through as I type this. 1) 1989 TV Put the album on in my car. No, really, do it. It sounds great, it makes me want to drive through the city, park on the street and eat a $27 bowl of ramen. You won't see many songs from this album down below, but what you don't see is that of the tracks I ranked 16-20, four of them were from this album. Songs I stayed up until 2am, skipping through her discography and finding the songs I liked the best at the end of this whole adventure. I watched the clock roll back to 1am as I listened to each track again and again, ordering my list until the clock read 2am a second time. Honorable mentions to I Heart ? and Mean, the two songs I liked the most from her first three albums. Those albums aren't for me, they have never been for me, and I won't be likely to listen to them again on purpose. But if they come on, I'll feel a way about my memories of this adventure. How did I pick these? Simple, which ones do I want to sing when I'm alone, driving at 2am on the way out of the middle of nowhere? Which songs do I want to save to my library, so I can revisit them again someday when I want to remember that strange first week of November in 2023? When someone laughs when they hear I reviewed every one of her songs in a week, which ones do I want to play them to prove it was all worth it? Here are my answers. 15) Evermore 14) Begin Again (TV) 13) Birch (Big Red Machine) 12) Lover 11) New Year's Day 10) betty 9) the 1 8) willow 7) Paper Rings 6) Run (TV) [ft Ed Sheeran] 5) Everything Has Changed (TV) [ft Ed Sheeran] Don't tell me I might like Ed Sheeran. I'm not going to find out. This is good enough. I've decided it's good enough! 4) ivy This is the best song on evermore. Fight me. When she hits the chorus and that harmony comes out of the ground, I feel my brain pour out my ears. 3) Style (TV) 1989 as an album has my favorite sound. Even over the folk albums, this is the sound I want to hear the most. And it's a car song. And it's got the ever-beltable chorus. 2) The Last Time (original) [ft Gary Lightbody] It hurts to put this song second. I wanted to put their names at the top of my list, really I did. It was in first until my very last listen of my Final 15 playlist. I love the mood, the message, and most of all the harmony. But it was in the front portion of her career, and she had an even greater track inside her, that took me, even if I didn't know it at the time, from Football Fan ---> Swiftie Man. 1) invisible string This track is flawless. It has the bright sound, the sad voice, the storytelling, the pace, the wordplay, she growth (she sends those babies presents!), the optimism. And it's so, so fun to sing. Lyrics C'mon. It's impossible for me to rank these right now. I can't even bundle my favorites very effectively, I'd miss a bunch! I'm not the kind of person that would have flagged three or four phrases out of thousands and carried them all the way here in my memory. I can't answer which one was the most gut wrenching, freeing, thought provoking, clever or impactful. If you want to see which lines popped for me while I listened, they're right there in the track reviews. Surprise Song: The Car Lore Essay Throughout this project, I was seeing road signs for interesting essay ideas fly by as I drove through this discography. I knew I couldn't take those exits because we had a lot of miles to cover, but there was one theme that kept encouraging me to pull over and rest awhile. This still isn't a lot of time to spend with a topic, but since we finished a day early I wanted to give this theme a test drive. Let's talk about car lore. Singing about trucks isn't exactly unique to Taylor's country music. It's one of the holy trinity of annoying country music topics - truck/tractor, whiskey, blue jeans. And it's no wonder why, either. The greatest American metaphor for freedom and self-actualization is the car. Add a bed on the back for hauling lumber and a tow hitch for hanging truck nuts, and you've got an equally powerful symbol of masculinity. The truck is inseparable from rural American culture. Chevy vs Ford is the rural equivalent of which colors you're wearing in a 90s rap album. When Taylor burst onto the scene with her first three albums, you'd be hard-pressed to find someone who thought, "wow, this girl sure talks about trucks a lot." It came part and parcel with the genre. What started as a joke for me, complaining about the country music trope, slowly became a curiosity. I've not listened to enough female country singers to know for sure, but I thought it was notable how often Taylor sang about being in the passenger's seat of someone else's car. I dismissed it initially. She's a young girl, of course boys with cars are an exciting topic to sing about. She probably doesn't have a license yet. But as I learned that this wasn't just some girl writing these songs, I started to question her purpose in the choice of recurring image. Before I get started, I owe an enormous thanks to the tumblr blog TaylorSwiftAndX for saving me uncountable hours searching for lyrics. My hypothesis here is fairly simple, but due to the multi-layered and branching nature of her thematic play through the years, it's going to require a few sentences to get the idea across. First, the car is a foil for her house (for those who aren't literature nerds, a foil is a character who contrasts with another character, typically to expose some qualities about each other). Taylor stays home when she's lonely, sad, and single. That's what the house is for - well, that and watching Law and Order with her cats. Conversely, she's in the car when she's up to something. Sometimes it's to be with boys, sometimes it's to get away from boys, sometimes it's just to be happy. On special occasions, it's to escape from the police. But for Taylor, being in a car is often the same thing as being in a relationship. Second, she places a lot of meaning on being in the passenger's seat of a car. Being a passenger means submitting yourself to the control of another, being vulnerable to their decisions, and it often is used to show which direction the love is flowing in the relationship. What about when she's in the driver's seat? Well, that's a whole big thing and we'll get there. Finally, there's a strong distinction between beat up cars and fancy cars. Taylor ties authenticity with beat up trucks, and being fake with fancy cars. The best place in the world for Debut Taylor is in the passenger's seat of a truck with the right boy next to her. The worst place for Red Taylor is in the back of a big black car with Riviera views, and when she's done with you she says to call a cab and lose her number because she doesn't want to be in your car anymore. Don't take my word for it, let's take Taylor's. The best way forward will be to break this down by album. And please note, when I refer to relationships going forward I'm painting fictional and real relationships with the same brush. In Debut, the album starts with not one, but two songs that lead with trucks. Tim McGraw features a boy with a Chevy truck that has a tendency of getting stuck. This truck is the inaugural truck, a relationship that she's out of and which likely had some challenges because it kept getting stuck. But she still hopes the guy thinks of her when he's using the car radio. In Picture To Burn, Taylor sings a breakup song about hating the boy's stupid old pickup truck, and calling out that she was never allowed to drive. This is such a teenage thing, not letting someone drive your car, but also it's a control thing. Knowing what she does in the LWYMMD music video, he might have been on to something. When describing her exciting relationship, Taylor describes her happy place, riding shotgun with her hair undone in the front seat of his car. Not to cherry pick, we also see her driving home alone in Teardrops On My Guitar, so she's played with the image of herself behind the wheel even this early. Fearless Taylor finds herself laughing on the car ride home with her mom, a great example of a loving relationship and how some real life car rides mattered so much to her growing up. She also gets into a car with a boy in The Way I Loved You, but in this album she's mostly focused with the aspect of being in motion. Fearless is saturated with talk about the way she wants the boy to drive. We see Taylor behind the wheel as she drives away both in Breathe and in Bye Bye Baby. Taylor is surprisingly mum about cars in Speak Now, but they aren't entirely absent. We return to the world of vehicles with a bang in Red. Red Taylor is Fearless Taylor with a macchiato and a manicure - cleaner, caffeinated, and a little more sophisticated. In the eponymous track, Taylor describes loving Scarf Guy like driving a Maserati (God's most perfect creation) down a dead end street. That's a very fast car to be driving such a short runway, symbolizing both the short length and abrupt end of her relationship. This car is also quite expensive - as we will see, this is a note from Taylor that Scarf Guy isn't trustworthy. Treacherous explains to us that nothing safe is worth the drive, a nice metaphor for how relationships have inherent risk. Taylor also puts a car in front focus for Run, a song where she describes escaping from the world's problems with someone special. This time, she brings the car around to show she's in charge of the decision to get away. Finally, in All Too Well, we have a powerful image of Taylor being tossed a set of car keys, and dropping them. This event is still mysterious to me and I don't have time to really dig into it, but it sticks out in a major way. Another one within this song is how he almost ran the red because he was looking at her, a strong and eyebrow raising reversal of the typical love-flow direction typically dictated by her driver and passenger placements, especially considering the real life context. Is the driver being disingenuous, ignoring the rules, and putting her in danger? We find ourselves now in 1989, with Taylor describing a long drive that could end in burning flames or Paradise - a succinct way to describe the two extreme conclusions for a relationship. In Wildest Dreams, we have a heartbreaking realization that despite this relationship being doomed, this driver wants to take her away from the city and return to that rural environment of her first albums. Similarly, in I Wish You Would, she finds herself passing her street and replaying her memories while she rides in his car with the windows down, and in the next stanza she's out of the car, reminded of him when headlights pass her window. In this song about longing, she wants to be back in that car. Before we exit this album, I want to bring to mind that beautiful Shelby Cobra in the Blank Space music video, getting the shit beat out of it in a song about how she's willing to date a bad boy - so of course, when she ends the relationship with this kind of man, it's perfectly represented by obliterating an expensive car. We've arrived. Are you ready for it? I referenced before that she crashes a car in LWYMMD's music video, which is an incredible visual metaphor for her character in this album not caring when she wrecks a relationship. In Kind Of My Heart, she once again paints the unworthy boys in expensive cars like Range Rovers and Jaguars. But the Pinnacle of car lore rests in a song I initially brushed off: Getaway Car. In the rep movie, this song starts with a powerful speech, leveraging evocative language to describe a gauntlet of abuse and its effects on her. The moving poem reaches its conclusion as the camera lands on her, in the driver's seat of world's sexiest Jaguar E-Type, on a big pink X. The song itself starts with a man driving the car, one described as where nothing good can start. This car-relationship isn't going to get far, and there are sirens giving chase. Taylor's drunk, and telling the driver to just GO. In the bridge, Taylor tells us that she switches to the other side, into the driver's seat. Now the chorus is about HER driving the getaway car, leaving the guy behind and leaving this pile-up of relationship drama in the dust. From this point in her discography, we see her taking charge more often. On the next album, Lover, she shows this change. In I Think He knows, she explicitly states "I'll Drive," and in Paper Rings she wants to drive away with him, not bothering to be specific about who's behind the wheel. Jumping ahead to Midnights, Taylor sings a lyric with multi-faceted significance in the song Vigilante Shit. She leads us to thinking about her dispute with Voldemort and his divorce, stating that she's thick as thieves with his ex-wife and that she looks so pretty driving in his Benz. As if it wasn't clear in context, she drives home his untrustworthiness by talking about his expensive car. This brings my enormous essay about car lore to a close. It's fascinating to watch her relationship with cars in her songwriting evolve over the albums, and I hope she finds the right wheels for her someday. Maybe a nice, dependable '87 Chevy like you might find on country roads in Kansas? But I'm not one to speculate. FINAL THOUGHTS I don't know what will happen to me after this. Will I put music on absentmindedly, and find myself listening? It doesn't sound like me. The only way for me to know for sure, is to find out. For now, though, I'm leaving you to enjoy this wonderful hideaway you've built. r/TaylorSwift is an amazing subreddit with some of the kindest and most open-hearted people I've ever interacted with on the internet. Thank you from the bottom of my heart for welcoming me into your community and reading my ridiculous posts. I wish I could take you with me into the next strange project I find myself working on. I don't know when that'll be or where it'll go, but I had the very best time here with you and with Taylor Swift. Part 8 Part 9 submitted by /u/Alex_Demote to r/TaylorSwift [link] [comments]

PandaBuy Unlimited 5% OFF Coupon Signup Bonus (Click Here) 🔥 PandaBuy App is expected to be available around August 8th for iOS and Android devices! 🔥 Ongoing Pandabuy Events Shipping prices reduced by 10% for 60% of countries Use Discount Code "fashionreps" to Get 5% Discount for unlimited uses. Can be combined with shipping coupons! New Features Released: Taobao Shop Viewer all on-site (doesn't require you to use taobao to view a sellers products) Similar shop viewer (browse for similar sellers all on site!) Search via seller name instead of taobao links ​ ​ PandaBuy Quick Intro Video _______________________________________________ ▌GUIDE 6.0▐ The Biggest & Best Full PandaBuy Agent Guide I Introduction II General Info About Taobao Agents III The PandaBuy Guide + Unlimited 5% Discount IV FashionReps Terminology & Translations V How to Reverse Image Search VI How To Avoid Customs VII General Tips About Shipping VIII What Happens When Your Haul Gets Seized By Customs IX Useful Links And Seller Stores X How To Make Your Haul Cheaper XI I Shipped, Now Where Is My Parcel? _______________________________________________ I Introduction Welcome to FashionReps, the worlds largest online discussion board for all things related to replica goods but also other products from China such as electronics, food, and much more! Started in 2014, FashionReps has grown to become a leading community in the world-wide movement towards purchasing goods from China. Throughout the years there has been numerous malicious sellers who have done the community wrong which is why I'm writing this guide - to allow for a better and safer experience throughout your journey. In the current world environment it is important to use an agent. Agents offer additional security when ordering from websites such as Taobao, Weidian, 1688, and even direct sellers! PandaBuy offers unique features that no other agent offers and more importantly has great shipping prices. This guide will go over everything you need to know to start ordering products from China as soon as today. _______________________________________________ ​ II - General Info About Taobao Agents 1. What is an Agent? ​ An agent is a middle-man service provider that allows you to purchase goods from numerous websites such as Taobao, Weidian, 1688, Yupoo, and many more. Much like how Amazon works with third party sellers, an Agent will do the same. Products will be purchased through your choice of agent (I recommend PandaBuy due to their unique features & pricing), sent to a warehouse, pictures taken of the product and uploaded for you to see, then shipped to you after payment. The main website used by the community is Taobao.com and Weidian.com. Think of it like Amazon or eBay for China - solely for China. The problem that results in is that we need to establish a connection between your country and China. This is where an Agent comes into play. You browse through your favorite Taobao shops and find some items you want to buy. Now you do not buy it through Taobao but through your agent (in our case, PandaBuy). PandaBuy now buys this exact item and lets it deliver to their warehouse. You ask for pictures, measurements, exchanges, returns etc. When everything is fine PandaBuy will package everything and deliver it to you. They are the connection between you and Taobao. ​ 2. Which agent to use? The community is filled with many options of agents. Due to this, it's best to understand why specific ones are better than others. Over the years, I have used several agents and many of them have been out-ranked by others due to their lack of features, high shipping prices, and lack of customer support as new agents come along. This is why I highly recommend using PandaBuy. PandaBuy offers the most honest, swift, and most importantly professional customer experience you can get. They're also creating unique features that no other agent is offering. This is why a majority of the community is starting to move towards PandaBuy. In this guide I will continue to make examples and tutorials only about PandaBuy's information. I am sorry if you use another agent but just keep PandaBuy in mind when you plan your next haul. Use any agent you want, there are many out there. However, I highly recommend using PandaBuy due to their unique features catered to the replica community and pricing. ​ _______________________________________________ III - The PandaBuy Guide + Unlimited 5% Signup Bonus 1. Signing up + Get $90 Shipping Coupons/Discounts To receive your unlimited 5% off Signup Bonus you need to sign up HERE. After successfully creating your account, you'll receive an infinite 5% off coupon in your account automatically. ​ ​ When shipping, click discount code ​ Add fashionreps code for 5% off total shipping I recommend as a precaution to use a unique password that isn't used for any websites. This is a precautionary measure that should be done on all websites, not just China-related sites. Also don't worry about your payment information such as Paypal - You never enter your Paypal email + password on the PandaBuy homepage, it always redirects you to Paypal's official website where you log in as usual. PandaBuy also uses a secure connection between you and them (https). ​ 2. Ordering Process - How to order (Image & Text Version) ​ Go to Pandabuy.com after signing up here for your 5% off Discount Find the item you want on Taobao and paste in the link OR if you know the name of your seller, type it into the product navigation bar You will be taken to a page like this. Here, PandaBuy translates the color and size options for you, and all you need to do is select the color and size you want. After, you can either Add to Cart or Buy Now. For this example, we'll assume that the sock is the only thing you want. You will next be taken to this page. Here, you have to select your country from the Choose Destination Country box, then hit submit to be taken to the payment screen. If you have an existing balance in your PandaBuy account from previous purchases that you have returned, you can use that to buy the product. Here, just select Balance or your choice of Payment Processor and pay for your order unless you have an existing balance. Sometimes PandaBuy will not allow you to use PayPal and that is when you need to simply top up your balance instead of doing a direct order with PayPal. Now, just wait until the seller ships his order. Once it arrives in the PandaBuy warehouse, you will receive a notification. Once your product arrives, hover over your username in the navbar and select My Warehouse. Here, you can view QC, or quality control, pictures that PandaBuy takes. If you're satisfied with your order, select it and click Submit in the lower right corner. Here, you can choose your preferred shipping method. The fashionreps favorite currently is EMS, but it's up to you what line you would like to use. Just select the shipping line, then click Submit Delivery Order to have PandaBuy pack up your products and send it to your door. Post your hauls! ​ Image Guide Step 1: Find your product via Shop Name or Taobao Link Search ​ Shop Search Function ​ Traditional Taobao Link Search Function Step 2: Add To Cart or Buy Now ​ Product Page on PandaBuy, full of features to help you browse products easily. Click \"Buy Now\" Step 3: Submit Order ​ Click Submit Order whenever you make all your chosen selection of upgrades & filled in information Step 4. Check Out ​ Choose your choice of payment then click \"Confirm Payment\" Recommend Wise due to the currency exchange rates being better than Paypal. Step 5: Wait for product to arrive to warehouse & QC pictures to be uploaded to your profiles warehouse ​ Once payment is completed, wait a few days for the product to arrive in your warehouse and pictures to be uploaded to your account. From there, you submit your haul for shipping to you. ​ 3. PandaBuy Unique Features PandaBuy is set to be different than other agents by creating unique features for the community to use. Below are some of the key features that made my experience far better and put them a mile ahead of other agents. Taobao Shop Navigation Navigating directly through their site, not requiring a taobao account.. you can view all the products from a seller. This allows me to be better use my time instead of wasting it with the pesky taobao UI that is clunky. Directly enter shops through the roduct page & also favorite them for future use. No longer requiring you to have a taobao account to browse stores! ​ After entering a shop you can browse all the seller products with ease Favoriting Products & Shops After favoriting a product or shop, it gets put under your favorites on your profile for easy navigation in the future. ​ When you favorite a product or store it is placed in this location for future usages Similar Shop Searching Lets you search for shops similar to the one you're browsing. ​ https://preview.redd.it/qffc4lru43591.png?width=1872&format=png&auto=webp&s=e5c74a24f70c8e7ec437c4710448dda2e83f9687 _______________________________________________ THIS IS ALL OPTIONAL READING, WE RECOMMEND READING PAST THIS POINT BUT IT IS NOT NECESSARY FOR LEARNING HOW TO ORDER IV - FashionReps Terminology & Sizing Chart Translations FashionReps Terminology QC: Quality Control (QC for short) is talking about pictures that are posted from an agent of an item that was ordered. Users will post these if they're unsure about the quality and would rather have someone else take a look at them if they're good enough. LC: Legit Check (LC for short) This is a tag used for posts requiring a legit check. Legit checks are a great way of finding out if a item you're purchasing is authentic or not. GP: Guinea Pig (GP for short) You will be the first person to order a sellers new item. This means you'll be the first to get pictures of their product and often times you'll post them to be checked for quality by the community. FIND: Much like the name states. Posts with this flair are often linked to new products that haven't been posted before. W2C:: Where To Cop (W2C for short) W2C refers to the search for a desired item. Often times will be linked with retail images for an example. 1:1: One to One (1:1 for short) 1:1 refers to a perfect replica. However, not many exist and often times you won't be able to get these as they're sold out. GL: Green Light (GL for short) GL Refers to a user who has given their approval of a QC post. RL: Red Light (RL for short) RL Refers to a user who has given their disapproval of a QC post. B&S: Bait & Switch (BS or B&S for short) B&S Refers to a seller who has advertised their product and sent goods that are different from advertised. Tops 尺码: Size 领宽: Neck width 领长: Collar length 肩宽: Shoulder width 袖长: Sleeve length 袖围: Sleeve circumference 袖口: Sleeve/Cuff opening 肘宽: Elbow width 胸围: Bust width; Chest width Pants and Trousers: 腰围: Waist 臀围 or 坐围: Hip width 衣长: Length 松量: Relaxed (measurement) 拉量: Stretched (measurement) 前直档长: Front rise 后直档长: Back rise 裤长: Trousers length 拉链长: Zipper length 内长: Inseam 大腿围: Thigh width 裤脚围: Leg opening 裤脚宽: Trousers width 身高: Height 长度: Length 宽度: Width Shoes 脚长: Foot length 美国: US 英国: UK 欧洲: EUR 中国: China 厘米: cm 毫米: mm 英寸 or 寸: inches _______________________________________________ V - How to Reverse Image Search Taobao for the average consumer may be hard to grasp and often times users may be hesitant to dive into Taobao's ever-growing catalog of products. Taobao offers a feature called Search via Image. This allows users to easily find items related to the image they upload. Start here: https://s.taobao.com/search? Unfortunately, my video guide below would not process on reddit, so please watch this Youtube video. Click on the camera icon 📷 Upload the image of the product you want to search for Wait for the product to finish uploading Select the appropriate category Done! Now find a reasonably priced and good looking product for your needs! _______________________________________________ VI - How To Avoid Customs 1. Intro Revised Ok this may be the most important part of my Guide. How to avoid customs - especially when you are living in Europe (s/o to Germany). Not everything changed, but there are some IMPORTANT steps that I added to the checklist. DHL is the way to go for Germany, Austria and many more European countries. Do not use EMS in Germany or Austria. If you live in the US or Canada you can choose EMS, DHL or GD-Sal. Customs are pretty relaxed in these countries. For the US and Canada, shipping hauls up to 10kg generally isn't a problem. Some people even do more. Do so at your own risk. For the USA, the declaration value doesn't matter much, as you are unlikely to be taxed. For Canada, declare the package 10-14USD. Also, If you live in Canada, it is advised that you use EMS or GD-SAL. If you use DHL, you will be taxed upon package arrival. 2. Checklist For Europe You may have to look up laws for any import fees or regulations. These numbers are an example for PandaBuy shipping to Germany, it should work for any country though. [ ] Stay within .9 of a KG. Read here for more information [ ] Try to stay at a maximum of 4kg. Do not go over this for the safest rate. [ ] If possible ask for no cardboard wrapping, let them package in DHL plastic bag [ ] Ask for vacuum sealing (Possible in the fewest cases) [ ] Ask them to wrap up your whole package with tape, a lot of tape. [ ] Let them put a Commercial invoice on the outside (!)! of your package [ ] The commercial invoice should have a value UNDER $24 including shipping costs [ ] The commercial invoice has to be readable, if it has printing errors it has to be printed again [ ] The commercial invoice has to state the shipping costs with a value >$0 [ ] The commercial invoice has to have a sender address [ ] Your telephone number has to be stated on the commercial invoice [ ] Let them send you a copy of the commercial invoice to your email (Will come back to this) It is strongly advised that you go to Google and type in "[Your country] customs fashionreps". By doing this, you will get a good grasp of what others have done. Trust me, your situation is not unique. _______________________________________________ VII - General Tips About PandaBuy/Shipping Use Rehearsel Shipping to avoid paying too much shipping costs You can ship shoeboxes - Do not ship more than 2 shoeboxes in one package You can ship as many packages as you want simultaneously (Keep calm tho) Think twice before shipping shoeboxes, if you don't need them, don't ship them and let PandaBuy throw them away. They're heavy and require volumetric weight. If you have a non-Rep haul then you can probably use other shipping methods. Decide on your own. I recommend you to use the service called 17Track to track your packages. No matter the tracking number 17Track usually can decipher it and track it for you. If PandaBuy does not let you pay for your replicas directly through Paypal, just top up your account balance and then pay through your balance. _______________________________________________ VIII - What Happens When Your Haul Gets Seized By Customs Outside of United States Keep. The. F***. Calm. This can have so many reasons. And I want to correct myself: It is a difference between your parcel is held up by customs and your parcel being seized by customs. Let me take all the fear from you. If your parcel is held up DHL probably just messaged/emailed/called you and they told you some long story about some value declaration and so on. To keep it short: DHL does not trust your invoice/can't read the invoice/is bored af and wants a proof of payment to declare the value of your haul. For DHL Germany it is really easy to do this. You go to this DHL Link fill out the information and upload a Paypal/Bank wire/Western Union/Payment Screenshot. For any other country: Search for the email address of DHL Express Customs (not normal DHL) in your country. You can also call the DHL Express hotline and ask them. Email them the same proof of payment screenshot. The bad side is that you will probably have to pay some importing fees (EUSt in Germany are 19% + 12,50€ DHL fees). I can tell you that DHL Customs will not check if you send them an authentic screenshot of your Paypal transaction or if you managed to change up some digits in order to stay under $24. To save the importing fees. I cannot tell you how to do it, though of course. Google inspect element... This is why it was important, that PandaBuy sent you the Commercial Invoice they put on the parcel - You know exactly how high they declared it and what they stated is inside. The Tracking status should be "Clearance Event" when they want the proof of payment and should change to "Clearance processing completed" when it is done. This can take up to several days after you send them the screenshot. If your haul really got seized (Tracking status "Please contact DHL") there is nothing you can do. DHL will send you a letter where they will ask you for your permission to destroy the items. Just ignore this letter. It will automatically count as a permission (in Germany). There is nothing else. You don't go to jail, you don't get a Million $ fine. Some DHL Customs worker told me that if you stay under 3 shoes per package they will not contact the brand. But keep in mind, this is TOTALLY random. If you follow the checklist there is a micro chance that you package will even get inspected. Because inspecting alone is not enough, so many DHL workers just don't care and pass Nike, Adidas, Gucci Fakes. And if you really are that unlucky, just deal with it. Some sellers send out a replacement for free, some don't. You, Your family and your future kids will be safe, don't worry. Inside the United States If your package was seized within Chinese borders often times the Agent will refund you the full parcel price. Meaning if your haul went to the value of ¥2,000 then you will be reimbursed ¥2,000 directly to your PandaBuy account. If your package was seized or taken in for inspection by United States Customs then you will be given a call or a notice that DHL, EMS, or your selected shipping company has took in your package. Do not panic. Often times when they take your package in for inspection they will ask you to provide a receipt or invoice for the declaration of value for your haul. Seizures and inspections are 100% random and aren't able to bypassed through any method. To keep it short: DHL does not trust your invoice/can't read the invoice/is bored af and wants a proof of payment to declare the value of your haul. For DHL Germany it is really easy to do this. You go to this DHL Link fill out the information and upload a Paypal/Bank wire/Western Union/Payment Screenshot. For any other country: Search for the email address of DHL Express Customs (not normal DHL) in your country. You can also call the DHL Express hotline and ask them. Email them the same proof of payment screenshot. After this step you will need to wait for the review period to end and if everything went well then your package will be released to you. If your package was seized and they send you a letter than it is best to say you didn't order the item and take the loss on the haul. This rarely happens. _______________________________________________ VIII - Useful Links And Seller Stores Ok this was the Big Customs/FashionReps Newbie Guide/PandaBuy Guide v6.0. If you have any remarks/questions feel free to hit me up. I will add some links that are quite useful and try to update it as often as possible: Use Taobao Image Search FashionReps Newbie Guide How to properly measure Trusted Seller List (Low Risk) How much will my haul cost? Massive List of Shops IX - Typically Weights Of Each Item To Estimate Costs Credit to reddit user. /u/125ba. Please note these are just averages. Depends on sizing and quality. ​ Type of Item Weight to estimate shipping Chonky Sneakers (e.g. Balenciaga Triple S) 3300 Boots (e.g. Timberland Boots) 2700 Regular Sneakers (e.g. Jordan 1) 1500 Slides 900 Coat (e.g. Feiyu Langford Parka) 2000 Hoodie / Sweatershit (e.g. Yeezy) 1200 Average T-Shirt (e.g. FOG) 700 Thin T-Shirt (e.g. budget tour tees) 500 Vest (e.g. Terry basketball Jersey) 400 Button-up Shirt (e.g. Cloud Stores PRL Oxford) 350 Jeans 900 Joggers 700 Shorts 500 Belt - Leather 600 Belt - Fabric 300 Sunglasses 200 Purses/Designer Bags Varies X - How To Make Your Haul Cheaper You will need to do rehearsal shipping once you have all your items in your warehouse. In short, you pay a small fee (around ¥20) for someone to package up all of your stuff, weigh it, measure it, and put these figures into the shipping calculator for a final cost. There are two ways to do rehearsal shipping and you do this from your warehouse in PandaBuy. With PandaBuy, they are more or less spot on with their revised methods of weighing. You can still opt for Rehearsal Shipping but it should not be used every order. Typically, you will see a new reduction by doing this. XI - I Shipped, Now Where Is My Parcel? You wait till it arrives! But here are some FAQ's. Q - How long should my parcel take to arrive? China Post’s tracking service documents the average arrival times of all parcels for some frequent countries as follows. If your haul has not arrived and the “longest” number of days has not elapsed, you should not be concerned. Country - Average Delivery Time - Longest Time - Shortest Time Australia / New Zealand : 12 - 15 - 9 Canada : 30 - 60 - 10 EU : 17 - 44 - 7 United Kingdom : 12 - 40 - 6 United States : 16 - 62 - 4 As you can see, a delivery time of 40+ days for Europe and North America is frequent. (source: China Post) Q - What does “shipping notice received” (or similar) mean? This means the agent has put a tracking number from China Post on your parcel (i.e. a sticker with a barcode and scanned it), but has not shipped the goods yet. It can take two to three business days for the goods to be shipped as the agent will be waiting for China Post to collect the goods. In most cases, sellers will take immediate action to ship the goods to avoid disputes and reputational damage. Q - It's been a couple of days since I finalized my haul, why hasn't anything happened? In general, to avoid disappointment you should start counting days from when the parcel is collected (it says this specifically on your agent's site and on 17track) rather than the date you submitted the parcel. Paying for your parcel today doesn't mean it will be in the hands of China Post tomorrow - it takes time to physically bundle up the parcel, allocate a tracking number and get China Post to physically collect at the warehouse. It can often take two to three business days for this to happen and your haul to update that the tracking number has been activated. Agents and (more frequently) direct sellers will tell you "the item has shipped, but the shipping company hasn't given the tracking information yet" when in reality your parcel is still in the warehouse Q - There seem to be a lot of delays, should I ship my parcel now or wait? This is similar to driving to a friend’s house cross-country when the traffic is awful all the time - the sooner you leave, the sooner you’ll get there. Things won’t be any faster by delaying your haul. Q - Has my haul been seized?! In all likelihood, no. Your parcel status will update saying it is being inspected by customs at the point of seizure. A lack of status updates is probably a good thing in that sense. Q - Is my parcel lost? In all likelihood, no. These things are very rare and if you are worried about this happening you should purchase the relevant insurance protection from your agent before finalizing your shipment. Q - My parcel has been scanned by customs but it hasn't been updated to say customs has been cleared. Has my haul been seized? In all likelihood, no. The scan to confirm the parcel has cleared customs doesn’t necessarily take place in the warehouse and often takes place while the parcel is being loaded into a lorry or when it arrives at your local sorting office. Q - What can I do to hurry things up? Literally nothing. This is how international shipping works, so get comfortable with it. Ignore These Tags: PandaBuy, Guide , Newbie Friendly , Usage Guide To PandaBuy, PandaBuy Guide , PandaBuy Help , PandaBuy Assistance , PandaBuy Tutorial , PandaBuy Discounts , PandaBuy Shipping Help , PandaBuy Tracking Help , PandaBuy Order Help , Taobao Agent , FashionReps Guide , FashionReps PandaBuy Guide , FashionReps Shipping Help How to Buy From Taobao, Customs, Tips, Tricks, Ordering, Shipping, Splitting, Haul, Review, Guide 1.0 PandaBuy, Taobao Reverse Image Search, Reverse Image Search, Taobao Image Search, Taobao Image, Taobao PandaBuy, Taobao Agent, Taobao PandaBuy Guide submitted by /u/GuruReps to r/FashionReps [link] [comments]

​ https://preview.redd.it/wobnriw52vg81.jpg?width=4032&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=2ee970b62f9392e5365e30a7b4e3e31e0380bda2 So what are the best jeans for guys with MASSIVE legs?? This question gets asked so much around here, it’s basically a meme. If you’re like me though and you have big legs, you probably hate shopping for jeans online. It’s such a pain in the ass that I avoid it as much as possible. Lately though I’ve been needing a new pair of jeans since my old ones are worn out and don’t fit me anymore. So I decided to try on a bunch of the recommended options here to find the best jeans for me. 10 jeans and $700 dollars later, I was able to find a few pairs that I actually really loved. The experience was still annoying though but I was super happy with the few jeans I kept and hopefully I won't have to do this again for a while. Here’s my honest review of each jean I tried and what I liked and didn’t like about it. For you visual guys out there, I also made a Youtube Video that has all the info from below, plus links plus you can see how they fit on me. For reference, I’m 5’9” and 190lbs. I wear a 34x32 jean size and my thighs are 27in wide. #1 Wrangler’s Regular Taper Jean $26.99, made of 98% cotton and 2% spandex. I think these are the best jeans all around. Only $30 but fit really well and are comfortable. There’s plenty of room in the seat area and they’re tapered at the bottom so it looks clean. I own 3 other pairs of these and I use them for working around the house and casually around town. If I could buy just one pair of jeans these would be it. #2 Amazon Essentials Athletic Stretch Jean $31.90, made of 98% cotton and 2% elastane These are way too big and baggy. They are big in the waist and also super long in the bottom. Definitely size down if you’re thinking about buying these. Also I didn’t love the material, it’s not very soft and they have a course and rough feeling to them. #3 Everlane Athletic Stretch Jean $88, made of 94% cotton, 2% elastane and 4% other materials By far my favorite jeans in this Haul. These are extremely comfortable and the material feels heavy, like it’s a super high quality. They are is super soft and stretchy. They feel comfortable when sitting down so I can wear this when I work at my desk. The taper on the bottom is perfect too. They are a little large in the waist, so I probably could have sized down to 33x32 with these but they didn’t have this size #4 JCrew 1040 Athletic jean $98, made of 100% cotton even though the website says they should have some stretch material to them. I had high hopes for these, but I was super disappointed. There’s barely any stretch to them and they don’t feel comfortable at all. They restrict my movement when walking or even just standing up straight. When I bend down in these, it feels like they’re going to rip any moment. Also at $100 they’re a little overpriced. Do not recommend these for guys with big legs. #5 Abercrombie & Fitch Athletic Skinny Jeans $78, made of 94% cotton, 4% polyester and 2% elastane. These jeans are amazing. They fit really well, and they are soft and stretchy and feel really comfortable. Also they are very fashion forward, more so than any other brand I tried. So these would be perfect for date nights. Definitely in top 3 of this Haul. #6 Levis 541™ Athletic Taper Fit $79.50, made of 68% cotton, 31% lyocell and 1% elastane. Overpriced. The fit is good but the material feels kind of cheap, they are light weight and there’s too much stretch, at least for my taste. I know these are classics and everyone recommends them, but for the same price, I recommend the Everlane or the Abercrombie instead. #7 American Eagle Athletic Fit Jean $39.95, made of 99% cotton and 1% elastane Blown away how good these jeans were, and only $40. They're extremely soft and super comfortable. This pair is 33x32 and they fit perfect. They sit just right in the waist area and there’s plenty of room in the seat and leg. I only wish they had more colors on their website. When I checked they only had 3 and I liked the light wash the best. #8 Gap Flex Athletic Taper Jeans $70, made of 93% cotton, 5% elastane and 2% spandex I loved, loved the color but these jeans are way too short. The inseam feels more like a 30’ instead of 32’. They fit okay in the waist, but are too short on the bottom. When I cuff them up they look like capri pants. Gap is cool though, they have tons of discounts all the time and I’ve never paid full price for anything from them. #9 Lucky Brand 411 Athletic Taper $69.30, made of 94% cotton 4% polyester 2% elastane Really soft and comfortable. They fit true to size but the taper on the legs is a little too aggressive. They are also a little too stretchy for my taste. I was on the fence with these and almost kept them. I liked them, but I didn’t really love them. I don’t know why but I ended up returning them. Maybe they were just too basic and for $70 I didn’t think they were worth it. #10 Lee Men's Legendary Athletic Tapered Leg Jean $32.79, made of 99% cotton and 1% spandex. Along with Wranger’s and Amazon Essentials these were the other budget jeans I tried. They were only $32 but they are way too long in the bottom and not tapered at all. They have more of a bootcut leg opening. The fabric feels really soft though, better than the Wranglers or the Amazon Essentials. They stretch and are comfortable when sitting down. For $32 I’d definitely get these if they were to fit me a little better. Summing up And that was it. I tried 10 pairs and ended up keeping 4. I’m super happy with the jeans I found and I didn’t just settle for the first available brand out there. If there’s one thing I learned from this haul is this though: make sure the jeans you buy have some type of stretch material in them. 100% cotton will be too restrictive and won't feel comfortable. As far as best jeans, here’s my favorite: Best overall --- Wranglers Most comfortable --- Everlane Most Fashionable --- Abercrombie Biggest Surprise --- American Eagle submitted by /u/slashdotcomdotcom to r/frugalmalefashion [link] [comments]

Updated For 2021! New Information Available! Click Here For A $40 Wegobuy Sign Up Bonus This guide is simply a reformatted version of Repguides + HyperionFR's and guide because of me forgetting the password to the accounts. If you are too lazy to ready the guides, just watch this video. ▌GUIDE 1.0▐ The Biggest & Best Full WeGoBuy Agent Guide I Introduction II General Info About Taobao Agents III The WeGoBuy Guide + $40 Discount IV FashionReps Terminology & Translations V How to Reverse Image Search VI How To Avoid Customs VII General Tips About Shipping VIII What Happens When Your Haul Gets Seized By Customs IX Useful Links And Seller Stores X Typical Weights Of Each Item XI How To Make Your Haul Cheaper XII I Shipped, Now Where Is My Parcel? ____________________________________ I Introduction /u/repguidesFR here with a revised and detailed update version of the original Full WeGoBuy/FashionReps Newbie Guide and some tips on on how to get your hauls through customs safely. Much of this is copy pasta. After the most recent post I've decided to go back in the history of /r/FashionReps and update a great guide that helped numerous users. This guide will be revised and rewritten to include all the new WeGoBuy tips and tricks to get the best results while using their service! Several things have changed since the last revision of this guide (over two years old!) ____________________________________ II - General Info About Taobao Agents 1. What is an Agent? For new users coming to this sub daily it is hard to directly understand the point of an agent. Be honest, you did not do better in your first days/weeks. So instead of redirecting them to the searchbar just explain it to them in 2 sentences. The main website we buy our reps from is taobao.com. It is like a amazon or eBay for China - solely for China. The problem that results is that we need a connection between your country and China. You cannot buy from TaoBao directly (for most of the countries) and you probably would not understand anything. So here comes the agent in hand. You browse through your favorite TaoBao shops and find some items you want to buy. Now you do not buy it through TaoBao but through your agent (in our case WeGoBuy). WeGoBuy now buys this exact item and lets it deliver to their warehouse. You ask for pictures, measurements, exchanges, returns etc. When everything is fine WeGoBuy will package everything and deliver it to you. They are the connection between you and TaoBao. ​ 2. Which agent to use? I have experience with many agents and it would be fair for me to compare them. I do not want to call out Agents and tell about bad experiences with them but I will tell you that WeGoBuy was the one with the most professional, honest, fast and caring service I could ever experience. If it would not be good it would not be the most popular agent ever. In my last Guide I compared prices of each agents and showed you how there is more than "no service fee", "cheaper shipping costs" since in the end every agent somehow earns his profit. There is no real price difference between agents, just use the one that will give you the best experience. In this Guide I will continue to make examples and tutorials only about WeGoBuy. I am sorry if you use another agent but just keep WeGoBuy in mind when you plan your next haul. ​ 3. Conclusion Use any agent you want, there is very little price differences when it comes to agents and depending where you are located in the world prices will differ. ____________________________________ III - The WeGoBuy Guide + $40 Discount. 1. Signing up + Get $40 Shipping Coupons/Discounts Just press on the little "Sign Up" text on the top right corner and fill in the info. That's it. To redeem your $40 worth of Shipping Coupons you will want to sign up here. Do not worry, signing up is a normal thing. Beware that I would still advise you to use a unique password that you do not use for other websites - Safety reasons. Also don't worry about your payment information such as Paypal - You never enter your Paypal email + password on the WeGoBuy homepage, it always redirects you to Paypal's official website where you log in as usual. WeGoBuy also uses a secure connection between you and them (https). Ordering Process - How to order Find the item you want on Taobao. Use this subreddit, try to find it yourself with image search or Google translate, whatever. For this example, we'll use the A$AP Rocky x Guess Tee from UnionKingdom. Go to WeGoBuy, and hover over the Shopping Agent button on the navbar. Click the blue box and paste your Taobao link into it. You will be taken to a page like this. Here, WeGoBuy translates the color and size options for you, and all you need to do is select the color and size you want. After, you can either Add to Cart or Buy Now. For this example, we'll assume that this shirt it the only thing you want. You will next be taken to this page. Here, you have to select your country from the Choose Destination Country box, then hit submit to be taken to the payment screen. If you have an existing balance in your WeGoBuy account from previous purchases that you have returned, you can use that to buy the product. I have 91.06 yuan in my account already, so I just need to pay 18.94 yuan for this 110 yuan tee. Here, just select Paypal and pay for your order. Sometimes WeGoBuy will not allow you to use PayPal and that is when you need to simply top up your balance instead of doing a direct order with PayPal. Now, just wait until the seller ships his order. Once it arrives in the WeGoBuy warehouse, you will receive a notification. Once your product arrives, hover over your username in the navbar and select My Warehouse. Here, you can view QC, or quality control, pictures that WeGoBuy takes. One con of using WeGoBuy is their picture taking skills. To receive better pictures, you have to contact their live chat and give them your order number and request better QC pictures. If you're satisfied with your order, select it and click Submit in the lower right corner. Here, you can choose your preferred shipping method. The fashionreps favorite currently is EMS, but it's up to you what line you would like to use. Just select the shipping line, then click Submit Delivery Order to have WeGoBuy pack up your products and send it to your door. Post your hauls ! Posting reviews is what keeps this subreddit alive. People find new stuff, buy it, review it, search for pieces themselves, buy the, review them. This circle is the Rep Circle of Life. Don't forget to add pics (Please add a link to all pictures in one album, please. Please.). Please follow these tips to post the PERFECT Review: You can use Spreadsheet or Reddit itself to write/structure it, no problem. Add a link to all pictures (QC or Fitpics) in one imgur album, please. If you use Spreadsheet please do this: You type in all brands/piece names in the Reddit post/title itself. That way we can use the search bar to actually search for items Add your stats (weight, height, body type) If you are unsure whether or not your item has any errors or has a good or bad quality - Just post your QC pictures here. There are so many people who know their stuff, let them check your item and give you advise. Don't forget this. Don't forget to write the name of the piece in the title. Always think about the search bar, guys. ___________________________________________________ IV - FashionReps Terminology & Sizing Chart Translations ​ 1. FashionReps Terminology QC: Quality Control (QC for short) is talking about pictures that are posted from an agent of an item that was ordered. Users will post these if they're unsure about the quality and would rather have someone else take a look at them if they're good enough. LC: Legit Check (LC for short) Much like the name states, this is a tag used for posts requiring a legit check. Legit checks are a great way of finding out if a item you're purchasing is authentic or not. GP: Guinea Pig (GP for short) Guinea Pigging is much like being a test subject. In this instance you will be the first person to order a sellers new item. This means you'll be the first to get pictures of their product and often times you'll post them to be checked for quality by the community. FIND: Much like the name states. Posts with this flair are often linked to new products that haven't been posted before. W2C:: Where To Cop (W2C for short) W2C refers to the search for a desired item. Often times will be linked with retail images for an example. 1:1: One to One (1:1 for short) 1:1 refers to a perfect replica. However, not many exist and often times you won't be able to get these as they're sold out. GL: Green Light (GL for short) GL Refers to a user who has given their approval of a QC post. RL: Red Light (RL for short) RL Refers to a user who has given their disapproval of a QC post. B&S: Bait & Switch (BS or B&S for short) B&S Refers to a seller who has advertised their product and sent goods that are different from advertised. 2. Tops 尺码: Size 领宽: Neck width 领长: Collar length 肩宽: Shoulder width 袖长: Sleeve length 袖围: Sleeve circumference 袖口: Sleeve/Cuff opening 肘宽: Elbow width 胸围: Bust width; Chest width 3. Pants and Trousers: 腰围: Waist 臀围 or 坐围: Hip width 衣长: Length 松量: Relaxed (measurement) 拉量: Stretched (measurement) 前直档长: Front rise 后直档长: Back rise 裤长: Trousers length 拉链长: Zipper length 内长: Inseam 大腿围: Thigh width 裤脚围: Leg opening 裤脚宽: Trousers width 身高: Height 长度: Length 宽度: Width 4. Shoes 脚长: Foot length 美国: US 英国: UK 欧洲: EUR 中国: China 厘米: cm 毫米: mm 英寸 or 寸: inches ___________________________________________________ V - How to Reverse Image Search Taobao for the average consumer may be hard to grasp and often times users may be hesitant to dive into Taobao's ever-growing catalog of products. Taobao offers a feature called Search via Image. This allows users to easily find items related to the image they upload. Start here: https://s.taobao.com/search? Unfortunately, my video guide below would not process on reddit, so please watch this Youtube video. 1. Click on the camera icon 📷 ​ 2. Upload the image of the product you want to search for ​ 3. Wait for the product to finish uploading ​ 4. Select the appropriate category ​ 5. Done! Now find a reasonably priced and good looking product for your needs! ___________________________________________________ VI - How To Avoid Customs 1. Intro Revised Ok this may be the most important part of my Guide. How to avoid customs - especially when you are living in Europe (s/o to Germany). Not everything changed, but there are some IMPORTANT steps that I added to the checklist. DHL is the way to go for Germany, Austria and many more European countries. Do not use EMS in Germany or Austria. If you live in the US or Canada you can choose EMS, DHL or GD-Sal. Customs are pretty relaxed in these countries. For the US and Canada, shipping hauls up to 10kg generally isn't a problem. Some people even do more. Do so at your own risk. For the USA, the declaration value doesn't matter much, as you are unlikely to be taxed. For Canada, declare the package 10-14USD. Also, If you live in Canada, it is advised that you use EMS or GD-SAL. If you use DHL, you will be taxed upon package arrival. 2. Checklist For Europe You may have to look up laws for any import fees or regulations. These numbers are an example for WeGoBuy shipping to Germany, it should work for any country though. [ ] Stay within .9 of a KG. Read here for more information [ ] Try to stay at a maximum of 4kg. Do not go over this for the safest rate. [ ] If possible ask for no cardboard wrapping, let them package in DHL plastic bag [ ] Ask for vacuum sealing (Possible in the fewest cases) [ ] Ask them to wrap up your whole package with tape, a lot of tape. [ ] Let them put a Commercial invoice on the outside (!)! of your package [ ] The commercial invoice should have a value UNDER $24 including shipping costs [ ] The commercial invoice has to be readable, if it has printing errors it has to be printed again [ ] The commercial invoice has to state the shipping costs with a value >$0 [ ] The commercial invoice has to have a sender address [ ] Your telephone number has to be stated on the commercial invoice [ ] Let them send you a copy of the commercial invoice to your email (Will come back to this) It is strongly advised that you go to Google and type in "[Your country] customs fashionreps". By doing this, you will get a good grasp of what others have done. Trust me, your situation is not unique. ___________________________________________________ VII - General Tips About WeGoBuy/Shipping Use Rehearsel Shipping to avoid paying too much shipping costs You can ship shoeboxes - Do not ship more than 2 shoeboxes in one package You can ship as many packages as you want simultaneously (Keep calm tho) Think twice before shipping shoeboxes, if you don't need them, don't ship them and let WeGoBuy throw them away If you have a non-Rep haul then you can probably use other shipping methods. Decide on your own. I recommend you to use the service called 17Track to track your packages. No matter the tracking number 17Track usually can decipher it and track it for you. If WeGoBuy does not let you pay for your replicas directly through Paypal, just top up your account balance and then pay through your balance. ___________________________________________________ VIII - What Happens When Your Haul Gets Seized By Customs Outside of United States Keep. The. F***. Calm. This can have so many reasons. And I want to correct myself: It is a difference between your parcel is held up by customs and your parcel being seized by customs. Let me take all the fear from you. If your parcel is held up DHL probably just messaged/emailed/called you and they told you some long story about some value declaration and so on. To keep it short: DHL does not trust your invoice/can't read the invoice/is bored af and wants a proof of payment to declare the value of your haul. For DHL Germany it is really easy to do this. You go to this DHL Link fill out the information and upload a Paypal/Bank wire/Western Union/Payment Screenshot. For any other country: Search for the email address of DHL Express Customs (not normal DHL) in your country. You can also call the DHL Express hotline and ask them. Email them the same proof of payment screenshot. The bad side is that you will probably have to pay some importing fees (EUSt in Germany are 19% + 12,50€ DHL fees). I can tell you that DHL Customs will not check if you send them an authentic screenshot of your Paypal transaction or if you managed to change up some digits in order to stay under $24. To save the importing fees. I cannot tell you how to do it, though of course. Google inspect element... This is why it was important, that WeGoBuy sent you the Commercial Invoice they put on the parcel - You know exactly how high they declared it and what they stated is inside. The Tracking status should be "Clearance Event" when they want the proof of payment and should change to "Clearance processing completed" when it is done. This can take up to several days after you send them the screenshot. If your haul really got seized (Tracking status "Please contact DHL") there is nothing you can do. DHL will send you a letter where they will ask you for your permission to destroy the items. Just ignore this letter. It will automatically count as a permission (in Germany). There is nothing else. You don't go to jail, you don't get a Million $ fine. Some DHL Customs worker told me that if you stay under 3 shoes per package they will not contact the brand. But keep in mind, this is TOTALLY random. If you follow the checklist there is a micro chance that you package will even get inspected. Because inspecting alone is not enough, so many DHL workers just don't care and pass Nike, Adidas, Gucci Fakes. And if you really are that unlucky, just deal with it. Some sellers send out a replacement for free, some don't. You, Your family and your future kids will be safe, don't worry. Inside the United States If your package was seized within Chinese borders often times the Agent will refund you the full parcel price. Meaning if your haul went to the value of ¥2,000 then you will be reimbursed ¥2,000 directly to your WeGoBuy account. If your package was seized or taken in for inspection by United States Customs then you will be given a call or a notice that DHL, EMS, or your selected shipping company has took in your package. Do not panic. Often times when they take your package in for inspection they will ask you to provide a receipt or invoice for the declaration of value for your haul. Seizures and inspections are 100% random and aren't able to bypassed through any method. To keep it short: DHL does not trust your invoice/can't read the invoice/is bored af and wants a proof of payment to declare the value of your haul. For DHL Germany it is really easy to do this. You go to this DHL Link fill out the information and upload a Paypal/Bank wire/Western Union/Payment Screenshot. For any other country: Search for the email address of DHL Express Customs (not normal DHL) in your country. You can also call the DHL Express hotline and ask them. Email them the same proof of payment screenshot. After this step you will need to wait for the review period to end and if everything went well then your package will be released to you. If your package was seized and they send you a letter than it is best to say you didn't order the item and take the loss on the haul. This rarely happens. ___________________________________________________ IX - Useful Links And Seller Stores Ok this was the Big Customs/FashionReps Newbie Guide/WeGoBuy Guide v1.0. If you have any remarks/questions feel free to hit me up. I will add some links that are quite useful and try to update it as often as possible: How to use the ~$40 WeGoBuy Discount infinite amount of times Use Taobao Image Search FashionReps Newbie Guide How to properly measure Trusted Seller List (Low Risk) Explanation Of WeGoBuy Shipping Costs How much will my haul cost? Massive List of Shops Yupoo Seller Starter Pack 2021 X - Typically Weights Of Each Item To Estimate Costs Table was created by a reddit user and is fairly accurate. Credit to reddit user. /u/125ba. Please note these are just averages. Depends on sizing and quality. ​ Type of item Weight to estimate shipping Chonky sneakers (e.g. Balenciaga Triple S 3300 Boots (e.g. Timberland Boots) 2700 Regular sneakers (e.g. Jordan 1) 1500 Slides 900 Coat (e.g. Feiyu Langford Parka) 2000 Hoodie / Sweatshirt - Winter (e.g. FOG) 1200 Hoodie / Sweatshirt - Summer (e.g Balenciaga) 700 Heavy T-Shirt (e.g. Yeezy) 500 Average T-Shirt (e.g. FOG) 400 Thin T-Shirt (e.g. budget tour tees) 300 Vest (e.g. Terry basketball jersey) 300 Button-up shirt (e.g. Cloud Store PRL Oxford) 350 Jeans 900 Joggers 700 Shorts 500 Belt-Leather 600 Belt-Fabric 300 Sunglasses 200 Purses/Designer bags Varies XI - How To Make Your Haul Cheaper You will need to do rehearsal shipping once you have all your items in your warehouse. In short, you pay a small fee (around ¥20) for someone to package up all of your stuff, weigh it, measure it, and put these figures into the shipping calculator for a final cost. There are two ways to do rehearsal shipping and you do this from your warehouse in Wegobuy. In warehouse, click Apply for Rehearsal Packaging If you have submitted your parcel already but haven’t paid the shipping deposit, select option 1. Customer service will action this for you and update the weight and shipping fee of the parcel - you may need to remind them to do this. If you have not yet submitted the parcel, select option 2. You will speak to customer service via your inbox and will need to tell them what you want in the package, they will then be able to tell you the cost and once you submit the parcel you will again need to ask them to update the weight and shipping fee. Typically, you will see a new reduction by doing this. XII - I Shipped, Now Where Is My Parcel? You wait! But here are some FAQ's. Q - How long should my parcel take to arrive? China Post’s tracking service documents the average arrival times of all parcels for some frequent countries as follows. If your haul has not arrived and the “longest” number of days has not elapsed, you should not be concerned. Country - Average Delivery Time - Longest Time - Shortest Time Australia / New Zealand : 12 - 15 - 9 Canada : 30 - 60 - 10 EU : 17 - 44 - 7 United Kingdom : 12 - 40 - 6 United States : 16 - 62 - 8 As you can see, a delivery time of 40+ days for Europe and North America is frequent. (source: China Post) Q - What does “shipping notice received” (or similar) mean? This means the agent has put a tracking number from China Post on your parcel (i.e. a sticker with a barcode and scanned it), but has not shipped the goods yet. It can take two to three business days for the goods to be shipped as the agent will be waiting for China Post to collect the goods. Infrequently, if you have purchased directly from a seller and have chased them to confirm your goods have been shipped after QC, some asswipes will give you a fake tracking number. If the status remains “shipping notice received” after four days or more you should chase them to actually ship the goods. In most cases, sellers will take immediate action to ship the goods to avoid disputes and reputational damage. Q - It's been a couple of days since I finalized my haul, why hasn't anything happened? In general, to avoid disappointment you should start counting days from when the parcel is collected (it says this specifically on your agent's site and on 17track) rather than the date you submitted the parcel. Paying for your parcel today doesn't mean it will be in the hands of China Post tomorrow - it takes time to physically bundle up the parcel, allocate a tracking number and get China Post to physically collect at the warehouse. It can often take two to three business days for this to happen and your haul to update that the tracking number has been activated. Agents and (more frequently) direct sellers will tell you "the item has shipped, but the shipping company hasn't given the tracking information yet" when in reality your parcel is still in the warehouse Q - What does “delivered to air transport” / “despatched to [my country]” (or similar) mean? This means that China Post has given the parcel to the airline company - it does NOT mean that the parcel is on a plane. This status will not update for a long time until the parcel arrives at the destination airport and is scanned by the domestic parcel company. It is not unheard of for this to take between two and four weeks in regular season, and four to six weeks during holiday season or where there are complications like COVID. If you are worried you can ask your agent to confirm which flight your parcel is on. If they are able to give you a flight number, it is worth noting they do not always see the date of the flight and this could still be in the future - you should not assume your parcel has left China. Q - How can I check progress on my parcel? Until the point of arrival in your country, 17track is the most detailed resource to keep up to date on your parcel’s progress. ParcelsApp also has good feedback. Q - There seem to be a lot of delays, should I ship my parcel now or wait? This is similar to driving to a friend’s house cross-country when the traffic is awful all the time - the sooner you leave, the sooner you’ll get there. Things won’t be any faster by delaying your haul. Q - Has my haul been seized?! In all likelihood, no. Your parcel status will update saying it is being inspected by customs at the point of seizure. A lack of status updates is probably a good thing in that sense. Q - Is my parcel lost??!?!!?1111?@ In all likelihood, no. These things are very rare and if you are worried about this happening you should purchase the relevant insurance protection from your agent before finalizing your shipment. Q - My parcel has been scanned by customs but it hasn't been updated to say customs has been cleared. Has my haul been seized??? In all likelihood, no. The scan to confirm the parcel has cleared customs doesn’t necessarily take place in the warehouse and often takes place while the parcel is being loaded into a lorry or when it arrives at your local sorting office. As per the above, unless there is a notice specifically saying your parcel is being inspected by customs you probably have nothing to worry about. Q - What can I do to hurry things up? Literally nothing. This is how international shipping works, so get comfortable with it. Posting on the sub asking how other people’s parcels are progressing won’t make yours arrive any faster. That is all for now. You can expect additions to this guide over the next few months! ​ Ignore These Tags: WeGoBuy, Guide , Newbie Friendly , Usage Guide To WeGoBuy, WeGoBuy Guide , WeGoBuy Help , WeGoBuy Assistance , WeGoBuy Tutorial , WeGoBuy Discounts , WeGoBuy Shipping Help , WeGoBuy Tracking Help , WeGoBuy Order Help , Taobao Agent , FashionReps Guide , FashionReps WeGoBuy Guide , FashionReps Shipping Help ▌GUIDE 5.0▐ The Biggest & Best Full WeGoBuy Agent Guide | Discounts, Customs, Tips, Tricks, Ordering, Shipping, Splitting, Haul, Review, Guide 1.0 WeGoBuy, Taobao Reverse Image Search, Reverse Image Search, Taobao Image Search, Taobao Image, Taobao WeGoBuy, Taobao Agent, Taobao WeGoBuy Guide submitted by /u/repguidesFR to r/FashionReps [link] [comments]

Do you ever ask yourself, “Am I really a writer?” In the winter of 1965, the man who would become one of America’s greatest contemporary writers was living in a halfway house for mental patients in Durham, North Carolina. He was making a buck-seventy-five an hour as a long-haul trucker. He had a dream one night that he never told anyone about. He dreamed all his shirts had folded themselves in the drawer. His boots had crawled out from underneath the bed and shined themselves. That was the first inkling, he recalls, that he wanted more out of life. That he had ambition. Soon after he found out just what that was: he wanted to be a writer. But he spent three decades in what he calls his Shadow Careers. A trucker, driving a cab, an ad man. He had a regular life. But a voice inside of him never let him rest. He kept asking himself, “Am I really a writer?” He was in his 50’s before he published his first novel after thirty years of trying. That man is Steven Pressfield. That first book he published in ‘95? A little number called the Legend of Bagger Vance. Ever heard of it? Since then, he’s published over 15 books, sold millions of copies, inspired millions more, started his own publishing house, appeared on Oprah. His story is the story of the Writer as Hero. We all recognize it. Are you stuck in a shadow career? Are you living a shadow life? Are you a writer who doesn't write? When you fall asleep, do you dream of Will Smith and Matt Damon starring in something you wrote? Are you really a writer? Here’s how you find out. ​ Step 1: Write Every Day In 1910, two explorers, Robert Falcon Scott and Raold Admunsen, both set out to be the first man to plant his flag at the South Pole, one of the last unexplored places on Earth. Both had access to mountains of research from previous expeditions, both recruited a rugged bunch of explorers to accompany them. Both stockpiled literal tons of resources. Both had experience, both had the finest gear, both had sled dogs to do the bulk of pulling. Only one made it back alive. What made the difference? Admunsen had a simple philosophy: consistency and focus. Where Scott’s mission had two purposes, scientific exploration and winning the race to the pole, Admunsen had only one: to plant his flag first. Where Scott drove his men to exhaustion fighting for every inch of progress, Admunsen demanded twenty miles a day. Nothing less, nothing more. Admunsen wanted his men well-fed and well-rested for the next day’s twenty-mile march. Scott’s men starved to death. In the end, it was Admunsen’s flag waving in the breeze at ninety-degrees South. To be sure, there were many more differences. Scott’s expedition seemed to go wrong at every possible turn. But experts agree on one thing: it was slow and steady that won the race for Admunsen. He made consistent progress every single day. That’s why he won the race and that’s why he brought his men home alive. And that’s why Scott didn’t. The first step to being a writer is...wait for it...you have to write. That’s harder than it sounds. Most people never get to this step. Most people who in their head say, “I just want to quit my job and be a writer” have never written a fucking word. How do I know? Because I was one of these people. An even smaller fraction of people who want to become writers, maybe they even call themselves writers, don’t write consistently. Have I revealed something you know but don’t say out loud? I’m sorry. I really am. But if you want to be a writer, maybe even a great one, you have to sit down to write every day. Yes, every day. But insert-your-favorite-writer-here doesn’t write every day! Bullshit. Even if he or she doesn’t write every day, he or she is a professional. You are an amateur. I promise you that when they got started, they wrote every day. Everyone knows the story of Sly Stallone sitting down and writing the screenplay for Rocky in three nights flat. You are not Rocky. Or at least, it would serve you better to imitate Admunsen. Don't wait for the inspiration like Stallone. It may never come. A new writer may take a day off only to realize it lasted ten years and she hasn’t written a damn thing. You need to form the habit. Only once you’ve formed the habit and you’re absolutely certain you won’t fall off the wagon, then you can take a day off. Maybe. Willpower and discipline will get you started but they won’t sustain you. The goal is to write because it feels so damn awful not to write. The goal is to write because it is who you are. The goal is to be a writer. Writers write every day. Here’s how you get started: wake up five minutes earlier than normal. Go through your morning routine, make your bed, brush your teeth, shower, shit, shave, get dressed, and ready for work. But before you leave, walk to the computer. Open a document. Sit down and stare into the blank page for 30 seconds. Don’t write, just stare. Do that for a week. The next week, wake up five minutes earlier than that. Do the same routine, sit down at your computer again, open a document. Write something. Anything. Literally, anything. A-n-y-t-h-i-n-g. Keep it short. Write at the same time every day, ideally first thing in the morning. Write in the same place every day. Keep this place clean. No clutter. This is not where bills, gum wrappers, and empty coke cans live. This is your altar. This is where you pray. This place should be protected from nagging spouses and screaming children with a door that locks. If such a place doesn’t exist, wake up before the heathens do. If you haven’t missed a day yet, you’re ready. Set a goal. Maybe two hundred words to start. Work up to three hundred words. You’d be surprised how easy it is. You might notice you want to keep writing. Don’t. Stop every day while you’re still fresh. You don’t want to blow your load writing three thousand words on Monday and then put up goose eggs the rest of the week. You’re looking for consistency. Commit to what you can hit predictably, even in driving snow. Remember Admunsen or die like Scott. What do you write about? Doesn’t matter. Is it any good? Don’t care. Don’t think. Just write. Whatever comes to mind. Write in one direction. The backspace key is made of lava. Typo? Fuck it. Carry on. Lose your train of thought mid-sentence? Good. Don’t even use a period. Just keep writing. Having trouble eeking out the last couple hundred words? Write this: So far, I’ve written two hundred and fifty words. I have two hundred and fifty left. Two forty-five cuz I just used five words to say how many words I’ve got left. Words. Words is a funny word. Two nineteen. Maybe you’re six months into writing every day and you’re at five hundred words of sheer nonsense. Awesome! You have outstripped most people who put “Writer” in their Tinder bio. ​ Step 2: Write About Something Every Day Here’s a secret no one knows: You’re not special. Memoirs suck. No one cares what you think. No one wants to read your memoir unless you’re an ex-president, a CEO, or a famous actor. Maybe not even then. Someone might want to read your journal if you’re a famous author like Virginia Woolf but not until you’re already dead and they’ve read all your other shit. Stream of consciousness sucks. The inner workings of other people’s minds are not interesting. Don’t ask people to read this shit. It’s rude and you’ll be embarrassed later. If you want someone to read your shit, you’re eventually going to have to transition from writing journal entries, to actually writing about something. To do this, take your daily habit and build on it. Once you hit, say, five hundred words a day and you do that consistently, write about something. It can be anything, doesn’t matter. But it should have a structure. It should be a thing, not just your thoughts. This doesn’t mean write it perfectly. Nothing is ever written perfectly. That’s why editors exist. To become a writer, you must first learn how to write badly and keep going. If you’re going to write something, whether it’s a book or a blog post, that’s a piece. It’s a piece of writing. That piece is made up of smaller pieces. In order for a book to work, it’s pieces have to work together. Each little piece has to stand on its own. And it has to fit with what comes before and what comes after. Take movies for example. A movie can be split into acts. Acts can be split into scenes. Scenes can be split into shots. A shot gives you information. A shot tells you something. After that shot, you know something you didn’t know before. If it doesn't, it doesn’t work. It’s on the cutting room floor. You’re practicing writing something. Some thing. A thing could be an idea or a thought. It gives information. Tells a story. Like a shot in a movie. Here’s something: The summer sun rising over pine trees, casting light on the side of the barn. Rays of light shining through the cracks, falling on the cheek of a beautiful girl wearing a flowery dress. She sits on a stool, milking a cow. Here’s another something: A boy watching that girl, taking off his hat, holding it over his heart, wiping his brow, clearing his throat. He’s trying to summon the courage to get her attention. He does. Here’s another something: The girl looks up. She smiles at him. “Hiya, Jimmy!” These “somethings” stack on each other. They lend meaning and context to the one before. Each one of these thoughts tells you something and it leaves out a whole bunch. This is what’s called “leaving space for the reader”. The reader fills in the space with her imagination. Notice I didn’t tell you what kind of flowers were on the girl's sundress. I didn’t tell you that she’s seventeen. I didn’t even tell you her name. Because it doesn’t matter in the context of what I’m telling you. The only reason I told you his name was to show you they know each other. I didn’t tell you he’s in love with her. I told you they were the same age and he was nervous. You inferred he was in love with her from what I did tell you. You might have thought, and you’d be right, that he was going to ask her out. How? The word “courage”. The sweat. The hat over his heart. See how much you can say without saying much!? This is why you’re practicing writing about something. So you know what to say and you know what to leave out. Have you ever read something that was overly detailed? Has anyone ever paused mid-story to say “And this is so funny...” Like, bitch I’ll tell you if it’s funny or not when you’re done. Feels manipulative doesn’t it? As readers, we don’t like that. What we want is enough information. We want the idea. We want you as the writer to implant a thought in our heads and we will decide how to feel about it. We will fill in the details we need. Think of writing as telepathy. Writing is implanting a thought in the reader’s brain. What’s the idea? What do you say so that person gets the idea? What can you leave out? Let’s take a breath and situate ourselves, shall we? We want to be writers. We’ve developed the core habit of writing every day. Now, we’re going to build on that by writing about something every day. Great! Now, each morning we wake up. We make our bed, we brush our teeth. Shit, shower, shave. We do whatever we do and then we sit down to write. We have a word count we’re trying to hit. A twenty-mile march. We write “something” in that many words. Then, we increase the dosage. Say, five-hundred words. Regress to stream of consciousness if you have to but get the words in. Then, write five hundred words about something. Then write seven hundred and fifty words. Then seven-fifty about something. Then a thousand words. Then a thousand about something. You’ll be Stephen King in no time. King, by the way, just writes three thousand words a day and “deletes what isn’t good.” I bet he has files and files of “somethings”. I bet some of those somethings ended up in a movie you’ve seen or in a book you’ve read. Write every day. Then write every day about something. ​ Step 3: Write What You Love Every Day Michael Jordan shot a hundred free throws every single day. He brought a basketball to bed with him. He’d practice getting that perfect backspin before drifting off to sleep. He did this in addition to practice, workouts, games, press conferences, watching film, the Hanes commercials, and having a family. Do you think it was discipline that got him there? Willpower? No way. He’d burn out. Plenty of people do even at that level. Of course, he had discipline and he had willpower but that wasn’t the active ingredient. It was something else entirely. I bet that time he spent shooting free throws went by in a flash. I bet he had to drag himself away. Why? Because he loved it. Twenty-nine years ago, the Bulls were up six against the Denver Nuggets. MJ steps to the line. Sinks his first of two. On his second shot, he looks down the blocks at the Nugget’s seven-footer, Dikembe Mutumbo, and says this: “Hey, Mutombo. This one’s for you, baby,” He closes his eyes, releases the shot. Swish. He was smiling the whole time. He loved this game. What’s the writer’s equivalent of closing your eyes and draining one in Mutumbo’s face? What do you write for the love of the game? What turns you on as a writer? Not sure? What turns you on to read? Are you a sci-fi nut or are you chomping at the bit for every new self-help book? Screenplays? Poetry? What could you write about every day for the next thirty years without ever getting paid for it? That’s your domain. Your domain is the hill you’d die on. Sure, you could write a finance newsletter if you had to. And you will to pay the bills. But your domain is what you love. Your domain is what you’re willing to suffer for. Because even loving it is not enough. You want to be good. Fuck that, you want to be great. You read everything in that domain. You know the top five or ten people. Read everything they ever wrote. You read with intent. You read it as a student of the game. But that might be a hundred books!? Yup. If you love it, you’ll do it. If you won’t do it, maybe you don’t love it. Impersonation is the sincerest form of flattery but it’s also for fucking amateurs. Professionals steal. Steal, steal, steal, steal, steal. Anyone who is anyone steals. Pressfield stole the names, plotline, and theory for the Legend of Bagger Vance straight from the Bhagavad Gita and the narrative device from To Kill A Mockingbird. He didn’t impersonate it. He fucking stole it. Then, he wrote a redemption story about golf with it. That’s a professional. I stole the tone for this article from Mark Manson. I read everything he ever wrote, stole his voice, and wrote my version of the War of Art. I would say this to his face if we ever ran into each other. He’d love it. You know why? Because he fucking steals too. Steal unapologetically from the best in your domain. Why? Because other people are good and you suck. I say that with love. If you want to get good, steal. Everything has already been done. South Park stole from the Simpsons. Family Guys stole from them both. All are great. Say, you love baking. When someone eats your sugar cookies do you want them to say, A) “Wow, I can tell you really love baking,” or B) “These are the best mother fuckin’ cookies I’ve ever had. Do you have any more,” while crumbs fall out the corner of their mouth. The answer is B. You want them to love what you made. Does it matter if it’s someone else’s recipe? Some people will tell you that loving what you do is enough. It’s not. You have to love something to put in the work. But the goal is to do it well. That’s true love. Not for the accolades, not for the awards, certainly not for the money, but for the love of the game. Here’s another truth about writing: no one wants you to be creative. We only want to see creativity within a certain box. That box is a domain. If you’re going to write a Western, write a fucking Western. When you can write a Western properly, then you can be creative. You can do things within that domain that have never been done before. Every genre has conventions. Those conventions are wired into us. We know them subconsciously. Every action novel has to have a hero-at-the-mercy-of-the-villain scene. That’s a convention If it doesn’t have it, it’s not an action novel. Romance has conventions. Same for a redemption story. Same for everything. Everything has a convention. The conventions are what makes a thing what it is. If they are absent, it will just feel wrong. The reader won’t know why. They certainly won’t be able to tell you. It’s deeper than that. It’s just a feeling. All the reader will know is that it doesn’t work. You want to be a writer? Learn your domain. Write something that works. Most people don’t want to be writers. They want to be praised. When they learn it’s hard work and not creativity that wins, they quit. They never write their novel. They talk about it, sure. But they never write it. But you’re not one of them. So here’s the good news: if you do the work, then you get to be creative. You get to write the villain who’s evil as fuck but also kinda has a point. You get to write the flawed hero. Maybe that hero even dies in the second act and it’s his daughter that’s the real hero. What a twist! You get to be creative to expand the bounds of your domain. But you have to work from the inside out, not the outside in. The court was Jordan’s domain. What’s yours? Write that. ​ Step 4: Finish Something In 1986, Steven Pressfield was 42. He had been writing for 17 years and just scored his first professional writing gig: a script for a sure-thing blockbuster starring Linda Hamilton, called King Kong Lives. He invited his entire family and all his friends to the premier. He even booked the hall next door for an after-party. After the movie, no one showed. It was that bad. The critics agreed: “Steven Pressfield and Ronald Shusset, we hope those aren’t their real names for their parents’ sake...” Oof. Can you imagine? If you’re a writer, you’ve got a knot in your stomach the size of a pimento loaf right now. It’s our biggest fear: to pour our heart into something and have it shit on. Humans are social creatures. We really care what other people think. We’re deathly afraid of being ostracized. That’s why capital punishment in the old days was being cast out, not put to death. Lots of us would rather die than to have our novel ripped apart. That’s why we don’t write it. That’s why we don’t publish it. But being a writer assumes one important thing: there’s a reader. Would you write your novel if you knew no one was going to read it? If a tree falls in the woods and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound? I don’t think it does. Similarly, I don’t think a piece of writing is a piece of writing until someone reads it. That’s why, even if our parents get dragged into it, we must publish. We must put our work out there and let the chips fall where they may. Don’t believe me? That’s okay. You may argue that writing for the pleasure of it is enough. Fine. But there's an even better reason you have to publish: it’s not really finished until you do. Something happens when you make the choice to publish something. Knowing someone will read it reshapes your perception. It raises the stakes. It invites you to see your writing anew. That line on page 246, am I sure I’ve got the science right on that? Man, I could really use fewer adverbs. It’s a more critical eye and that’s why people don’t do it. They don’t want to be confronted with the realization that the whole first act has to be cut or their protagonist who they based on themselves just isn’t interesting. Publishing your work makes you more self-conscious. That’s a good thing. It pushes you to be better. Have you ever asked out a girl that was totally out of your league? It doesn’t just happen willy-nilly. You become aware of your flaws first. You try to clean up your act. You get a haircut. You stop wearing those jeans. Maybe you even clean the Mountain Dew cans off the front seat of your car. You fix what you can and make peace with what you can’t change. Because being confidently five-foot-nine makes you at least five-nine-and-a-half. Ask her out. Publish your shit. ​ Step 5: Become Something Imagine a six-foot-tall post standing on a bluff overlooking a river valley. A leather strap about ten feet long is tied to the top of the post and splits into two cords at the opposite end. On the end of each cord is a hand-carved, wooden hook. Each hook is buried into the chest of a boy about fourteen years old. Pawnee. The boy is leaning back on his heels, pulling the cords tight. His chest is bleeding down his belly. He stands like this in the heat of the sun and the cold of the night for days. No food. No water. Why? He is on a vision quest. Waiting. Waiting for what exactly? He is waiting for his power animal. He sings a song to it, enticing it to visit him. And to bring him a vision. The vision is what he’ll bring back. The scars he bears on his chest are his rite of passage. His manhood. His membership in the tribe. He’s not being forced to do this. He wants to do this. Fuuuuuuck. You might say this is barbaric. You might say that a rite of passage is totally unnecessary in the modern world. But we still have all kinds of rites of passage - baptisms, bar mitzvah, quinceanera, graduation, prom. They all serve a purpose. They mark a transition from one state into another. No going back. The Pawnee boy can point to the scars on his chest and say, “That is the day I became a man.” And everyone will agree. There is no universally recognized rite of passage for writers. And we, writers I mean, suffer greatly for it. That’s why we keep asking ourselves, “Am I really a writer?” Though I don’t envy having to hang from a post in the hot sun, I do envy the surety it provides. There is no scar I can point to and say, “That is the day I became a writer.” You might argue that the day you become a writer is the day you publish your first book. Or get paid for it. I disagree. I bet a Pawnee, before his quest often says, “Once I have my scars, then...” He is saying once I have something then I’ll be someone. The writer says, once I have my first book published, then I’ll be a writer. This is a childish fantasy. Perhaps this is what you learn on a vision quest: You already have everything you need to be. The vision just convinces you of that fact. Being a writer isn't about having. It’s about being. Being a writer means, as I’ve beat to death in this piece, writing. That’s the cost of admission. But it’s more than that. It’s about willingly accepting the suffering that comes along with being a writer. Our scars. Look, being a writer is fucking hard. Some days you sit down to write and the words spill out like Molasses on a cold Montana morning. Sometimes you get to the third draft of your novel and realize it just doesn’t work. Nearly all the time, you don’t get paid. You don’t play this game unless you love it. You don’t play this game unless you can’t do anything else. You don’t get into this game to have. If you do, you won’t be here long. If there is no rite of passage for writers, how do you know you’re a writer? When you ask yourself, “Am I really a writer,” who answers? What do they say? If you’re anything like me, your inner critic pipes up and says things like “Who do you think you are,” and “In your dreams, pal.” We all have this monster within us. Pressfield named it. He called it Resistance. It’s the universal force that stops writers from doing their work. Ask yourself now, “Am I really a writer?” If you sense Resistance, then maybe you just became one. Maybe you already were one. Maybe all that’s left to do now is the work. Only one way to find out. submitted by /u/anonymouslobster82 to r/writing [link] [comments]

This happened 5 minutes ago. My room is a sort of mother-in-law suite, really cute, with windows that face the street. Right underneath my bay of four windows is a slanted roof, and the sun hits it all day. I've been a bit stir-crazy as one might imagine, so today, I thought I might go be that person who enjoys a tan and a beer on their roof. I might add that I (34F) was a child during Clarissa and Blossom where various forms of rooftop/stairwell/cozy nook chillin was name of the game. I should have thought, "hm, it's hard to even get out of the window feet first, perhaps this is a bad idea!" But no, I simply braced myself on the interior molding. Perhaps I should have thought, "even my outdoor thirsty cats never try to go out there," But no, they probably just didn't see any birds landing so it wasn't motivation enough. How about, "I can't seem to flatten my feet on this sloped surface despite ample texture and being of a good height," Must just be my angle of exit! So, I invest myself in this damn exercise fully, and shove the rest of my body through the window. I immediately think I should document my success to my friend and go to take a selfie, resulting in throwing my phone bodily from my hand (and blessedly back through the window) as I scrambled for support, skidding to a stop just before the gutters. It was like the gd Lion King, y'all. The classical music swelled as I slammed each of my quarantine-grown-and-raised claws into the shingles of my sunny roof, hauling towards the now, in retrospect, teeny tiny ass window. Finally, my white knuckles grabbed the sill. Jeans torn, ankle bleeding, I began shouting for the roommates; "ROOMMATE (SCAR), ROOMMATES (brother!!) HELP ME!!" it took ten minutes of kicking and clawing for one to hear me over their headphones and haul me in. I tried to explain myself, but when you're in your thirties dangling from your window and your near 40 year old roommate is facing you down, all you can say is "I'm sorry I tried to be Ashton Kutcher or some shit," and quietly ice your wounded ankle. EDIT: I live in the PNW so it was not warm enough to be in shorts, but I was in a really revealing tank and full jeans. Decided my shoulder-cleavage color would work. EDIT.2: someone asked me to measure the angle of the roof. 33 degrees?? Roommate says that is steep. I say ANGLES WHO NEEDS EM EDIT.3: in retrospect it was really like 3-4 minutes calling for help but I wrote this five minutes after it happened, reddit. It felt like even more than ten. I also actually do weightlift and that is probably why I am just fine and got back up?? TL ; DR Thought I'd be like my cool '90s tween heroines and jauntily enjoy the sunshine from my roof. Nearly died, clawed to safety, never again, I live in shame. submitted by /u/sifridstatten to r/tifu [link] [comments]

I thought with escaping retail two years ago mostly unscathed that I would never have to deal with a Karen. I was wrong. I'm on mobile so I apologize for the formatting and I will try my best to keep grammar mistakes to a minimum. I am so sorry for how long it turned out to be but I'm still kind of embarrassed with how I reacted so my typing is a little frantic. So for the cast you've got ME as myself, DK for Dumb Karen, WE for Walmart Employee , and FM for my Former Manager. So this week I actually get to be home for a few days. I am an over the road truck driver that runs a dedicated load every week across country and nowhere near hom. My co driver aka my dad and I pretty much run 40+ weeks out of the year and usually take a solid month off or so when we want to be home or go on vacation out of the country. Any other time it is just a day or two here and there when we can just happen to get to town. But this time we got to go home for a solid week. You know what that means? Home cooked meals! I love to cook and so to do so I needed fresh groceries. Stupid me decided to run to Walmart solo instead of the neighborhood grocery store down by my house and boy do I regret that now. I actually enjoy Walmart much to everyone's shock. I am a former employee you see, an ex cashier, that according to my former coworkers have an unshakable customer service personas that couldn't be wavered by two years of retail abuse. I actually rather liked the job being the people pleaser (masochist) that I am and I had quite a number of regulars and employees that I still like to chat with when I'm out shopping. This day I'd finished with my catching up and had moved deeply into my hunt for the ingredients I needed for a new recipe I was eager to try. I was having trouble finding a certain spice among the variety before me when it happened. The classic Karen throat clearing. Full disclosure, I have no idea how long the woman I looked up to find glaring at me had been trying to get my attention. I had on my BlueParrott headset that I usually wear when driving and at the time was using it to ironically listen to scary Walmart stories by a Youtuber while my eyes were scanning the shelves and checking the recipe list on my phone. Needless to say I hadn't been looking for human interaction at that moment. But like usual my knee jerk customer service persona (which is just me giving a polite smile and friendly eyes) kicked in and I shifted my cart away from the shelves while also muting my phone. ME: I'm sorry if I'm- DK: You shouldn't ignore a customer like that. It's so unprofessional. Honestly why do they appoint barely teenagers to management. DK scolds me a bit more ranting about management meaning experience but really I only paid attention to the first thing she said to me. My mind had wandered of looking from her to down at myself. To her credit I was dressed "nice" but not exactly what I call professional with pastel pink capris, flouncy olive green blouse and shiny metallic bronze flats. What can I say? I like dressing nice and colorful when I'm not at risk of getting diesel on my clothes. DK was a middle aged local classic pain in the behind whose sense of fashion often hurt my eyes. This one looked like she just rolled out of the trailer park wearing a camo hoodie with pink, black workout pants that probably had never seen the inside of a gym, lime green running shoes, and bottle blond hair done up in a ponytail pulled through the back of a very loved baseball cap. To complete the look she had a huge Coach purse sitting in her buggy beside her, a bag even I know cost more than her entire outfit times three. Yeah, typical Karen for where I'm from. ME: Listen I don't work here. If you need help with something though all you need to do is press that button and it will call someone for you. I gesture to a "need help? call" button located on a post about two pace behind me up the aisle. Usually I wouldn't mind helping someone who couldn't find something. I had former customers ask for my help all the time and if I wasn't busy and they were nice( or just elderly, I was a big hit with the elderly because I'm a sucker for little old ladies). So far DK wasn't any of those things and she had a perfume on that was making my nose itch so I was hoping to shoo her away. No such luck. DK scowls at my suggestion. DK: Why are you lying?! You work here. You've checked me out numerous times and I don't appreciate being lied to. The nerve! To be honest I felt this mixture of confused resignation and completely dropped my smile and sighed. I'm only as nice as I want to be. In truth I have a resting bitch face that makes me very unapproachable according to my best friends. ME: Listen...I don't work here anymore and I'm in the middle of getting my own groceries. So let's just not? Turning back to the shelf of spices I check my phone again before glancing over the selection before finally finding what I needed. Just as I move to put it in my buggy and move along with my day I get a sharp nasty pain in the side of my head. I yelped, probably louder than necessary but I was so caught off guard by the pain that I didn't care. Plus I am very tender headed. See apparently the DK was not happy with me and grabbed ahold of my headset and yanked it off my head. Unfortunately for me I have very thick very wavy hair that for some reason other people envy. Not me though and especially not when the head rest of my headset tangled in my hair from the way she tried to snatch it off and instead she ended yanking and pulling out more than a few strands of my hair. Even with such a yank she didn't manage to free if from my hair and just ended up dropping it causing the headset to tangle further in my hair and cause gravity to yank my hair mercilessly again. Most people would have stopped and apologized after realizing what they've done, not DK though. DK: Don't you dare walk away from me! How dare you speak to me that way! I don't care if you're management now or what, you still work at fucking Walmart. You're still not as important as me. Her last comment made me pause in the midst of me trying to free my hair from my headset, eyes watering, scalp throbbing. I always have hated how people looked down on people working at Walmart. Majority of the cashiers and floor associates that I knew at this store were either students or were retired professional like teachers, nurses, office workers. Most of our older staff were just part timers to have something to do. I was pissed Me: I. Don't. Work. Here. DK: Not this again. I told you- Me: I. Don't. Work. Here. I! Don't! Work! Here! I DON'T WORK HERE! I DON'T WORK HERE! I just kept repeating myself getting louder and louder until I was practically screaming at her making her back away from me. Something I had learned early on as a child was that I was the last kind of person people expected to hear yell. I don't know if it's the way I look or just a vibe I give off, I don't know, but either way I've learned to use it to my advantage to get people to back off. But the screaming also started to draw attention to us as people started coming into the aisle to see what was happening. Among the people included a Walmart employee I was familiar with even though she started after I left and my former manager. By the time they showed I had finished screaming and was now just glaring at the shell shocked and probably embarrassed DK who was red in the face. WE: What's going on here? Is someone hurt? DK points a finger at me first as I'm catching my breath and have started fiddling with my hair again trying get it untangled. DK: This girl went crazy when I tried to ask her where something is, and started screaming in my face and even swung at me! She needs to go to jail or at least be fired. By the end of her speech big crocodile tears were streaming down her face and one of the random customers who had come to watch was patting her shoulder and trying to console her. The WE and FM turn to me just as I finally get my headset free with a good clump of hair still wrapped around the head rest and look up meeting their gazes. FM: OP are you alright? What happened? Why were you screaming? What's with all the hair? FM, bless her, didn't even wait for my response (I really wasn't in the state of mind to give one as I tend to go mute when I get very very upset) as she looked from my distraught face to my hands still holding the headset and mess of hair hanging limply from it before turning back to DK who was quietly regaling some of the crowd with just how horrific I had been. FM: Excuse me, but can you tell me what happened again and also perhaps tell me why OP is holding a chunk of her hair? DK: What about her hair? I told you, she attacked me! I'm the victim here. Are you believing her over me because she is you employee? WE: That still doesn't answer her question. Did you pull out OP's hair? What kind of person does that? The crowd begins to murmur and DK obviously realizes she's losing popular opinion. In the meantime, I'm starting to calm down and rub at my scalp trying to dissipate the pain. Luckily no blood. DK: I was, I was just asking her a question and she ignored me. I pulled off her headphones to get her to listen to me. It's not my fault she doesn't brush her hair. WE: That's assault! Why would you ever put your hands on someone? And now you're telling everyone that she attacked you? What's the matter with you? FM: I think it's time we called for the sheriff's department. DK's eyes widened as she seemed to come to the realization that she might have screwed with the wrong person, but as I've said before, I can be nice when I want to. ME: I'm fine. Just make her leave me alone. I don't want to spend one of my precious nights at home with a police officer unless he's buying me dinner. This made the crowd laugh. FM: Are you sure OP? ME: No, but I have cold things to get home, a dinner to cook, and my Dad's probably wondering what's taking so long. To that FM nodded and forced DK to follow her while the crowd quickly dispersed and when back to their own shopping. WE stayed with me and we chatted while I got the last few things I needed and went to checkout. FM came up to me after I finished paying and told me she'd had the woman banned from this store. To be honest that really sucks for her because this is the only Walmart in this county and the closest Walmart I know of is over a forty minute drive from where I live. Apparently though I wasn't the first person she had harrassed here, although all the others had been actual employees, and the security feed that she reviewed clearly showed the woman trying to snatch off my headset. FM tells me that if it had been her she would have socked the woman in the mouth which is really surprising because FM was a former elementary school teacher who taught for close to forty years before retiring and taking up the management position to stay active and supplement her income. FM has the patience of a saint but says she wouldn't have hesitated to backhand DK after I explained to her what DK had said to me. We chatted some more, laughed a bit, and then I went home. I'm sorry it was so long, but I just had to get it out of my system in order to sleep tonight. I knew there were irate people in this world, but I never thought I'd meet such a self-entitled Karen in real life. TL/DR: A woman demands I help her thinking I still worked at Walmart. When I refuse she ends up pulling out some of my hair and gets banned from the store by my awesome former manager. UPDATE: I take it back! I should have had her arrested the first go around. This woman has made my nice peaceful week at home a freaking nightmare. Yes, I ran into DK again today, but this time at Lowe's. So the new cast is DK as Dumb Karen who didn't learn her lesson the first time, ME for myself, AD for my Awesome Dad (and boss), LE for Lowe's Employee that I know, and LM for Lowe's Manager who I am familiar with. So I decided to run another errand while I was home for the week. This time it was to Lowe's to pick up some mulch for AD's newly built raised flowerbeds and a few odds and ends like metal piping, spray paint, and screws for a home project I decided to start. AD is a few aisles over from me picking up the spray paint while I was looking at screws and chatting with LE for a few minutes about my cat. I own a Sphynx cat, a hairless cat, named Pan, who will go with me anywhere if I'd let him. Since Lowe's is pet friendly he usually tags along with me every trip and sits in the child seat without complaint the whole time. All of the staff here adore him and are constantly stopping me for a visit and a chat, LE being the most often to visit because her section is right next to the main entrance. After LE leaves to check her section, but not before promising to bring back some cat treats for Pan, I turn my attention back to the screws. I kid you not, mere seconds after LE leaves I hear someone growl out, "You!" I turn around wide eyed to find DK standing there behind her cart glaring at me. Let me note before this exchange that I am wearing jean shorts, a red blouse with a bandana print, flip flops, and and my hair pulled up with a scrunchie. I was the definition of nonprofessional attire and I certainly don't look like a Lowe's associate. DK: So! This is where you work! ME: Sorry? DK: Oh, you will be sorry! Where is your manager! I demand you ge t him for me now! I want you fired after what you did to me the other day! I'll admit I wasn't on my best game in this moment. It had been a long day. AD and I had spent most of it out in the yard checking on the progress of the lawn (we had laid grass seed before we went back to work at the end of May) and also shoving soil into the raised flowerbeds. I was sun tired and this woman had enough malice to knock the wind out of you sails. ME: I don't work here either lady. DK: Liar, I saw you talking with your coworker. No one talks that much with staff unless you're an employee. Now get me your manager! Now! Her comment really irritated me. By her logic I should also work at the bank, the water company, the electric company, the Dollar General, Whitt's Barbecue, the Pilot, and pretty much everywhere else that I run errands in town. Especially the places I take Pan. He's such a well behaved baby and an easement for people to approach me and strike up conversation. Plus I really do enjoy talking with people. But this woman, this woman acted like anyone working or making a living was beneath her. It disgusted me. ME: Are you deaf? I don't work here, and LE and I were just talking about my baby here. DK: Baby? Confused DK peeks around me at Pan sitting there doing his best yoga pose with back leg thrown high in the air while he cleaned his leg. DK shrieks making me step back into the shelves because damn I was not expecting that. Meanwhile Pan doesn't even acknowledge her, he's too busy cleaning and used to loud noises from living on a truck. DK: What is that hideous creature?! ME: Whoa, whoa, hang on wait a mi- DK How dare you bring that disgusting thing in a store! It's a naked rat! ME: It's my cat, you dumbass! I actually think the woman was getting ready to throw something at me and/or Pan if LE didn't appear coming up the aisle followed by AD. LE: Ma'am would you pleas calm down? OP what's going on? DK: This girl brought a disgusting creature into this store! Get me a manager! I want her fired and banned? LE: Disgusting? AD: Fired? LE: Ma'am, this is a pet friendly store and Pan Pan is a welcome guest. He may be unusual looking but he is a very good fur baby. DK: That thing is an abomination! What if children saw it! It's licking it's junk. Well that was true, Pan had moved farther south with his cleaning and was still completely oblivious to the crazy lady. While LE was defending my little Pan's honor AD nudged me to get my attention. AD: What the hell's going on with this woman? ME: Remember that stupid woman I told you about that thought I still worked at Walmart? AD: The one that pulled out you hair when she tried to snatch off your headset. ME: Uh huh. And that is when AD's eyes went from mildly annoyed to fully pissed off. I wish there was an analogy for dads like their is for moms. You know: tiger mom or momma bear. AD really deserves one, especially when he's upset on my behalf. AD has big heart and is a surrogate dad to any and all who need one, but biologically I am his only child. I am his number one priority. And DK dared to mess with me. AD: Tell LE to get her manager. He steps forward, calling for DK's attention who is still ranting about Pan (another bad move on her part because my dad refers to him as his grandbaby). ME: I am OP's boss. What exactly did she do to you? DK gets this smug grin on her face for a minute as she looks from LE to ME and then back to AD. It's then that her face twists into this stricken expression as she recounts to AD how I harrassed her in Walmart a couple of days ago and got her thrown out of the store because I was friends with management, and how I had spotted her today and started threatening her and taunting her and yelling at her to get out of the store. Geez this woman had a screw loose. I managed to mumble to LE to go fetch the manager towards the beginning of her story and LE scurried off, coming back fairly quickly with her manager in tow just as DK was demanding AD to kick me out and how she couldn't believe employees acted like this and brought ugly animals to their place of work. LM stepped up looking around at our little group slight confused, apparently LE had only told him a customer was harassing another customer and to hurry. LM: I'm the shift manager, what seems to be the problem here. AD: Yeah, sorry to bother you but this woman came up and started screaming at my daughter. She assaulted her at the Walmart on Friday and got banned from the store. Now she seems to think she can get my daughter banned from here in return so she's making up wild accusations. DK's jaw drops at my AD's calm, albeit stern explanation as she looks between me and him. I don't know how she didn't realize he was my dad. I bare a stiking resemblance to him although most people say we look the most alike when we smile and we weren't smiling right now. DK: Your daughter?! I thought you said you were her manager?! AD: No, I said I was her boss, which I am. She does not work here or at Walmart. DK: You...you! DK made a strangled sound in her throat, her face turned almost purple in shade. Whatever she wanted to say I guess words couldn't convey because suddenly she launched herself at us arms raised, fingers curled like claws ready to scratch our eyes out. AD was too quick for her though as he shoved me out of the way and side stepped her causing DK to run full force into the shelf behind us. She's lucky the lower drawers kept her from impaling herself in the eye with the hanging racks. Judging by her screams though I'm pretty sure she scratched the hell out of her arms though as she fell back onto the floor none too gently. DK began shouting assault and for help and of course for the police. She got her wish. LM radioed for security and in less then a minute two guy were hauling a screeching and cursing DK up and marching her towards the front of the store. The police were called and what should have been a thirty minute shopping trip turned into an hour and a half long ordeal of speaking with the multiple managers, giving our statements to the police, watching DK lose it on the police and have to be tasered in order to be handcuffed, and agreeing that this time yes, I wanted to press charges. They took security tapes and I gave them the name of my former manager from Walmart to contact confirming the earlier incident as well as see about getting their security tapes as well. We then finally got to pay for our stuff, LM insisting on giving us 10% off our final purchase price for all the trouble, plus he knew from working with us in the past just how much we'd spent at his store in the last year while we've been landscaping AD's new property. That made AD very happy and he's spent the last couple hours calling up his buddies and telling them about the lunatic at Low's and how he got a discount. He's a simple person to please. I wish he wouldn't have told his wife though because she got very upset and worried about us (it's her normal state) and demanded for us to leave the rest of the yard work and my project until tomorrow and to just relax for the rest of the night. We obliged her and I'm taking part of my "resting time" to write this update. I'm so shocked by this woman. I have never been spoken to by a stranger like this outside of my stint doing retail. Is this just how some people are? God I hope she gets help. She won't be finding it at Lowe's though because we were assured that DK was banned from there as well and as a side note Lowe's is also the only home improvement store in our county. The next available one is a Home Depot about a thirty minute drive up the interstate. Sucks to be her. Update: So, hello again to everyone. I know all of you have been waiting on some sort of update as to what happened to the woman after she was arrested. The quick and simple version of it is: she's in the county jail. I was contacted a few weeks ago and was informed that she plead guilty on all charges as a part of a plea deal. You see at the time of her arrest (and yes on top of her charges for harassing and assaulting me, she was also charged with resisting arrest and assault of an officer because apparently she spit in his face) she was also carrying a controlled substance (they didn't say what exactly and I didn't think to ask) and apparently she had enough of it that the charge was upped to possession with intent to sell. I'm assuming the deal was about getting her supplier but they didn't give me any details about it because it was still an ongoing case so don't quote me on that. I'll see if I can find out more later on and will keep you all apprised of the situation. Yes, I'm sorry, that is a long quick explanation, but I felt it was owed to you all who were very supportive in my last post and I was planning to wait until I found out her full sentencing before I updated everybody, but then something happened this past week. You can go read about it in my other post. submitted by /u/Road_Witch to r/IDontWorkHereLady [link] [comments]

First dates can be awkward, tough, and complicated... but they really don’t have to be. In my experience, here are some ways to make your first date as awesome as possible. Choosing a great location, a perfect time of day, and interesting questions to ask will allow you to turn that awkward small talk into real, fun conversation. The end goal of the date should not be to achieve a second date. Your only goal should be to create a positive outcome and enjoy yourself. Positive outcome is for both parties to ultimately feel as though the date was worthwhile, whether that leads to a second date or not. (Even if you don’t click, a positive outcome could result in her saying, “Hey, I have a friend who you would be perfect with!” and achieving a second date that way. You never know.) That being said, a few tips/ideas! Hopefully some of these are new and you haven’t heard them all before – this subreddit helped me when I was beginning to date, so I figured I could return the favor after gaining some experience :) PICK YOUR LOCATION Coffee Shops are clutch for first dates. Try to avoid Starbucks, as they tend to be noisy and seating is very exposed. Instead, opt for a local café with a more intimate, cozy atmosphere. Coffee dates can be as brief or as long as you want, and they’re not a big investment. Bowling adds a fun activity to the mix and isn’t a huge monetary investment either. Most everyone has been bowling a few times in their life, and few people dislike it. Light competition makes for good flirting and laughs. However, as u/Stantron brought up, bowling could be a time investment and last longer than you bargained for. In addition, you’re always gonna be leaving the table to bowl, which could constantly pause conversation. Bowling may be better suited for a later date, but can be excellent as a first date if you already know the person (for example, if you have asked out a friend). Mini golf is similar to bowling, see above. Arcades are similar in the realm of activity/competition, but with a slightly geeky touch. Ice cream dates, like coffee dates, are best as a late evening activity and can be as short/long as you would like. Drinks at the bar as a late evening activity if you’re old enough and more interested in a spicy/flirty atmosphere. Just remember, this can get expensive quickly and it may be better to reserve alcohol for a later date. Pool at the bar (as suggested by u/FoolsGoldDogApe) is similar to drinks at the bar with a bit of light, flirty fun. And, you’re always staying right near your date (unlike bowling) so conversation won’t have to pause for the game to continue. All of these things can be done inside if the weather is sour. If the date is going well, you could always combine two options, i.e. grabbing ice cream after bowling. If the weather is nice, combine one of the above options with a walk or something else outdoors! Low-key touching (like hand holding) is absolutely acceptable, but be respectful about it (i.e. “Do you mind if we hold hands?”) PICK YOUR TIME Try to avoid scheduling a first date around a big meal like dinner/lunch. Meals are expensive and you’re taking a bigger gamble with that if you don’t end up with a positive outcome. Morning/early afternoon dates always appear more casual and less sexual than late evening dates, so that’s something to consider, depending on what you want. Furthermore, (also credit to u/Stantron) create a time window for yourself. Mention before the date occurs that you have to leave at a certain time after the date begins. An hour and a half would work as a solid window. That way, you have an out if the date doesn’t go well, without slighting the other party. If the date is going well, wrapping it up allows you to end on a positive note and improves the likelihood of a second date. WHAT TO WEAR Your three goals should be to... wear something flattering appear weather/season appropriate feel comfy and confident for the date activity On that note, avoid wearing orange or brown, as those are not flattering colors on most people. Black, red, and blue are solid colors. Business casual is fine, a tailored T-shirt/blouse and jeans could be fine too, it just depends on the activity. Make sure you smell nice and have good hygiene. INITIATE CONVERSATION When you first see your date (whether you’re picking them up, they’re picking you up, or you’re meeting at a location) put on a smile and offer a greeting. “Hey (their name), I’m (your name), nice to meet you!” or “Hey (their name), great to see you again!” depending on circumstances. A brief hug would be appropriate here, but again, be respectful (i.e. by asking “Do you like hugs?”). Handshake would be somewhat appropriate, but a little professional for the scene. Read their movements/expressions and choose your action based on that. As u/CrystalCritz and some others mentioned, always make sure you have their consent before initiating physical touch. And if someone touches you in a way you don’t like, don’t be afraid to say no and set a firm boundary. Your comfort and safety are important and should be recognized as such. As u/doomt_26 mentioned, it is also appropriate in many cultures to give your date a greeting kiss on both cheeks! MAKE CONVERSATION As you proceed throughout your date, stay far away from certain topics, like... Family drama Political drama Your sexual preferences/history Your ex or lack of exes How much money you have/make Unless these topics are extremely important to you and your date can only proceed if you are on the exact same page, OR unless you can navigate these topics appropriately, respectfully, and without a narrow mind (as pointed out by u/Trulymadlydeeplydo), it’s best not to directly ask about... Political affiliation Religious affiliation Health, including disabilities, physical illnesses, mental illnesses, etc Needs for future (like kids or marriage) Keep conversation positive. No self deprecation if you can help it. It’s fine to throw in a joke about how you can’t cook to save your life, or you have a massive fear of heights, but only if they’re humorous and you can provide a funny, confident story about it too. Overall, I know this sounds basic but, be yourself! Get to know them. You’re trying to gauge their personality just as much as they’re trying to gauge yours. Afterward, your date should have a pretty good idea of: Your hobbies/passions/interests, what you do for fun Your job, what you do for work (without directly discussing money) and possibly what your most simple career goal for the future is Your education path, if you’re still in school Where you’re from You should also have a pretty good idea of your date in these respects. When asking questions, try to avoid flat questions like “What are your hobbies? What is your job?” Instead, pose questions in a different way, like “So if you weren’t on this date right now, what would you be doing instead?” or “I read on your profile that you love traveling! That’s awesome, where have you been?” or “You said you like skating, that’s really cool. How did you get started with that?” If your date asks you a flat question, you can still respond in a way that creates deeper conversation. For example sake, let’s say your date opens up with “How are you?” Instead of “Great, how are you?” let’s reply with something interesting. “I’m great, thanks for asking! I just started a new Netflix series and it has me hooked, so life is good right now. How are you?” (That would allow him/her to pose more questions, like inquiring on the Netflix series or whatever) As you dive deeper into conversation, you might be inclined to tell a scary/funny/crazy story. Go for it, as long as the story has a happy ending! For example, you can tell the story about how you got bitten by a shark and your friends hauled you out/saved you, but if one of your friends drowned in the process, that’s not first date material, that’s nightmare material. “First time” stories (first time doing a hobby like skiing/surfing, for example) can also be funny as long as they aren’t sexual in nature. If conversation gets dry, comment on the atmosphere. “Wow, the bowling alley is pretty busy today. Have you ever been here before?” or “Dairy Queen ice cream never gets old. Do you have a favorite flavor?” GIVE COMPLIMENTS Flatter your partner, but be cautious. Don’t compliment physical features aside from style. Instead, try to compliment them on stuff they talk about, and don’t overdo it. Compliment choices and actions, not genetics. Let’s say your date just brought up her hobby of writing books. “Wow, I really admire that! That must take a lot of dedication and talent.” Or, painting. “That’s so awesome! Do you have any pictures of your work that you could show me?” Or he offhandedly mentioned the recent death of a loved one. “I’m sorry, that must have been hard. You seem like a very strong person.” AVOID, at all costs, sexual compliments. She doesn’t need to hear about her boobs and he doesn’t need to have someone doting on his muscles. Discussing his weight lifting hobby and doting on his muscles are very different things. WHO PAYS? Regardless of societal gender customs, you should always walk into a date expecting to either pay for both parties or split the bill. If you’re the one initiating the date, lean toward paying for both; if your date made the first move or if it was mutual (such as on a dating website), lean toward splitting. To be polite, always offer to pay your share, even if the other party has chosen to pay for you. If the date has gone well, you may offer to pay for your date, especially if you initiated the date to begin with. HOW TO REJECT A SECOND DATE So, the date is over. Conversation was good and you’re now at home, but you didn’t feel the spark. Several hours or a day after you leave, you receive a text thanking you for the great time, but you aren’t interested in a second date. How do you reject in a nice way? “Thank you for tonight! I’m not interested in a second date right now but I hope you enjoy the rest of your day.” “You seem like a great guy, but we’re just not quite right for each other! Have a good weekend.” If your date gets pushy and insistent, a “no” will suffice. You don’t need to JADE (justify, argue, defend, explain) after showing kindness once. HOW TO SUGGEST A SECOND DATE So, the date went well! After the successful time, give your date and yourself some time to process it. Waiting until the day afterward is perfect, although it’s also polite to give a little “Text me when you’re home safe!” if the date ends late at night. After time has passed, shoot them an upfront message. “Hey, I really enjoyed last night and I would love to have a second date. Are you free to (do X activity) on (X date) at (X time)?” I know that sounds pretty specific, but that’s the best way to gauge interest. If they respond with a yes, then you’ve got this! If they respond with another date/time, awesome! If they simply reply that they’re busy, then either they would prefer another day/time and haven’t articulated it properly, or they just aren’t interested. Assume the latter. When your date is busy, leave the ball in their court. “No problem. If your schedule clears up and you’re interested in seeing each other again, just let me know. :)” Bam. Done. Not complicated and you handled possible rejection like a confident pro. In this way, you don’t shut down future opportunities but appear understanding and non pushy. I hope these tips are helpful and not overdone! I know some of these seem obvious, but I’ve noticed a lot of friends struggle in these categories. Let me know if you have any suggestions or feedback :) submitted by /u/pm_me_ur_misfortunes to r/dating_advice [link] [comments]

Intro Did you just recently decide you want to look better by dressing better? Maybe you checked out /r/malefashionadvice and it wasn't for you so you discovered /r/streetwear. Maybe you like hip hop and follow your favorite rappers in IG and you want to look like them. Maybe you're in high school and you're sick of getting stunted on by rich kids. Whatever the reason, you found yourself on /r/streetwear looking at inspo albums and WDYWT posts and getting really psyched about cool outfits. Then you found some pictures you REALLY fell in love with. You looked up the prices of the items in the outfit and immediately lost hope of ever looking like that. Then something led you to /r/FashionReps. You're pretty new to streetwear. Your daily outfit is jeans and a graphic tee with some tennis shoes. Maybe cargos and a zip-up hoodie. Whatever. Point is, you're here to completely overhaul your wardrobe and not spend very much money. If I just described you, this is the guide for you. If none of that hits home, you probably won't get much out of this guide. There will be zero useful information here for people who have been on this sub for a long time. FashionReps Terms You may be looking at the front page of /r/FashionReps and see the terms "QC" and "GP" and wonder what the hell are these letters for? Well, how about we explain them. QC: Quality Control (QC for short) is talking about pictures that are posted from an agent of an item that was ordered. Users will post these if they're unsure about the quality and would rather have someone else take a look at them if they're good enough. LC: Legit Check (LC for short) Much like the name states, this is a tag used for posts requiring a legit check. Legit checks are a great way of finding out if a item you're purchasing is authentic or not. GP: Guinea Pig (GP for short) Guinea Pigging is much like being a test subject. In this instance you will be the first person to order a sellers new item. This means you'll be the first to get pictures of their product and often times you'll post them to be checked for quality by the community. FIND: Much like the name states. Posts with this flair are often linked to new products that haven't been posted before. W2C: Where To Cop (W2C for short) W2C refers to the search for a desired item. Often times will be linked with retail images for an example. 1:1 One to One (1:1 for short) 1:1 refers to a perfect replica. However, not many exist and often times you won't be able to get these as they're sold out. GL Green Light (GL for short) GL Refers to a user who has given their approval of a QC post. RL Red Light (RL for short) RL Refers to a user who has given their disapproval of a QC post. B&S Bait & Switch (BS or B&S for short) B&S Refers to a seller who has advertised their product and sent goods that are different from advertised.   What web sites exist to buy reps from? For our purposes, we're going to pretend that a few of the big web sites don't exist. There are lots of sites out there that buy stuff from the web site I'm going to show you how to buy from and then sell for double the price. But you're not a sucker. You're going to buy from a weird ass Chinese web site and get shit for the low. There's Aliexpress which I do not recommend for several reasons. It's very tempting to buy stuff from Aliexpress but you will get burned. First, the site is Western-facing which means the pressure is on the site's operators to crack down on illegal activity. Aliexpress is widely used around the globe. When there's good fakes on Aliexpress and the link gets shared, the link gets taken away. The administrators of the site need to cover their asses and take down things that get reported. So the stuff that stays up usually isn't very good. There's DHGate which has a lot of good options for if you only want to buy one thing, especially "non-hype" shoes like Stan Smiths, Old Skools, Nike running shoes, etc. There's TaoBao. This is the site we'll be talking about. Here's the catch though, it's going to be a little tricky. If you don't want to put in a little work to save a lot of money, then give up on reps right now and save up for legit pieces. Then there is Weidian. This site is very similar to TaoBao in the sense that they have replica goods and it is a bit tricky to get started. However, you can find many budget batches here.   I clicked on that TaoBao link and it's all in Chinese. How am I ever going to figure this out? Chill, we got this. For now, we're not going to worry about navigating TaoBao much. That'll come later after you've done a couple orders. Use Google Chrome while rep shopping and utilize the full-page automatic translation by clicking on the translate button in the URL bar. My goal right now, however, is not to overwhelm you more because you're probably already overwhelmed so don't worry if the site looks really confusing even after translating it.   We're going to use an agent. An agent is a third party with a warehouse that orders things from TaoBao for you then repackages all the items you buy from different sellers into one package and sends it on to you. I'm going to recommend Superbuy. They make it pretty easy for new people to buy stuff from TaoBao. Go to the Superbuy home page and paste this link into the box. You'll see that the page has been automatically translated for you via Google Translate and it looks a little less scary. Feeling calmer yet? Superbuy is going to make it almost as easy as shopping on Amazon. You can sign up for Superbuy by clicking here upon signing up you'll automatically receive $27 worth of coupons to aid you towards shipping out your first haul! Here's a video with a 1:1 cutie explaining Superbuy if it's confusing for you. Note: I chose Superbuy because they have the best interface and reasonable fees, as far as I can tell.   Alright, I've made an account with the agent. What do I buy? Okay, so the catch here is that I'm going to give you the outline of a basic streetwear capsule wardrobe for you to build upon. A capsule wardrobe is a wardrobe made up of few pieces that are simple and can be combined in many ways to create many outfits. I'll try to include a few simple hype pieces because, let's be real, you want to get some hype shit. We all do. Bottoms: Fear of God zipper pants & Represent distressed skinny jeans in blue and/or H&M skinny low jeans (as cheap as most rep jeans) Tops: Layering tees in pretty much every color, Basic hoodies in black, beige (apricot), and gray, or Yeezy-style hoodies if you want to spend a little more for a different cut, Thin bomber in black and/or olive green (very thin, this is a windbreaker not a winter coat). The other tops I'll recommend are Faded Glory flannels from Wal-Mart and Hane's Beefy tees. These items are as cheap in the US as they are from TaoBao for the most part. If you're not in the US I'm sure there is a local equivalent. If you need a winter coat, I don't recommend finding a rep. Quality seriously matters if you live in the frozen north and you don't want to take any chances. Hats: Hat store. I own quite a few hats from this store and most of them are pretty good quality. Some have even survived an accidental cycle in the washer! Shoes: Replica Shoes are one of the hottest categories of replicas right now. However, there are some dos and donts for replica shoes. Here is a list of sellers that currently offer a very wide variety of shoes and are trusted within the replica community. If you're looking for some basic shoes I definitely recommend going for Boostmaster Lins Budget Ultraboosts. Lins Ultraboosts are a great shoe that costs on average $20~$30 and offers the very comfort of retails as well with a very close to retail look! Boostmaster Lin (BMLin) Cocosneakers (Coco) FlightKickz (LN5) JoyStudio (Joy) Kickwho.vip (H12/KW) Staysucc.net (Vicky) Tonysneakers.ru (Real Tony) Willsneakers.ru (Will) Easy To Use Websites: Now you may be wondering if there is a ability to purchase goods from Taobao without a big hassle. Luckily in the recent year we had some new provisions made by sellers and they created sites that are easier to browse than Taobao. Now you aren't able to get everything off of these websites but they offer a good starting level for those who are looking to not dive into Taobao just yet. I definitely recommend using Superbuy and their $27 worth of shipping coupons you'll get from Superbuy by just signing up CNFashionPub offers a great deal of hypebeast & streetwear clothing. CNLuxuryPub offers a great deal of designer-wear clothing. CNFashionBuy offers a great deal of streetwear shoes and accessories. The beauty of creating such a simple wardrobe is that you can mix and match in almost any possible combination and end up with a decent looking outfit. 1 or 2 pairs of pants, 5 or 6 tees, 2 or 3 hoodies, a couple of flannels, 1 pair of shoes. Lots of combos. And you've spent less than $250, maybe a lot less. For the price of one Supreme hoodie, you just built an entire wardrobe. It's basic, yes, but it's a start.   How do I know what size to buy? This is a VERY important question. Some products will be reproduced with the same original size designations. Others will be shifted to better accommodate their Asian clients. Some items purchased from Tao could be a Large that fits like a US XS. So you really need to pay attention. When you find a piece you like, it's time to pick the correct size. Most of the time, sellers will have a size chart towards the bottom of the item page. You'll have to scroll down a bit to find it.   Here are the translations for sizing: 肩宽 - Shoulder Width 胸围 - Bust 衣长 - Length The surefire way of picking the correct size is to identify the type of item you're purchasing (shirt, coat, pants, underwear) and measure an item of that type you own. So, if I wanted to buy a bogo tee, and I didn't know my size, I'd take a shirt that fits me, and measure from shoulder seam to shoulder seam for shoulder width, pit to pit for bust then x2, and bottom of collar to the bottom for the length. The reason you multiply the bust by 2 is because some sellers will have chest circumference listed on their chart, so to get your chest circumference just measure pit to pit and x2. Example here   What is shipping going to cost? Shipping works a bit differently than you're probably used to. You will pay a small fee (5-10yuan) for shipping when you first order the item. Then, once your agent has all the items and weighs them, you will pay them for the final shipment of everything from them to you. It is not uncommon for a $150 haul to cost $50 to ship. Keep this in mind when you are budgeting your order. Some agents will offer a service called rehearsal shipping. Rehearsal shipping is when an agent will reweigh your package (for a small fee) to get you the true exact weight. If you feel as if your package weighs too much this is a great option to add on.   What shipping option should I choose? There are 3 main shipping options that are frequently used by the FashionReps community and are considered the "go-to" options. DHL - Fast shipping times (average at 3~7 business days) DHL is great for EU packages as it tends to have a lesser seizure rate. US can use DHL too. EMS - Fast shipping times (average at 5~9 business days) EMS is great for US packages. China Post - Slow shipping times (average 15~30 business days) China Post is great if you're looking to ship for a low price and are fine with your items taking a while to arrive.   But, OP I want hype shit. I know, me too and so does everyone else who is new to /r/FashionReps. As a general rule, get all the basics before you get any hype. If you wear too much hype or wear hype shit before you figure out how to match and create a good outfit, you'll look bad. I know it's tempting to just put on a full Supreme outfit but you will look like an idiot. However, I can't stop you from needing to satisfy your itch for cheap hype. Start with just tee shirts. Seriously. With stuff other than tees (jackets, pants, embroidered items, etc.) there's a lot more that can go wrong and you don't have a trained eye for details yet. It will come with time and with looking at posts on this sub. Nelly offer a variety of basic wear and is one of the best sellers to go to for non-hype streetwear. CWhat has a great selection of clothes that are low-key and aren't shouting out "Hey, look at me I wear high end streetwear!" Trusted Taobao Store List you can find a large variety of sellers who offer a large amount of clothing brands here.   But I want a Supreme BOGO hoodie! Currently there are a few top sellers that offer the top batches for Supreme BOGO Hoodies! Luckily, I've done the research for you so here they are Kingshark is definitely on the top of the game right now with his quality. Mirror has been a long time seller in the /r/FashionReps community and definitely is up to par with Kingshark quality. Teenageclub offers a decent variety of Supreme BOGO Hoodies from the other sellers listed above.   Okay, I've got some basics and I looked at Nelly, Cwhat, Kingshark, etc and they don't have X. Where do I get it? The easiest way to find a specific item is to use the Search Bar on this subreddit. Check out links, reviews, etc. If you don't see it, your instinct is probably to create a new thread and ask for links. Please don't do this until you have already tried to find it for yourself. It is so rewarding to hunt down and find an item that no one has posted before. It also helps keep the front page of the sub unclogged with repetitive posts. As you know, TaoBao is mainly in Mandarin Chinese. So typing in "Supreme red tee shirt" won't get you too far. So we use a function on TaoBao called the reverse image search. Here's a nice simple guide to using reverse image search by our mod /u/mikeygigs18. Only addendum I make to that guide is that sometimes to change TaoBao to "Mainland China" it's in the upper left corner of the page rather than the bottom bar.   Where do I go from here? Here's a good post from /r/streetwear that lists a lot of guides you can check out to keep expanding your style and trying out new fun stuff. That's all I have for now. Please comment with any questions, I'll be happy to help. Let me know if there's anything I should add to this guide but keep in mind the point is for it to be simple. One more thing, if you are mad or frustrated with the state of the community, the influx of new users, people being mean, whatever, just remember that we're all here for the same reason. We want to look good for the low. So just chill and don't be dicks. Also, if you comment with a question and no one replies then your comment is being hidden because you are on a reddit account with not enough karma. Go participate in some discussions in other subreddits to build up a little so you can post and comment here. submitted by /u/hyperionfr to r/FashionReps [link] [comments]