Here at Just About, we celebrate the knowledge and passion of fans. That's what our bounties aim to do. But as they're specific prompts, there might be something you're itching to talk about that hasn't yet come up.
That's what this bounty will offer. What curious pieces of expertise are you proud of? What's your specialist subject on Mastermind? What interesting thing would you like to share with your fellow members?
Give us 150 words (or more!) in writing or video about a subject you know well and care about. The more niche, the more quirky, the better. Tell us why more people should have heard of Thales, how whisky is peated, how to get overpowered in Final Fantasy VIII within the first hour, or whatever else is close to your heart.
The top submissions will get $20 apiece and be featured in curated content right here on JAJA, while a further two will receive $10 and may be featured too.
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This reward closed to entries at 11:22am on October 7, 2024 but you can still reply, react, and join the conversation below! If you’d like to enter other rewards which are still open, click here.
If there's one thing I'm passionate about, it's storytelling. In particular, I love digging down into non-traditional ways to convey a narrative. Like the item descriptions in Dark Souls or Major Orders in Helldivers. But there's one medium with a particularly unusual trait when it comes to the way it tells stories that I just can't help but love: Professional Wrestling.
I doubt I'm blowing anyone's mind when I say that the likes of WWE and AEW are not competitive sports leagues. I mean, "You know it's fake, right?" is practically a meme whenever someone metions Wrasslin'. Of course, 'fake' is maybe too disingenuous. After all, the moves happening in the ring are really happening and are often actually dangerous (though often not in the way one might assume as a viewer), but at the same time the people launching those moves and getting hit by them are charicatures. Or rather characters. Like a group of evil male cheerleaders, for example, or a literal undead wizard who sometimes likes to be a cowboy and others prefers to be a biker. To borrow a phrase from Max Landis' Wrestling Isn't Wrestling, WWE is not a wrestling show. It's a TV show about a wrestling show. That means that wins and losses are determined ahead of time, that champions aren't the people with the most skill, but the ones who've been determined to be the most beneficial for driving the buyrate of the next big pay-per-view, and that matches, while not fully choreographed, are planned around the big moments to perfectly generate the desired emotional response from the audience .
But things don't always go as planned. The next chosen champion might get injured and have to sit out for a months, forcing the the planned story to pivot. Someone might miss their cue and force everyone else to improvise into a situation that wasn't accounted for in the playbook, forcing the planned story to pivot. Sometimes the planned story just isn't as good as the folks plotting it out expected, so they decide themselves to pivot. And sometimes, the audience decides that there's a better story that's not being told, and they force the pivot.
Because the audience themselves is a character. More specifically, the live crowd in attendence at the arena. WWE's shows are shot for the folks watching on TV at home, but the in-person fans are still a vital part of the experience. They need folks to cheer for the good guy, boo and hiss at the bad guy, sing along with entrance music, quote catchphrases in real time, and join in the call-and-response chants. It creates a certain atmosphere that carries through the broadcast and is the biggest factor in establishing the tone of the show. But the company isn't in control of the audience. They can try to gently nudge them or outright manipulate them, but at the end of the day the writers just have to hope that they play along. Because unlike any other storytelling medium in the world, when the audience doesn't feel like just going with it, they can do something more than just drop the series or reviewbomb the latest installment. The audience has the ability to hijack the entire show.
This kind of emergent/forced-reaction storytelling is fascinating to me. And it's not like this is purely theoretical, or even particularly rare. In just the time I've been watching we've seen Daniel Bryan, a man WWE higher-ups considerd to be a 'B+ Player', get so much crowd support that not only did the company wind up having him win their top championship at their biggest annual event, they gave him a storyline where he did so by winning two matches in the same night, against some of the biggest stars they had at the time. Or what about 2019, when Kofi Kingston was used as a last-minute replacement for an injured wrestler and got such a positive reaction that they scrapped their existing plans to set up a storyline spanning three months where he endured failure after failure before ultimately becoming the first African-born world champion in the company's history. And then there's Sami Zayn, in 2022 what was meant to be a short-lived comedy angle where he tried and failed to join the current top-dog faction was so well-received that transformed into a heartfelt story of him actually joining and discovering a newfound sense of comraderie with the other members, before getting betrayed by them and ultimately attaining revenge alongside his former best friend. Hell, earlier this year the company pivoted away from one story they'd been building with a particular wrestler for over a year, because they were able to convince Dwayne Johnson to come back for a brief stint and figured he'd be a bigger draw. But then the negative backlash to that was so severe that they reverted to the original plan, integrating Johnson into that instead.
I often tell my friends 'Wrestling is wild,' because it's true. It's this weird mashup of full-conact theater in the round, audience-participation improv, live action anime, and telenovelas. It's a chaotic long-form narrative with no between-season hiatus or anime timeskips. It's not always necessarily good, but it's usually interesting. The way it has to tell its stories is almost singularly unique. And I love it for that.
I’ve been taught about compost my whole life. When I was a boy, my dad had a big garden, and I remember the compost pile that he used to keep. We would toss in food scraps, leaves and grass clippings. They would slowly decompose over time, and we would dig up the compost underneath to fertilize the garden. I knew worms liked to eat stuff in the compost pile, too, but it wasn’t until about seven years ago that I discovered there’s an entire business that focuses on a type of compost derived from worm casting (poop). It is called vermicompost.
Vermicompost is a great product, and it has a wide variety of applications. It can be used as a soil amendment that provides valuable nutrients and other components for plant growth. It can also be suspended in bubbling water to create a product called vermicompost tea, or “worm tea”. Worm tea can be diluted and used as a foliar spray to help protect plants from certain pests and diseases, and it can be injected into the ground to assist lawns with root growth.
The secret to vermicompost’s success is microbiology. Fungus, bacteria, nematodes and other microorganisms thrive in vermicompost, and they play a vital role in breaking down minerals and nutrients in the ground that are not yet plant available into components that plants can easily absorb through their roots.
If you have a garden or house plants, and you would like to add something to the soil to help increase the health and vitality of your plants, then vermicompost is a great choice. You can find many vendors online or in certain stores in your local area. It could either be called vermicompost or simply worm castings. However, I prefer the more hands-on approach. Maintaining a small worm bin of your own can be a really satisfying experience. It is interesting to watch the worms process food scraps into vermicompost over a period of time. Not to mention, you can cut down on waste going to landfills by feeding the worms your table scraps, and you can save money by producing vermicompost on your own as opposed to buying it.
I could go on and on about how to start and maintain a worm bin, different problems you could experience and how to mitigate them, and much more. However, there is a wealth of resources online from articles to YouTube videos, and if you are interested in the topic, I highly encourage you to look it up and learn more about it. The vermicomposting community is a very friendly and diverse place. I hope you find it as fascinating and fun as I do.
Great post! Not exactly the same topic but I once saw a basil plant that was so massive it was like a hedge. I asked the owner of this magnificent herb what their secret was and they said crushed eggshell, which provides a calcium boost. I do like the idea of supercharging plants with supplements. Haven’t tried it much myself but perhaps I will start to dabble.
Thanks for the response, Kerri! It's not directly related to vermicompost, but it is most certainly in the same arena in regard to things that plants thrive on. It's interesting to note that different plants actually require different things, from minerals and nutrients to ph levels to the amount of water or sunlight the plant requires. I'm still learning about all of these other things myself. My goal is to be an avid gardener one day with some of the best produce I've ever personally seen.
Ok I know this is super dark (i do a politics degree ok!) but I have a special academic interest in genocide studies. They're super important.
Here is an essay I wrote about how we define genocide and how this has implications for our real world application of the term. I think genocide studies demonstrates the importance of not tainting political theory with power politics...
Genocide remains the most atrocious crime a state can commit. However, the UN’s understanding of genocide is flawed.
The UN defines genocide as:
‘In the present Convention, genocide means any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such:
Killing members of the group;
Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group;
Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part;
Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group;
Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.’
The issue with the definition here lies in who is defined as victims of genocide. Only ‘national, ethnical, racial or religious’ groups can be viewed as being able to be victimised by genocidal efforts. This leaves out a plethora of identities. From political ideology to gender and sexuality. This is an issue in how we understand this act, as many genocides in history have included groups that aren’t included in the convention. In the holocaust, homosexual men were targeted and systematically killed in concentration camps. During the Cambodian genocide, anybody considered an ‘enemy’ of the Khmer Rouge was targeted. This included people associated with the regime before the Khmer Rouge took power, and ‘new people’, who were from urban areas. Therefore, there is a gaping hole in the UN convention, that limits our ability to both understand genocide as a concept and prosecute individuals involved in these acts of mass killing.
The obvious answer here, surely, would be to add more groups to the convention. However, as our societies evolve and shift, surely this will only lead to more and more groups needing to be added over time. Genocide is not a static concept, it fluctuates with the technologies available and how societies are structured. Instead, Chalk and Jonassohn’s definition of genocide can provide the solution for this.
Chalk and Jonassohn’s definition states victimhood in genocide ‘as defined by the perpetrator’. This allows for a wider scope of who can be affected by genocide and acknowledges how these groups can be often arbitrarily created by perpetrators. For example, the Nazi’s understanding of alcoholics and criminals was that these traits are a genetic flaw that could not be solved through rehabilitation. We can argue that, therefore, the groups ‘alcoholics’ and ‘criminals’ were racialised by the Nazis; they were seen as deviants from a ‘pure’ Aryan race. The UN convention does not provide the subtlety in its definition to deduct this. Chalk and Jonassohn’s definition, by putting the onus of defining victim group on the perpetrator, does.
Why does the UN convention have such a limited victim group scope?
The UN convention as we know it was born out of cold-war tensions, with the Soviet Union and the US playing a large role in drafting the convention. Both powers were wary of being implicated in their domestic affairs. The US fretted over Jim Crow laws and the prevalence of lynching becoming an issue on the world stage. The Soviet Union had the issue of Gulags and previous mass killings against certain political groups possibly implicating them of genocidal acts.
When analysing victim group construction, the Soviet Union becomes significant in the crafting of this aspect of the UN convention. Political groups as potential victims were a key part they wanted omitted, due to their domestic actions. This is despite the original creator of the term ‘genocide’, Raphael Lemkin, including political groups in his first draft. Due to the Soviet Union playing a key role in creating the convention, political groups never made it to the final cut.
Whilst the exclusion of political groups in the convention isn’t the UN’s only limitation in their understanding of genocide, this is most scholar’s bone to pick with the convention. We live in a time where political ideology is as potent as religion. So, surely, in this era of party politics and ideology, political identity could be a thing people are persecuted for. We have already seen this in the case of the Holocaust and the Cambodian genocide. There have also been numerous mass killings in history that could be counted as genocides due to the targeting of political groups.
Overall, issues with the UN convention for genocide displays a wider issue. International bodies and the policy they create are always tainted by geopolitics. Genocide can never be an ‘apolitical’ issue as our understandings of it are shaped by politics. In order to amend this issue, the UN should look to scholarship on the issue (who all mostly agree on the issue of omission of political groups) and make changes accordingly. Otherwise, our analysis and ability to prosecute those responsible for this horrendous crime will always be limited.
Chalk , F.R. and Jonassohn, K. (1998). The History and Sociology of Genocide, Analyses and Case Studies. New Haven: Yale University Press.
For further reading on this subject, here is a list of great sources about genocide.
Lemkin, R. (1944). Axis Rule in occupied Europe Laws of occupation ; Analysis of government ; Proposals for redress. Washington: Carnegie Endowment For International Peace.
Midlarsky, M.I. (2008). The killing trap : genocide in the twentieth century. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Straus, S. (2001). Contested meanings and conflicting imperatives: A conceptual analysis of genocide. Journal of Genocide Research, 3(3), pp.349–375.
Theriault, H.C. (2010). Genocidal Mutation And The Challenge Of Definition. Metaphilosophy, 41(4), pp.481–524.
These sources are mostly about how we define genocide. If you want more information about the mechanisms of genocide I would suggest looking at the different ‘understandings’ of genocide in scholarship. Below are the three different main theories of genocides with recommended works for each!
Socio-psychological (Hitler’s willing executioners: ordinary Germans and the Holocaust by Daniel Jonah Goldhagen and The Psychology of Perpetrators and Bystanders (6)1 by Ervin Staub)
Macro-sociological (Genocide, Civilization and Modernity (46)2 by Michael Freeman and Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil by Hannah Arednt)
Strategic accounts (Final solutions: The causes of mass killing and genocide (9)3 by Benjamin Valentino and Patterns of twentieth century genocides: the Armenian, Jewish, and Rwandan cases (6)4 byVahakn N. Dadrian
That's an incredibly tough subject but a very interesting read! How far through the degree are you?
I'm fascinated by peoples' definitions of deviant behaviour, and I'm researching norm violations in online communities. It can be pretty dark but thankfully I've not had much call for literature on genocide!
Well...of the bat I could never say I know anything better than anyone as I have not met everyone.
But an issue that has been close to my heart since I was a young boy is how early age trauma seems to come back and haunt you at a very later stage.
I had a rough childhood...but overall I also know of kids who had it much worse. My mother was of the mentally abusive kind when I hit puberty and throughout my teens and adolescence and also young adult stage I almost could forget it ever happened.
It was only now after my 30's that i started having nightmares and even more strange...bed wetting.
I have sought the help of a very caring psychologist but who is also a friend. The knowledge i want o pass on is how integral help is when you need it . Mine is a bit late and I will most likely bear some scars for the rest of my life , but it helps. I keep going...I keep breathing.
I'm so sorry you experienced that, but I'm glad you felt able to reach out for help. Several members here have similarly opened up about the difficulties they have (or still) experience, so we're here if you ever need to talk 🙂
Sidenote - my partner is training to be a counselor and was recently telling me about this book: The Body Keeps the Score. It sounds like a tough read but a very interesting one!
I never finished my university career and I was so worry about it, because I didn't have knowledge of anything at that time, so I started to teach myself web design, when I was in my 30's, I felt an enormous curiosity how the html and css code structure work and started to learn by myself, no teachers, no school, just me and my mind, I think it took me 3 years to master both thanks to that intense curiosity that guided me, this the expertise that makes me feel proud today.
i remember one day a secretary friend of mine approached to me and asked, Cristian what are you doing there all day in front of that computer wasting your time? ... i look at her with big smile, and answer her, Massiel, im assuring my future. Today in my 50's this is what i still do for a living.
I want to share, that if like me you are in the same situation, start right now looking for where you can be good at, develop it and start specialize yourself in it, time will keep running and we dont know what will the future holds ahead, everyone is good at something.
nice one mate! I took a course in web design at the start of the year. I've always been interested in it as a teenager but never really had the guidance to pursue it (which I kinda wish I had access to this course).
I'm also now in my 30's and after the course I've decided it isn't really for me. I got an idea of CSS, HTML and JavaScript but its a little disheartening when chatGPT or AI can get the code like 90% there and you just need that 10% to implement that little bit into it. It's also like most things where you need to use resources like W3Schools and just copy and paste example code and tweak it a bit to fit your design. Maybe when I update my rig I'l l get back into coding as it was quite rewarding once I got something to work
Keep the pace, time run so fast, learn and do what your curiosity leads to, we dont know what will be ahead in time, i remember this phrase from Forrest Gump film; "Life is like a box of chocolates. You never know what you're gonna get."
In my personal case instead let the fastness or effectiveness of an AI drop my interest to learn, what i actually do is use 'em as a tool to gain time on projects or find rapid solutions to issues, evidently we're not fast as AI's, but the human mind and our knowledge will always be superior, that's a fact.
I think we all go through bad times... Things that we want to keep to ourselves, suppress inside us, not even remember that something happened. But it destroys, it corrodes in the most painful way possible, and recovering from it is suffocating.
I went through the end of a long relationship where I could only see bad endings for my future after the break-up. Love again? I wouldn't be able to dedicate myself to someone again and suffer the way I'm suffering now. I didn't want to have to go through that again, and all I could think about was that if I started a new relationship, it would happen again!
At these times, the universe tells us it's not the way we want it to be. Things happen as they should... After a few years of almost falling into depression, I was able to love again without having to force myself and it was something very light.
A few years later, I've now been married for six years and have two children. I have nothing to complain about, as much as we don't see the light at the end of the tunnel, everything is possible, and I managed to succeed in life when I had no hope left!
We can always hope, try hard and believe that it will work out. This makes all the difference to living life to the full, enjoying every moment!
ummm.. I work in accounting, but I also study informatics engineering, this is very interesting isn't it, where I actually have a passion that is not towards informatics, but because I like playing games, I dared to major in informatics, and you know it turns out that in the field of informatics there are many interesting things, such as learning about programming, one of the studies that I like is algorithms and data structures, in that field of study we are taught to create a program where the program can be run and display data repeatedly without any manual mechanism for us to input continuously, so this program is useful to make it easier for us in everyday life. for example, we want to create data on a computer with the same type, well we don't need to type it manually continuously, in this program we just input how much data we want to input, what types, and so on, well later the data will be automatically displayed as we want, without excessive work and taking a long time. this is the result of the programming that we did earlier. so in this study learning, I came to know, about the various ways an application works, or a web that can help our daily lives comes from where.
I always have been an lover of technology since the minimal things like a disk phone from the 80s and even the 90s, to the space rovers that explore mars and how they were meda and how it works. I think all this curiosity is just not exclusive to the technology or just for me, but as my personal experience the technology subject was the real deal for me.
I remember when I was a kid I received a book withe the following title: HOW IT WORKS (how it was a book in Portuguese it was written in Portuguese "Como Funciona", you can see in the image below)
It was a very illustrated book showing how a lot of technology works, from duster Vacum Cleaner to a Maglev Train. With the illustration showing the direction of the magnetic field how the air flows and with the text as well explaining everything, and I remember that was the first time a saw those kind of explanation and I think this was the first book that I've read besides the books from school or comics books. And I've read everything.
And that didn't learned me how to love the technology but the planing side of it. Now I'm a architect and to think the design of something giving it real and good function is one of my jobs. And I'm not really making a new technology but like everything else in nowadays understand and work with different kinds os technology is necessary, some jobs more than others. with 3 years after be graduated and get my diploma I've been in more contact with new technologies that I would have imagine to.
I've been in contact with simple tools like drawing and modelling softwares, to more specifics and complexes one like the modelling tools that keep all the information need to the construction site, one of my jobs is to configure a model to be the more precise as possible to calculate material, time needed to finish a building, the cost of it. Besides of this we have to make some preparation before and after the project. So we have to have some precises measurements of a site to be able to project with precision so I've learned to use laser scanner for topography. I don't have one where I work but we already rent the equipment some times. And after that we have a raw scanner file where to be treated and after that exported to other tool we work.
And more things I've been in contact not directly but we have to plan realistic things and make it low cost. So I have all the time study some technologies that some industries use, like laser cut to make metal panels with specifics patterns to the front of some building. And to make the project of the front of those builds I've to understand how the cut is made and what make it expensive, how it will be installed, all of that to be able to plan everything and in the end we and our clients don't have any bad surprise.
So my point is, a simple curiosity or a simple gift from 20 years ago influences me so deep right now in my job that is a big part of my life. And how you interests make you go to different ways. years ago I was think I would be an programmer or some engineer, and now I am an architect were my focuses is to understand and works with the most recent technologies out there.
The misconceptions about "Eastern-European accent"
Surprise, this time I'm not bringing you Final Fantasy history lessons, mostly because they have their own weekly section now with Final Fantasy Fridays, and also because there is another topic very much close to my heart. A topic which often causes me frustration when I speak with people in the UK or read travel blogs.
As a Hungarian I often get told I have an Eastern-European accent, or that Hungary is Eastern Europe. This statement is incorrect on so many levels, and I don't know if it comes from how the education system is in western countries or simply from the ignorance of people, so I thought I would share some things which will hopefully be interesting and help people understand why we can get so frustrated over this topic.
Hungary is not Eastern Europe.
I know, shocking, but the two correct way to refer to Hungary (and Poland by the matter, I know our Polish friends also have to deal with this often) is either Central Europe or East-Central Europe. Let me show you some maps from Wikipedia, which takes this information from the Encyclopaedia Britannica:
Map of countries considered to be Central Europe
Map of countries considered to be East-Central Europe
East-Central Europe is more a geopolitical phrase than a purely geographical, so it also includes countries which geographically belong to Eastern Europe. This might be a cause of the confusion among people of the west.
Let me put it simple: Hungary is in the Central European Time Zone. Based alone on this, it would be false to call it part of Eastern Europe, right?
Hungarian is not a Slavic language.
While there are languages spoken in the region which belong to the same language family so they will sound similar and people might even understand each other briefly, Hungarian is a unique language.
Our ancestors migrated from the Ural valley, and Hungarian belongs to the Finno-Ugric language family. (More on this later)
Map of Finno-Ugric language regions
Unlike Slavic languages, ours is not similar enough to understand other languages from the Finno-Ugric family, and actually there used to be a debate which put Hungarian closer to Japanese than to Finnish language. In school at grammar classes we got a text in Finnish which was meant to be understandable by us, but there were always people (myself included) who felt this comparison to be forced. The only actual similarity I heard about from someone who also has Finnish friends, that Hungarian sounds similar to Finnish because both languages use a lot of the "e" sound we pronounce as the first sound in "ever" and not as the first sound in "eat".
I studied Japanese at uni and I found a lot of similarities between the two languages, both in grammar and in pronunciations. For example both Japanese and Hungarian has only one past tense, and my Japanese teacher had no problems pronouncing Hungarian names which an English person would be struggling with, as the sounds exist in Japanese as well. So I'm not sure why the Finno-Ugric family was the accepted classification for the Hungarian language, but I'm glad that was not the topic I got for my final exams, because I would have been a loud advocate for the Japanese connection and fail my exam.
Fun fact: they say that Hungarian is the second hardest language in the world. The first one is Chinese.
Fun fact no 2: a friend from South Korea told me they could pick Hungarian as foreign language in school and it was easier for them to learn it than English, as they found similarities to Korean.
Tourist blogs spreading incorrect information
Hungary became a very popular tourist destination, thanks to the low-cost airlines. Often people from the US or Australia will fly in to Europe and use the low-cost airlines for getting around in the area. This also saw a rise in tourist blogs, both written and video format. There are a lot of misinformation in these blogs, and I would like to address the most important:
The "s" in Budapest is pronounced as the first sound of "shake" and not as the first sound of "seat"
In the Detour email newsletter by Jack's Flight Club a recent review about Budapest from an Australian traveller described the city as:
I visited Vienna two years ago and became acutely aware how these eastern European cities were unique, with their rich history and different cultures.
Charming old-world eastern European architecture was in abundance.
Architecture similar to ours can also be found in France and Germany. Do those countries have "Eastern European" architecture as well then? Hungary was part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, our architects and poets were found of the enlightened France. One of our railway stations was designed by Gustave Eiffel (in case his name doesn't ring a bell, there is a quite famous tower in Paris...). Unless the poster of that article was referring to factories built during the Soviet era, I don't know what made him call our architecture Eastern-European.
Nyugati Railway Station designed by Gustave Eiffel
I learnt from travel blogs, that apparently there is a Jewish Quarter in Budapest and I had to go and ask my partner if I was living under a rock that I haven't heard about such a part of Budapest, but he was just as stunned as me.
Yes, there is a part of Budapest which was serving as a ghetto, and it has the synagogue in it. But no local would ever call it as the Jewish Quarter, so don't imagine it like you would imagine a China Town. All sorts of people live there and you can find Jewish people anywhere in the city. If you walked down on those streets, you wouldn't think it any different from the other districts of the inner city.
Here is a list of Budapest's districts and the actual names we call them on if not referred to by their numbers, and an article if that's easier to read than the embedded picture:
The supposedly Jewish Quarter is part of District VII. All the street signs will show the name of the District which is "Erzsébetváros" or "Elizabeth Town" if you wanted to translate it, named after Queen Elizabeth, also known as Sissi, consort of Emperor Franz-Joseph.
This is quite a long-winded article, you can probably say I'm very passionate about my home country :D
With many members of Starkid (famous for A Very Potter musical and the Hatchetfield series to name a few) also being a part of this production, it’s a comedic, silly and heartbreaking show. My favourite character being the central Curt Mega, who I got my partner to cosplay as Owen with me.
As they are based in America, I never would have dreamed of being able to see it live, but earlier this year, they announced that they were bringing the show to London for ONE DAY ONLY. I got to go with one of my closest theatre friends and my fiancé, which made the experience even more special to me.
The cast were phenomenal and did the script so much justice, especially for a concert version of the show. Now before the show started, I was gutted that they had run out of programmes but in a moment that meant the world to me, afterwards there were somehow signed programmes by the Tin can bros available and now I just need to find the right frame for it.
I still can’t believe how lucky I was to have this experience and how much this show means to me. I would encourage anyone who hasn’t had the joy of watching it, to do so immediately!
Since my early childhood l love to write , esculpt , to draw , to paint and dozens of thing that a boy that born in Latin America with not too much resources at the begin of the 70’s
This illustration belong to a comics made by me at the beginning of 90’s
This protho Comic named DCS 1991
I'm not sure if I still have the touch, but when I was about 13 years old I loved drawing, I also tried to do some little comics and I was really good at some
I got to create some characters from a special group similar to Mask , GI JOE or POWER X’TREME (Fully influenced by 80’s cartoons culture l made this in 1991) named DCS a special group formed by members of diferent countries the comic is unfinished but l hope soon finished
A 1989 TRANSFORMERS COMIC made by me
and I also got to create an unfinished comic about the Transformers if you want I can send you more photos, but here are some of them and well
COMICS , POEMS AND SONGS
it's not that I'm very very talented, but also one of my hobbies was writing poems, writing songs and many things, I insist, if you want me to send you more photos and more information about those things just let me know because I don't want to seem too pretentious.
INFLUENCED BY MUSIC PHENOMENON
Also when Michael Jackson releases his álbum BAD l was simply impressed with his clothes and make a draw too
Draw of MICHAEL JACKSON’S BAD
Apart from the Michael Jackson illustration that you can see here, I also dedicated myself to making small drawings dedicated to love, romance and trendy topics such as the character of He-Man or the Batman movie.
A COMIC WITH CARTOONS + TOYS POTENTIAL
I also created character sheets for My DCS comic and as you can see in some illustrations, I also wrote poem booklet and a songs little book of course, in Spanish, which is my mother Language
Characters file of DCS TEAM
LAUNCHING A POEM BOOCKLET IN TV 📺
in 1998 approx l was invited to present my poems and songs in the Dominican national TV 📺 show CADA DÍA and here can watch the whole video but in Spanish
I'm a health student and dealing with patients is something that affects me every day. I'm interning in the pediatric ward and those little ones have a lot to teach us. Chronic illnesses, palliative care and other conditions that keep them hospitalized for weeks and even months.
One of the patients I follow had a throat infection that was so intense that it compromised his Right Internal Carotid Artery (a very important blood vessel that carries blood from the heart to the brain). A certain part of this vessel, in the neck region, has become more fragile, forming what we call an aneurysm, which could rupture at any moment and lead to her immediate death, or it could remain intact and she could grow old healthily. We can't estimate the likelihood of these situations occurring.
It's possible to try a surgical approach, which most of the time isn't effective, so as an option you'd have to disable this artery on the right side, which is so important for oxygenating the brain... And thus rely on collateral circulation, small vessels that go up to irrigate the same region, but not as effectively as the carotid. As a result of this intervention, she could die, or survive with sequelae from cerebral ischemia (losing movement on one side of her body, for example), or a small chance of everything working out (around 10%). All of this is not very predictable because it depends on how the blood vessels are supplying her brain.
Now imagine an 8-year-old child who appears to be as well as any healthy child, but who may go to sleep for surgery and wake up with unpredictable sequelae.
This situation really affected me this week and I wondered what I would advise as a health professional and what I would decide as this child's mother. Should we count on everything going well in the procedure or not intervene and “hope” that God or nature will protect? Very difficult.
As you might know, two weeks ago I finally overcame my fears and launched my personal blog. The Justabout staff and community members played a huge role in this meaningful step. Previously, all my content was scattered across the web, and I often had to deal with others’ specs, formatting rules, and limitations. So, I decided it was time to run my own platform—where I can freely express myself on my own terms, even if it’s not always perfect for SEO or as timely featured as some might expect.
I’m still in the process of building it, with a lot left to optimize. Right now, the visual aspect is the weakest part, but I’ve chosen to prioritize the technical side. It was important for me to familiarize SEO crawlers with my site as soon as possible. Building a relationship with search engines is a long and complex process, and it's not something you can control directly. But now that my content is indexed and starting to rank correctly, I can focus on refining and optimizing it, or change design and create a logo hehe.
The whole journey of launching this blog is a story in itself—full of ups and downs—and as things settle down, I have intentions to share it in detail. But for now, my message is simple: if you're thinking about starting something, don’t delay. Just do it. Make a plan, start with research, and keep moving toward your goal.
In just two weeks, I’ve reached my first 1,000 unique visitors—and that’s 1,000 more than I would have had if I’d kept the idea in my head.
Today’s platforms like WordPress provide powerful tools to launch without any coding skills, and AI can help you research, offer tips on setting up your site, and even guide you through the overwhelming parts.
And it’s not just about launching a blog—it could be anything you’ve been putting off. To rephrase the popular saying: life is too short to waste time on fears.
For a while now, I've been really into making our family tree, and it has gotten insanely large, currently with over 2500 people on it. It has been such a great experience, as I now know great-grandparents on several sides going into the 1700s, I and even united with family I never knew existed. We recently went on a trip to meet up with 4th and 5th cousins we had no idea existed, to a small village where our family originated from, or at least as far back as we know. It also gave us an excuse to finally go somewhere I wanted to go for a long time, finally travelling to Ukraine earlier this year to meet some family there, family which we somewhat knew we had, but no one had any contact for so long most people in my family even forgot how we were related. We met up with a cousin there who also loved it, as she actually visited us when she was very young, but never really knew who our side of the family were.
All this knowledge actually came in useful as well. A while back, my grandma received a letter regarding compensation for property left back in Ukraine by my great-grandparents, so we had to have info on who everyone was and where everyone lived going back to my great-great-grandparents, all of which we already had ready.
There are a lot of services for this obviously, most of them pretty much do the same thing. And thanks to tools like being able to just copy entire parts of someone else's tree that's related to you, you too can grow your tree pretty fast.
But then, if you want to take things to a new level, there's DNA tests. Whilst expensive, they're pretty fun to find out where you're from. My own ethnicity breakdown is a lot different than I imagined, being 47% Baltic, 38% Eastern European, 14% Balkan, and even somehow 1% Finnish! Keep in mind that sometimes however certain genes just aren't inherited or not picked up as they are just so rare in your own DNA. For example, my mum had some trace ethnicities that didn't even show up for me. These tests can help a lot in both confirming hypothesis on how far away people are connected, but also discover all-new branches of your tree.
There's three types of tests:
Autosomal are your most frequent, that usually give you your ethnicity breakdown, and find DNA matches from both your paternal and maternal side, usually going back only six generations or so.
Y-DNA tests only test the Y-chromosome, hence only men can take these. They go down the paternal down only, all the way to the beginnings of humanity! They allow to see your haplogroup, and where your paternal ancestors came from. While you'd think this could be used to track the origins of your surname, most of these tests only go up to the point where surnames only started to become a thing. Depending on how lucky you are, your haplogroup could've been formed way before any sort of records even began, or it could be a bit more modern, going in the 1400s or 1500s. They also allow you to find paternal line matches where your common ancestor lived hundreds or thousands or years ago. Pretty cool, but not much that you can actually put on a family tree. They are also by far the most expensive.
mt-DNA tests are sort of the opposite of Y-DNA tests, as they go down the maternal line only, and find maternal matches. They can be taken by both men and women. As the maternal line is almost always neglected, it's a great way to get more info on the side of your family that doesn't always get that much attention.
We began testing quite a few family members, so a great strategy to do is here is figure out how you can separate all the matches you get. As you just get a list of people, and you don't know who's from the side of the father and who's from the side of the mother, you want to strategically test people that will allow you to compare results and get matches for just one path or the other, creating these venn diagrams of matches.
Here's some other hot tips for finding more family:
Parish records are usually the best place to start, with a lot of them already being scanned and available online. If you can't find them, go to the parish, and they may allow you to look through their old books.
Use surname heatmaps to deduce where you could be from based on where you can see the most of your surname.
Use all the new fancy AI tools to their fullest. Use it to find info on people you could be related to, use it to scan and read old documents if you don't understand the old handwriting on them, or have it explain how your ancestors could've gotten from point A to B and why.
Grave finding websites are also fantastic for this, allowing to find someone's dates of birth or death very easily, their spouse by whom they are buried with, and also where they most likely lived.
If you done DNA tests, check back frequently as new matches can always appear.
Remember that surname spellings can change over time, or if translating between alphabets (for example in family's case a lot of translating between Latin and Cyrillic), certain strange results could occur.
It's a great excuse to also go hunting for old photos or documents at your house or at your grandparents' house.
First things first: what amazing entries! We'd like to thank everyone who entered this bounty, which must be our strongest Members' Corner bounty to date. Congratulations to TrialByStory, first place is yours!
We only had three prizes available for this bounty and we received more than three personal, heartfelt, and fascinating entries. And so we've made a rare exception and manually credited the accounts of some other entrants. In addition to the runners up awarded here (Commander Cordulisk and mar1gold ), Sturmeravrona and Lanah Tyra should now have received $10 in their JA wallets.
Probably this is my favourite from the recurring bounties, I love reading people's stories and you can truly tell when someone is really passionate about something.
Even though there are fewer prices for this one, I always sit here reading the entries and struggle to decide which one is "the winner" as they are all amazing!
Having checked in fairly frequently to read other folks' submissions, I definitely wasn't expecting to claim top honors on this one; I just wanted to talk about a weird thing that can happen in wrestling. That said, I'm definitely happy to see that notification, so thank you!
If anyone's somehow reading this comment but hasn't checked out all the original submissions for this bounty, I highly recommend you do that!
