[Teaser] 양요섭(YANG YOSEOP) 2nd PHOTO BOOK [Somewhere in Time] 💛 #하이라이트# #HIGHLIGHT# #비스트# #BEAST# #양요섭# #YANGYOSEOP# #Somewhere_in_Time#

Have you ever done something for someone — expecting nothing, telling no one — and felt so good that you still remember it years later? When you do a mitzvah, the spark of God inside you touches God Himself. And in that instant you step outside of time. You go above it. That's why the moment never fades — because it was never in time to begin with. Everything else you did that week is gone. That one thing is still burning. The Baal Shem Tov taught something staggering: a soul may descend into this world and live seventy, eighty years — through childhood, marriage, work, illness, joy, loss — for the sake of doing one single act of kindness for one single person. Seventy years. For one moment. Which means the errand you almost didn't run. The call you almost didn't make. The stranger you almost walked past. That may be the reason you were born. I have sat at many bedsides at the end. I have never once heard a person speak about their title, their portfolio, or the year they finally got what they wanted. They speak about the moments they showed up for someone. Those are the only things that make it through the door with you. So don't wait to become a better person. You don't have to be one. You only have to move — once, today, toward someone who needs you. Because somewhere in this world, right now, there is a person waiting for the kindness only you can give them. And your whole life may be the long road you took to reach them.

My friend Akiyama has photographed about 3,000 Japanese weddings on a beach in Hawaii. In about a thousand of them, somewhere in the background, there is a random American losing his mind with joy. Japanese couples love to get married in Hawaii. Small ceremony. Eight guests. Very quiet. Very proper. In Japan, wedding guests clap politely, at the correct time, and then stop. For his first two years, Akiyama tried to keep strangers out of the frame. In 2004, he gave up. Now he keeps a separate album. He calls it "The Guests Nobody Invited." He showed it to me. A man from Ohio, eating a hot dog in a beach chair. During the vows, he stood up, raised the hot dog toward the couple like a sword, and sat back down. He never stopped chewing. Two grandmothers from Iowa, crying harder than the bride's mother. The bride's mother asked who they were. Nobody knew. They were invited to lunch. A bachelorette party from Texas who screamed "YEEHAW" at the first kiss. The bride's grandmother, 86, has said "yeehaw" at every family event since 2016. Nobody in the family knows where she learned it. Akiyama does. A surfer who rode a wave past the ceremony, took both hands off his board to applaud, and wiped out. In the photo, he is completely airborne. Still clapping. A Marine in dress blues, walking to his own sister's wedding, who stopped, saluted the groom, and said, "Take care of her, sir." The groom has told this story at every family dinner for fourteen years. A man fishing off the rocks who caught a fish during the kiss and held it up high, for luck. In Japan, a fish at a wedding really is good luck. We serve sea bream at weddings for exactly that reason. He did not know this. He just felt it was the right thing to do. In Japan, if a stranger walks into your wedding photo, both of you apologize. For a long time. In America, the stranger joins the wedding. Then he leaves. Then he tells everyone at his hotel. But Akiyama says one guest in that album is different. An old man on a bench under the same palm tree. Faded blue aloha shirt. Every few weddings, there he is. Standing. Clapping. He never came closer than that bench. After about ten years, Akiyama finally walked over and asked who he was. His name was Norman. He was from Oregon. He had married his wife, Marian, on that exact beach in 1966. She died in 2003. He moved to Honolulu the next year and started coming to the bench. "In case anybody gets married," he said. "Somebody clapped for us." Norman died this spring. He was 91. Akiyama went back through twenty-four years of photos. He found Norman in 412 weddings. He printed every single one, put them in a book, and flew it to Norman's daughter in Oregon. She turned the pages for a long time. Then she said, "Dad went to 412 weddings? He always told me he was just going to the beach." Last month, Akiyama shot his first wedding since Norman died. The bench under the palm tree was empty. Halfway through the vows, a man on vacation from Wisconsin sat down on it. He saw the couple. He stood up. And he started clapping. He had no idea. Akiyama took the picture. The bench is never empty for long.

Somewhere in this country, a young American family is doing everything right. They got married. They saved. They worked overtime, cut expenses, and put money aside every month with one goal in mind: buying their first home and building something lasting for their kids. The average first-time homebuyer in America is now 40 years old, a record high. Home prices relative to income have nearly doubled since 1976. That young family playing by the rules is getting crushed, and Washington has spent years telling them it’s complicated. It’s not complicated. A new Federal Reserve study found that illegal immigration was responsible for 30% of home price growth and 20% of rent growth between 2021 and 2024. Biden flooded this country with millions of illegal aliens, every one of them competed for the same finite housing stock that young family was saving for, and Washington subsidized it the entire time with taxpayer-backed mortgage loans that were never meant for noncitizens. That family deserves better. My Homeownership Eligibility Reform Act restricts taxpayer-backed mortgages to U.S. citizens only, permanently. No future administration can reverse it with the stroke of a pen, and no young American family gets priced out of their dream because Washington decided illegal aliens come first. I’m fighting back.

Twenty five years ago today a 24 year old equities trader tied a red bandana over his face and went back up into a burning tower until it killed him. Welles Crowther worked for Sandler O'Neill on the 104th floor of the South Tower. Nyack, New York. Boston College lacrosse. When he was six his father handed him a red handkerchief and told him to keep it in his back pocket, and he carried one every day after that. Teammates knew him by it. He wore one under his lacrosse helmet. At 16 he joined his father's volunteer fire company in Upper Nyack. By 2001 he had a trader's salary and a trader's future and he had already put in an application to the FDNY, because he wanted out of finance and into a truck. 9:03 a.m. United 175 goes into the South Tower, floors 77 through 85. The 78th floor sky lobby is right in the impact zone, packed with people waiting for express elevators down. Most of them are killed instantly. The ones still alive are lying in the dark in burning jet fuel and collapsed ceiling, and none of them know that one stairwell is still open. Judy Wein, badly injured, hears a voice cutting through it. A young man with a red bandana over his nose and mouth, carrying a fire extinguisher. He puts out flames. He finds the intact stairwell. Then he says, everyone who can stand, stand now. Everyone who can help others, find someone to help. He lifts an injured woman onto his back and carries her down seventeen flights to the 61st floor, where the elevators are still running. Then he turns around and climbs back up to 78. He does it again. Ling Young, burned over most of her body, is led down by the same man in the same bandana, with another injured woman in his arms. He hands them off at 61, points them toward the elevators, and goes back up a third time. Somewhere in all of that he called his mother's voicemail. "Mom, this is Welles. I want you to know that I'm okay." The South Tower fell at 9:59. In March 2002 they found his body in the lobby, intact, lying with FDNY firefighters and the jaws of life. He had gotten all the way down and stayed to work the fire department command post instead of walking out the door. His family knew none of it. Then that May his mother read survivor accounts in the paper describing a man in a red bandana who came out of the smoke on the 78th floor and told them to stand up. She recognized her son from a piece of cloth. At least a dozen people are alive because of him, and the number is usually put at eighteen. In 2006 the FDNY made him an honorary firefighter, something almost no civilian ever receives. He was 24 years old.

Born somewhere in world history. Live one whole life. Die. "Life once upon a TIME" is out: a free browser game. Live an ordinary life in Edo Japan, Imperial Rome, medieval England and more. Step in at up to 3 turning points. No sign-up. #indiegame#

【NIKKE Comics】 GODDESS OF VICTORY: NIKKE ''Arcana's Counseling Time'' Special Four-Panel Comics Episode 4 [VIP Seat] If you became a phantom thief fighting for justice, Commander, what kind of route would you plan to make a surprise appearance somewhere in the Ark? Author: ranaga210 (@ranaga210) #NIKKE#

Hope everyone caught up in the situation gets made whole. Genuinely. Worth explaining the architecture though, because "be careful where you put your money" isn't the lesson people think it is. Any card that requires you to pre-load a balance creates a pool that sits there waiting to be spent. Settlement lags, so it sits for days. Whatever can authorize a withdrawal from that pool can reach all of it at once. That's true whether the contract is self-custodial or not. Just in time is a different shape. Nothing is pre-loaded. Funds move at the moment of authorization, for the exact amount of the purchase, then settle. There's no standing balance to drain. That's not a claim that one is safe and one isn't. Every model concentrates trust somewhere and you should know where yours is. The difference is what a failure costs you. Pre-funded fails all at once. JIT fails for one transaction.

In Japan, returning something to a store is like asking for a divorce. You need a reason. You need the receipt. You need the original box, the tags, and a face that shows you have suffered. My coworker Sugiyama has done it once in his life. In 2011. He still thinks about it. Last month, our company sent him to Delaware for two weeks. On his first day, he learned Delaware has no sales tax. He assumed every store was having a sale, out of kindness, because he was new. On his second day, he bought a dress shirt. It did not fit. He did not sleep for two nights. On the third day, he prepared. Receipt. Box. Tags. The shirt, refolded along its original lines. A written explanation in English, which he practiced in the hotel mirror. He wore a suit. To return a shirt. The sign above the counter said RETURNS. Behind it stood a woman named Tameka. Around fifty. Reading glasses on a beaded chain. Sugiyama bowed and began. "I am deeply sorry. This shirt did not fit. The fault is entirely mine. I misjudged my own body. I have caused your store great inconvenience, and I—" "Sure thing, hon," Tameka said. She was already scanning it. "Any reason?" He started his speech over from the beginning. Tameka took off her glasses. "Baby. Ten minutes ago, a man returned a lawnmower with the grass still in it." Sugiyama turned around and looked at the line behind him. What he saw there, he says, changed his understanding of mankind. A woman returning a candle. Half burned. "It smells different at home." A man returning a garden hose because it was too long. An old man returning one sock. "The other one's fine." A woman returning a houseplant. Not wilted. Dead. Brown. Crispy. She said, "It didn't work out." They gave her a new one. She said thank you. The plant said nothing. Nobody apologized. Nobody bowed. Nobody brought a box. And every single one of them walked away forgiven. Inside Sugiyama, the entire Japanese economy fainted. In Japan, a sale is a marriage. In America, it's a first date. And somewhere in the back of every big store in this country, there is a desk whose only job is forgiveness. It's next to the restrooms. It's open until ten. Tameka handed him the next size up. And a coupon. And a mint from a little bowl he hadn't noticed. Sugiyama bowed again. "Thank you for forgiving me." Tameka looked at him over her glasses for a long time. "Honey. There's nothing to forgive. It's a medium." Then, without thinking, she bowed back. He came home to Tokyo last week. He kept the receipt. It's in his wallet now, behind the photo of his kids. He says it's the only document he has ever owned that says he's allowed to change his mind. The new shirt doesn't fit either. He wears it anyway. He says he couldn't do that to Tameka twice.