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https://www.essence.com/lifestyle/saving-tips-balance-dollars-invest-business/
To get your business off the ground, it’s important to make financial sacrifices to support your new venture. One golden rule of budgeting to remember is that every little bit of effort counts. You can invest in your big ideas by making small changes throughout the year that eventually add up. Here are a few easy savings tips to incorporate into your financial plan:
Use A Savings App
There are savings apps that will slowly syphon off dollars and cents from your income and keep it on hold for you until you’re ready to make a purchase. If you want to put money towards a business, it’s best to start this process as early as possible in the year, and increase or decrease your contribution depending on how you’re tracking. Tools like this are great for saving because it takes a little away at a time so it’s much more manageable month to month.
Sell Your Old Things
You could be sitting on a goldmine hoarding items in your closet that you don’t wear anymore. Take that vintage purse and jacket and see what kind of money you can make from them by selling the loot to your favorite consignment shop. Use your social media platforms to post and sell your clothes/shoes directly to potential buyers. And if all else fails, go old school and plan a summer garage sale.
Cooking
Not eating out is a great way to cut back on costs, stay safe, and keep more money in your wallet. Try to make this chore fun by challenging yourself to cook a crazy Pinterest recipe for dinner or maybe putting your own spin on Grandma’s coveted macaroni and cheese. Also, the $16 cocktail you order during a dinner out could be substituted for a great $16 bottle of wine instead. These small sacrifices will add up to get you closer to your business goals.
Pick Up A Hobby
What ideas or talents do you have that are sellable? For some folks, it could be designing wreaths, for others, it could be writing a freelance article for their favorite dot com from time to time. Whatever your thing is, take a bet on yourself and see what side hobby you can finesse into real extra profit for you and your business.
The post These Simple Saving Tips Will Help You Balance Your Dollars And Invest In Your Business appeared first on Essence.
Here’s what we reviewed in comics this week that you might want to check out:
Empyre #3
One of the faults with this issue of Empyre is that it leans hard into a lot of pretty well-known tropes. Strong men like Cap and The Thing are leading the front lines while the eggheads, Tony and Reed, struggle to come up with a plan to turn the tide of battle against the Cotati.
Legion of Super-Heroes #7
In this issue, the Legion of Super-Heroes is dealing with a problem: Leadership. Cosmic Boy and Saturn Girl argue with each other about the Legion’s de facto leader Brainiac 5. Up until this point, Brainiac has assumed top command simply because he’s smarter than everyone else. But the leadership is really like a council between Saturn Girl, Cosmic Boy, and Brainiac 5.
Suicide Squad #7
Tom Taylor consistently delivers a comic that’s as entertaining as it is sincere. A lot of times, a comic is one or the other, but Suicide Squad has a healthy balance of both. I shouldn’t care this much about a group of mercenaries and killers whose heads can spontaneously combust at any given moment, but here I am.
X-Factor #1
In this new era of X-Men, the best spin-off books expand on the nation of Krokoa and how it operates. X-Force is basically the black ops team, Marauders deals with moving drugs and smuggling mutants, and New Mutants is basically the young kids on the block. Enter X-Factor, a book that answers a curious question – What happens when a mutant dies?
What comics did you check out this week that we didn’t cover? Hit us in the comments or on our social media!
Want to see what else we’ve reviewed? Check out our previous Pulls.
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The post The Pull – 07/29/2020: Pandemic Comic Store Run appeared first on Black Nerd Problems.
This year, fans are celebrating 20 years of the first X-Men movie, which changed superhero films forever upon release in July of 2000. The movie went through many iterations before finally hitting theaters. And there are many behind-the-scenes “what if?” scenarios when it comes to Marvel’s cinematic mutants. But one potential casting would have changed the movie entirely had it actually happened.
According to a story in The Hollywood Reporter, which details the history of abusive behavior from X-Men director Bryan Singer, producer Ralph Winter dropped a very bizarre “making of” factoid. Trying to win the part of Professor Charles Xavier at one point was none other than pop superstar Michael Jackson. According to Winter, in 1999, Jackson came into the X-Men production offices wearing sunglasses. He also refused to shake hands with anyone. Jackson explained to them why he should play the part of Professor X, the X-mentor.
Walt Disney Studios / Twentieth Century Fox
The film’s producer, Lauren Shuler Donner, told Jackson at the meeting “Do you know that Xavier is an older white guy?” Instead of doing the obvious thing, and suggesting they merely change Professor X’s race, Michael bizarrely said “Oh yeah. You know, I can wear makeup.” Given what we know of the bizarre life of the late pop superstar, this story doesn’t sound all that far-fetched.
Michael Jackson was clearly a nerd, as he lobbied to play roles in other geek friendly properties. A few years back, it was revealed that Jackson also tried to win the part of Jar Jar Binks in The Phantom Menace. He also tried to play Peter Pan in Steven Spielberg’s Hook, and Willy Wonka in Tim Burton’s Charlie and the Chocolate Factory.
But the other role he wanted in the Marvel realm was to actually play Spider-Man. Jackson went as far as to meet with Stan Lee to get his thoughts on his playing Peter Parker. He even considered buying Marvel to assure himself the coveted role! It obviously never happened, but it’s strange to think there is an alternate timeline out there where Jackson played all these iconic roles.
Featured Image: Walt Disney Studios / Twentieth Century Fox
The post Michael Jackson Wanted to Play X-MEN’s Professor X appeared first on Nerdist.
I was 9 years old when I told my Burundian parents that my dream was to dance for Beyoncé, and you should have seen their shocked faces. I didn’t speak English back then, so it took moving to the U.S. at 17 and learning Bey’s native tongue to properly fall in love with her music. She has shaped my entire life and validated my Black existence in ways I could never fit into one article. I want to make sure you all understand that what I am about to say is not about Beyoncé as a person or necessarily her art. This is an ongoing conversation among decolonizing spaces and Pan-African theorists that no Black person has ever gained freedom by claiming to be king.
White supremacy has done a number on Black people with slavery and colonialism at the top, taking away the possibility for us to evolve on our own. It violently and intentionally robbed us of a past and left us unaware of who we were due to a continuous erasure of our beloved memories through the devaluation of oral and written history. It’s left us with imagined stories rooted in the white gaze.
There is a real danger in romanticizing pre-colonial Africa. The glorification of kingdoms before white men met us erases the reality that Africa wasn’t exactly a paradise. African kingdoms were rife with slavery, imperialism, women’s oppression and class oppression. Not everyone was a king or even a queen. More importantly, not every Black person in African countries had the potential of being born into a royal family or accessing its benefits.
Beyonce in “Black Is King” on Disney+.Our beloved Toni Morrison told us, “The very serious function of racism is distraction. It keeps you explaining, over and over again, your reason for being. Somebody says you have no language and you spend twenty years proving that you do.” This has been our struggle as Black people, living under the blinding effects of the white gaze, by continuously proving that we are worthy and even more harshly by participating in structures that uphold whiteness such as capitalism and imperialism, under the guise of Black power.
My queen Beyoncé is a powerful transcending artist with the power to instill in us liberating imaginations. As a woman African descent, whose ancestors survived generations of enslavement, she has the right to tap into her Africanness and find her connections to the continent and her belonging to the land. But when she willingly, through her art, participates in telling romanticized African royalty stories, rooted in glamorizing Africa, she indirectly dehumanizes our Africanness. She validates neo-colonialism, entrenched in negotiating and proving our humanity by pretending we’re superhuman. One could wonder are Africans humans with dignity if they are not kings and queens, draped in gold and diamonds? Are we saying our ancestors shouldn’t have been enslaved because they were kings and queens and not simply because they were humans?
Honoring our ancestors isn’t about creating false illusions of who they were or how they lived. Being dishonest to ourselves with these royal narratives, ingrained in the elite extravaganza of the continent won’t change the fact that the master’s tools will not dismantle the master’s house (shout out to Audre Lorde). Black capitalism, Black imperialism, Black monarchies were never our freedom. And they won’t be even if we add Black faces to these systems. They will still oppress the Black community since they are rooted in anti-Blackness.
Beyoncé in “Find Your Way Back” from the visual album BLACK IS KING, on Disney+The acclaimed Pan-African revolutionary Kwame Ture said, to paraphrase, Black struggle is a struggle for the land and the land for me is the belonging. It’s time our imaginations as Black people across the diaspora break free from the white gaze and the constant desire to defy it. Our energy should be used for imagining real Black futures where we don’t have to participate in capitalism and imperialism to be granted humanity. We should resist neo-colonialism by choosing to tell decolonized stories that tap into the full breadth of who we are as human beings — as pure or dirty, as holy or evil.
To Beyoncé, whom I love so much, thank you. The film was rich, beautiful and entertaining, but I expected more. I hoped that you would’ve engaged Africa and Blackness not rooted in a capitalistic stance. I hoped you would’ve let the world intothe everyday realities of Africans. Because while we woke up to a gift from Beyoncé, filled with rich imagery, we also woke up to the news of activists in Zimbabwe arrested for protesting against the government’s violence towards the people.
To end this, I would love for the Black diaspora, in their journey to relate to the continent, to be more aware of the power dynamics that exist on the continent. It’s my hope that in this heightened awareness, the diaspora doesn’t unwillingly participate in harmful systems that injure our motherland.
Beyoncé can better love Africa by creating decolonizing art that tells Black people that we don’t have to be associated with a monarchy to matter.
The post Why We Must Be Careful When Watching Beyoncé’s ‘Black Is King’ appeared first on Essence.