#5 Reasons Why Your Website May Be Useless

[ranidspace]

"I cant switch to firefox because..."

"It's too much effort to switch"

If you install firefox, it will ask if you want to import your browsing history, bookmarks, saved passwords*, and in a as of october of this year your extensions as well.

*dont use your browsers built in password manager. they're very much not as secure, even firefox's. read about passwords here

You can't import cookies for security reasons, but external tools can do that for you (try to avoid this. if you do have some data you need moved over, usually websites have their own "export data as file" option)

Everything else that you may need to fully complete the switch will come up naturally over time, the initial setup can be half an hour, or if you're happy with how it is at the start, less than 5 minutes.

"They don't support [website]"

Firefox is entirely up to date on current HTML, CSS, and Javascript standards. Theres a bunch of websites that compare all the features that firefox supports compared to chrome and stuff and they're often just, wrong? I've used some MANY of the features that firefox supposedly doesn't support. Plus they're constantly updating it for added support of new and old features. anything they refuse to add is due to security reasons, and nobody uses those features anyway.

In my experience i've never had to switch to chrome to avoid a website breaking. Sometimes it was because of an extension* but thats a very easy fix. Firefox has profiles built in and really good troubleshooting features.

*(stop using privacy badger/possum, please, it's built into firefox now, most of all privacy addons are completely useless because firefox already does it for you!!! ublock is safe tho i love u bbg)

If a site tells you "switch to chrome to see this site as intended" they're lying, and you can use a user agent switcher to trick them into thinking you're on chrome

"i need chrome for work or school"

i'd say 4 times out of 5 you don't, they say you have to use it but in reality it's just that they have better control over what you can do with it.

My high school had a shit ton of extensions automatically installed on chrome, including some shit that was literally spyware, it reported to teachers and staff all of your tabs you have open at any given time, and they could force shutoff tabs and force things open. They had absolutely no control or ability to monitor me when i switched to firefox, and there werent any problems that arose from it.

You can also just use chrome for school/work and use firefox for your personal web browser. separate your work life and personal life, you can do this with two different firefox profiles as well.

"I don't like change"

The only thing that's different about firefox in a day to day usage is the bar at the top, which is entirely customizable. Right click, customize toolbar, and you can mess around with it to make it the same layout as chrome. you can also get rid of those weird empty spaces to the left of the search bar they add by default for some reason. mozilla pls fix. You can further use themes to make it even look even more similar to chrome, I did that with my school profile to differentiate them.

When I switched, there wasn't anything I missed, I didn't have any of the "ugh i dont like how [blank] is in a different spot", or "ugh they dont have [this]". it just worked. It's a web browser, it works and does everything it needs to be. I didn't miss chrome at all, nothing felt different and the adjustment period to the new browser was LESS than what i felt when chrome updated the design in 2018.

"I have no reason to switch"

If you care about privacy at all (which you should), i could list hundreds of reasons why you should switch. Google removed "don't be evil" from their code of conduct for god sake lmao. Every new change they do is a ploy to get as much data from you and feed you as many ads as possible.

The dumping of Manifest V2/dynamic filtering not only makes most adblockers useless, it makes any sort of content blocking worse. Blocking trackers, malware, intrusive and annoying website features, these are things ublock does for you which chrome is doing its best to get you to stop doing. They want you to be exposed to predatory ads and malware so they can get more money.

If you have issues with ram usage and performance issues, firefox includes a lot of (lesser known) features to monitor RAM and CPU usage. While it seems as it may use more RAM, it automatically releases it when more ram is needed by other programs, effectively using less. It also uses much less ram in total in cases where there's 10+ tabs open.

Firefox can automatically block sites from auto-playing videos whenever you go on them

As mentioned firefox has so many more customization features than chrome, allowing you theme and move around everything to your hearts content

While on desktop, Chrome and Firefox are very close in functionality, on mobile, Firefox is working to add full extension support to mobile, it already has a small catalogue of extensions you can use, such as uBlock Origin. It has all of the desktop privacy features as well.

Firefox, only has about 3% of the market share. Other than that, chromium controls over 70% of all browsers, with apple controlling over 20%. The less people use firefox, the more control TWO companies have on the very act of using the internet. The Mozilla Foundation is a fully non-profit organization, with full ownership over the mozilla corporation, they don't have shareholders, and prioritize an open, safe, and private internet. Don't let them die.

"but what about..."

there's probably other reasons but the last of my advice:

you can have multiple browsers at once, install firefox and don't get rid of chrome. try firefox, see if there's anything you don't like, and try to fix it, and whenever you feel the need to, you can go back to the browser you already had.

[chaoskirin]

Have you found that you’ve been less motivated to create art now that AI has become so good?

I don’t really draw anymore because whenever I start a new drawing, I’m immediately plagued by thoughts like, why even bother? This piece is going to take hours when, theoretically, I could ask Mid-journey to do it for me and it would take about 10 seconds and probably look way better. So like, why should I even try?

I’m at college getting a degree in illustration but I’m afraid that by the time I graduate and get out into the field, I won’t have any job prospects. Human artists are becoming increasingly obsolete in the corporate world and I feel like nobody is going to want to hire me. I mean, from a shitty CEO’s perspective, why hire human artists when AI is right there? It’s faster and cheaper. Many established studio and corporate artists are already being fired in droves. We’re seeing it happen in real time.

I feel like I’m fighting a losing battle. AI has drained me of my creativity and my future job security. I’ve lost interest in one of my dearest hobbies and my degree may end up becoming completely useless. I loathe AI for the way it has stripped me of something I’ve dedicated so many years of my life to. Something that was once so precious to me.

I feel that I’ve spent thousands of hours honing a now useless skill. And that really sucks.

Sorry for ranting in your inbox, I hope you don’t mind… but since you are a working adult and do art and writing (of course writing AI has gotten stupid good as well and I’m bitter about that too) professionally, and as a hobby too, I figured that you would definitely understand.

Hey! This is a great question, and I have what I hope is a very hope-filled answer.

By the way, I don't call image generation "AI." It's not. There's no actual intelligence involved. It's an algorithm that averages images and combines them into something new. I refer to it as GenSlop.

First, the reason you're seeing such a proliferation of image generators attaching their dirty little claws into every website on the internet is due to what I call "just-in-casing." Rather than develop an ACTUAL ethical image generator (which would only use images from creative commons or pay artists for their use) generators like Deviantart's DreamUp and Twitter's Grok (?????? wtf is that name) have just stuffed LAION-5 into their code and called it a day.

Why? Why not wait and create an ethical dataset over several years?

Because it's become more likely than not than image generation is going to become strictly regulated by law, and companies like DA, Stability, Twitter, Adobe, and many others want to profit off it while it's still free and "legal."

I say "legal" in quotes, because at the moment, it's neither legal nor illegal. There are no laws in existence to govern this specific thing because it appeared so fast, there was literally no predicting it. So now it's in a legal grey area where it can't be prosecuted by US courts. (But it can be litigated--more on that in a bit.)

When laws are passed to govern the use of image generators, these companies that opted to use LAION-5 immediately without concern for the artists and communities they were harming will have to stop. but because of precedent, they will likely have their prior use of these generators forgiven, meaning they will not be forced to pay fines on their use before a certain date.

So while it seems they're popping up everywhere and taking over the art market, this is only so they can get in their share of profits from it before it becomes illegal to use them without compensation or consent.

But how do I know the law will support artists on this?

First, litigation. There are several huge lawsuits right now; one notable lawsuit against almost every major company using GenSlop technology with plaintiffs like Karla Ortiz and Grzegorz Rutkowski, among other high-profile artists. This lawsuit was recently """pared down""" or """mostly dismissed""" according to pro-GenSlop users, but what really happened is that the judge in the case asked the plaintiffs to amend their complaint to be more specific, which is generally a positive thing in cases like this. It means that precedent after a decision will be far clearer and have a longer reach than a more generalized complaint.

I don't know what pro-GenSloppers are insisting on spreading the "dismissal" tale on the internet, except to discourage actual artists. What they say has no bearing in the court, and it's looking more and more likely that the plaintiffs will be able to win this case and claim damages.

Getty Images, a huge image stock company, is also suing Stability AI for scraping its database. I'm not as well-versed on the case, though.

The other positive, despite what a lot of artists are saying, is the new SAG-AFTRA contract.

It's not perfect. It still allows GenSlop use. But it does require consent and compensation. Ideally, it would ban the use of artist images and voice entirely, but this contract is far better than what they would have gotten without striking. If you recall, before the strike, the AMPTP wanted to be able to use actor images and voices without any compensation or permission, without limitation.

And you can bet your ass that Hollywood isn't going to allow other organizations to have unregulated GenSlop use if they can't. They might even step in to argue against its use in front of congress, because their outlook is going to be "if we can't make money stealing art, no one else should be able to, either."

TL;DR: the huge proliferation of image generators and GenSlop right now is only because it's neither legal nor illegal. Regulations are coming, and artists will still be necessary and even required. Because the world is essentially built on a backbone or artistry.

I personally can't wait to drink the tears of all the techbros who can't steal art anymore.

[memento-tech]

Web Design & Development : Importance of Web Design & Development in SEO.

Web Design & Development : Importance of Web Design & Development in SEO.

Websites these days are mandatory for any business to expand and to be aware about you and your product’s presence in the world, but developing a website without setting target or purpose is useless or having it on the internet has no meaning. And also it might be very difficult for any SEO to crawl it on internet and to rank it on the any Search Engine. So, here you will know what to keep in mind or set the points clear before Web Design & Development for.

Here are some reasons why the website is important for business:

1, Engage with more people : 

Nowadays websites are the source for engaging with people. Through websites you can increase the awareness about your product with the buyer who is far away from you and you can tell or do marketing of your product by sitting in a corner of the world.

2, To build the presence of your brand : 

A website is the base or we can say the heart of your brand. When you do marketing of your product through social media, email marketing, link creation, blog or any other marketing these all things will be get back or bring the customer to your website. So, the website is the only place who will build your brand presence.

3, Credibility will be Increase : 

When a user search for the product they will be insure that the product he is purchasing is trustworthy or not. To insure this they will go to the website and if they do not find the website or get the worst experience from the website, you will lose the trust of the customer and send the thought that your product is not legitimate.

4, Increase the search in Search Engine : 

Website creation is not just build a website, buy a domain and put it on the internet. To make it searchable in search engine, you have to put the SEO concern into it and make the content of the website as per the SEO suggest and use the SEO techniques to increase the search volume of your product or website. 

By using SEO you can increase the traffic to your website. A good SEO will help when a user search for a keyword and that one keyword may get the searcher to your website.

5, Interaction with customer required : 

Most of the businesses have a strict working hours. For examples some businesses work 5 days of the week, most have strict office time like 9 to 5. And if the customer want to buy a product they have to aware of this timing or if they have any query about the product and want some clarification they have to wait for the time to interact with the representative.

Making the website for 24x7 you can get the trust of the customer. By doing this you can get customer for your product anytime and the purchase for the customer can be easy and by providing the support anytime, the trust or credibility of the customer can be increase.

First of let's be clear about what a website is and why it should be perfect? So, when we think about creating a website our main focused idea is to expand the business and to inform readers about our company and products. Right? Yes.  Then when you present your company to  customers and your website is not well maintained or not user friendly then there is no meaning to creating a website.

Here are some checkpoints we should keep in mind during developing a Website : 

1, Be Clear the idea to create a Website : When you create a website the idea should be clear about for what purpose and why it is and where it will effect and to whom it will help and how it will help. So, ask these five questions to your self i.e. What, Why, where, whom and How?

2, User friendly Visuals of Website : As you have started developing a website, we should also check the visuals of the website that should be User friendly, mobile friendly or any other resource friendly because if the content or view of the website is not a attractive as required then the viewer can be bored and will not stay to website and that will directly affect to our business, as this the website should be as comfortable viewable in all devices like mobile, tablets etc. so we can engage users from everywhere.

3, Quality and Sensible content : Content written in the site is the backbone of the website and the content represents the quality of the website. So, the content written in a website should be original and written like it can directly affect to viewer or customer. 

Sensible content means when a viewer visits your site and tries to move from one page to another then it should be easy for the viewer to navigate and not be lengthy for him to search for any topics.

4, Platform and Tools : When you are connecting to any developer and discussing the website, ask him on which platform they are developing a website. There are many platforms and tools that are used to develop an effective website. Here are some tools which we have mentioned here for your reference i.e. HTML5 design | Bootstrap Framework | PHP Development | Java Development | Asp.Net Development | Jquery | Ajax | Angular Js | React Js

5, Security of WebSite and Customer : When you create a website for sale or engagement with a customer, the customer will first of all see the safety of himself before he interacts with your website or shares any personal information on your site. So, you have to be clear in content and have to use different certificates and security encryptions to secure user’s data and your website credibility. 

Tools that can be use to Develope a Website : 

There are multiple tools that can be use as per the requirement of the website are given below : 

1. GitHub

2. Chrome Developer Tools

3. Sublime Text

4. Marvel

5. Visual Studio Code

6. Node Package Manager (npm)

7. Sass

8. Bootstrap

9. Grunt

10. Ruby on Rails

Top 10 Web Development Tools for Advanced Developers

1. Postman

2. Docker

3. Kubernetes

4. Sketch

5. NGINX

6. Flutter

7. ReactJS

8. Angular

9. Vue.js

10. Laravel

Look After below things while choosing Website Development Tools : 

Complexity

Security

Scalability

Cost

Programming Language

Platform Support

Till this you got some idea about what should keep in mind about Web Design and Development and now we are going to understand what is the importance of good web design and development in SEO or Digital Marketing.

In one point if we say, what is the importance of Digital Marketing in Web Design? It can be say “Digital Marketing is the backbone of any Website.”

An SEO or Digital Marketer is the person who will help to drive traffic to your website i.e. they will do marketing of your website or product organically or through paid ads and convince people to buy a product or service from your website. 

And if your website will not be properly designed and then the people who are convinced to visit your site will go back if they find the website is poorly designed or not responsive.

What makes a website a poorly designed website?

A poorly designed website can be identified by its loading speed, navigation from one page to another page, internal linking of the web pages, high bounce rate i.e. a visitor cannot find for what he had visited the site.

Adhering the terms and conditions of SEO for Digital Marketing and following the rules of SEO for developing a website will help to achieve the goals of marketing.

Why is good Web Design Important in Digital Marketing?

Any Digital Marketer have many techniques for internet marketing, such as SEO, content marketing, pay-per click, Social Media Marketing etc., none of these will be effective if the website is not well designed.

1, Help to make a First impression :

People who will visit the site and see well designed site, will get the first impression and will make to spend some time on site.

2, Trust Building with Audience:

Well Designed website help people think the site is reliable and the product of the site is trustworthy.

3, Helps to SEO for work better : 

SEO is the one who helps to make a website visible and rank it better.  Well designed website ensure the SEO that the website is responsive, easy to navigate and friendly to crawl.

At the beginning we show the checkpoints about the Web Design and Development and here mention are the points for effective SEO or Digital Marketing process.

Points to keep in mind for effective Digital Marketing : 

1, User Friendly Experience of Website

2, SEO(Search Engine Optimization)

3, Site Speed

4, Responsiveness

5, Content Readability

6, Branding of Product

7, Competition

8, Analytics and Monitoring

Well Web Design has a significant impact on Digital Marketing, so, it is important to add all the strategies and tools to create a website because only then Digital Marketing strategies will be impacted.

These are the basic points you have to consider when you develop a website but there are many more things you should include while developing a website. If you want more deep guidance for developing a website in an effective and professional way and to get more strategies of Digital Marketing then MementoTech is the top Web Design and Digital Marketing service provider in Gujarat, India. That will help you for Web Design and Digital Marketing for your business and MementoTech is also providing professional training to prepare web developers and Digital Marketers.

[my-darling-boy]

Genuinely asking, isn't self-diagnose with a condition kind of dangerous? Because legitimizing self-diagnosing opens a door to many malicious people who would want to exploit the fact they can self-diagnose? And in turn, make the space of autistic people worse?

Was going to skip this, but I’m writing a LONG response because I’m VERY exhausted with the amount of misinformation I see on this “self dx is dangerous” take, so buckle up and allow me to info dump.

Recently, authentic_autism_advocacy, an Instagram account run by a supposed medically diagnosed autistic woman was discovered to be a non-autistic woman, Connie Manning, posing as a medically diagnosed autistic person to spread hate and anti-self diagnosing speech. In reality, she is a neurotypical mother who regularly uses her autistic son for clout; she also turned out to have a hand behind CalmWear, a brand of sensory compression products designed for disabled people. Not only had she been spewing hatred towards other autistic people, she had been accusing well known AFAB autistic tiktokers like beckspectrum of faking being autistic and threatening self diagnosed autistics and saying they are a danger to the community, and engaging in other incredibly discriminating behaviour. Yes, she herself was a neurotypical person posing as a medically diagnosed autistic to perpetuate hateful rhetoric about self diagnosed people and used her voice to speak OVER autistic folk for financial gain and exploitation of autistic people, including her own son. If you want to read this roller coaster of a story, an autistic person wrote an entire article on it with tons of screenshots and sources.

So let me make one thing clear to you.

The purpose of actually, genuinely self diagnosing is not done to attract attention or to parade around and exploit other autistic people. Self diagnosed autistic individuals have recognised due to difficult life circumstances, financial hardship, bigotry and stigma within the medical/legal world, being a minor, lack of insurance, lack of proper access to safe care facilities, being denied assessment due to incompetent or biased practitioners, and/or any other obstacle that they may temporarily or permanently be barred from diagnosis. Self diagnosis does NOT instantly mean a person is posing for clout, nor does it indicate a person is trying to wring money from assistance services or exploit other autistics. And nts who use self diagnose with intentions of harming the community? That’s NOT self diagnosis, that’s abuse of something meant to aid people blocked from medical care or financial means to that care. All we can do for autistic people, no matter who we perceive them to be, is treat them the same way we would any other autistic person. Because the moment you start deciding by your own book who deserves respect and who doesn’t, you’ll be on a slippery slope to locking out thousands of autistic people from the community. If it’s discovered a person like Connie is literally abusing the system of self dx to intentionally mislead the community, by all means, we must hold them accountable. But you cannot simply go about granting and revoking access from people just because someone lacks a diagnosis or doesn’t fit your idea of what being autistic looks like, especially if it’s based on stereotypes.

Moral of the story? Isn’t it ironic how anti-self dx people will 100% believe a user who claims to be medically diagnosed but shows no “written proof” of it, yet always demand written proof from a self dx person? It’s almost like even anti-self dx people can’t tell the difference between someone who is medically diagnosed autistic and someone who isn’t. Well, that’s because they can’t. While there might be common traits, autism has no set model, it is a spectrum, no autistic person is alike; Policing self diagnosed people about their self diagnosis isn’t a form of protecting the community. It’s a form of gatekeeping. If you find yourself granting instant acceptance, without asking for proof, to a person insisting they are medically diagnosed like this neurotyical mother, but then prohibit self dx people from entry entirely on the grounds of not showing proof of medical assessment, you are upholding a double standard. This is why policing autistic people’s diagnosis, self or not, is inherently useless.

So here’s the thing... instead of asking people to stop self diagnosing, what you should instead be asking yourself is, “Why do people self diagnose? What kind of medical system could possibly be in place where people feel they need to resort to self diagnosis rather than get an actual diagnosis?”

Well, it’s mainly common knowledge among most of the autistic community that diagnosis is NOT easy to come by.

One of the main reasons why people cannot get a diagnosis is due to financial/insurance reasons. It’s reasonable to estimate that by the end of 2020 almost 30 million Americans alone were without health insurance. I’ve heard costs out of pocket for an autism diagnosis are between $500-$6000. If a person or a family cannot afford health insurance—which by the way on average is around $5,400 a year for a single person and $13,800 for a family here—where are they supposed to pull out $6,000 to get screened?

You might be asking, “Well aren’t insurances supposed to cover disability?” Sure, there are options for disability care through health insurance—not even going to get into that—but like a lot of things in the US, this is a severely flawed system. A lot of private health insurance will stop or limit coverage for an autism diagnosis or assistance services once a person reaches 18 to 21 years old. In most states, coverage has a higher chance of being denied to autistic adults coming with the added age cap or ONLY covering ABA, an abusive, manipulative “therapy” used to force social compliance and trait suppression on autistic people. The fact that ABA, a conversion therapy, is covered, but little else, shows exactly what insurance companies think of autistic people: they’ll only cover us if we want to learn to be “normal”. This can leave many undiagnosed autistic adults who cannot afford analysis, insurance, or safe assistance services with nowhere to turn. If I was not on my parents’ insurance, there is NO WAY I would EVER be able to afford a diagnosis. I don’t have $2,000 lying around. The MONEY ALONE would prohibit me from getting a diagnosis, no matter how many autistic traits I presented.

When I was going through this system years ago to start a diagnosis, I was shocked to find no therapist within three hours of me was accepting adult patients. “Up to 18 only” their websites would say. And in the event I had found one (1) that accepted me as a then 20 year old with X insurance, and that person refused me diagnosis, I would be out of options unless I planned a 5 hour drive which may have also led me to another biased screener. A person seeking self financed assessment can waste thousands of dollars therapist hopping.

People will say, “Well I live in X place, and where I come from, it’s covered!” Well the reality is that everyone in the world does not live where you live. It’s not realistic to assume everyone is in the same position as you or your family to afford care or access the same resources as you. When you say, “Just go out and get a diagnosis! It’s not that hard!”, understand you are speaking from your personal vantage point where screening may be easily accessed or easily covered/is free OR you have no personal knowledge of what that process is like yourself.

The second thing that bars a ton of people from being diagnosed is the fact that when autism was first discovered, its research was HEAVILY centered on white, cis, heterosexual men. The idea that autistic people are ONLY cis, white, heterosexual men carries on to this day. If you are an outlier to this stereotype, your chances of being misdiagnosed with something else or refused diagnosis skyrocket because so-called “professionals” don’t know how to observe traits in any other person besides a cis, white, heterosexual man, and refuse/fail to recognise the endless ways in which a person can be autistic. ALL the time I hear how AFAB people will go in to get screened only to find out their screener does not believe AFAB people can be autistic, because yes, sexism and anti-lgbtq+ ideas play a huge role in the incredibly outdated diagnostic process, because autism is still believed to be an “AMAB only” thing. People report going into a therapists office and being asked questions like, “Do you like going outside? Do you like having friends?” and being told that if you agree with either of these, you cannot be autistic because criteria at some places is so backwards, you can’t even say you enjoy conversation without failing the test. Other things commonly heard during the analysis are screeners telling someone they are too smart/articulate to be autistic, gas lighting them by saying they are mistaking their symptoms for something else/making them up, telling a person they seem normal, dismissing clear autistic traits by saying they’re unique “superpowers”, or intentionally misdiagnosing a person as ADHD INSTEAD of autistic. People on social media have also pointed out what influences racism has on the diagnostic process as well and how lack of research and understanding of autistic POC contributes to under-diagnosis and stigma has only contributed to refusal of care and under-representation of POC in the disabled community, as one autistic Black woman points out on Instagram, “I found excellent articles that support and validate my feelings and experiences, but I could find no research on autistic Black people.” Additionally, because research has primarily been done on young men, this means anyone who is not a cis man and is over the age of 18 and is seeking a diagnosis has a much higher chance of not receiving one because screeners don’t understand how autistic traits may present differently in adults, especially since adults are very likely to mask. Some autism screeners are so against autism they have told clients they would only diagnosis a person autistic if it was their last resort to avoid “placing a burden on their shoulders”. These reasons are largely responsible for why autism is incredibly mis/under-diagnosed. This ask would be the length of a novel if I included every single type of discrimination and mistreatment during the evaluation process alone, but understand it can be incredibly biased, sexist, transphobic, racist, or just flat out ableist. And guess what? Though this process can take as little as a month to get sorted, that is rare. The assessment SHOULD be very short. But a lot of autistic people have reported their diagnosis took more than 2-4 years because of having to waste time, energy, and money hopping from therapist to therapist looking for someone to take them seriously, as many autistic people compiled on the actuallyautistictiktoks page on Instagram point out.

The last thing I want to touch on is this idea that people have that self diagnosing is dangerous. “What if someone self diagnoses and they take advantage of services that are meant for autistic people?” ...The Big Things you think I am going to take advantage of as a self diagnosed autistic person, like scholarship money for instance or SSDI, I do not have legal access to without a formal diagnosis. I cannot waltz into a law firm and ask for a $5,000 scholarship for autistic people without a diagnosis, because they WILL NOT give it to me!

Let me tell you some of things I’ve “cruelly taken advantage of” as a self diagnosed autistic person. I bought glasses with blue light protection, because screen and fluorescent lighting at work and even natural blue toned light from the sky lowers my threshold for some sensory input like noise and social interaction; wearing them to work everyday has improved my sensory thresholds incredibly. I’ve talked to my manager and told him I’m autistic and that I have a hard time understanding vague direction and may need to step away briefly on occasion to tend to a shutdown before a meltdown comes on at work; he had no problem with this. I use subtitles; sometimes I have trouble processing audio or reading facial expressions and tone, and being able to see the words displayed on the screen gives me a significantly better understanding of what I watch. All my life, I have been having meltdowns which I had mistaken for mental breakdowns or panic attacks and having access to resources that walked me through preventative methods and tips on what to do if I have one has been ENORMOUSLY helpful to me. All my life, I was trying to deal with them thinking they were something else; becoming aware of this and accepting that they are in fact autistic meltdowns has helped me not only go through them, but has helped me redirect stims which at their worst previously had me hitting and clawing my arms, slapping my face, and even hitting my head. I don’t know about you, but I don’t want to wait 4 years for a diagnosis to use resources I could be using to make my life more accessible right now!

People will say, “Oh well yeah, I don’t mean You are one of Those Types of self diagnosed autistic people, you clearly sound/look autistic, I’m talking about other people.” The thing is, there is no broad “sounding/looking autistic”, that’s stereotyping, and you can’t demand everyone who interacts with you show you their Autistic Card, because again, not everyone is able to be diagnosed, especially given the mistreatment and stigma present towards autistic people in the medical field! And what made you ask for their diagnosis? Because they “don’t seem autistic” to you? Why didn’t you ask for their diagnosis? Because they “seemed autistic” to you? By denying anyone who doesn’t have a diagnosis resources they may very well need, you are denying assistance to thousands of people who are without means to be diagnosed. And I am SO tired of seeing comments online on self diagnosis posts that “people don’t know what they’re taking about” as if they know us personally, like are you me? Are you my doctor I’ve consulted? Did you watch me academically research and consult with other autistic people about being autistic for over 3 years? I’m tired of “well, one time a self diagnosed person laughed at my actually autistic diagnosed friend...so all self dx people are evil” because there is ZERO correlation between a person being self assessed and their behavior towards a non self assessed person. The fact both those arguments are in use whenever self dx comes up is yet another form of gatekeeping.

Self diagnosing autism is not begging for attention or Evil Criminal Money Funneling Schemes. It is a result of a deeply flawed medical and insurance system that has failed to give proper attention and care to those who need it, it is a result of resources not made available, of safe support systems not there for kids and adults alike. You want to talk about what’s truly dangerous? How the hate group Autism Speaks has been parading itself around since 2005 as an advocacy group for autistic people and has been misusing millions of dollars worth of donation money and promoting stigma and hatred around autistic people; no autistic members are present on their board. How Sia and her new film Music was nominated for 2 Golden Globes despite it replacing the original autistic actor with a neurotypical actor, using offensive stereotypes, and using the main autistic character as a prop, and featured an extremely dangerous bodily restraint scene on an autistic person having a meltdown in public and featured very insensitive content due to Sia’s lack of consulting with autistic people to make the film (spoilers in that article).

Instead of policing autistic people, whether they fit your idea of what an autistic person is or not, redirect your efforts and your energy to dismantling systems and holding others accountable for perpetuating harmful stereotypes about autistic people that are legitimately dangerous on such a scale that they have created insurmountable damage to the autistic community. But I guarantee you, worrying over whether your classmate is “faking it” will not do any justice to the decades worth of discrimination autistic people face still today.

I understand. You care about the community, you don’t want autistic people to be exploited or taken advantage of. I don’t want to be exploited and taken advantage of as an autistic person, and I don’t want that for others! But I also understand that when we self proclaim ourselves as judges of random autistic strangers on the internet or start accusing people of faking or demanding to see medical paperwork from people when the basis of our suspicions is “this person doesn’t look like my stereotyped view on how I think an autistic person should act”, THAT is when you really run into trouble. Because if you are allowed to deny self dx people entrance into the autistic community, what’s stopping you from thinking you have the power to deny ANYONE entrance into that community?

And there is power in self diagnosis for many autistic people. When the evaluation system is literally rigged to set you up for failure and put you through unnecessary hardship, self dx is a self affirming, empowering tool to take back control from a process designed to gaslight and crush you. The evaluation process was NOT formulated by an autistic person, nor was it made to be inclusive of all autistic people. Until the evaluation system in place for autistic people is safe, accessible, and free to ALL, you have EVERY right to self diagnose.

[silenthillmutual]

daniil dankovsky is autistic and here’s why:

because i’m autistic and i said so

i kid, obviously. what sort of autistic person would i be if i wasn’t read to back up my silly little claim with an overly long post of evidence a total of three people will read? (hi ned hi jordan hi raven :))

i’m aware that this is cringey because adults aren’t supposed to have autism or interests or talk about either of those things, but this is my blog and you are free to block me if the cringe is too much for you.

these are some things i picked out from the DSMV’s diagnostic criteria, found on the CDC website:

deficits in social-emotional reciprocity

reduced sharing of interests, emotions, or affect

abnormal social approach

abnormalities in eye contact and body language

defecits in […] understand[ing] relationships

difficults adjusting behavior to suit various social contexts

repetitive motor movements or speech

rigid thinking patterns

highly restricted, fixated interests that are abnormal in intensity or focus

hyper- or hyporeactivity to sensory input

there’s also some misc. stuff not in the diagnostic criteria (though it may be in the adir or gars-3) i thought was worth noting.

important note from the diagnostic criteria: “symptoms cause clinically significant impairment in social, occupational, or other important areas of current functioning”. i’d say that in his case, they do.

spoilers for pathologic classic, pathologic 2, and the marble nest

deficits in social-emotional reciprocity

in bachelor route of classic, daniil

seems completely oblivious to eva making advances toward him, to the point where she complains to him that he’s ignoring her in favor of asking questions about simon.

seems surprised when people mention maria being in love with him, despite outright asking her a couple of times if she’s flirting with him.

not to mention the fact that he asks her that at all.

his inability or resistence to making connections with others is typically considered one of his character flaws. although it is not outright stated in the dsmv criteria, one trait of autism and other neurodivergencies is “having extremely high or extremely low empathy” - and daniil, despite being a doctor, lacks empathy. which is not to say he doesn’t care at all. i think that he does, but is terrible at showing it.

for example, this scene from marble nest:

Sticky: You must feel terrible… right? That’s fine. I forgive you. You just got confused… Adults always do. Daniil: Oh yes, adults are always occupied with the most asinine nonsense. Like feeling anxious that a bunch of urchins keep roaming the streets, putting themselves in mortal danger!

daniil clearly cares about sticky’s wellbeing (and the wellbeing of the kids looking after him, though he’s not cognizant that he’s in a coma), but his way of showing it is… kind of by being a jerk. all of which bleeds into the next item on the list

reduced sharing of interests, emotions, or affect

he has no problem sharing his interests, but in both pathologic classic & pathologic 2, daniil speaks with a flat affect - which is to say that he lacks intonation. the words we read him saying may be dramatic or come across as passionate, but the actual voice reading his lines is very monotone, which may contribute to being read as lacking emotion.

and in pathologic 2, he has a voiceline lamenting not telling “her” (eva?) how he felt

in marble nest, he’s teased by the tragedians for being “heartless”:

Tragedian: Maybe. Possibly. But it’s useless to explain to a heartless man. …Take heart, Excellency! If you ever find it, that is. And then come back to us… Even though it all sounds like a rather implausible turn of events.

abnormal social approach

daniil has a tendency to say things that are tactless, odd, or just socially inappropriate. i probably don’t need to point out too many examples, as i think it’s fairly obvious - these are the things people love to pick at when it comes to him, but i do have a few in mind. like, for example, from haruspex route in classic:

Haruspex: What of the antibodies essential for making a serum? Bachelor: I don’t know for sure yet, I’ll send you a report in a few hours. Don’t go about cutting people’s hearts out for your panacea until then. It’s a… controversial solution, you know… Haruspex: What?! Do you even hear yourself? Bachelor: Sorry! I meant no offence… it was just a momentary lapse of… well, you know. Haruspex: None taken.

until artemy points out, daniil doesn’t seem to be aware he just said something rude. even with therapy, picking up on social cues doesn’t come naturally to people with autism, so we tend to say things that come across as rude or strange to others without realizing we’ve put them off. we tend to lack a “filter” that tells us when things are or are not appropriate to say. even when we may recognize it, the rules may not make any sense to us. for example, it makes very little sense that allistics favor politeness over honesty.

i think the glaringly obvious abnormal social approach in pathologic 2 is him threatening to hold artemy at gunpoint to get in the house, which is just overkill, but my personal favorite comes on day 7, when he’s complaining about the orders aglaya has given him. artemy stops him to say he doesn’t understand what daniil wants from him, to which daniil replies:

From you? Oh, nothing. I was just sharing.

to daniil, they were just having a normal conversation. but some part of this - his tone or his words or maybe even his body language - didn’t give artemy the impression that this was supposed to be a regular conversation. (we could, in fact, attribute the same idea to artemy here; why didn’t artemy pick up that this was a normal conversation? the reason i count it towards daniil is because artemy doesn’t seem to have this problem with anybody else. for the record: i don’t think artemy is neurotypical either.)

abnormalities in eye contact and body language

it’s hard to get proof of this in video games, but i will say i think it’s very funny that in pathologic 2 daniil’s idle animations are “pacing”, “sitting like he desperately wants to start bouncing his knees but is stopping himself from doing it”, and “standing unnaturally still” - but there you go. i don’t know anything about making gifs, or i’d gif this one specific talk menu idle he does where he holds eye contact for about three seconds, looks away uncomfortably, and then looks back out of the corner of his eyes.

deficits in […] understand[ing] relationships

mostly examples from his route in classic:

when the army arrives, he can claim to block that aglaya, whom he’s known for two days, is his best friend

he seems baffled by the fact that everone is smitten with maria and working with her, and seems equally baffled by the idea that she’s smitten with him

despite eva implying on day two that she is in a relationship with andrey, is completely blindsided by the revelation on day 6, asking him, “How in the world is she ‘your woman’?”

i’d also like to use his sign-off on his letter to artemy, day 2 of the haruspex route - he signs it as “Your friend (hopefully)”. i know i’m not the only autistic person who used to ask people if we were friends or not. pro tip, if you’ve never done this: don’t. it really weirds people out.

difficulties adjusting behavior to suit various social contexts

the fact that he stands out is blatantly obvious even in pathologic 2 and in the haruspex route of classic. people will comment on him being an outsider and mention that they don’t trust him. but you can watch it happen in real time in his route, because he never fully acclimates to the town. he says something about this to aglaya on day 7:

Bachelor: Was there any particularly notable backstory? I’m deadly tired of all these people. They’re inhuman. They tell the future, believe in walking zombies, and die in all manners of painfully abnormal ways. Inquisitor: Your line of t hinking is obviously falacious - and I was implying something rather mundane. I promise you, no one can really tell the future around here: and neither are deaths inspired by third parties uncommon. Mysterious phenomenons do occur here sometimes… but hardly more often than anywhere else.

actually, there’s an example of him saying something similar to artemy on day 5 in pathologic 2:

Damn this town… I feel I’m trapped in a nightmare. The absurdity of it all… There’s no one to talk to. Everyone’s so volatile. They all seem to want to help, but… their help is worse than hostility.

some of this can be explained by the town’s strangeness, but keep in mind that the first instance happens after he’s been there and involved in the ongoing for an entire week, and the second at nearly a week in. clearly he’s struggling to adjust to the changes.

it’s also worth noting that his reason for fleeing the town in the nocturnal ending?

I have no place here anymore.

This town is no longer mine. No longer human. No longer rational. It doesn’t… accept the likes of me anymore.

repetitive motor movements or speech

it’s harder to see the motor movements in classic, but remember how i pointed out earlier that he paces? pacing is a form of stimming. murky, who is canonically autistic, can also be found pacing as one of her idle animations. having stock phrases for characters to speak when you come near them already ticks off the box on “repetitive speech”, but that by itself doesn’t really cover what they’re talking about - echolalia.

but you know what this does fit with? “‘quoting’ things(communication is HARD! sometimes we need to take shortcuts and use someone else’s words)“

i’ll get to the more obvious example in a minute - i want to point out something that happens very early in pathologic 2 first. you know how you first meet him and artemy accuses daniil of trying to guilt-trip him by asking if it’s true that isidor would still be alive if artemy had come sooner? keep in mind that he spoke to rubin first. and this is what rubin says, when you get a chance to talk to him:

Yesterday, I was told you had killed your father.

That’s not far from the truth, Burakh.

You betrayed him. You left when he needed you most. He cried out for your help, but you didn’t care. He was in peril, and you were too busy elsewhere, He believed, truly believed, that your arrival would put an end to his troubles. And, as always, he was right.

i’m not saying this was necessarily the game’s intent, but it’s entirely possible daniil is parroting back to artemy exactly what rubin said to him.

now, for what you’re probably expecting in this section: the latin. people love to refer to his use of latin as “random”, so let’s clear that up:

it is not latin daniil has made up. with the exception of latin that is mispelled in the game’s texts, all of them are proverbs or otherwise common sayings. you can find most of them on the wikipedia list of latin phrases, or through a 3-second google search.

he’s a doctor. him having taken latin isn’t anymore strange than a lawyer taking latin. in fact, if you pay attention, artemy also took latin; this is implied when artemy tells him he’s always sucked at it.

his uses of latin actually aren’t random at all. what he says fits the situation, and sometimes is used in place of him having to come up with something to say on his own.

prime example:

Forget it, Burakh. I have a splitting headache. If you have no urgent business, then we’ll talk later. Later, later… Qui non proficit, deficit.

qui non proficit, deficit - he who does not advance, loses ground. in other words, “i’m sorry, but i really do need to keep working.” one of his voice lines.

as for why he doesn’t translate the latin: it probably wouldn’t even occur to him to. these are not obscure sayings. the utopians all have a certain degree of education - what would he need to translate them for?

this bleeds into something that isn’t really mentioned, but that i’ve found i have a lot of trouble with in everyday life. autistic people have a tendency to either overexplain (and then have everyone get mad at you because they feel you’re being condescending) or underexplain (and have everyone get mad at you because you haven’t explained anything). the latin would be a case where it feels like a justified underexplanation. you’ll notice that when it comes to anything scientific, he tends to do the reverse, and overexplain. this also happens in classic, whether artemy has asked him to clarify or not.

rigid thinking patterns

the thing i had marked for this was simply his strict adherence to western medical practices and refusal to acknowledge the supernatural, even when it seems obvious - he has a conversation in his route in classic with yulia about this, and that is in fact how he manages to get to her: by asking saburov if there are any other logical skeptics in town. it should be noted they seem to be breaking with this in pathologic 2, where one of his voicelines is “I’m no positivist. There are things in this world beyond our mundane perception.” i have no idea where they’re planning on going with that.

there’s also a quote floating somewhere around twitter about him having been raised by a military man, and militaries tend to enforce very rigid routines. you could say the same thing of block - who (in classic at least) i also have my suspicions about.

highly restricted, fixated interests that are abnormal in intensity or focus

special interests. the one that should obviously come to mind is thanatology, though i would argue latin if not classics in general is a special interest of his as well - in addition to his usage of latin, he also references pericles in the marble nest and was probably refering to the roman occupation of haruspicy in addition to augurs in the same text. he also makes references to shakespeare more than once in both marble nest and pathologic 2.

hyper- or hyperoreactivity to sensory input

i don’t have much written down for this one but there seem to be several places in classic especially where he asks npcs to stop shouting at him. we don’t really have the privilege to know their volume or how they’re interacting with him, but i think it’s also worth noting that he’s the only one of the healers who wears gloves. in pathologic 2 he’s the only named character i can think of who wears them at all. his thing in the lucid dream about the brain being “a border”? gloves are his border, as is his jacket, which may be worn to cut down on sensory issues.

he will also sometimes seem to “overreact” to the situation at hand - such as in classic, when some dogheads mispeak and say that daniil is going to “sterilize” them, and instead of understanding that they must have mispoken, freaks out over the idea that they think they’re going to be… well… sterilized. or in haruspex route, when his reaction to the inquisitor arriving is to threaten suicide.

miscellaneous

he never goes anywhere without that carpet bag. we don’t see it in pathologic 2, but we do hear about it and he doesn’t let it go for a second in classic - not even in the cutscenes where he’s using the microscope. his bag could be a comfort item.

“getting very attached to things like inanimate objects” could work for the bag - but you know what it actually fits the bill much more obviously? the polyhedron. in the haruspex route he recognizes that it’s a lost cause, but he’s still too attached to it to let it go.

in classic at least, daniil is absolutely terrible at lying. most autistic people either are not good at lying, or feel uncomfortable or anxious with having to lie. when he’s asked by yulia and the kids in the polyhedron to lie to block (for different reasons) he’s clearly uncomfortable with the idea that it’ll work. and when it actually comes time to come up with a way to lie to block about why he needs five rifles, your options are to either buckle and tell him the truth, or simply say that you need them for “self-defense”. block believes that you’re not lying to him, but daniil can’t come up with any embeleshments to explain why he needs what he’s asking for.

Commander: Are you hiding something from me? Bachelor: No.

he comes across as naive to other characters. in classic, capella has a voiceline saying, “The Bachelor is not smart. Intelligent, yes… but not smart.” in Pathologic 2, Daniil complains that Aglaya takes him for “a useless dreamer”. he’s also easily used by the Kains to fulfill their endgame in classic.

my final, and absolute favorite: he takes things way too literally. autistic people (and adhd people, from my understanding) have a hard time differentiating jokes and sarcasm. so my favorite moment in marble nest is a case of him taking that earlier advice - to “take heart” literally, by bringing the tragedians a literal human heart:

Tragedian: Oh… Excellency. What a sordid sight! Sorry for underestimating you. You definitely do have… how shall I put it… a creative touch. But this is pure madness. You can’t take things so literally! Daniil: You wanted me to come back to you with an open heart. Well, here I am. …It looked too fitting to be a coincidence.

your mind map, after this, updates to say “I misunderstood the tragedians.”

conclusion

people don’t stop being autistic with age and i think he’s a good example of what it’s like to be in your late 20s and be autistic. i’m sure i missed things as i haven’t finished haruspex route of classic yet and there may just be some other things he does or says that i missed! if anyone has anything to add they think fits i would love to know, thank you for your time :)

[darker-soft-starker]

Starker High School AU, Pt. 2 (Pt. 1, Pt. 3, Pt. 4, Pt. 5)

-----

Peter will admit that during he took an extended moment during his journey home to grieve the loss of his free afternoon, and indeed the impending headaches.

And the rest of his future, if he was honest.

Not that Peter was prone to melancholy by any means, but with this assignment his fate was officially sealed, there was no misunderstanding. He was going to fail this assignment. He was going to, for the first time in his academic career, be forced to submit garbage of a caliber worthy of Tony Stark. It will forever be a black mark on his academic record.

No respectable college is going to accept him after this. In fact, he might as well drop out of school now and hit up Mr Delmar for a job. All of his prep for his MIT application is as good as useless after this. Extracurriculars? Goodbye.

Because it’s confirmed.

He’s doomed.

Swaying with the motions of the train, Peter types a text to Ned, the only person who might provide him with some much needed sympathy.

>  I’m doomed >  paired w/stark for an assignment lollllllllll.  >  help

Maybe Peter could trade with Ned. Maybe he could plead with their teacher, for honest fear of his life and scholastic integrity. He wasn’t even exaggerating. In no known iteration of this universe could Peter amicably work with Tony Stark. It would be like Harry Potter sitting down for tea with Voldemort, or Frodo and Sauron chilling with a pint and a pipe in Bag End. 

It was unthinkable. Implausible. Laughable.

And Peter would laugh, were it anyone but him in this situation.

The feeling is unusual. Never had he found reason in his life to truly dislike anybody before, everyone could be redeemed or given the opportunity for penance. Natasha has said more than once that Peter would offer the devil himself a sandwich if he appeared. 

Tony Stark on the other hand? No sandwich for him.

Well, maybe a slice of bread. A stale one.

While he waits for Ned to responds he catches sight of his injured reflection in the train window, which is admittedly pretty gnarly. Even with his hood drawn up, there was a noticeable berth allocated to him in the busy carriage between himself and the other passengers.

< sux. can I have ur lego hogwarts if u die?

> dude :( pity me.

< lol. so, can i?

Peter sighs.

> sure. Look after May for me, bro. delete my internet history.

< deal. godspeed

Pocketing his phone, Peter wonders if it’s too late to take up praying.

---

By the time he’s back in his apartment his mood has managed to swing back up.

Tony Stark is not going to be the arbiter of Peter’s fate. Hell no. He’s smart, he’s creative and hardworking - it isn’t up to anybody but Peter to determine his outcomes. If he has to do the assignment with Stark then he will. And he will work his hardest. 

If he has to do it sharing the credit with Stark, well, Peter knows a concession when he sees one.

No matter how reluctant he is.

But he powers through it, like ripping off a bandaid. It’s fine! He’s a Parker and he’s come this far in life already against ill, Parker-like odds. What was being paired for one assignment with someone who escaped the nearest hellmouth? 

It’ll be fine. 

Probably.

Not letting himself linger on his fears, Peter clears out his previous plans of going on a YouTube spiral and eating sour gummies until his teeth stick, instead utilising the time to get his foot in and and begins prepping for the assignment. Cursory, preliminary research at first, before the inevitable deep dive begins.

Neanderthal, Peter scoffs, mad all over again. Who is Stark to call Peter a neanderthal? He’s second in his class. He’s a straight A student. He likes school.

And as much as he is moderately skilled in, and enjoys JV, it’s not like he received his scholarship to study at Midtown based on his physical prowess.

The graze on his cheek that stings every time he yawns is proof of that.

Stark can eat his entire ass and choke on it, he thinks darkly, as he continues his research. He doesn’t know the first thing about Peter.

The data is sobering as he delves into job listings and statistics of his projected salary in a three year margin. This is really what his teachers earn? Wow. Depressing.

The contrast of expected salary versus the forecast of steep student loans is disheartening further still.

Teaching quietly slips from second to third on his list of ideal occupations.

Turning on a playlist on his phone, Peter continues to compile notes, amassing a truly gargantuan amount of tabs on his browser. His computer, old enough to be on its’ last teeth, whirrs loudly in protest.

It’s not until his room goes dark that he thinks to check the time.

Ah, shit. It’s nearly six.

Peter pauses. Should he tidy up the apartment?

...Nah, no point in breaking a sweat for Stark.

He continues typing. Then he hesitates, fingers suspended in mid-air. 

But what if Stark sees his unfolded laundry out on the dining table and publicly shames him for his old-but-comfortable Bulbasaur themed boxer shorts?

Goddamnit.

---

A quick, cursory clean ensues and leaves a relatively orderly Parker apartment. No freshly laundered underwear is in sight.

Peter wraps up just a few minutes before six. Right on time.

Taking a seat at the now clear dining table Peter drums his fingers on the surface and waits.

And waits.

And waits.

---

He knows when Tony finally arrives when he hears the sound of a car pulling up outside his apartment block. The riffs of a Roxette remix can be heard playing loudly  from the ground to the seventh floor of his apartment, the bass so thunderous it reverberates the windows all the way up to his floor.

Drumming his fingers on the kitchen table, Peter checks the wall clock again. It’s nearly seven.

Tony’s late.

Not that Peter is particularly affected with surprise that Tony is incapable of following basic instructions, but still. Really? Really?

By the time there is a knock on his door, Peter is already before it, his arms crossed over his chest and a scowl on his face. Every second between Tony pulling up and his ascent to Peter’s floor has him positively fuming. He can’t believe how this day played out. It started with such promise. He had such innocuous, but high hopes.

Clearly, he miscalculated.

Feeling a touch petty, he waits to answer, listening to Stark knock a second and then a third, more insistent time before he rouses enough calm to open the door.

He instantly regrets it when he does. 

Tony’s expression is curious one as he breezes right passed Peter without waiting for further invitation. There’s a smudge of something dark on his brow, his otherwise white undershirt smeared in dark stains.

Peter watches incredulously as the other boy drops his backpack by the door with a thump.

“You’re late.”

He closes the door behind Tony and scowls at the other boys easy posture, hands shoved into his pockets, eyes taking in the apartment.

“I didn’t realise you lived all the way out in fucking Queens. Do you have any idea how bad traffic is at this time of day? Also, your elevator doesn’t work. I just climbed seven flights of stairs, where’s the hospitality?”

“Try earning it.”

The other boy rolls his eyes. “Like it’s worth my time.” He breezes past Peter and slides his leather jacket off his arms, tossing it atop of his backpack in the corner. “Look, I’m here now. Okay? You can unclench now. So, do I get a tour or what?”

“Or what. This wouldn’t have been an issue if we had just started straight after class like I said.”

“Oh I’m sorry,” Tony clutches his hands to his heart before gesturing to the room. “I didn’t realise I was interrupting your busy Friday night, Parker. You got a keg and the rest of the meatheads stashed away somewhere?”

Without waiting for a response, Tony wanders around the living room like a curious child in a new play room. His gaze inspects everything all at once, from peering at up close at the wall mounted photos and hovering his grubby hands over the oddments and knick-knacks speckled throughout the space.

Apprehensive, Peter can’t help but shadow him, afraid he just let loose a hurricane in a china shop.

Without asking, Tony picks up May’s old Magic 8-Ball and gives it a good shake. Peter’s fingers itch to reach over and stop him, but stops himself because then that would require actually making direct skin contact the other boy.

Not worth it.

“Cannot predict now. Huh,” Tony says to himself before placing the ball back in the wrong spot. 

They both watch silently as it rolls precariously close to the edge. 

“Anyways,” Tony helps himself to an armchair, lounging back and spreading his legs wide. “I know your long-term memory is probably as defective as the rest of you, so don’t strain yourself recalling that I had other priorities.”

“Like what?”

“Like literally anything that isn’t being around you,” the other boy grins. “Now, are we doing this thing, or did you invite me over so you could bitch at me?”

“I didn’t invite you,” Peter grumbles, swiping his notebook from the dining table before sitting on the sofa, as far away from Stark as possible. Shifting, he takes his phone from his pocket and opens the notes he’d taken earlier.

“So, I cross referenced some websites and current job listings,” Peter scrolls through his research, adjusting his glasses as they slip down his nose. “Assuming you have no savings, we’re looking at an average of sixty-thousand per annum based on my salary alone. The average rent in --”

“-- Uh, why are we assuming I have no savings?”

"Because... we’re being realistic?”

Tony springs to his feet and paces across the living room.

“Well,” he says, gesturing to Peter, “if we’re being realistic, does having no savings also that mean I have no debt -- or are you paying off two student loans on your salary?”

“I don’t --”

“Do we have car loans? Health insurance?”

“Wait, slow your roll, Stark. I haven’t yet --”

“-- Of course you haven’t. I mean really, Parker, do you ever think ahead? You should try it, we do have a baby on the way, you know.” Tony clicks his fingers and points at Peter. “Oh, names! I want to call it Molly.”

“As in the drug?” 

“No, as in Ringwald. Anyhoo, seeing as only one of us has the intellectual capacity to construct a budget,” Tony gestures to himself, “that would be me, consider maybe that I spent my savings paying off my student loans and bought a car for me and Miss Molly, leaving you with just your own stagnant debt. Happy?”

“Thrilled,” he says through clenched teeth, feeling utterly steamrolled. “But we’re not calling the baby Molly.”

“Yes, we are. Think of all the great nicknames. Hey wait,” Tony pauses in his pacing, “are your parents going to be home soon?”

It was in that moment Peters world narrows down to one, botched cosmic joke.

Turning his gaze heavenwards, Peter prays silently for mercy. What did he do to deserve this. This is all his bad karma come at once. This is the bad place.

“Ah, no,” he replies, eyes widening. “No, my parents are not going to be home soon.”

“Cool. Lucky you.”

Oblivious to Peter’s existential turmoil, Tony resumes his patrol through the living room, picking up a frame on the mantle. It houses an old photo of Ben, May and a young, bespectacled Peter. 

It is one of the more embarrassing immortalisations of his younger self, eleven-years old and grinning widely, bearing his silver braces to the camera as he holds up a science fair trophy, curls wild and untamed.

Oh god. That was exactly what Peter needed on this unholy day - Tony Stark in his living room, witnessing Peter in his prepubescent glory. 

Quick, create a diversion.

“So, as I was saying,” he says loudly, “rent is reasonably affordable with a sixty-thousand budget in --”

“Who’s the babe?” Tony points to a younger Aunt May in the photo.

Peter gets to his feet and removes the frame from Tony’s grasp. He glowers as he places it back on the mantle. 

“No one you would have a chance with. Can you stay focused? Like, are you physically capable of it?”

“Okay, calm down,” Tony holds his hands up in surrender. “You’ve got a lot of anger for someone so vertically challenged, you know that, shortstack?” 

“Focus, dumbass.”

“I’m focused! Let’s see, we’ve established that I am excellent at managing my money. You have a shitty job and a shitty salary, and apparently my imaginary future self has terrible taste in men. So. Have I got that right? Where are we living?”

“Queens. LIC has some one bed, one baths that could be affordable.”

“Uh, rewind. Going to have to eighty-six that - I am not living in Queens.”

Peter stares at him.

Tony rubs his hands over his face and sighs. “Fine, whatever. But I want a Pontiac Firebird in this imaginary life if I have to deal with you.”

“For someone so keen on getting away you’re doing your best to prolong this experience. It’s literally painful.”

“Well, I just like to see you get all riled up, Princess,” Tony grins, leaning back against the mantle and folding his arms over his chest. “You have this vein that bulges on your forehead when you’re mad. Makes you look like a pitbull.”

Peter swallows the particularly acidic retort sitting on his tongue and tries not to let Tony’s words sting. Be the bigger man, Ben used to say. As difficult as it is to channel even a modicum of the mans’ eternal patience, Peter takes a deep breath and reminds himself to stay focused. The less he gets sidetracked by Tony’s fuckery, the sooner it’s over.

He mentions the next part with unease. 

“...Miss Ahn said that we need references and should do field research. Speak to realtors. Ask people who have a similar lifestyle and budget.”

The look that comes over the other boys face is one of unequivocal revulsion. Peter can relate. The thought of having to spend more time with this guy makes his stomach turn.

“Well, Parker, any bright ideas who we can ask?”

The hinges of the front door squeaks before Peter can respond.

Moments after, Aunt May walks into the living room, placing her bag down on the dining table. She looks between the two boys curiously.

“Hey, Pete,” she comes to his side to squeezes his shoulder. “Who do we have here?”

Tony rushes over with his hand outstretched, an eager grin on his face. 

“Tony Stark, ma’am. It’s a pleasure to meet you.”

“Oh, ah, okay, well,” May laughs as he enthusiastically shakes her hand. Her eyes are soft as Tony smiles brightly at her. “Nice to meet you too, Tony. I’m May, Peter’s aunt. Are you... friends with Peter?”

Peter snorts. 

“Definitely not. We just have an assignment --”

“-- Great friends, actually,” Tony talks over him, taking a seat beside Peter on the sofa. To Peter’s utter disgust, the other boy puts an arm around his shoulders, squeezing his bicep encouragingly. “Aren’t we, Pete? Hmm? Best buds. We go way back.”

Peter freezes, feeling the line of heat from Tony’s against his side, the weight of his arm on his body. 

Eyes widening, he feels his skin crawl. 

“That’s sweet,” May smiles, putting her hair up in a loose, messy bun. “Well, I don’t know about you boys, but I’m starving. I’m ordering pizza, Friday special. You should stay for dinner, Tony.”

Tony places his free hand on his chest.

“I would be honoured.”

May looks at Tony strangely before retreating to the kitchen to retrieve the menus.

As soon as she’s out of sight Tony takes his arm off Peter and quickly shifts away from him like he’s been burned. 

“Dude,” Peter whispers, bewildered. “What the fuck?”

“Oh my god,” Tony whispers, shuddering as his face scrunches up in disgust. “I’m going to have to pour scalding hot water on all the places your skin just touched me. Ugh, I feel like I just touched toe fungus.”

Peter slaps his arm.

“What is wrong with you?”

Tony backhands Peter’s arm in retaliation and then shudders all over again.

“Your aunt is crazy hot, okay, I couldn’t help myself. It was an instinctual reaction. Is she taken? C’mon. Vindicate me.” 

“I’ll eviscerate you --”

“-- I mean, clearly she married into the family, she doesn’t share your unfortunate phenotype, but I didn’t see a ring on her finger. So? Yes or no?”

“You’re unbelievable,” Peter hisses as his aunt comes back in. “She’s not available to you. Not now, not ever.”

“But she is available?”

“Don’t even, Stark. You’re like, sixteen. Don’t you have any shame?”

Tony smiles, as she nears. “Not a shred.”

“So,” May waves a menu at them. “You boys happy with pepperoni?”

Closing his eyes, Peter wishes for death.

As fate would have it, he gets pepperoni instead.

-----

If you had ever told Peter that he would be sitting down for dinner with his Aunt and a dirt-streaked Tony Stark, he would have laughed.

And if Peter were outside himself he would probably find the sharing of pizza and soda over their plastic, chequered table-cloth comical -- in that uncanny, Dogs Playing Poker kind of way. But in reality there was nothing funny about the discomfort of having Tony in his personal space or the heavy, suffocating tension that has removed the air from the room. 

The entire time Tony has been hamming it up, cracking jokes with his aunt, complimenting her on the decor, asking what she does for work. Peter doesn’t know if he’s being sweet to May for the purpose of buttering her up, or, given the wealth of his family in contrast to the Parkers, if he’s being cruelly facetious. 

Nonetheless, Peter has felt on edge. It’s disconcerting, is what it is. Every single movement Tony makes, every time he opens his mouth -- frequently to sweet-talk his aunt -- has Peter’s anxiety standing at attention, hyperaware of everything the other boy does.

He’s beginning to feel like a meerkat whose den has been invaded by a lion.

Through the course of a single meal Peter’s attention moves from the sky to the floor. There is no grace or higher power that is coming to save him from this profound, unusual torture. 

So he focuses his hopes to the south, seeing through their tiny, cramped, dinner table, past bargaining. He’s willing to trade his soul to end it all. Surely some wayward being from hell would come to his rescue. 

May has Peter’s chin between her fingers. She turns it this way and that, inspecting his injuries.

“What happened this time, bubby?” She frowns, brow furrowing. “You look like you got beat up.”

Peter, very aware of Tony’s amused gaze on them, gently pulls away from her grasp. He smiles placatingly and picks at his pizza slice. God he’s never going to live this down.

“Training accident. It’s okay, I feel fine. ‘Tis but a scratch,” he brings himself to joke.

“You sure?”

“Yep.”

She leans in to kiss his cheek, carefully avoiding the fresh scabs and injured flesh. “God, you bruise like a peach. Be careful, baby, you’re our money maker,” she laughs. “What about you Tony, do you play football?”

Tony, who is mid way through chewing on a mouthful of pizza, momentarily chokes, beating his chest with his fist to swallow down the obstruction.

“Uh, no,” Tony gulps, wiping his mouth with a napkin. “Nope. No recreational sports for me. Can’t.” He gestures to his chest and sighs heavily. “Asthma.”

Peter sips his coke and rolls his eyes, knowing full well there’s a half-empty pack of Marlboro Light’s in the pocket of Tony’s jeans. Asthma. What a schmuck.

“That’s a shame. Do you boys have classes together?”

Unfortunately, Peter thinks.

The other boy seems to have the same thought, as he glares at Peter from over the table. When he picks up his can of coke, he gives Peter the finger outside of May’s eye-line.

“That’s why Tony’s here,” Peter twists his napkin in his grip. “We have an econ assignment together on microeconomics. Teach says Tony’s destined to be on welfare.”

Tony leans in, chin rested on his hand. He addresses May but his stare, dark and odious, rests on Peter.

“Not accurate. Stay-at-home parent, actually. One might say that is the most important job of all. Wouldn’t you agree, May?”

She raises her Coke.

“Hear, hear.”

Tony grins roguishly, the same grin he gave the girls at the lockers earlier. “Petey here was just saying that we should ask you about your experience running a household on a single salary. We’d love to have you as a reference.”

“Was I saying that?” Peter narrows his eyes. “I can’t remember.”

Tony kicks him under the table. The hit lands right in his knee cap.

Wincing, Peter kicks back, satisfied when the other boy bites his lip to hold back a pained groan.

“Yeah, well, not surprising,” Tony says airily, waving his hand. “Hit your head today, didn’t you? Maybe you should get all that damage looked into.”

The napkin rips in Peter’s grasp.

“Maybe you should go f--”

“I’d be more than happy to help with your assignment, boys,” May cuts in.

Whatever snide reply he has in his mouth instantly wilts when he looks over to his Aunt. She looks...pleased. Delighted, almost. Her eyes under the dull, yellow kitchen light seem to get warmer, and her smile is small but softens around the edges.

Instantly, Peter feels like the worst person in the world. Of course May would be the best person to ask. She does so much for him, the least he can do is set his pride aside for one moment to make her feel good about how hard she works for their life.

He reaches over to squeeze her hand, smiling as gratitude swells unexpectedly in his chest.

“Thanks, May. That would be great.”

Across the table, a smug Tony looks like the cat who got the cream. 

Without warning, Peter’s chest goes hot with contempt, his fingernails dig into his palm. He’s not sure he’s ever met anyone he couldn’t like, until now.

I hate you, Peter mouths while May busies herself with rounding up the pizza boxes.

Kiss my ass, Tony mouths back. 

In an instant his expression flips from contemptuous to angelic when he stands and offers to help May clean up.

Peter stands too, sparing a disdainful glance to the floor. Turns out not even the devil was willing to give him a hand.

Natasha was right. It’s going to end in murder.

---

Peter walks Tony to the door after dinner to say goodbye to his ‘friend’. Following him into the hall, Peter closes the door behind them.

“What do you want, Parker?” Tony asks wearily, retrieving a cigarette from his pocket. “I’m trying to make a getaway here.”

Peter crosses his arms over his chest. “Don’t do that with my aunt. I’m not joking, asshole. It’s not cool.”

“Relax, princess,” Tony rolls his eyes, fishing for his lighter in his backpack. “I’m not actually interested. Just trying to get under your skin. Worked, see? You’re easy like that. Hey, why do you live with your aunt anyways?”

“None of your business,” he frowns as Tony holds one hand up in surrender and lights his cigarette with the other. “Dude, you can’t smoke in here.”

“Can’t, shouldn’t, gonna. By the way, you’ve got sauce on your chin, it’s very distracting.”

Peter wipes at it without thinking. When he pulls it away there is indeed a smear of red sauce on his hand.

Tony walks backwards down the hall and exhales a cloud of smoke, waving in a sardonic imitation of a farewell.

“See you Monday, bubby.”

Peter doesn’t bother with a response, too tired from the week, exhausted by this whole darn day, and it’s not like the other boy cares what he has to say anyway. He takes a moment to swallow his anger before he heads back inside, sighing. 

Well, at least he has an entire weekend free of Stark to look forward to.

May looks at him curiously when he reemerges, but says nothing. He considers for a moment about heading to his bedroom and playing a video game to disassociate - but then, suddenly, remembers her smile earlier, and how alone she looks now. A surge of affection hits him right beneath his breastbone.

He checks his watch and then catches her eye.  Tilting his head towards the living room, he says, “Hey. You wanna eat some ice cream and watch some Colbert before bed?”

She smiles just like she did earlier and kisses his cheek. “Sounds nice, Pete.”

Maybe the whole day wasn’t lost.

As May heads to the sofa and switches the TV on, Peter catches sight of the Magic 8-Ball from the corner of his eye. He walks over and gives it a shake.

Outlook good.

*

*

----

tagging: @bylerboyfriends @ravens-starker-stuff, @starker-rays, @ironspiderstarker, @notfor-temporaryuse, @tabbycat1220, @sugarfreecult, @rebel13lion39, @muse-of-gods

[giuliafc]

Betrayal Chapter 7: Mors tua vita mea

<< 1 -- 2 -- 3 -- 4 -- 5 -- 6 -- 7: Ao3 || FFN -- 8 >>

Written by: JuliaFC

Beta: Agrestebug and myimaginationflows

Summary: Did you think we'd heard the end of Lila? No sir… she's back. And her plan is… scary!

Disclaimer: This story is based on characters and situations created and owned by (c) Thomas Astruc, TS1 Bouygues, Disney Channel, Zagtoon, Toei Animation. No money is being made and no copyright or trademark infringement is intended.

Written for the "Snippet July" challenge of the Miraculous Fanworks Discord server @miraculousfanworks AND for LadyNoir July @ladynoirjuly Day 18 — Pipe-dream/can't transform. Let me know what you think!

oOoOoOoOoOo

Adrien: [M'lady? Have you forgotten about Prince Ali's engagement ceremony? I'm waiting for you at the Town Hall. Please be quick, Chloé sat next to me since you weren't here.]

Adrien: [M'lady? Are you alright? Haven't heard from you for ages. Please call me as soon as you can.]

Adrien: [Marinette? I'm getting really worried now… your mum and dad also haven't heard from you, nor Alya. Where are you? Chloé won't leave me alone!]

Alya: [Girl? Adrien is very worried, where are you? I'm getting worried too…]

At the bottom of the Seine, a phone beeped with a message received and then switched itself off.

oOoOoOoOoOo

Marinette opened her eyes, a sharp pain spreading from the back of her head. She tried to say something but all she could let out was a muffled: "Mhhhf".

"Oh, you woke up. Alla buon'ora!(1)"

Marinette's eyes widened. She wiggled, desperately trying to move, but her body failed to follow her brain's request. That's when she realised she was tied up.

"Wiggling like the slimy little worm you are." The green in Lila's eyes seemed to sparkle as she smirked. She heard Marinette mhhhf'ing some more and her smirk widened. "So good that finally you've been reduced to the silence you deserve."

Marinette could hardly breathe. What happened? She remembered reading Adrien's text message that the place for the ceremony had changed and to meet him at some luxury boat moored at Port Debilly. She had reached the place, a strange man had let her in and…then nothing. The taste of the cloth that had been stuck into her mouth was overwhelming her. Her skin was all tensed around the tape that shut her mouth.

"Is she awake, sweetie?" The man who'd let her in the boat looked in from the door.

"She is, Jacques. Leave us alone a little longer. Then she'll be all yours," said Lila looking at him and the man smirked before closing the door behind him.

Marinette's heart went into overdrive.

"Amazing what you can achieve with flattery." Lila looked at her again, showing her a website that displayed the message she received from Adrien earlier. "And amazing what you can find on the internet. It was so easy…just flattering the right people and I got access to this fake SMS website. And Jacques…is the perfect pawn. He thinks I'll help him sign an exclusivity deal with Prince Ali for his cruising boats. Che imbecille. (2)" She cackled. "And now, it's the end of you. You won't prevent me from achieving my goals again." She slammed her hands on the table in front of her. "All my plans always ended up being no more than pipe-dreams, all because of you! I HATE you, Marinette. You'll pay for all the tears I've shed on my pillow at night."

Marinette wanted to tell Lila that this was going too far. This was much worse than threatening. This was kidnapping. Attempted murder. This was a criminal offence. As annoying and evil as Lila had always been, Marinette didn't expect that she would fall this low. But she couldn't say anything, she could only struggle more with the knots that were tying her arms and hands.

"Pointless of you to try to open those knots," said Lila when she saw her struggling with it. "Jacques was a sailor, he's an expert at knots of any kind. You won't free yourself. Whatever you do. And no superhero will find you here. Jacques will stay, to make sure nobody finds you until Papillon comes back." She patted softly on her cheek. "Yes, Marinette. Papillon wants you spared, to akumatise you. He thinks you'd be his best akuma. Un altro imbecille (3). You must die, and I will make sure you will, this time. This time you won't ruin my plans. I'll be the winner at the end and the real pipe-dream will be yours!" Her face lit up with an eerie light as she sneered. "Mors tua, vita mea(4), after all. You brought this on yourself."

Cackling, she moved to the door. "Jacques? I'm done with her. I'll go to Prince Ali's ceremony now, give me some time to talk to him, okay?"

"I'll make sure the cat won't find her, sweetie. Don't worry."

A wave of disgust shook Marinette's gut when Lila gave the man a quick peck on the lips. But as Lila closed the door behind her and the man kept staring at where she left dreamily, Tikki popped out of her shirt and looked at her with a determined frown.

"Don't worry, Marinette. We'll figure out something!"

All Marinette could do was dart her gaze towards one of the windows of the boat, but Tikki shook her head.

"I won't leave you alone."

Marinette closed her eyes and lowered her head.

oOoOoOoOoOo

"Any sign of her, Rena?" said Chat Noir to his communicator.

Chloé had been more clingy than she used to be in the bad times, but as soon as he'd managed to get rid of her, he transformed and started looking for Marinette. The ceremony for Prince Ali's engagement hadn't even started yet, but he didn't give a damn. It was unusual of Marinette to not contact anyone for hours, and his gut feeling told him she was in danger.

"No sign of her anywhere. She won't even answer her bugphone."

Chat Noir sighed. "I know. I've been calling her non stop for hours on both phones. I have a nasty feeling about this."

Carapace appeared near Rena on her communicator. "Don't worry, dude. We'll find her," he said before Rena hung up.

"Hope so, bro." Chat Noir looked at his baton with concern. It felt like a useless exercise to look for her in superhero form. Wherever she was, it wasn't in full sight. There was only one other thing he could do. He opened his communicator again and dialed Nathalie's number.

To be continued… Day 19

-------------------------------

Notes:

Alla buon'ora = At bloody last! (Italian)

Che imbecille = What an idiot (Italian)

Un altro imbecille = Another idiot (Italian)

Mors Tua Vita Mea = Your death, my life (Latin)

-------------------------------

Author's Note

Well.. so now you know. Lila wasn't seething in the distance for no reason at the end of the other chapter. Marinette has pushed her buttons a little too much and… well, she may have gone a bit extreme but, why not?

I hope you liked it and will leave me a comment. You know that comments are my bread and butter!

Until tomorrow, bug out!

[writing-with-olive]

Editing tips x2

These are like, first steps to start editing. I’ve got stuff that go into ways to tackle making actual changes under the tag #developmental editing

+++++

If you can, once you finish your first draft, wait. Give it at least some time before you come back and start to edit.

The reason this is helpful is because it gives you the distance to see your story more wholistically and makes it easier to be objective when making edits and changes - especially big ones. (this is why lots of big-name authors wait)

How long should you let your draft sit? 

This is going to depend on the draft. If it’s super rough and you already have a sense for what you need to fix, the wait might be shorter. Letting a messy draft sit for too long and getting too distanced from it can mean it’s harder to get back in your head what you were going for, and what you’re trying to work toward, and if your POV is messy, it can be hard to get back in your MC’s head.

If you finish your draft feeling pretty good about it, like it’s a solid draft, you may want to let it sit for longer, as it will help you gain more objectivity about your work, and it will be fresher when you come back to it.

As a general ballpark, many authors say at the bare minimum give it a week or two. I had a fairly messy draft and took about five weeks (in retrospect, four probably would have been more ideal). If you can manage it, some authors suggest anywhere from 3-6 months. 

During the time you’re letting your draft sit, you can do other things. I planned out another book and did the bulk of the worldbuilding for it. Other things you can do include: work on building your author platform, focusing on other major Life things so they won’t be as pressing when you come back to writing, continue working on other WIPs if you have multiple, etc.

What’s step one after the wait time is over?

DO NOT GO BACK INTO YOUR MANUSCRIPT AND START DELETING ALL THE CRUTCH WORDS SOME WRITING SITE TOLD YOU TO AVOID YOU ARE NOT ON THAT STEP YET*

This is useless at this step and honestly a waste of your time. You’re going to need to do more substancial edits that involve moving around/rewriting/taking out chunks of your story, and surface-level edits are the equivilant of frosting an uncooked cake - it looks pretty, but it’s still gonna taste like shit and if you look too closely you can see it’s still a mess underneath.

*the word-by-word stuff comes in during line/copy edits, which come AFTER you’ve finished all of your developmental edits

Do not worry it will get better.

With that out of the way, step one is, if you can, get a printed out version of your book. I got mine printed and spiral-bound at Staples through their website and then picked it up when they said it was ready. Make sure to pick the black-and-white option wherever you’re getting your WIP printed because the default is probably going to be color, and it’s like three times the price.

When you’re picking the file you want them to print, make sure you’ve got the margins and spacing are big enough that you can make notes to yourself. Yes, it will be a little bit more expensive, but it makes it so much more usable.

The reason you want a printed out version consists of a couple different facets:

1 - it’s damn satisfying and everyone deserves to see how much work they’ve put into the first draft

2 - it keeps you from doing all those little time consuming surface edits when that’s not really the focus

3 - developmental edits are fairly intensive and it can get really overwhelming/confusing very fast if it’s all digital

4 - less eye fatigue

5 - okay but seriously it’s amazing how much of a difference it makes

++++

I know this post was more vague than usual about the editing process, but I figured a few concrete steps never hurt anyone. If you want more of a guide on how to really dig into developmental edits and going about big changes, definitely check out my other posts (#editing and #developmental editing should pull up all the relevant stuff), and also check out Alexa Donne’s youtube channel because she seriously knows her shit

[lady-divine-writes]

Kurtbastian Week 2020 - “War of the Roses” (Rated M)

Summary: Kurt suspects that his husband may be cheating on him. But instead of taking the mature route of talking with him, he calls up a radio talk show that has a unique way of uncovering the truth. (2236 words)

Notes: Inspired by a talk show I used to listen to by the same name. Written for the @kbweek2020 Day 5 prompt 'angst', but not quite as angsty as you might imagine.

Read on AO3.

“War, War, War, War of the Roses!”

The pre-recorded announcement, surrounded by loud fanfare, blares through Kurt’s phone. He moves it away from his ear before the d.j. follows with: “It’s War of the Roses day on Magic 92.5! Hop on the website, send us a text, or call and leave us a message, and you, too, may be featured on War of the Roses! Today, we have Kurt on the line, ready to share the troubling story of him and his husband Sebastian. Kurt - thank you for joining us.”

“Th-thank you for having me,” Kurt replies, hating the way his voice sounds, the way it rattles around his dry throat. Hating what he’s doing. Hating that he gave the show their real names! What an imbecile he is! People he knows listen to this show! His boss Isabelle listens to this show! She must be listening now because he hears a beep over the line - a sign that another call is trying to wedge its way in. When he doesn’t answer it, it disconnects with a chunky bwap-bwap! A second later, messages start flooding his email, which he left open on the laptop in front of him. And not just from Isabelle. From Rachel, Mercedes, Santana, Brittany, Chase …

Kurt lifts a hand and closes the lid, shutting them out.

Oh boy. 

He’s only been on the phone for 30 seconds and he’s already made a mess of things.

“Kurt,” the d.j. says, “why don’t you start by telling us why you contacted us? How can we help you?”

Kurt sighs. I contacted you because I’m stupid, he thinks. And insecure. And, frankly, I should hang up right now and put my phone in the freezer for safekeeping before I do anything else stupid. “I … I think my husband might be cheating on me.”

Canned ooo’ing follows his admission, and if he didn’t regret this decision before, he certainly regrets it now. He can’t stand the idea that they’re using this situation that’s been keeping him up at night as the punchline of a joke. But he can’t blame them. He did this. There are other ways to go about this that he should have considered first. Counseling. Private investigators. Honest and open communication with his spouse. But for some reason, when his husband got up early and left for work without waking Kurt for a goodbye kiss for the eighth day in a row, Kurt broke. If his marriage isn’t working, if they’re headed for Splitsville, Kurt needs to know today. 

Now.

Sooner, if possible.

And that’s when he leaped for his cell phone and made this ill-advised call.

Kurt didn’t think there was anything wrong with his marriage. He thought they were happy – blissfully so. But for the past few days, things have gotten odd between them. Strained. And Kurt doesn’t know why. He needs to find out.

Lucky for him (depending on how you look at it), the radio program had a last-minute cancellation. The person who was scheduled to be on this morning decided to take matters into their own hands and run their unfaithful spouse over with a Cadillac.

A Cadillac that wasn’t theirs to begin with.

The station called him practically a second after he got off the phone with their answering machine.

“And why do you think your husband might be cheating on you?” the female co-host asks in a voice sympathetic from years of practice.

“Well … he’s been avoiding me.” Kurt winces at that weak excuse. To be fair, Sebastian’s firm recently landed a huge client - their first of this caliber in years. And since one of his partners is out on maternity leave, the job of wining and dining had fallen on Sebastian’s shoulders - a task he hasn’t performed in close to a decade; one he never liked much, especially after he and Kurt got married since it kept him away from home. “But on top of that,” he says, leaving that pertinent information out, “he’s been talking a lot about some guy named Martin.”

“Really?” the d.j. says, working hard to make this revelation sound like the scandal of the century since Kurt isn’t giving them much to work with. “And what has he been saying about Martin?”

“He’s been very complimentary about the job Martin has been doing down at the office.” Another wince. “A-and my husband isn’t normally the kind to hand out compliments. Plus, they’ve been working a lot of late nights - meetings, overtime, all last minute, that sort of thing.”

“Do you think Martin is doing something other than working that your husband might actually be complimenting him on?”

“Maybe,” Kurt says meekly, his heart going from ache to break. He hadn’t put those thoughts into words before today, hadn’t even texted them to his closest confidants now crowding his inbox. This is the first time he’s getting it off his chest … and he’s doing it to millions of people he doesn’t know.

He can hear Sebastian's voice in his head, laughing and saying, "Smart, Kurt. Very smart."

“Alright! Let’s get Sebastian on the phone and find out what’s going on once and for all!”

“Okay,” Kurt mumbles, covering the fact that the host's apparent enthusiasm to destroy Kurt's life put him on the verge of throwing up.

“What we’re going to do (for those of you who don’t know how this works) is offer Sebastian a dozen romantic roses to send free of charge to the person of his choice," the d.j. explains. 

"Let’s hope he says Kurt,” his co-host adds.

“Yes,” Kurt says, and very unlike him, he begins to pray. 

He prays Sebastian doesn’t answer the phone.

He prays Sebastian's secretary answers instead and tells them to send the roses to Kurt, Sebastian’s one true love. Kurt would accept that, hearing it second hand. That would be fine. Hearing it from Sebastian's secretary would be almost like hearing it from Sebastian. She’s a trustworthy soul, not inclined to cover for her boss.

He thinks.

Most of all, he prays that no matter who answers, no matter what happens, he’s wrong.

Ring-ring.

Ring-ring.

Ring-ring.

Click.

“Hello?”

Sebastian answers and Kurt’s stomach drops. In the time it takes Sebastian to complete that word, Kurt recalls the way most of these things end. Then his mind, which rarely seems to be on his side lately, conjures up how it might end for them.

This phone call and their entire marriage.

“Let’s get a name for the card, Sebastian. Who would you like us to send those roses to?”

“Let’s send them to Martin,” Kurt imagines his husband saying in a sly, seductive voice without pause. 

“Martin? And what message would you like to go with it?”

“Make it out to Captain Flexible. And write ‘last night was incredible. Here’s to many more late nights in the future’.”

That nightmare spell shatters when Kurt hears the d.j. say his husband's name. “Sebastian?”

“Yes?” Sebastian answers, already sounding annoyed. No one who calls Sebastian’s office line ever calls him by his first name except family. 

And Kurt.

“Hello! My name is Andrew, and I’ve just opened a new flower shop in Uptown called The Rose Knows.”

“Good for you,” Sebastian says dryly.

“We’re calling businesses in the Midtown area with our first promotion. We’re offering a free dozen romantic roses to send to the person of your choice. And all we ask in return is that you recommend our shop to your family, your friends, your co-workers …”

“You must have the wrong number. I don’t need anything for free. Put an ad in the Pennysaver like everyone else.”

"I'm not sure the Pennysaver's still in business."

"Not my problem."

Kurt bites his lower lip, grinning when he should be in tears, the nervous flip-flopping of his stomach, like pancakes on a griddle, causing his abs to cramp. But that’s his husband. His Sebastian. 

So far, so good.

“Come on,” the d.j. presses. “We’re a small business, just starting out. Do a man a favor. Have some community spirit.”

Sebastian sighs like this is so beneath him. He stays quiet, and Kurt knows he’s debating between messing with this guy or hanging up on him. But Sebastian probably figures he’s not going to shake him until he gives in. Besides, Sebastian is nothing if not a networker. A flower shop would be of no use to him, but who knows? “Let’s see. Who in my life deserves free roses? My mom’s birthday is coming up, so maybe I could send them to her. Or my sister. She just had a baby.”

“Oh! Congrats!”

“A-ha,” Sebastian says, the amount of unimpressed in his tone staggering. “There’s Martin Lewis ...”

“Martin?” the d.j. repeats, stressing the name subtly to put emphasis on Kurt’s concerns.

He doesn’t need to. Kurt’s heart has already stopped.

“Yeah," Sebastian says, his voice going softer. "Roses would definitely brighten up his office.”

“And why does Martin deserve roses?”

“Not that it's any of your business, but he’s been busting his ass helping me put together a huge proposal. Plus, his wife's in the hospital. He could bring them over to her."

"O-oh ..." The d.j. slips. That's probably the last thing he expected to hear.

"Or you know what?” Sebastian's voice drops a register, a hint of wickedness lacing between. “I could send them to this guy I absolutely worship."

"Oh really?" The d.j. recovers, seeing things start to turn around. The hosts definitely root for a happy ending, but it's no surprise that angst makes their ratings soar.

The cringe-factor of someone confessing unaware to their infidelities. 

Their listeners eat that up.

"Yup. The most amazing, sexiest man on the face of the planet. The man with the biggest heart of any human being I have ever met. The man I call the Energizer Bunny because he can go all. night. long. The man I hope to spend the rest of my life with.” 

Kurt hiccups. His heart, a useless lump in his chest, lodges in his throat. 

“And who would that---?” But before the d.j. can interject with their usual spiel, Sebastian continues. 

“But I think he’s worth more than a bouquet I got for free from some lame-ass radio talk show. What do you think, Kurt?”

The line goes dead.

Kurt has been listening to this radio program religiously for close to seven years, and to his knowledge, this has never happened before - a caller called out by their s.o. But the d.j. is on it because he immediately plays an old school ‘wah-wah’ noise to show that Kurt has been caught.

“H-how did you know?” Kurt asks.

“Because I know you, Kurt,” Sebastian says. “I know the kinds of things you do when you panic, and you mostly panic when you feel like people you love are going to leave you.”

“Yeah?” Kurt sniffs, a tear rolling down his cheek. Adding to his list of things he hates, he hates that Sebastian knows him so well. “And what do I do?”

“You kind of go off the deep end.” Sebastian chuckles, lighthearted and anxious, reminiscent of the night he asked Kurt to be his for the first time. “And I understand why. I’m sorry I’ve been distant lately. And I’m sorry about the late hours. I’ve just been caught up at work. I swear that’s all. But Kurt … can we talk about this when I get home? So I can look at you, in your eyes, and tell you that there’s no way in heaven or earth I would ever cheat on you? It took me a long time to win you over. There’s nothing that could persuade me to give you up, not for anyone.”

More sound effects - an awww followed by applause - play in the background as the d.j. and his co-host attempt to maintain control of the show.

“So … you don’t hate me?” Kurt asks.

“For which offense? Doubting me, my loyalty, and my love for you? Or airing our dirty laundry on the radio?”

“Uh …” Kurt awkwardly clears his throat. “All of the above?”

Sebastian sighs again. He sounds exhausted, but also like he can’t wait to get home and give Kurt a good ribbing. “Yes, babe. I forgive you.”

“Thanks. And I’m sorry about all this.”

“Apology accepted. I mean, what’re a few tawdry secrets among friends? Strangers? The barista down at Starbucks? My clients?”

“When should I expect you home?” Kurt rushes to cut him off, feeling more like a heel than he had before. “I know you have another big meeting and …”

“I’ll be home in about an hour. Wait … make that an hour and ten. I’m going to stop by a real flower shop and get you some roses. I think you’re overdue.”

“Really?” Kurt says, so astounded, so touched, he doesn’t hear the cheesy music the d.j. has started playing in the background.

“Yes, really. And Kurt?”

“Yes?”

“Be naked when I get there,” Sebastian growls.

The music stops, skidding to a halt with the sound of a record scratching. “Guys … uh … you’re still on the air.”

“Sorry not sorry there, champ,” Sebastian says and hangs up the call.

So does Kurt, shoving his phone in the freezer before the station tries to call back for a recap.

[assetsliterature]

7 ways to earn money while you sleep

: Creating money while you sleep. Whenever I get this in my mind, I always remember a quote from Warren buffet “if you don’t find a way to make money while you sleep, you will work until you die.”

First, let me tell you something. If you haven’t been heard this type of thing before, then believe these things:

Every way I share in this blog works.

Ways which can make money while you sleep are called: “Passive income.”

You cannot achieve multiple income sources just reading ``always remember “1 hour of doing > 5 hours of thinking.

Passive income :

Just imagine you wrote an ebook and publish it on Kindle, then people who are interested in your ebook will buy it, I know that selling a book on a huge level can be a hard task, but after doing this, you will make money while you sleep ;

This is just an example of ‘selling a digital product online.

~ Please scroll down if you don’t want intro~

Don’t let your area influence your mindset:

When I was living in my hostel, sometimes I used to to the terrace for stargazing at 3 a.m. with my best friend. One night he asked me to give my best advice to him because I haven’t got any advice for him in my mind.

But now I have one

:

You must have heard that- “the people you socialize with influence you so much.” That’s why you should be with people who have a positive mindset ~~

People around you affect your life in many ways. Let’s understand this with an example- “imagine you’re a student and your classmates don’t take their studies seriously, they only study one night before an exam, they bunk classes and waste so much time on not-so-good things.” Then there is a big chance that you can be like them too!

“Sociologists tell us the most introverted of people will influence 10,000 others in an average lifetime” every person you come in contact with is impacted in some way.

So, in my opinion, train yourself to not learn from negative minds. Stay with people you want to be. They will always lift you!

Remember: Just because someone is so confident at saying something doesn’t mean they are right!

How much you can earn:

Creating Passive income in your 20s is not something that everyone does, and for making your passive income source work good you have to put in some effort and time. You have to invest your money in it.

You can start with investing a little, and then you have to invest from your profit to make it work well.

So it depends on you; however, there are so many ways that have a huge income compared to another passive income source.

7 ways to create passive income for beginners :

1.Sell Digital Products:

If you’re a newbie, then this can be a good start for you!

There are a lot of things to create and sell online! I.e., ebooks, online courses, podcasts, graphic art bundles, photographs, music, templates, and so much more.

If you like blogging, you can create podcasts, ebooks, online courses related to your niche. Visit this for more examples of digital products_ If you’re interested in photography, you can sell your pictures at reasonable prices. Just pick your interest and go for it! It is not effortless, but you can learn and earn a lot from this!

Requirements?

All you need to have is a phone, a good internet connection, an urge to learn, and a lot of patience.

How much can you earn?

If you choose to write an ebook and you list it on Kindle for 1$, and you get one buyer a day, then you can earn 30$/month easily; stock photos earn approximately 25–45 cents per image, it depends on how many people are buying from you. The prices of online courses are usually 8$. If 1 thousand students buy your course, then you can get 624$ from it!

The more you work, the more you’ll earn but make sure to be creative and unique and don’t forget- “quality over quantity.”

# Don’t give up too easily if you’re here to earn.

2.Start a blog:

You may have heard that before, but it’s because it’s work. Even I was thinking about this so many times before starting this blog, and it’s good to have something on your bucket list to work on. When you are free, you can start a blog and give your six months in it.

Remember, it’s worth the hustle. Imagine if you started a blog one year ago. Do you believe you’re that useless that you can’t even get 50,000 views on a blog after working one year?

You can check this out if you’re interested in starting a blog.

Requirement:

I know a friend who is planning to start a blog. I asked him about his blueprint, and he said, “i will write and earn” he is stupid; I hope he is now seeing this right now, first learn about blogging in-depth and decide how much time you can give it, if you don’t have a plan then you will be lost for a moment, trust me I know that, been there.

These things are a must for starting a blog :

A niche

A map for both before posting an article and after posting an article

And expect the hard time will come, and if it will not, then it will.👁

How much you can earn:

Blogging is something a small blog can be a bug business after some time, many bloggers who just started blogging for a hobby leave their 9–5 from it,

It’s from google AdSense website;

Google will pay you according to your niche, but if you create a finance blog and you get 50,000 visits per month, you can make 15,012$/year.

# for blogging, you should learn daily and use google sheets for planning. You can download the sheets template from here

3.Join the affiliate program and use Pinterest:

You can join the Amazon affiliate program by just signing up to their website. By doing that, you can share your link, and if someone buys a product from your link, you’ll get paid depending on the product category and price.

So there is a problem in that like who will buy products from your link, I know, so that’s why you will use Pinterest,

If you don’t know about Pinterest, you can download Pinterest from any app store and use it.

You can share pics with links on Pinterest, and it’s called creating pins. So people can see your shared photos on Pinterest, and if someone sees a product they like, they will click on the pic, and then they will redirect to amazon.

Requirements: you don’t even need a laptop for it, just 1 hour a day and a little bit of Pinterest SEO, and it’s the best thing I love about Pinterest; it has so easy SEO compared to google.

How much you can earn?: amazon affiliate earning has no limits; you can increase it as you grow anywhere online. Once you achieve your target on Pinterest, you will thank you for just starting.

4.Rent your apartment on Airbnb:

Airbnb is a platform where someone can rent out their couch, room, or home.

Since hotel prices are so high in major cities, it’s been obvious that before booking hotels people check Airbnb.

If you have free space in Airbnb, you can try this out, and after some time, you can hire a cleaner and an assistant to manage everything.

Requirements: you have to live in a developed city, if you are like me then AirBnb is no use for you, but I will wait when my hometown has so many travelers all around the world XD!!

How much you can earn?: That depends on the level you are receiving orders from AirBnB, but for a try, you should register on it and try yourself how often you get a call !!

5.Write an ebook:

If you love the idea of digital products, then you can choose to write an ebook. In that case, you don’t need any investment. You can check this out for more category ideas !!

For creating book covers or any graphic, use Canava. You can choose something related to your studies or interest. But do remember this ‘getting readers for your book is not easy. Everything is hard, so choose your hard.

Requirements: just an idea about your ebook, map of where you will share your ebook(like Facebook groups. Forums related to your book title etc.), and you have to know good writing and your target audience but don’t worry and don’t afraid of failure, you should give 30 days to write your ebook and see what you can do

How much can you earn?: As I mentioned earlier, it depends on your readers. If you get 80 readers at a 1$ price per month, you get 80$/month without doing anything. It’s just a starting future. You will get more readers if you write valuable content for your target audience.

#write an ebook like you are talking to your friend about something

6 .Dropshipping:

Dropshipping is like selling products online, but you don’t store your product. You use a third-party supplier (like wholesaler or manufacturer) to fulfil product needs; I am sure you have heard Shopify’s name before from Shopify; you can create your dropshipping business; I highly recommend you check out Shopify website. If you use Shopify, don’t worry; no one will know if your eCommerce website is Shopify.

From here, you can learn how to start an eCommerce dropshipping store from scratch.

Requirements: A niche, a supply for your store, build your online store and then market your store after that to improve your store.

How much can you earn?: It’s just like a store but online, but it can be a lot more profitable than an offline store. You have to put a lot into it to succeed, so your earning cannot be defined by just typing and thinking !!

7. Create an app:

I am not saying that it’s not risky, but you can create an app that solves people problems or help them with something like if you use android, then you might have some problems and wish that there was a solution for it _

Some time ago, I was searching for friends interested in fantasy books, so i wish that I had an app where I can just find them ~

So if you can solve the problem from your app, then try it.

However, you have to invest in it first because everyone is not an android/ios app developer.

Requirements: an idea, some money to hire a developer, and a plan

How much you can earn?: when you upload your app on any app store, and user use it, you earn money, so it depends on what’s your planets

Like you can sell the app to every user or add a subscription fee or monetize your app.

So it will worth it when it achieves its meaning!

_____

Thanks so much for reading this article, I will share more business strategy in-depth and if you really want to earn from passive income please accept my suggestion and plan something and go for it because i know a lot of people who learn and never take actions ~~

You can subscribe to us if you love this topic!

Assets- Literature

Original article: https://www.assetsliterature.com/2021/05/how-does-cryptocurrency-work.html

You can check our website for other contents like this.

[bits4boys]

5 Reasons Why Your Website May Be Useless

Hey if I don’t tell you who will? Don’t take it personally as it’s not only you who’s been making these mistakes. So here goes and I really hope you can’t identify all the 5 reasons your website is useless in your business!

What We Need To Avoid

1. You used a site builder tool such as weebly, blogger, or web.com

Some people think that it’s great, it is so easy to build a site that way, it takes about 15 minutes and you have a fully functional site, right?

ermmm… Wrong

The reason why you shouldn’t use those tools is because there are millions of other people with your same basic layout. I was just looking at a few sites with people I have spoke with in the last 3-4 months who didn’t decide to use us to build their website and that is the solution they came up with.

Using a website builder, building a very very basic website that looks like it was built in the late 90′s early 2000′s. Do a search, find your competitors and look at their websites. Chances are they have a lot better site than you! Many of you have your own business.

Is starting a business and making it successful easy, is there a quickstart program to start making money overnight? No… Many of you should know better than to expect the quick and easy ways to actually work! You take your business seriously right? Your website is a virtual business card, that can change and update, it is an extension of your business and probably the most serious thing and way to generate more income!

2. Expecting that once your site is built, people will come!

Here is the next major issue. Just because you have a website now, doesn’t mean that it is worth anything, it doesn’t mean people are coming. So if you think of a website as something you can send your clients to, developing trust. Sure, that is an additional bonus of a website, but that is not what the purpose of a website is! You have to build up your traffic, whether it is through SEO or adwords or some kind of paid advertisement.

Having the best product in the world, or offering the best service there is, doesn’t mean people are going to buy it. You have to get it out there, push it, advertise, generate traffic!

3. Having a website that is not going to make you money.

Why would you even want a website unless you are going to make more money with it? This doesn’t mean you need to be selling products or services through your website, but it does mean that you should be getting leads with your website that will convert to sales! A simple home page, about us page, and contact page hardly is a website. The key here is to make money, right? If you aren’t generating a certain amount of leads or income through your website, you’re doing something wrong!

4. No meta tags, or on site optimization.

If you go to a site, look in the top of your browser. What is the title? If you see it say “Home” then they are not getting great results with their site. You need to optimize your site for search engines. That means having proper keywords, descriptions, titles, and alt tags for your website. Why is this important?

Your onsite optimization plays a huge role in getting your site found by targeted buyers. Some of you don’t even have meta tags. No keywords, no keywords in the title, no description. So even if for some very strange reason you do get ranked in google, yahoo, or bing, nobody is going to click on your site if you don’t even have a description! Now this isn’t going to give you massive amounts of traffic, but it is a necessity to do!

5. Because it looks horrible and like a school project!

Your website isn’t a place to test out new photoshop ideas that you are attempting to learn. It isn’t a place to try out all these different weird things that no one else will think is cool except you. I know it is fun learning new things, but this is your business!

I absolutely go insane if there is a problem with my server and it’s down for 15 minutes, in those 15 minutes I could have a very high profile website being sold, I take it very seriously. You should too! Swallow your pride, and brush up on your photoshop skills on a personal site or test site!

BONUS REASON: FLASH!!!

Never use flash, I know it looks cool and clean and it is really fun. Okay, so you might be thinking, why not use flash then? Because you won’t get the results you want in the search engines. It isn’t easy for a search engine to crawl through a flash site. AND, it is just too expensive to make changes.

If someone asks for even a flash banner, the price will typically be $1,000 minimum for the site with a flash banner. So you pay more, to have a site that won’t do well in search engines no matter what! Not only that, but how many times do YOU get a pop up that says your flash is outdated? How many people are out there that won’t even be able to VIEW your site?

You’re just losing out on business! And that sums it up guys and gals, I hope this was informative and beneficial to you. If you have any questions, feel free to email me back. In a follow-up post, I will be discussing the power of social networks for your business, and how to use them to get your website higher in the search engines!

The post 5 Reasons Why Your Website May Be Useless appeared first on Raising Status.

from 5 Reasons Why Your Website May Be Useless

[clarkfaint]

SEO Tasks You Should Do Daily

There are five simple tasks that you need to do daily to keep your site on top. 

Here they are:

1. You need to start off by managing your links. This involves making sure that none of your current links are dead, and you should also check if there are any sites linking to you that you don’t know about. If your site consists of a large number of links you should make sure that they aren’t getting out of control and get rid of anything that is no longer relevant. Also make sure that your links are sufficiently labelled to reflect the page that they link to.

2. Re-order your links, putting the best ones first. And putting them into categories if you have a high number of links. If you have a links page with 25+ links it is a good idea to turn it into a directory of some sort. This can even help you in getting more links to your site in exchange for back links on the directory that you have created. Also check the sites that you link to and make sure that any back links that are due to you are still there as you don’t have much reason to keep a link if you aren’t getting the backlink that you deserve (if the back link was, indeed, negotiated when you placed the link onto your site).

3. Process link request emails. Whenever you receive requests for a link exchange, respond quickly. Not every mail you receive will be a good one, and you should make sure to check any site that wants you to link to it. If you are declining a link request let the web master know why. Perhaps you have an incite that they do not have. They may be able to fix a few things and then become excellent link partners in the future. It is common curtesy to inform the web master as to whether or not you are willing to exchange links within two or three days of receiving a request. Web masters will be even more impressed if you send them a personalized message regarding your approval or disapproval of the link exchange.

4. Check link exchange forums. This is a similar aspect to the above except that in this case it is more difficult to keep track of all of the people who can potentially request links from your site. There is a lot of spam on these sorts of things as well as many really terrible and useless sites. If you encounter such a site or forum member, inform them of your problem with what they are doing and report them to a moderator/administrator if they do not correct their behavior in a suitable manor. It is important that these kinds of forums be kept clean or a search engine may consider it a link farm more than an exchange service.

5. Finally, you should check each feature of your website, to make sure it’s still working properly. The dynamic content that you will probably include at some point must be delivered properly. Any messages that are generated on the fly must not be generated at the wrong times. The difference between a quality dynamic site and a subpar dynamic site is that in a quality dynamic site all content is delivered at the right time and everything seems static and planned out.

Take your time with your website and make sure that you do everything you can for it each day. Keep adding anything new that you find, because updating regularly will keep search engines coming back to spider more often. Updates are crucial and if you can follow the patterns here of insuring quality and precision, you will probably be able to come up with other ways that you can insure your visitors satisfaction and your increased traffic, link count, and search engine listings.

Never agree to link to someone’s site without asking for a link in exchange, unless they offer to pay you – even then, you should think twice. All your incoming and outgoing links need to be related to your site’s content for you to be ranked high in the search engines.

Basic Link Checks.

Some sites use robots.txt to stop search engines from indexing their links pages, in the mistaken belief that outbound links will count against them. To check, just retype their URL with robots.txt on the end (for example, http://www.website.com/robots.txt). If you see a page that says ‘Disallow’ and has the URL of their links page, then they’re not letting spiders index that page. Don’t exchange links with that site.

You should also check to see if the website is being ‘cloaked’, and report it to the search engines if it is. You don’t want to get involved with these people – better to have them banned and out of the way.

Does the site offering you a link have PageRank? Even if they do, you should look at how it drops between the front page and the links page. Be aware that new pages take a while to get ranked, so PR0 doesn’t necessarily mean a site that will never have any PageRank.

Take a look at how many links are on the page already. There shouldn’t be more than 20 links – if the site breaks this rule, don’t even consider it. Plenty of webmasters collect links, thinking they’re helping their rankings, but it just has the effect of making them look like link farms. Many of them don’t even involve linking to the big spam industries, like casinos and adult content. There’s no point in having a link from a site that takes links from just anyone.

More articles from Clark Faint marketing.

[jeannereames]

Hello, Dr. Reames. I have a question I would like to ask you. How is it like to work as a historian? I'll be finishing high school soon and i thought a lot about studying history at college, but I really don't know much about how it really is to work in the field, so if you could tell me how is it like, at least from your experience, I would really appreciate it 😊

(The following was written to reply to a query from a high school student, but is aimed broadly at anyone pondering the value of a history degree at various levels: BA/BS, MA, and PhD, written by an older professor who’s also served as Graduate Program Chair. PLEASE SHARE.)

First, by “working in the field,” I’m not entirely sure what you mean, and maybe you’re not either. And that’s okay.

So let’s talk about what “working in the field” could mean.

The common assumption about majoring in history is that it leads only to teaching high school, college, or working in a museum. (Maybe archaeology…but that’s actually a different degree.)

FACT: MOST history undergrad majors do not teach history or work in museums. Look at this helpful little illustration below. Note that only 18% work in education. Maybe some of the 10% administration are education administration. But even if we assume half are, that’s still less than ¼ of history degree recipients going into education, plus that 18% includes library science.

Now, some of the things on that list have little to do with history directly. Yet some have connections the average person might not think of: both legal and protective services, for instance. Legal = law, and protective services = FBI/CIA/other policing. The FBI loves historians as analysts, so does the CIA. History uses the same skill-set as police detectives. In addition, several (working and former) lawyers I know who were history majors all say their history degree gave them a leg up in law school over colleagues who’d done poli-sci or criminology.

Why?  CRITICAL REASONING. We teach you to think about what you’re reading/seeing/hearing, then how to write about it. Those skills are imminently useful in a number of careers. (To be fair, philosophy is useful for much the same reason; don’t knock a philosophy degree!)

So if you want to study history…it’s not going to hurt your job prospects, especially if you mull over how to “professionalize” yourself. Below, I’ve put a link to the American Historical Association’s website talking about just that: career development. If you have other skills such as IT, or are multi-lingual, it makes you even more valuable. Lots of work in the fields of digital humanities (which involves history), archiving, and public history. Also, sometimes scientific skills pair well, particularly for archaeology: LiDAR and GPR, for instance. Chemical analysis, dendrology, etc., etc., etc.

 American Historical Association Professional Development

Now, let’s say you are thinking about going on to teach history in college (at least in the US). My best advice?

Don’t.

That may shock, from a history professor, but the plain fact is that not only is history (and the humanities) undergoing seismic shifts on campuses, but college itself is altering profoundly. I call it the “Wal-Martization of Higher Education.”

Administration is bloating. Just look some time at the various administration levels in most any college: how many assistant deans, and senior-vice chancellors, etc. It’s crazy. There were half that (or less) when I was hired at UNO 20 years ago. Meanwhile, fewer tenure-track positions are opening in departments (that aren’t big grant winners). If anything, colleges are cutting those. More administrators! Fewer professors! Sure, that’s the ticket….

Why’s this happening? Administration has learned that, especially for entry-level courses (1000-, sometimes 2000-level), they can hire part-time lecturers, pay them peanuts, not pay them benefits…and rake in the same tuition. Bean counters don’t help, where they look at “Butts in seats,” enrollment figures, retention, and shortening the “Time to Degree.”

College is increasingly expensive, students want to cut corners and save bucks. I don’t blame them, but AT THE ROOT is the Almighty Dollar.

Education has become a “commodity,” a mere certificate to get you a job. Quality pedagogy is increasingly sidelined. From enrollment to graduation track is emphasized. This is a discussion all its own, so won’t go into it. (Again, this is a HUGE philosophic debate.)

The teaching of intro-classes by grad students/newly minted PhDs has been A Thing for decades. It’s not new. But back when I was doing it, it was considered job training and critical experience for my resume to get a “real”—e.g., tenure-track—job that had benefits and job security.

Pay your dues. Okay, fair enough.

BUT around the time I got hired by UNO (2000) and even a little earlier, college administrators began to suss out that they could cut tenure-track jobs by hiring an endless (desperate) string of part-time lecturers to teach entry-level classes. The idea spread slowly, but by c. 2010, it was entrenched. Too many PhDs, not enough jobs, so to make ends meet, those lecturers would take 4, 5, 6 classes (at various schools) at a couple thousand a class. Without a spousal unit, many live at the poverty level…WITH a PhD. Increasing numbers simply bailed on academia after several years on the job market, taking other jobs as they could, but (in some cases) trailing enormous tuition debt. Some still write and publish, and are content with that.

The field has wised up, but too many PhDs (or even MAs) were caught in that trap as it became clear what was happening—hundreds competing for a handful of jobs a year. I’ve run job searches (just did one, in fact). We can regularly expect 80-120 applications for one job—higher for Americanists. Yet this will be one of a handful of tenure-track jobs that year. Think about that: c.100 applicants for…5 jobs, 6, 7…10 if you’re lucky in a “hot” field.

Yet some unscrupulous professors STILL turn out oodles of MA or PhD students because it looks good for them. Beware of such! I’ve worked with a few. If ANYbody tells you there are easy jobs to be had and don’t give you a version of “The Talk” above (which I gave ALL my MA students) they’re in it to pad their CV, not to take care of you as their grad student. Find a new advisor ASAP.

Some fields are more “hot” than others, but this varies, and you can’t assume a “hot” field when you start won’t be a “saturated” field by the time you finish. It’s unpredictable.

This is all bound to implode sooner or later, and the pandemic may very well push that along.

So YES, there will continue to be jobs open for history professors. But they’re many fewer than in the 60s. 70s, 80s, or even 90s, and most will go to students from top tier (private) universities. Yes, dammit, people pay attention to the name on the kidskin. There will always be exceptions. So if you work your ass off and are truly driven, you could secure one of those jobs. When hiring, I look at what you DID/published/presented, not just where you got your degree.

So if you really want to teach at the college level—are driven enough—you’re going to ignore everything I just said and get that PhD anyway. But at least you’ll go in with your eyes wide open, knowing it’s a volatile field with “college” itself in flux. I’ve no idea what the institution will look like by the time I retire in 10 years (or less now).

Jump at every opportunity. Present papers at salient conferences, seek grants, try to get published if you can (mostly PhD level). It’s still possible, just understand the competition is STEEP.

I’m here to prove a first-generation college student with NO useful language got a full-ride scholarship to Penn State in the ‘90s, secured a tenure-track job at U-Nebraska, Omaha. Not a Research 1 university, but still tenured at a school with a History MA and research time off, then started the Ancient Mediterranean Studies Minor/Program here, and served as grad chair.

But I’m RARE, and come from an earlier era.

How much are you willing to buckle down and kick ass?

It’s an uphill climb. I won’t lie. Your odds are bad. So you have to REALLY WANT IT, to go on to an MA then PhD.

Teaching at the high school level is more attainable but comes with its own freight of baggage.

SO… getting a BA or BS in history, or even a minor in history, at the undergrad level is NOT a useless degree. For that matter, an MA in history isn’t. But the PhD is increasingly becoming The Hunger Games to find a job after. How much will you sacrifice?

[silver-wield]

It bothers me probably more than it should when I see C/leriths post their resolution as a "love confession" or misinterpreting other vaguely CA scenes then present those as facts. I know they're off-base and are probably just making the most of what little was given to them, but it just irks me because.. those are lies. I don't want them to stop enjoying their ship but I really hope they can do it without lying. 😞😞 Hope I come to a point when I am unbothered by this.

They lie. That’s their whole deal and has been since the game came out. It’s called gaslighting and is the exact same shit that happens to Cloud and Tifa in the game. They’re forced to hear lies until they doubt the truth. That’s why it bothers you because you know it’s a lie, but they repeat it so much that you start doubting your own sanity.

That’s why I don’t like them. 

For anyone who isn’t sure what gaslighting is, since I know it’s one of those things people think they know, but don’t always know exactly. I’m cping from a psychology page btw, so this is actual factual info and adding fandom appropriate examples as needed.

1. They tell blatant lies.

You know it's an outright lie. Yet they are telling you this lie with a straight face. Why are they so blatant? Because they're setting up a precedent. Once they tell you a huge lie, you're not sure if anything they say is true. Keeping you unsteady and off-kilter is the goal.

In the fandom’s case this is obvious and shouldn’t need examples.

2. They deny they ever said something, even though you have proof.

You know they said they would do something; you know you heard it. But they out and out deny it. It makes you start questioning your reality—maybe they never said that thing. And the more they do this, the more you question your reality and start accepting theirs.

Example: Tifa trending on Spain’s twitter because of insults thrown at Tifa, that was then argued by certain people it was about a wrestler wearing Tifa cosplay.

3. They use what is near and dear to you as ammunition.

They know how important your kids are to you, and they know how important your identity is to you. So those may be one of the first things they attack. If you have kids, they tell you that you should not have had those children. They will tell you'd be a worthy person if only you didn't have a long list of negative traits. They attack the foundation of your being.

Another obvious one. 

4. They wear you down over time.

This is one of the insidious things about gaslighting—it is done gradually, over time. A lie here, a lie there, a snide comment every so often...and then it starts ramping up. Even the brightest, most self-aware people can be sucked into gaslighting—it is that effective. It's the "frog in the frying pan" analogy: The heat is turned up slowly, so the frog never realizes what's happening to it.

23 years, people!

5. Their actions do not match their words.

When dealing with a person or entity that gaslights, look at what they are doing rather than what they are saying. What they are saying means nothing; it is just talk. What they are doing is the issue.

They claim they’re innocent and not doing anything and it’s us attacking them. All the while they’re making youtube vids with baiting titles and essays and websites full of “this is why Tifa isn’t...” to try and upset her fans.

6. They throw in positive reinforcement to confuse you.

This person or entity that is cutting you down, telling you that you don't have value, is now praising you for something you did. This adds an additional sense of uneasiness. You think, "Well maybe they aren't so bad." Yes, they are. This is a calculated attempt to keep you off-kilter—and again, to question your reality. Also look at what you were praised for; it is probably something that served the gaslighter.

I like Tifa blah blah blah and I’ve got no problem with her fans, but I can’t see why they think blah blah blah....

7. They know confusion weakens people.

Gaslighters know that people like having a sense of stability and normalcy. Their goal is to uproot this and make you constantly question everything. And humans' natural tendency is to look to the person or entity that will help you feel more stable—and that happens to be the gaslighter.  

They gather their forces, flood a single person’s comments and make themselves seem like the reasonable ones.

8. They project.

They are a drug user or a cheater, yet they are constantly accusing you of that. This is done so often that you start trying to defend yourself, and are distracted from the gaslighter's own behavior.

They imply Tifa’s fans are like her and use negative descriptions about her. You spend so long defending yourself and Tifa that you don’t have time to call out their blatant homophobia, racism, sexism and so on.

9. They try to align people against you.

Gaslighters are masters at manipulating and finding the people they know will stand by them no matter what—and they use these people against you. They will make comments such as, "This person knows that you're not right," or "This person knows you're useless too." Keep in mind it does not mean that these people actually said these things. A gaslighter is a constant liar. When the gaslighter uses this tactic it makes you feel like you don't know who to trust or turn to—and that leads you right back to the gaslighter. And that's exactly what they want: Isolation gives them more control.  

Gathering forces again. They’ll try and turn people against you using their “reasonable” arguments made of lies and manipulation until the person believes them, at which point they become evidence of the true path.

10. They tell you or others that you are crazy.

This is one of the most effective tools of the gaslighter, because it's dismissive. The gaslighter knows if they question your sanity, people will not believe you when you tell them the gaslighter is abusive or out-of-control. It's a master technique.  

I believe the exact term they use is rabid. 

11. They tell you everyone else is a liar.

By telling you that everyone else (your family, the media) is a liar, it again makes you question your reality. You've never known someone with the audacity to do this, so they must be telling the truth, right? No. It's a manipulation technique. It makes people turn to the gaslighter for the "correct" information—which isn't correct information at all.

All official sources are incorrect translations. The OST lyrics are incorrect translations. The devs interviews are incorrect translations. The script is incorrect translations. All of these official sources are lying. 

[cherp-official]

What the fuck is going on? A longpost.

Hi! Friendly neighborhood Cherp administrator here. I’m going to put this all under a readmore, but this will basically explain what is going on, why we are pitching the option of ID Verification, what our alternatives are, and so on. Please read this, comment if you’d like, and disseminate it to anyone that has questions. Thank you!

So here is what is going on: Because we are now directly aware of a minor being on the site we have developed an unacceptable level of existential legal risk. The site is currently hosted in the UK, which has very draconian laws regarding “corruption of a minor” - if the minor on the site gets in trouble, then thell is held responsible, jailed and goes on the sex offender registry (bad), and the site goes down because nobody can host it (also bad) and MAY also backsplash on me and the rest of the staff (also also bad), and also the person rping with that minor will also get legally turbofucked (also also also bad).

What can we do about it? Three options: 1: some form of ID verification that ensures that minors will not get access to the porn. 2: pay me a lot more money than I am currently getting to move servers elsewhere. 3: cherp dies

I heard ID verification. What exactly does that entail? I'll go through the six essential questions to break it down. What - In order to access the Sexual content on the site, you would require ID verification. Who - You would be providing ID information to Thell (technically, one of his business entities). This information would be encrypted, the details of which are gonna come in the next text wall. If something goes wrong and your shit gets leaked, you can sue Thell (sorry Thell!). This information will not touch me or any of the Cherp staff, Thell is acting as a third party arbitrator of identification. Where - The United Kingdom. When - Not immediately, you'd have at least a couple weeks warning if we decide to go this route at all, which we may not. So, "??? + a few weeks" Why - See the very top of the post. How - Exact submission method TBD, as is the allowable amount of blurring and/or censoring of information - I am also a very privacy concerned person and would prefer people have to give us the minimal possible. Information will be encrypted, then deleted when we're done w/ it.

What is encryption? Encryption is a process through which information is scrambled using a particular method that makes it inaccessible for anyone who does not have the proper "encryption key".

What encryption will you be using? We will be using the AES-256 encryption standard, which is the encryption used by the US Government (specifically, the NSA uses it to encrypt Top Secret documents). You can read more about AES-256 here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advanced_Encryption_Standard It's very technical and hard to understand but basically it scrambles the shit out of your data. It is essentially statistically impossible to brute force (never say never, but it's "orders of magnitude more time necessary than the universe has existed for"). If you'd like a simpler primer on what "encryption" is, you can find it here: https://simple.wikipedia.org/wiki/Encryption This is relevant because photos are stored in computers as basically just strings of text, and thus can also be encrypted just like text can be.

I'm concerned about my information leaking out. I'm unsure how to phrase this lead-in in a way that makes it a question, but, valid concern. Here are my assurances. 1: Data is encrypted on sending. If a hacker manages to get in and intercept it, without the cipher key it is functionally useless. I can assure you some random joe schmoe hacker is not going to be able to crack AES-256 without the cipher key. It's not happening. 2: Data is not stored long term - that's a GDPR headache that we actively want to avoid. Your data is encrypted, then Thell looks at it, tells us "Okay, this username is verified", we (the people working on the site) learn absolutely nothing of your identity, and then the data is deleted completely and you are verified forever. We do not need it after you are verified. 3: Because of both 1 & 2, in the unlikely confluence of events that someone gets into Thell's servers in the interstitial period while data is being held, and get onto his separate machine that has the cipher key, at most they are probably going to get 5-6 IDs, and not "Everyone who has ever verified on the site". Which is still bad and something we'd like to avoid, and I would consider a "Catastrophic security breach", but its not catastrophic catastrophic, you feel me? 

I don't trust Thell Okay, sorry! Nothing I can do about that. 

I don't trust you guys See above.

Would this mean that if I don't get verified I can't write my "pretty boys beating the shit out of each other" anymore? No, unless, said pretty boys are also planning on fucking. We are already planning on implementing a change that basically removes the SFW/NSFW/NSFWE categorization, as it's an archaic artifact of Cherubplay that we carried along without really thinking about it. You would still be able to RP all the violence you want. Even really bad violence! Drugs and alcohol and sad stuff too. Just don't have dicks pop out and you're aces. If you aren't verified, you cannot access "sexual" prompts, since that's the main object of concern.

What qualifications does Thell have to do this for you? Thell is currently taking and paying for a course that will train him in basically all manner of legal stuff that is required to keep his personal websites GDPR compliant. This is something that he'd be doing anyway, with or without us, and he's cheaper than the equivalent service from Anyone Else which runs us upwards of $100,000 a year. Bluntly, I can't afford that. Thell will be trained on things like "recognizing photoshopped/fake IDs" and "reading IDs from places that aren't the UK". Additionally, if your info gets jacked you do have recourse by suing the associated business entity.

Why doesn't [very large porn site] have to do this? They have more money than us and a legal team. 

Why doesn't MXRP have to do this? It's associated with Thell's business entity. Cherp is currently owned and ran by a single human being, so the laws are kind of different. 

Can you give it to Thell's business? No.

Why didn't Cherubplay have to do this? Cherubplay as a website allowed minors and was not, strictly speaking, a "pornography website" (even if it was in practice). Cherp is. Mystic may have been comfortable with the risk involved at the time, but the laws have shifted a little bit between then and now and Thell is no longer comfortable doing the same.

Will you force us to delete our porn chats? While that would great if we could magically detect every minor that's unverified and delete just their porn chats, it would also be practically impossible to do in a way that doesn't result in an unacceptable amount of collateral damage, so no. Requiring verification by itself would make our legal position considerably more defensible.

Are we sure we need to do this? So, it is either this or Option #2 (pay significant money to move the server elsewhere like America/Japan/Sweden). Technically, there might be some kind of clever legal loophole we could use, but it would cost about $2000 dollars for enough of Thell's lawyer's time to fully consult on it, and the answer still might end up being "no, you gotta if you're gonna remain in the UK"

What about the rule about exchanging contact information? Wasn't that implemented because you were afraid of minors getting groomed? Correct, and an astute observation! If we implemented ID verification we would open that rule back up and likely allow verified individuals to exchange outside contact information, since the risk would be considerably lesser to the point of nonexistence.

Alright, tell me about Option #2 Okay, I will, hypothetical person.

What is Option #2 Option #2 is that we get the server out of the UK, which has very, very draconian laws that is the reason for all this rigamarole to begin with. Option #2 is not as easy as just "move it" though, unfortunately. I'll break down the costs.

$3000 for the server itself - Thell says he'll let me pay half but I'm not going to . That being said, this can be paid over time because I have good credit at the Bank of Thell. This is essentially a recurring cost for a couple of years, probably working out to an additional $100-$250 a month. $150-$400 to transport the server - Servers are heavy. This is a one-time cost. $1100-1500 per month for colocation costs. The server is pretty big and takes up a lot of space. I'm also rolling in "gas costs to drive out to the server" for this - if the server was being hosted near me, for example, I'd probably be colocating it in NYC or thereabouts, which is about a three ish hour drive. If it was in Sweden, then Thell would be our wrenchman and we'd also need to pay for his gas. $250 per month for Thell to handle GDPR stuff. This cost is not going away.

Sum total, this is anywhere from $1450-2000 a month plus one-time costs of transportation.

For comparisons, the cost for Option #1 are considerably more mild $250 per month for hosting the server on Thell's hardware. $250 per month for GDPR stuff. $250 per month for the ID verification service from Thell.

Sum total is $750 a month for option #1. I currently pay $500 a month, for comparison.

Why do you need to buy the server off Thell, why can't you just lease a server from a hosting company? #1: Cherp's content is probably against the TOS of most hosting companies. Most hosting companies do not allow pornography of any kind on servers that you lease from them. #2: It is significantly more expensive - about 50% more on average. #3: The server hardware we currently use to ensure the site runs smoothly has specialized hardware that will not come standard with most if not all server companies.

Okay, if we go back to ID verification, how much of my ID do I need to provide? TBD. If we go that route (and everyone, Thell included, would prefer not to), I'd like for you to have to provide the MINIMUM information possible. If you're allowed to, say, only show the bottom half of your face and scribble out your address and name, gucci gang.

Do I need a driver's license? I believe any form of valid identification would work, including passports, birth certificates, Legal IDs (separate from Driver's Licenses), etc. Don’t quote me on that yet though.

Do you need my SSN? Absolutely not, please do not give us it.

Help! I am in a country illegally and cannot acquire any form of verification Unfortunately, if we go this route, then that is going to be an edge case we do not have a functional protocol for and your account will have to remain unverified. I'm sorry.

(EDIT:

)

If Option #2 happens, will you still undo the "no offsite contact" rule? No. We can only remove that rule if we can be safely assured that people interacting with each other are aware that the other is of-age. If we go for Option #2, we may include opt-in profile verification in the future.

Back to Option #2. That's a fuckton of money! What are you doing to ensure we can afford it and TTM doesn't go bankrupt? haha, nothing, lmao.

Jokes aside, a: We'd like to restart donations as soon as possible. Currently, donations are handled through me, and require you to request an invoice by talking to me on Discord and then manually pay the invoice. The buttons on the site don't work yet, but once they do that would be Peachy. b: When Cherp 3.0 is out we will also be debuting user-provided ad content. No advertiser will go with Cherp except the ones that do CUNT WARS and we don't want that, so instead, you, the user, can pay us for having an ad for whatever you want on the site. Your commissions, your Etsy shop, a link to Rickroll, whatever (so long as it passes our approval process). c: At some point we would like to get merchandise out but we've yet to find one that gives us a satisfactory profit margin for how much they cost.

I would be very comfortable with #2 if we could get total income to about $1000 a month since I already float $500 for the site.

If you want to see what user-serviced ads look like, you can see the current setup on the https://cherp.xyz/ beta site (and also look at a preview of the new Cherp 3.0 anyway. It looks good!). If you do so, feel free to give us feedback.

Can you do both #1 and #2? No, they're mutually exclusive.

Can I block the ads in Cherp 3.0? Sort of tangential to this bighuge post but yes, you can. They are designed in a way so that they hook into most modern adblockers.

Oh shit is Cherp 3.0 going to need us to wipe all our shit again? Again tangential but it's come up a couple of times so no, the database will remain the same, it's mostly a code update.

I see you talking about "Colocation" and "Colo" a lot, what does that mean? When you put your website on the internet you have three options for how to host it. #1 - You have a personal server and you sit it in your closet. #2 - You lease a server off of a server company - they own the hardware, you get access to it and are allowed to put your stuff on it.

#1 and #2 are untenable for cherp for a couple of reasons - #1 is "all the legal shit we are dealing with right now", #2 is detailed under "Why do you need to buy the server off Thell, why can't you just lease a server from a hosting company?"

#3 is "Colocation, or "colo"" - we own the hardware, and all we're doing is bringing it to the company's air conditioned room and plugging it into their electricity and internet connection. Most of the time, this also means we're responsible for fixing it, but it's significantly cheaper if you have the hardware and also means we don't have as restrictive ToS to deal with because we're handling all the financial risk.

Where are we currently at? Right now, we are looking into Option #2, specifically trying to find a colocating space in Sweden with Thell as our wrench boy. Due to Swedish law, if we colocated in Sweden, we would be required to ban visual depiction of underaged individuals (i.e, no loli/shota image references allowed on site).

I hope that answers all of your many questions, and I apologize for any undue stress this has caused. Please feel free to reach out on here or on Discord if you have further questions or any sort of commentary you’d like to provide.

Thank you!

-TTM

[maxsellcurrencymachines]

CASH COUNTING MACHINE

CASH COUNTING MACHINE

It takes a lot of time to sort and count money and time is a valuable commodity. As a result, making the cash counting process as reliable, fast, and as painless as possible is a no-brainer. Cash counting machines are used by banks, government departments, religious institutions, enterprises such as supermarkets, grocery stores, retail shops and many more. However, some people are wary of these computers because they seem to be so simple — as though they are cheating — when, in reality, they can prevent cheating by having instantaneous precision and identifying counterfeit money. So, how do cash counters function? The majority of machines are easy to use, compact, and need little to no instruction. However, a little extra experience will help you save time and money in the long run. Manual currency counting is time-consuming and error-prone. As a result, a little automation is needed in the form of a currency counting system. Based on your desired size, these devices are available in a variety of sizes. Some are portable, while others, including those used in banks, are designed to accommodate large sums of capital.

However, if you're considering purchasing a banknote counter, you may be unsure where to begin. These five characteristics should be at the top of the priority list.

You'll be able to find the device that better fits the company's needs if you consider them.

1. Think about Counting Speed.

It can appear self-evident to think of the machine's counting speed. After all, one of the reasons you're buying a banknote counter is to speed up the counting process and cut down on the time you spend juggling currency.

2. Consider the size and type of hopper.

As previously said, the scale of the hopper influences the pace of banknote counters. The unit is more effective when the hopper is properly sized. The smoother the counting process is, the fewer you have to wait to load more bills. If the hopper is so tiny that you have to sit there and feed bills through constantly, speed isn't an advantage.

3. Look at Batch or Adding Features options.

A batching feature is available on some money counting machines, which is useful if you need to manually strap cash for deposit. The computer will count up to a certain amount and then stop, allowing you to delete the batch before proceeding.

4. Counterfeit and Error Detection Are Important Features

If the machine counts incorrectly, using a banknote counter is useless. Miscounts attributable to folded or broken money, several notes fed at the same time, or bills of the wrong size may be reduced with a cash-counting system with built-in error detection.

ONE OF THE BEST DEVICE IN THE MARKET IS MX50I

The Maxsell MX50i is the most famous cash counting machine in India. Its high-precision sensors and sophisticated MG Spectrum Analyzing technology aids in the detection of counterfeit money when counting, ensuring that the MX50i does not skip any fakes.

BENEFITS OF CASH COUNTING MACHINE

Science and technology has made our lives easier, and daily technical advancements have increased production, quality, and accuracy. A cash counting machine is one such innovation that is now used in many departmental stores, financial institutions, hotels and the list is endless.

1. Saves time

The money counting machine can count notes even better than a person can, and it can hold a large amount of cash at once. The computer counts an entire package in a couple of seconds and provides correct data, saving us time in the recounting process. When manually counting notes, there is still the possibility of making a mistake, so the package can be rechecked.

2. Easy to Use

The currency counting unit is very simple to use. This computer has an automatic system that controls when they start and end. When the notes are properly positioned, the system begins counting and ends when the count is complete.

3. Counterfeit Notes Detection

The majority of currency counting machines have a feature that detects counterfeit money. If the computer finds a ripped, false, or unusable note, it will notify the user with a beep sound. This functionality is just one of the many reasons why people are increasingly turning to currency counting machines.

4. Perfection

These money counting machines are not only time savers, but they are also highly reliable, with a near-to zero risk of making an error. These machines are very silent as the notes are being counted.

5. Insightful

The current generation of currency counting machines are not only fashionable, but also intellectual. Instead of counting the notes, several computers now identify various denominations and provide the total number. This technique allows you to save time.

FAKE NOTES IN THE MARKET

Unfortunately, counterfeit Indian currency has been a major problem in recent years. Counterfeiters are getting so smart, and the current notes are so well made, that it's impossible to tell them apart.

THE ISSUE OF FAKE INDIAN MONEY

The official name for counterfeit notes in the Indian economy is Fake Indian Currency Note (FICN). The number of counterfeit notes in circulation is estimated to be in the millions. The worth, according to a report conducted by the National Investigation Agency in collaboration with the Indian Statistical Institute (ISI), is 400 crore rupees (4 billion rupees/$53.3 million).

 HOW TO RECOGNIZE FAKE INDIAN MONEY

There are a lot of indicators that money is counterfeit. There are some of them:

·         Watermarks that seem to be dense. Counterfeiting gangs also use tar, grease, or wax to make the image appear transparent.

·         Instead of being inserted into the currency at the time of manufacturing, imitation protection threads are drawn or written on.

·         Figures that aren't in the right place. Smaller or larger numbers, insufficient spaces, and multiple number alignments can all be viewed with caution.

·         Split printed lines, as well as ink smudges.

·         The "Reserve Bank of India" is written in thicker font than normal.

If you are having a small business, then here is the best machine for detecting fake notes

AUTOMATIC RUPEE DETECTOR BY MAXSELL TRUSCAN NEO

The Award-Winning Fake Currency Detector from Maxsell is the Truscan Neo. Neo has everything: design, style, compactness, and functionality. When it comes to identifying fake Indian rupee notes, the task is extremely difficult.

 RBI GUIDELINES TO IDENTIFY FAKE NOTES

You may have a few fake currency notes on you in these days of depositing currency notes with banks. Given the potential for confusion if a bogus note is found in the batch you're depositing, you and the bank staff could choose to kill the note rather than keep track of it. However, should not be shocked by the bank's procedure if fraudulent notes are discovered.

1. Banks must use note counting and counterfeiting devices to spot false notes.

2. Counter workers would seize the note and forge it by issuing a number receipt, since it would be unethical to lose or return it.

3. Since no reward can be issued for the impounded note, please countersign the receipt and retain a copy to ensure that the bogus note remains part of the official investigative machinery.

4. If the counter staff destroys the note, file a written complaint with the bank office, as well as a copy with the RBI's Consumer Education and Protection Cell.

5. If 5 or more fake notes are used in a single transaction, a FIR will be filed; if the amount of fake notes per transaction is less than 5, no FIR will be filed immediately, but a monthly cumulative report will be submitted to the police authority.

Become acquainted with Indian currency.

The best way to detect fake Indian currency is to become acquainted with the appearance of genuine Indian currency. For this reason, the Reserve Bank of India has a website called Paisa Bolta Hai (Money Speaks). It includes big images of all new Indian banknotes, as well as extensive explanations of their security features.