#95% sure i saved a lot of the responses on my computer

[thesharondefenseleague]

To that anon tbh Sharon I don't think is uniquely unpopular by fandom standards. Maybe by MCU standards but not fandom in gen standards. Or at least its not that weird that she is.

Ship wars and just being bitter that the ship that became canon wasn't your ship and throwing salt at that ship was just always a thing. Especially if the fandom for the non canon ship thought they had a shot of being canon. See any fandom with a love triangle in the story ever.

Now its more the norm to pretend that its something deep. That the other ship is morally repugnant and you aren't just being petty af. When Sharon was the most unpopular it was still kinda the norm to just be openly petty but justifying your saltiness was becoming more the norm. Hence you'd get arguments like Sharon was a no homo and Sharon was abusive. But also just people just actively shitting on her for no reason at all apart from the fact they didnt like her not even trying to justify it.

Which again is nothing all that new. What makes it stand out imo are a few reasons.

1. Social Media being integrated- before the social media spread for fandom ships would be more diverse. There would be communities for specific ships or fiction archives and it was easy to avoid ships you didn't like. Sure if your ship was involved in a major shipping war or people were talking trash about it you could still know but the exposure to the drama wasn't always inevitable. But now if fans of more popular ships occasionally shit on your far less popular ship even if its only like 5 percent of the fans of the more popular ship that outnumbers your entire fandom. So you get drowned out for amount of content and then when anyone looks for content for the unpopular ship they mostly get negativity and its very hard to avoid.

2. MCU being such a huge fandom. Not marvel comic characters specifically the MCU and Steve being kinda a fandom bycycle. There was a good chance if you were in this fandom you had a favorite Steve ship and if you were a MCU fan primarily not a comics fan ( which let's be honest many were during hieght of Sharon drama) then that ship probably wasn't Sharon. I know in general people like to say it was primarily Stucky and Steggy fans throwing shade. But that was mostly because those were two of the biggest ships with Steve. Other Steve shippers did too. It was just that there were just less of them so it seemed like it was just Stucky or Steggy. For a while it was just a thing to shit on Sharon for not just Stucky or Steggy fans but like it was a MCU fandom thing. And the reason for this is-

3. The lack of MCU Sharon and Steve x Sharon fans. There were a few comic Sharon and SteveSharon fans. But not MCU ones because Natasha and Peggy had taken alot of comic Sharons moments and character. It was really common to see arguments like oh I love comic Sharon but fuck MCU Sharon. Why she even exist?

Pretty much all canon ships got hate. But it imo was less because they still had quite a few fans it was less cool to shit on it you got more push back. And it didnt always reflect on the characters. BruceNat was incredibly unpopular but Bruce and Natasha didnt become incredibly unpopular as a result. Sure they had haters but theyd already been established and had fans of their own ( especially Natasha). While others happened early enough and got development so the relationship got fans like PepperTony. There was hate but there was more push back for shitting on them and more people spreading love for them so the negativity wasn't drowning out the good.

But MCU Sharon and MCU SteveSharon could more easily be treated as a universal dislike by the whole fandom. Even people who didnt really care about Steve ships would joke about SteveSharon being shitty. It was just like the thing to do.

This changed when calling out mysogny in fandom became more mainstream. However those 3 reasons especially 1 and 3 remain the same except for characters too not just ships. Its hard to avoid what you dont like in a fandom on websites like Tiktok Tumblr and Twitter ( especially Tiktok) . So if negative opinions of a character are popular it becomes harder to avoid.

And MCU Sharon is still not that popular due to how MCU handling her.

I cant even say its just a ship thing anymore the vitriol continues despite her not being in any ship nor is it indicated she will be with any major character in the future. And still so many people act like they will act like they will break into hives at just the prospect of her with Bucky or Sam.

Its not just a ew girl cooties thing these same people will love the idea of Bucky with Sams sister or Yelena or someone in the Dora Milaje. Sam doesn't even have that many popular ships it basically just Bucky rn but ive seen people who dont even like this ship just see it as a friendship and have no other ships for Sam but want him to have a love interest down the line turn up their noses at SharonSam.

I will say things are definetly better than the post CW era Sharon is less the MCU fandom punching bag though she still doesnt have that much love. However more people are critiquing the handling of her character instead of being frustrated at her existence. So while I do fully believe she more than any other character could become the fandom punching bag again i dont think it will be as bad as it was in the past.

Oh, it will never be as bad as it was in 2016. There was a Sharon RP blog that one day cleared out all the hate she got in her inbox. Absolutely wretched shit was sent to her, and you could feel the exhaustion in her clearing them out. And she posted it to remind everyone that hey, liking a character doesn't equal sending fucking death threats to a person.

But the problem is the shit that the character and the fans AND THE FUCKING ACTRESS got were not only seen by Marvel, they reacted in the worst way possible. They just justified fans' actions. So while it's not the worst it has been, jesus they could have done anything but that in response.

~Mod R

[vermillioncrown]

Hello Verm! I’m about to live on my own for the first time (feeling like an Older Sibling bc I’m the first to do so yet I’ve got none of the life skills lol) and I wanted to see if you had any advice

hahhaaaa...

it really depends, bc while i was 'living on my own' since 18, it was for college so i wasn't completely financially independent and i had roommates (that didn't stop us from being disasters)

when i got to grad school, i was in school housing but was completely on my own, and then a couple of internships w short-term rentals but w roommates for those. even now, i'm not so (let's say i'm like... 95% independent? with an unspoken parental safety net that i don't like using but i acknowledge it's there)

this is for the general, milquetoast scrub that's moving out of their parents' home and has a semi-secure source of money in

1. money

your life is now on a monthly cycle bc of bills. you can change the timing of when bills are due via online account/calling (sucks, but do it), and a priority is to make sure when your money comes in lines up with when your bills are due. so much bad shit happens when you technically make enough money to pay for your life, but the timing messes everything up.

the essential bills: phone, insurances, rent/mortgage, gas, electric, water/sewage, trash, internet.

2. transportation

where must you be? where are important locations (work, groceries, home supplies, hospital/clinic, other services, etc)? do you know how to get to these places in a reliable way? safe, reliable walking routes? take time to study public transportation routes, timing (safety is important) if that's your way.

if you're driving, parking lots/parking, routes (both local/highways), timing of traffic, gas stations is important to keep in mind. AND the closest little chain repair shop, for a quick diagnostic of what the fuck is wrong when something seems wrong. get a tire pressure gauge, and learn how to jump a battery.

3. sustenance and cooking

you need food to live

pick out a few recipes. a mix between 1) quick to make vs 2) can make a lot/freeze. those can become your fallback-no-braincells-necessary meals, and a good meal can raise your morale when shit gets bad (and when you're living alone and sitting in the dark on your computer, it's so easy to slip into a fugue state)

buy staples. don't feel the need to buy the cheapest (dried grains vs canned) bc sometimes you need to pay for convenience so you can live your life. ie, my soul departs every time i need to chop onions, and if i need to make a huge thing i splurge for the pre-chopped veggies so i save time. and don't waste food.

OH! frozen vegetables are a good thing to keep and make. the nutritional value is kept for much longer than fresh. canned sardines are a great source of protein and they're tasty when fried w pasta and lemon juice.

get a set of cooking utensils, a non-stick pan to fry stuff (try to find a lid to fit on it), a pot for boiling stuff (w a lid), and a bigger soup pot for stews and shit (if you can make the lid for this fit over the non-stick, too, that's the best). hot water kettle. a mini-rice cooker (the more barebones one)

why do i care so much about lids? keeps things clean, lets you 'steam' cook things (stir-frying vegs, even cooking through of meat, frozen potstickers!)

get a set of multisize tupperwares

4. home upkeep

don't be a slob. you don't need to live like a sterile home magazine, but get into the habit of picking up after yourself. everything you do has direct consequences upon yourself (you make a mess, that's your mess to clean)

learn how to clean your bathroom. clean your kitchen. there are plenty of chores cheat sheets for periodicity and extent of how to take care of your place.

if you will live in an apartment, the management company/landlord is responsible for repairs and big maintenance. do not be shy in putting in maintenance requests.

hey. take care of your clothes. wash them on gentle for the most part, make sure you separate by colors, and low temp dry/air dry them. improves longevity of your stuff/saves you money in the long run/keeps you looking kempt.

remember to wash your bedding, change your pillowcase every week (get a pack of pillowcases to use) (if you get lazy and it's just you and you're not taking anyone in bed, and you don't wear your outside germy clothes into bed, once a month for bedding will suffice)

if you have a dryer in your place, find the lint catch and empty it EVERY TIME. you do not want your place catching fire

you can clean most home area stuff w bleach diluted in water (if you're lazy and don't want a bunch of specialty chemicals). do not mix cleaning chemicals or you will violate the geneva convention. and possibly cook yourself alive

5. you upkeep

take care of yourself. build general habits (since it's so easy to just go off the rails as soon as someone is not observing you), you don't have to be 100% put together bc i'm still a fucking mess, but at least i generally eat 2 meals a day and always wash my face/brush my teeth

you'll find yourself not doing a lot of little things that you might have taken for granted when you lived w other people.

make sure to keep in regular contact w people you care about, do not hole up completely. go make friends at wherever you're commonly at (the school/workplace that made you move, or whatever)

breathe some outside air every once in a while, it'll make you less crazy

brush your teeth and floss, complications from bad dental hygiene are no fucking joke

that's all i got, good luck 👍

[lovemesomesurveys]

1. Have you had an argument with anyone recently? If so, do you still have issues with that person? No, not recently. 2. Are you talking to anyone while filling this in? How about texting/chatting on Facebook? Nope. 3. Have you done something recently that helped someone else, in any way? My mom asked me to help her with something yesterday. 4. What kind of mood are you in atm? Is someone else responsible for that mood? Blaaaaaaah. 5. Has someone of the opposite sex been getting on your nerves lately? No.

6. Who was the last person that asked to hang out with you? Tell me the story of how you met that person, everything you remember. Someone I used to be friends has wanted to for awhile, but I just really haven’t been up to hanging out and socializing. She’s someone I met several years ago in community college in a history class. 7. If you knew that one of your friends was considering suicide, what would you say to them? I’ve been in that situation. I was there to comfort her and lend a shoulder to cry on and an ear to listen. I helped her best I could through it and encouraged her to seek help. 8. Have you ever felt so depressed that you were struggling to carry on? If so, what would you say to someone else who was in that situation? I’ve felt that way for a long time.  9. Have you ever worn coloured mascara? If not, would you ever think about trying it? And if you have, what is/was your favourite colour to wear? I think I have, but I just prefer black. 10. What do you remember about your first day of secondary school? Were you more nervous or excited about it? Is that high school? I was extremely nervous. I saw movies like Mean Girls and pictured my high school experience being that way. It was also a lot bigger campus and I was worried about getting lost. 11. Who was the last person to pay you a compliment? My doctor complimented my hair. She came into the room and was like, “you’re a redhead!” ha. It’s sad cause I’ve been dyeing my hair red for the past 5 years, but prior to getting it done in February it had been well over a year since I last got it done. My roots were quite grown out and the red part of my hair wasn’t the vibrant red it is after I get it done. She hadn’t seen it this way in a long time lol.  12. Tell me about the shirt you’re wearing. Is it one of your favourites? Yeah. It has Powerline from A Goofy Movie on it, one of my faves. It says “Stand Out Tour of 95″ on the bottom along with the date and the fictional town of Spoonerville.  13. Is there anything that’s happened in the past month, that you wish you could go back in time and change? The increasing spread of the virus. 14. What colour is your purse/wallet? I’ve been using my mini gray Adidas backpack lately. 15. What’s the closest item to you that’s black? My remote. 16. Do you think guys see your mother as a ‘yummy mummy’? That’s a very creepy way of putting it, but my mom is gorgeous so I’m sure a lot of guys find her attractive.  17. Is there a certain name that you think seems to have become really popular, and you know lots of people with that same name? Growing up my name was very popular. There was a lot of Stephanie’s in my classes. I’m not sure what the popular names are now. 18. What’s the most expensive item in your make-up bag? I don’t have anything in any of my makeup bags. As for my makeup collection goes, I don’t have much anymore. I haven’t worn makeup in over a year. 19. Think about what you looked like 5 years ago. How did you look different, compared to the way you look now? This time 5 years ago I hadn’t dyed my hair red, yet, so my hair was my natural dark brown with blonde highlights. It was also very short. Now my hair is red and super long. I’m very thin now compared to 5 years ago. I was always thin, but now I’m too thin. 20. Who was the last person of the opposite sex to text you? Do you think that person is attracted to you? Uh, no... my brother is most definitely not attracted to me. 21. Before Facebook became popular, did you use any other social networking site, like Bebo or Myspace? Myspace. 22. Has anyone ever asked you out, and you turned them down? If so, did you feel guilty about it? Why do you think you said no? It happened a few times. I just wasn’t interested. Some of the times I didn’t feel comfortable. 23. Name the last five people of the opposite sex that you talked to. What did you talk about? Just my dad and my brother. 24. Who is your most recent text message from? Has that person ever told you that they love you? Yeah, my mom has told me countless times throughout my life. 25. Have you ever asked anyone “Do you love me?” If so, did you get the response you wanted? Do you think when someone says “I love you”, you feel obliged to say it back? I say that jokingly to my mom when I want something haha. 26. I know it’s a depressing thought, but have you ever actually tried to imagine what the end of the world might be like? Yes. The way people are acting with their panic buying and hoarding it feels like we’re preparing for that. 27. Which Disney princess do you think is the most beautiful? Why? All of ‘em. I do really love Ariel’s hair, though.  28. Someone tells you that you’re wasting your time with the person you like. What do you say? I’ve been told that before in the past. I knew my feelings for that person and I was going to do what I wanted to do.  29. Has anything happened in the last 7 days that you’d like to forget? Eh. 30. Has someone of the opposite sex ever sang to you? If so, how did you respond to it? Yes. It was sweet. 31. When did you last hug someone of the opposite sex? I don’t remember. 32. Have you ever seen the film “Casablanca”? Did you like it? I’m familiar with it, but no I’ve never seen it. 33. If you’ve had a bad experience in a past relationship, did you find that you were scared to get into another relationship, in case the same thing happened again? I’m afraid to let my guard down and be vulnerable again with someone and end up falling in love just to be hurt again. 34. Are you friends with the last person you hugged, or something more? She’s my mom. 35. Do you ever post song lyrics as your Facebook status? I used to years ago. 36. How many girls do you know with the name ‘Georgina?’ Zero. 37. Give me 3 facts about yourself, that I might find useful if I came to spend the day with you. - I'm an extremely picky eater.  - Im always tired and don’t feel that great. - I love coffee, so feel free to bring me some. ha. 38. Do you drink alcohol on a regular basis, or do you prefer to save it for special occasions? I don’t drink at all anymore. 39. Do you have a relative whose name begins with ‘L’? Tell me about him/her. One of my aunts is married to a Lonnie. 40. Did you play with Barbies when you were a kid, or did you prefer something else? I was obSESSED with Barbies. 41. Are you a secretive person? I just keep a lot to myself. 42. When did you last eat? A few hours ago. 43. If you were going to buy a present for the person you love/like, what would you generally choose? 44. Do you plan on kissing the last person you kissed, again? That’s definitely not happening. 45. If I’m going to buy you a box of chocolates, which kind should I definitely NOT get? Meh. Bring me coffee. 46. If you met the celebrity that you most admire, what would be the first thing you’d say to him/her? Yikes. I’d be an awkward, nervous, blubbering mess.  47. Has anyone ever told you that you are special? If so, do you think that person meant it? Yeah. 48. Is there something you generally always ask for help with? I need help with a few things. 49. If you had to give up your phone or your computer, which would it be? Phone. 50. Has anyone called you gorgeous/beautiful today? No. I’m neither of those things.

[meerhummal]

Electric Vehicles, All sides

Engines to electric motors, Fuels to batteries, Is it the time for us to change our car’s fuel source by 2021?

Image via Unsplash

Electric cars or Electric vehicles aka (EV) run on batteries “energy stored in batteries”, Electric vehicles uses one or more than one electric motors or traction motors for driving force. Unlike those conventional vehicles, BEV’s (Battery Electric Vehicles) can be driven without any gasoline or diesel, they generate power from batteries fitted inside. However, all electric cars do not work the same way!

Varieties of EV

(HEV’s) Hybrid Electric Vehicle is powered by both electricity and fuel, it starts by using electric power and runs at a specific speed limit but as the load increases the internal computer automatically shifts it to petrol or diesel depending on fuel system. Electric energy in HEV’s is produced through its own braking system called [regenerative braking system] while braking it creates heat and store energy in batteries.

Hyundai Ionic hybrid, Honda Accord Hybrid and Toyota Prius Prime Hybrid are the finest examples of Hybrid Electric Vehicles.

(PHEVs) Plug-in Hybrid Electric Vehicles comes with plug-in charging feature PHEVs can be recharged by plugging into an external source electricity. It can travel decent distances without using the internal combustion engine (ICE), PHEV out flow from car’s tailpipe to generators powering electricity grid.

Best-selling models of PHEVs are Mitsubishi Outlander P-HEV, Chevrolet Volt Family and BMW 330e.

(BEVs) Battery Electric Vehicles are complete electric cars without having any exhaust pipe, combustion engine and fuel tank. BEVs traveling range (miles) depends on the model, with plus 65 kilowatt hours Lithium ion battery BEVs are easy to charge/ fast charge wherever possible.

Jaguar I-Pace, Audi E-Tron and Tesla Model S are market leaders of fully electric vehicles.

Battery electric cars has been dominating the market for many years grabbing customer’s attention and growth in purchases:

Statistics from statista.com

In 2018 almost 3.3 million battery electric vehicles were in operation all over the world, the reason behind the growing purchase rate of BEVs is “less maintenance and less cost” ownership of electric vehicle will not cost much comparably to internal combustion engine.

Why do I switch to EVs?

Switching to EV is more than individual benefits, EVs lower emissions and save a lot of money, charging instead of fueling offers some profit in this case, which you can never get from ICEs. Electric cars response very quick, fast pick up acceleration and have a really good torque.

There are great names who has produced some quality models in last few years, and American electric car company Tesla Inc. is leading the market:

Statistics via statista

Climate view on EVs

Electric cars are not just attractive but beneficial too, with all smart features EVs are also harmless for environment, they radiate less air pollutants and greenhouse gases than a conventional car. EVs considered to be the most clean and green production from manufacturers.

With no exhaust silencers it is impossible to generate air pollutants, EV radiates no carbon dioxide while driving, in simple words use of EVs will result in clean and green streets all over the city.

Apart from this, it is for sure that covid-19 has already filtered climate in past months, such as lockdowns, and decrease in production of many major industries, the quality of air has ameliorated and same goes with water pollution which has also decreased this year, So it might be the perfect time for many firms to come up with the best of both worlds.

Pros and cons of EVs

Aside from benefits there are some disadvantages of electric vehicles as well, shorter range than fuel-powered cars, can be very costly if the battery fails, time taking while recharging the batteries, and they are usually expensive typically for a conventional car owner. PROS – the top of the list is that EVs are environmental friendly, “cheap” in sense of recharging batteries rather than filling the tank, Almost maintenance free – less maintenance required than gas-powered car, DC charging facility, Soundless drive comparably to conventional vehicles and at many routes, there are special lanes on highways for electric vehicles.

EVs in Pakistan

Similarly with fast growth of Electric vehicles globally, the global electric vehicle market is expected to reach 802.81 billion dollars by the end of 2027. Meanwhile in Pakistan EV technology counted less than 10% in all cities, but the country has plans to bring 30% of electric vehicles in use on roads by 2030,

Owning an electric vehicle in Pakistan can also be risky in many ways. The majority of people drive conventional cars because the country has full services for these cars, there are number of (HEVs) Hybrid electric vehicle users, driving Toyota Prius, Toyota Aqua and Honda Vezel. At the end of the year 2019 BMW launched its full electric car in Pakistan for the first time ever, around 95 lac rupees, costs an arm and a leg for residents and also it didn’t get any fame around natives.

Image via unsplash.com

EV freaks can face some major troubles in Pakistan as for example Lack of charging stations, fully electric vehicle in low budget, stressful road trips because of “if batteries depletes” and it’s heavy cost if batteries fail at some point, keeping rising petroleum prices in mind public would love to switch on EV technology as SAIC motors are launching an affordable MG ZS electric vehicle this year in Pakistan but the care services won’t be pleasing. The government has to work on EV infrastructures and invest in charging stations around all cities.

Besides all comfort seating, 5 star features and top notch technology a car driver need essentials and facilities for his car, I myself would love to have Porsche Taycan for fun and status but what about its necessities? Which my homeland is unable to provide at the moment. But the govt. has got your back if you step back from full electric vehicles and set eyes on Hybrid technology.

Will 2021 is going to be the year where people worldwide will be freed from noisy engines?

[meginoi]

All the numbers

Challenge Accepted, anon. You asked, i answered 

1:Full name - Meg (i’m not putting my last name)

2:Zodiac sign - Aires

3:3 fears - Insects, loneliness, the dark

4:3 things I love - Youtube, my friends, Netflix

5:4 turn on’s - Hmmmm, not sure

6:4 turn off’s - Being arrogant and cocky

7:My best friend? - Online: cutie5780 In person: soulydyingalone

8:Sexual orientation? - Polyamourous Bisexual or Lesbian (i haven’t figured it out yet)9:My best first date? - Bowling

10:How tall am I? - 5′6

11:What do I miss? - Having no responsibilities 

12:What time was I born?- 1:25pm

13:Favorite color? - Red

14:Do I have a crush? - Definitely 

15:Favorite quote? - Our greatest weakness lies in giving up. The most certain way to succeed is always to try just one more time. – Thomas Edison

16:Favorite place? - There’s a lovely coffee shop near to where i live where i go to work and write.

17:Favorite food? - Lemon Chicken

18:Do I use sarcasm? - Definitely, it’s my only source of humor

19:What am I listening to right now? - Impossible - James Arthur

20:First thing I notice in new person? - Their eyes

21:Shoe size? - 6

22:Eye color? - Blue

23:Hair color? - Naturally blonde but i dye it brown

 24: Favorite style of clothing? - Style? I just wear jeans and a jumper really…idk

25:Ever done a prank call? - Nope

26:What color of underwear I’m wearing now? - Not answering this one

27:Meaning behind my URL? - I used an username generator, its a mix of my name and idk what.28:Favorite movie? - It’s a tie between the IT remake and La La Land

29:Favorite song? - Temporary Bliss by The Cab

30:Favorite band? - Icon For Hire

31:How I feel right now? - Tired but happy

32:Someone I love. - cutie5780 - Sydney 

33:My current relationship status. - Single

34:My relationship with my parents. - Me and my mom have a good relationship. Me and my dad…not so much.

35:Favorite holiday - The cruise i did round Scandinavia in August 

36:Tattoos and piercing I have. - None

37:Tattoos and piercing I want. - A tattoo of a flower on my thigh

38:The reason I joined Tumblr. - I can’t actually remember

39:Do I and my last ex hate each other? - No, not at all

40:Do I ever get “good morning” or “good night” texts? - Yep

41:Have I ever kissed the last person I texted? - No

42:When did I last hold hands? - I can’t even remember.

43:How long does it take me to get ready in the morning? - About half an hour

44:Have I shaved my legs in the past three days? - Yep

 45: Where am I right now? - Home

46:If I were drunk & can’t stand, who’s taking care of me? - Probably soulydyingalone

47:Do I like my music loud or at a reasonable level? - Depends on my mood

48:Do I live with my Mom and Dad? - Yes

49:Am I excited for anything? - The Markiplier tour in February 

50:Do I have someone of the opposite sex I can tell everything to? - No

51:How often do I wear a fake smile? - Almost all the time - especially at work

52:When was the last time I hugged someone? - I can’t remember

53:What if the last person I kissed was kissing someone else right in front of me? - I wouldn’t really be bothered

54:Is there anyone I trust even though I should not? - Probably one of my exes

55:What is something I disliked about today? - Going to work

56:If I could meet anyone on this earth, who would it be? - Probaby either Thomas Sanders, Jacksepticeye or Markiplier

57:What do I think about most? - I think about my future career a lot

58:What’s my strangest talent? - Idk, I’m not talented

59:Do I have any strange phobias? - I have a phobia of getting ill

60:Do I prefer to be behind the camera or in front of it? - Depends on my mood

61:What was the last lie I told? - I’m not sure

62:Do I prefer talking on the phone or video chatting online? - Talking on the phone

63:Do I believe in ghosts? How about aliens? - Yep, believe in both

64:Do I believe in magic? - Yep

65:Do I believe in luck? - Not sure

66:What’s the weather like right now? - Raining (no surprise there)

67:What was the last book I’ve read? - Flawed by Cecelia Ahern

68:Do I like the smell of gasoline? - Yep

69:Do I have any nicknames? - Meggles

70:What was the worst injury I’ve ever had? - Fracturing my hip

71:Do I spend money or save it? - Spend, i have no control with money

72:Can I touch my nose with a tongue? - No

73: Is there anything pink in 10 feet from me? - Nope

74:Favorite animal? - Dogs

75:What was I doing last night at 12 AM? - Writing and watching Long Live

76:What do I think Satan’s last name is? 

77:What’s a song that always makes me happy when I hear it? - Cake By The Ocean by DNCE

78:How can you win my heart? - By actually caring about me and asking how i am

79: What would I want to be written on my tombstone? - Say not in grief that she is no more but say in thankfulness that she was. A death is not the extinguishing of a light, but the putting out of the lamp because the dawn has come. 80:What is my favorite word?- Bubble

81:My top 5 blogs on tumblr? - deadprinxietywalking, cutie5780. soulydyingalone, ilovemyspoopydad. mylasagnaisraw82:If the whole world were listening to me right now, what would I say?- Everyone, be nice to each other!

83:Do I have any relatives in jail? - Nope

84:I accidentally eat some radioactive vegetables. They were good, and what’s even cooler is that they endow me with the super-power of my choice! What is that power? - The ability to read minds

85:What would be a question I’d be afraid to tell the truth on? - Have you ever been abused?

86:What is my current desktop picture? - The Sanders Sides

87:Had sex? - No

88:Bought condoms? - No

89:Gotten pregnant? - No

90:Failed a class? - No

91:Kissed a boy? - Yes

92:Kissed a girl? - Yes

93:Have I ever kissed somebody in the rain? - Yes

94:Had job? - Yes

95:Left the house without my wallet? - Yes

96:Bullied someone on the Internet? - No

97:Had sex in public? - No

98:Played on a sports team? - No

99:Smoked weed? - No

100:Did drugs? - Np

101:Smoked cigarettes? - Yeah

102:Drank alcohol? - Yeah

103:Am I a vegetarian/vegan? - No

104:Been overweight? - No

105:Been underweight? - Yes

106:Been to a wedding? - Never

107:Been on the computer for 5 hours straight? - Almost every day

108:Watched TV for 5 hours straight? - No

109:Been outside my home country? - Yeah

110:Gotten my heart broken? - Yep

111:Been to a professional sports game? - Yeah

112:Broken a bone? - Yeah

113:Cut myself? - Yep

114:Been to prom? - Yep

115:Been in airplane? - Yep

116: Fly by helicopter? - Nope

117:What concerts have I been to? - So many, most recently was Ed Sheeran.

118:Had a crush on someone of the same sex? - Yep

119:Learned another language? - Yep

120:Wore make up? - Yeah

121:Lost my virginity before I was 18? - No

122:Had oral sex? - No

123:Dyed my hair? - Yeah

124:Voted in a presidential election? - No

125:Rode in an ambulance? - Yeah

126:Had a surgery? - No

127:Met someone famous? - Yeah 

128: Stalked someone on a social network?- No

129:Peed outside? - No

130:Been fishing? - Yep

131:Helped with charity? - Yeah

132:Been rejected by a crush? - Yep

133:Broken a mirror? - No

134:What do I want for birthday? - A tattoo

135:How many kids do I want and what will be their names? - 2 - Ellie and Ryan

136:Was I named after anyone?- I don’t think so

137:Do I like my handwriting? - Nah

138:What was my favorite toy as a child? - Not sure

139:Favorite TV Show? - American Horror Story

140:Where do I want to live when older? - Cornwall, UK

141:Play any musical instrument? - No

142:One of my scars, how did I get it? - Top of my wrist - carpet burn

143:Favorite pizza topping? - Bacon (that’s a topping right?)

144:Am I afraid of the dark? - Yeah

145:Am I afraid of heights? - Nah

146:Have I ever got caught sneaking out or doing anything bad? - Nope

147:Have I ever tried my hardest and then gotten disappointed in the end? - Almost all the time

148:What I’m really bad at - Singing

149:What my greatest achievements are- Passing first year of college with a distinction150:The meanest thing somebody has ever said to me - My life was better without you in it - my crush at the time.151:What I’d do if I won in a lottery - Take a trip to New York

152:What do I like about myself? - My eyes

153:My closest Tumblr friend - Cutie5780

154:Something I fantasies about. - Being a published writer

155:Any question you’d like - N/A

[componentplanet]

Living with a Dell Precision 5540 Mobile Workstation

Just when you think you’ve got a great mobile computing solution, something always comes along to upset the apple cart. In my case, it was mostly drones — more specifically, the 4K footage from my Mavic Pro drones. In addition to the added compute demands of rendering and encoding 4K video, consumer drone footage benefits mightily from substantial post-processing to reduce noise, correct artifacts, and perform color grading.

My two-year-old Dell XPS 15 9560 has been a great workhorse for photo and video editing but has been limited by its 4-core CPU and thermal issues (even after I hacked on it with various thermal fixes). Plus there is a whole new generation of GPUs since its 1050, for applications like Lightroom and Photoshop that take advantage of them. So I went shopping.

Shopping for a High-Powered Laptop

By default, I looked at the newest model XPS 15, the 7590, but early reviewers seemed to be having the same thermal issues as the earlier versions. I also looked closely at the HP and Lenovo mobile workstations,

but the components I wanted — latest generation i9, Turing GPU, and 4K touch display, all in one 4-pound chassis — weren’t all available at the time. They are starting to be, and I look forward to working with some of them over time. But I needed something sooner, so I took a chance and purchased one of the first Dell Precision 5540 units.

The Precision 5540 is very similar to an XPS model, with a few workstation twists, like the option for a Quadro GPU and some thermal tweaks, along with being certified for a lot of creative and engineering software. Early units even said XPS on the back flap, although now they say Precision. Physically the Precision 5540 looks nearly identical to my 9560, and in fact while I’ve had both of them in use I’ve found myself being frustrated at a missing file only to realize I’m on the wrong laptop.

Dell also provides about the same extensive set of ports it has for several years. There is a USB-C port that is now Thunderbolt 3 compatible, HDMI, 2 traditional USB ports, a mic/headphone jack, and a welcome SD card reader. Hard-wired Ethernet is long gone, but Dell does ship a USB-C Ethernet dongle along with the machine. Video callers will be thrilled that Dell has squeezed the webcam into the tiny bezel above the screen, instead of having it next to the keyboard.

If you’re looking for a fresh design, the Precision 5540 isn’t it. It’s nearly identical on the outside to my 2-year-old XPS 15, other than the new webcam placement.

You can get the Precision 5540 with Windows 10 Home, Pro, or Workstation (if you choose the 6-core Xeon). Linux is also available. RAM ranges from 8GB to 64GB, and hard drives from 256GB to 1TB. If you want either the T1000 or T2000 GPU, you’ll probably also want the large battery instead of an extra drive bay. The only screen option advertised to support 100 percent of Adobe RGB is the 4K IGZO4 Touch version. Selecting it will also require the large battery and configuring 2 RAM modules. After Dell’s online discounts, the 5540 is priced similarly to a high-end XPS 15.

The Precision 5540 Is a Performance Beast for a 4-pound Laptop

By the numbers, the Precision 5540 is a large upgrade over my last-gen XPS. The 8-core i9-9980HK has a lower base clock than the 9560’s i7 (2.4GHz versus 2.8GHz) but it boosts to a maximum of 5GHz and doesn’t throttle nearly as much. Running Cinebench R20 (CPU rendering) the 9560 crashed to a low of .8GHz, helping reduce its score to just over 1000. The 5540 never went below 2.9 GHz which, along with its 8 cores, allowed it to score over 3200. That performance ratio was more than matched in Intel’s XTU benchmark, at 2800 versus 850.

Similarly, the Quadro T2000 is a big upgrade. 3DMark’s TimeSpy jumped from 1800 to 3200, for example. The results for FireStrike were also good, jumping from 5000 to 7400. Following along with a monitor on the CPU temperature and clock speed, a small amount of thermal throttling occurred, but the CPU was always able to perform above its base clock.

Dell’s Precision 5540 4K LED display has a gamut covering 100 percent of sRGB and Adobe RGB, along with 95 percent of DCI-P3.

However, this is still a lot of processing power and heat crammed into a small package, so it isn’t immune from throttling. A combination of heavy CPU and Nvidia GPU load will cause the system power limit to come down, which in turn can reduce clock rates down to their base clock.

What? No RTX?

Having just covered Nvidia’s big push to roll out its RTX capabilities to “Creatives,” I was well aware that even though the T2000 GPU in the Precision 5540 is a beast by mobile standards, it doesn’t have any of the dedicated RTX functionality. In the end, I decided I’m okay with that. It isn’t clear how much true RTX capability is in applications Nvidia touts, so I don’t know what the performance gain would be.

In particular, while I do a lot of rendering, encoding, and image processing, I don’t game on my laptop (much) or use it for ray tracing very often. Similarly, serious AI work will still be the province of my desktop machines or the cloud, which have beefier GPUs and more GPU memory. Plus, the mobile workstations with real RTX GPUs are even heavier and more expensive. If Nvidia is successful in establishing RTX

as a permanent part of its architecture, I’m sure that will change over time.

“Kitbashing” to Save Some Bucks

A favorite term in our family comes from model railroading: Kitbashing to upgrade a pre-designed building model is one of our favorite activities. Doing your own computer upgrades can be just as rewarding, and even more profitable. Dell wanted an uplift of something like $700 to equip my machine with 32GB of RAM and a 1TB SSD. I found I could buy the equivalent or better components for about $250 (Crucial 2666 RAM and a top-rated Adata NVMe SSD) and install them myself.

I did find that the security settings in the BIOS had to be turned down a notch before it let me boot of my new drive — that I had cloned from the one that came with the Precision 5540. Then I used the excellent PC Mover utility from Laplink to get my apps, files, and settings across from my old machine. It’s not perfect, but having tried many tools that claim to do this over the years, it is the only one I’ve found that is actually worth using.

Using the Dell Precision 5540

Overall, the Precision 5540 is a joy to use. The screen is stunning and capable of being incredibly bright. Having the (optional) fingerprint reader in the power button makes returning to the machine simple and intuitive. And the machine is fast. It not only benchmarks fast, it feels fast and is responsive (which you’d certainly expect from all that power under the hood). You can order it with a spinning hard drive as the primary drive, but I find it hard to believe that would ever make sense.

Unfortunately, much like many other Windows computers, the Precision 5540 continues to struggle with sleep-related issues when running Windows 10. The first one I ran across was that the default “connected standby” or whatever the current term is for the default sleep mode is, would enable the machine to fire back up after I closed it and put it in my photo backpack. Forcing it to hibernate solved that problem, but it really shouldn’t be a problem at all in a state of the art high-end machine. The other issue I had with two different units is that after resuming from sleep the WiFi speed was crushed to less than 10% of what it had been before. Interestingly, I didn’t see this when the 5540 first shipped, but has been easily repeatable for the last couple weeks. Updating drivers (from either the Dell or Intel site) doesn’t seem to fix it, although turning WiFi off and on again does. I really hope Dell gets on top of this soon.

Conclusion

Overall, I’m satisfied with the Precision 5540. It performed perfectly on the road in Europe to process 360-degree panoramas and lots of 4K drone footage, and around the US on several different projects. While the 5540 pricing starts at $1,240, a fully-configured unit prices out at just over $3,000, so it isn’t for everyone. I’m pleased with my choice and wouldn’t hesitate to recommend it to those with similar needs and budgets, although both the Thinkpad X1 Extreme 2nd generation and the HP ZBook Studio G6 should be worthy competitors. I’m assuming that Dell can fix the annoying WiFi issue.

For Mac users, look for the rumored 16-inch MacBook Pro by the end of 2019. I do wonder if its screen will actually be larger than the 15.6-inch current standard for high-end 15-inch machines, or if the 16-inch moniker is just marketing. It’ll be interesting to see what Apple provides for GPU options for it, as that is one area where they have tended to lag behind Windows competitors.

Now Read:

At a Glance: Alienware M15 R2 Laptop Review

Hands On With the DJI Mavic Pro: A Serious Drone That Fits in Your Daypack

Lenovo X1 Carbon vs. Yoga: Which ThinkPad Model Is Right for You?

from ExtremeTechExtremeTech https://www.extremetech.com/computing/296737-living-with-a-dell-precision-5540-mobile-workstation from Blogger http://componentplanet.blogspot.com/2019/10/living-with-dell-precision-5540-mobile.html

[iwantunique]

20+ best stocking stuffers for toddlers 2019

Oftentimes, best stocking stuffers for toddlers 2019 or to choose toddler presents are some of the most difficult tasks on your shopping list. What’s your type when you choose the presents for your tot, like funny, cheap, useful, educational, and expensive? Well, there are heaps of miniature gadgets that will amaze your child by seeing the brimmed stocking! But it is always fair to indulge at least some things that the receiver of the gift (whether it’s your parent, child, or might your cute dog) gets really surprised; feel enjoyed while receiving those presents; at the same time, it would be the icing on the cake if they’re useful too! To help you out in this thorough process of figuring out the suitable Stocking Stuffers for Toddlers 2019 for preschoolers this year, we have assembled some of the best products aptly suited for the best stocking stuffers for toddlers 2019. These stuffers include items right fro, quirky toys to gag gifts, the very useful gadgets, beautiful accessories, and so much more.  Here, you’ll find the best stocking stuffer toddlers ideas for your little cutie pie! And remember while adding the excitement taste under Christmas Tree, fill these stocking stuffers with something that spreads enchantment and joy! The list of these best stocking stuffers for toddlers 2019 will make Christmas morning or the annual holiday present list a very special one! We test, research, and recommend the best of the best products. So, glance further to buy something unique for your child. Best stocking stuffers for toddlers 2019 1.Turbo Race Car Twin Bed The Turbo Race Car Twin Bed from Delta Children! Designed to resemble a classic race car, fun details include a rear spoiler, a front grill and racing tires with chrome-colored rims. Made of durable molded plastic and decorated with cool decals, this sleek bed will kick any car-themed room into high gear for years to come. The high sides of the race car act as secure guardrails and allow kids of all ages to easily enter and exit the bed. Perfect for any child who dreams of racing cars.

Promising review: " I bought this bed for my 3-year-old son. He loves cars and we were trying to motivate him to stay in his own bed. He loves his own bed and I have fallen back in love with my own bed."--Doognik Get it from Amazon for $252.89 2. Warmtree $100 Dollars Bill Funny Money Napkin This funny napkin is soft and comfortable,it looks and feels like real money, perfect for themed parties and interesting games.

Promising review: " Very happy with my purchase! Larger size than expected!"--Ashley Mcneil Get it from Amazon for $10.99 Best Stocking Stuffers for Toddlers 2019 3. Children's Night Lights Touch Sensor Vibration Birdcage Chargeable Hand-held Lamp Made of ABS and PC+TPU,Food-grade premium quality,safe and non-toxic materials ;High emulation lawn cute round animal in clear cap glowing soft light (birdcage shape).Build in 700 mAh battery,Rechargeable and energy-saving with an USB line(1200mm) Charging time:5h, Battery life:15h;USB charge it by your computer or power bank, etc.Base switches with 3 modes :ON / OFF / VIBRATION.VIBRATION: three status of middle-bright, high-bright, turn off , lights will cycle when your hands touch the cage.

Promising review: " My daughter loves it. It is a great night light."--Lenka Hrebickova Get it from Amazon for $19.99 4. Totoro Anime LED Night Light Kid's Character Lamp USB Charge, Desk Night Table Reading Lamp Whimsical lamp in the shape of Totoro holding an umbrella. Totoro is a popular Japanese animation character, loved by adults as well as children. Soft light emanating from Totoro's stomach or his umbrella are perfect as a nightlight. Charges conveniently with USB, making the lamp useful for outdoor camping and travel. Charging Time: approx. 2~3 hours. Light lasts about 8~15 hours.

Promising review: " Great little lamp. Super bright! Recharges with USB cable (included). Light comes out his belly or from the umbrella. Again both are fairly bright. It comes in a box and you snap the umbrella into place. The box I received also advertised the fan variant, so it might confuse someone if you're giving this as a gift. Overall my 12 year old daughter loves it. Very good resemblance to the beloved Totoro from his classic film."--James Wyatt Get it from Amazon for $27.00 5. My Neighbor Totoro Sleeping Bag Sofa Bed Twin Bed Double Bed Mattress for Kids Bed sack: 100% Polyester *Inner padding: 80% Polyester, 20% Cotton *Overall Size: 230CM * 175CM (90” * 69”) *New Weight: 13KG *Tail Size: 80CM (31”)

Promising review: " I Absolutely Love this. This one from this seller is better than I expected. My daughter absolutely loves it. Absolutely NOT made cheaply. Now my other daughter wants to buy one for my granddaughter. It's huge and comfy and no need to add more stuffing although we thought we were gonna have to with some reviews. Also it has a zipper if you do wanna add stuffing or remove it to clean it. Absolutely 100 % Completely Satisfied and A Very Happy Birthday Girl who turned 10! "--Sonja Schlegel Get it from Amazon for $273.64 Best Stocking Stuffers for Toddlers 2019 6. R/C Award Winning Tracer Racers High-Speed Remote Control Infinity Loop Track Set with Two Cars for Dual Racing Racing cars feature undercarriage lights that not only make these cars look almost like they are hovering rather than rolling - the lights also leave glowing streaks in their wake showing how the racers are "burning" up the track takes your racing to the next level with Tracer Racers High-Speed Remote Control Glow in the Dark Racing. Tracer Racer racing cars feature undercarriage lights that not only make these cars look almost like they are hovering rather than rolling - the lights also leave glowing streaks in their wake showing how the racers are "burning" up the track!

Promising review : " very good investment - not cheap, but will be used for many, many hours by my grandson and myself - so well worth the price - can see us buying more track pieces to create different designs - lots of fun to race, simple to charge - good quality product, did have an issue with one car when opened, called company and got immediate response - they sent new product out same day of call and I got it in 2 days - impressive - grandson loves hot wheel and RC cars - this is perfect for him - also light up track is very good - extra bonus!"--Wayne Get it from Amazon for $119.99 7. Hamburger Junior Beanbag Chair Fresh off the WOW! grill, The Double Stack beanbag is hot and ready! Warning: the delicious appearance of this superbly soft beanbag may cause slight drooling. Soft and cushy construction that lends a touch of whimsy for any area and is certainly a fun conversation piece. Digital printed fabric treatment projects real life-like appearance. Wow! Works bean bag unique chairs will wow you! Product Materials: Polyester, High-grade EPS Bead.

Promising review: " Bought it for my sons 9th birthday. It was a big hit! the chair is the perfect size and the print image is great. The only thing i didn't love is that the "beans" are really big. I am buy smaller filler to replace it."--TLC Get it from Amazon for $38.99 8. 95 Foot Zip Line Kit with Stainless Steel Spring Brake and Seat Our zip line used the 5.3 Foot Stainless Steel Spring Brake instead of the bungee cord braking system. All customers who have purchased our zip line before, if there is any problem with bungee cord braking system, please Contact us, we will help you replace the new Stainless Steel Spring Brake for free! This zip line meets the international quality standards (RoHS & CE) and can easily hold up to 250 lbs. Are you looking for a wonderful outdoor activity or a birthday gift that will help you bond with your kids and enjoy unforgettable moments? Look no further. Now you can spend endless hours of backyard fun with your children. Your backyard will instantly become a stunning amusement park, and you will become the neighbourhood’s coolest parent!

Promising review: " We LOVE this zip line! We were looking for something to draw our screen magnet youngest child outside with increased frequency. This fits the bill!! Installation was definitely a two-person job, just as we expected. It took us a part of a morning to put it up. Tightening it was a little tricky and required some trial and error on our part, but I'd call that operator error related to inexperience, not a flaw in the kit. We have installed a secondary brake just to add a back-up for safety. It's only been up for about five days but I bet we've made 500 trips down the line already. We have six children with an eighteen year age spread between them. All six have enjoyed multiple trips down the line along with their friends."--Dayna Strand Get it form Amazon for $161.27 Best Stocking Stuffers for Toddlers 2019 9. Giant Inflatable Ride-On Banana Float Huge over-sized inflatable banana ride-on float enjoyed by kids and adults alike for a great pool experience. Use as a lounger or for just any fun pool activities. Made of durable heavy duty PVC and measures 59 inches long. Not recommended for kids under 6 years old and children should have adult supervision.

Promising review: " I got this as a gift for my friend, and didn't realize that it's likely meant for kids, so can't really handle adult weight as well. It made such a fun floatie to even try to get on top of the thing! It's basically the water version of the mechanical bull."--Mia Get it from Amazon for $16.99 10. Baby Kids Play Mat Foldable Soft and Washable Toys Storage Organizer Children Play Rugs with 59 inches Large Diameter Winthome toy storage bag can store the toys in order, no longer need to find toys everywhere. It is very Simple, Portable and Sturdy. Ideal solution for leaning up small toys like trains, cars, dolls, stuffed animals and more. Mummy's good friend. Use this to make sure your child is having fun without worrying about the mess.You can also bring it with you while you are outdoors, making sure your child is safer and more comfortable when playing.

Promising review: " Purchased this mat for our 7 month old daughter and it's absolutely perfect! Easy to sinch up and move into another room. Just enough padding to keep her comfortable on our hardwood floors. I was nervous to wash it but no change to the quality of the mat after washing it. It's big but not too big. Big Brother can easily join her for play and there's room for everyone. Highly recommend."--EmmyB Get it from Amazon for $29.99 11. Baby Play mat Kid's Puzzle Exercise Play Mat for Floor Crawl mat for Baby with XPE Foam Thicking 0.8in This baby mat is easy to Splice as puzzle and take it out.You can optionally splice baby play mat baby mat play mat playmat extra large foam play mat according to your preference. Depending on the size of the space, different shapesbaby play mat, baby mat,play mat,playmat extra large foam play mat. The play mat is big and thickening 0.8 inches and Changeable Size so easily .baby folding mat play mat extra large foam play mat play mat large foam baby crawl mat playmat foam folding play mat baby foam mat folding baby play mat foam play mat for baby folding mat for baby foam baby play mat .

Promising review: " I wish I come across this baby mat sooner... My daughter is almost 2 and the mat is perfect to put at Grandma's. She goes there a few days a week and Grandma likes that it is foldable so it can be put away when it's not in used and depending what toys they put out, Grandma can adjust the playmat accordingly. The material is good, the prints are cute, I cleaned it a few times with disinfectant wipes, easy to clean, no colors were wiped off. This mat can be used for tummy time, crawlers, and of course toddlers, I really like the foldable design."--Doleman Get it from Amazon for $49.99 Best Stocking Stuffers for Toddlers 2019 12. Pool Floats for Kids - Llama Pool Float, Baby Floaties for Toddlers and Kids Baby water float and inflatable pool float features a unique trendy design for 2019 - only available from USA Toyz; these llama pool inflatables introduce little ones to these gentle South American animals. Let kids have fun splashing around with these swimming pool floats; this floaty for baby features 2 leg openings in the swimming ring for toddlers to sit safely, and should be used responsibly with adult supervision.

Promising review: " I loved this floaty. I loved that it is a cool llama, its actually fun to choose different animals / shapes every year, I had just become tired of the same old Aligator or Shark or even those flamingos that were popular the last couple of years. Llamas are cool, my kids got a huge kick out of it, and when their friends come over they also love it. It seems very sturdy, after a couple weeks and I don't know how many kids using it, it is still in tact as good as ever. The material seems thick and high quality. Nice design. I also think it is very reasonably priced for its size. I have seen floatys in the store for upwards of $50, so this was a great deal."--Julie S. Get it from Amazon for $15.99 13. Light Up Football : Glow in The Dark LED Ball Composite leather footballs and textured lace provides exceptional grip and control especially with Football Gloves, we’re talking solid spirals for days during your American football games. Butyl bladder locks in air for optimal pressure and shape retention for a consistent throwing during your football games. USES: Beach football, night-time football, recreational football games, playing in the pool, park, ootball practice.

Promising review : " Very cute- my son,Chance, will be thrilled when he gets it! "--SallySue Get it from Amazon for $24.99 14. Capture the Flag REDUX: The Original Glow-in-The-Dark Outdoor Game for Birthday  It's the classic game of stealth, speed and strategy that people have enjoyed for over 90 years – now adapted for today's generation using glow-in-the-dark lights! It includes battery powered game pieces for jail markers, territory lights, light-up wristbands and glowing crystals that serve as each team's flag. With a fresh look and the added dynamic of low-light game play, this activity inspires people of all ages to put down their phones and do something active together. Learning how to play is easy. Your objective is to enter the other team’s territory, steal their Orb (aka “flag”) and get it back to your home side without getting tagged. Tagged players go to “jail” and must remain there until a teammate reaches them without getting tagged.

Promising review: " I am a youth minister and this game was used on our Fall 2016 Retreat. Was a huge hit! A couple lights went out and I emailed them about it a few months after and they sent new parts without any hassle. Extremely good customer service and a great product. Well worth it for any size group. My group is bigger than what this game gives arm bands for so we use cheap glow stick bracelets for extra team identifying."--Mason Cothren Get it from Amazon for $59.90 Best Stocking Stuffers for Toddlers 2019 15. Anime Hooded Cloak Flannel Cape Hoodies for Sleep Nap Critter Blankets 100% brand new & high quality.Note:The snaps that connect the sleeves are the same which style just like the pictures.FUNCTIONAL:The versatility of this plush blanket allows to be a perfect camping, traveling, napping, playing, sleeping and reading companion.COMFORTABLE:Very soft and comfortable flannel,it can keep you warm in the winter or sleep under an air conditioning in office.OCCASION:You can use it as cosplay cloak,role play,Halloween,Christmas,all kinds of parties or daily wear.One Size:90*160cm(35.43*62.99inch).Package: a cloak.

Promising review: " I love it! It's super soft, the quality is way more than expected. I am just worried about the whiskers.... It might fall in the washing machine. And It should have a bigger version! So it could cover my whole body. SO cute!"--Bianca Get it from Amazon for $28.99 16. Glow Battle: A Light up Sword and Ninja Game  Family, friends and neighbors play organized sword fighting games using (harmless!) glowing foam weapons. Choose from 10 different ways to play or create your own! The perfect interactive game for team building, icebreakers and developing strategy for large and small groups. Get youth off their screens using the 28 glowing game pieces included in this kit. Make exercise fun as boys and girls run, swing and dodge to win.

Promising review: " This is a really fun product for the family. The glow bracelets and swords stay lit for a long time. I love that the batteries are replaceable. I would recommend that you play outside since its an active game. The ONLY thing I didnt like is that at the end of the battle need swords is plastic and can hurt someones face, you know if you're getting crazy, like kids do! We use safety glasses as always with any sport. I didn't take pics because we are having too much fun. Also, fun for adults in the forests. Not even kidding."--crystal knigge Get it from Amazon for $49.90 17. Kids Kick Scooter w/ 3 Wheel Deck, Handle Bar Grips, Sit-or-Stand Removable Folding Seat Adventurous tots gain a smooth-gliding companion with this cool convertible Kick Scooter from Modera Kids. Designed to adjust as kids grow up and fine-tune their motor skills, the three wheeler features a foldable/removable seat, adjustable easy-grip handlebars, built-in back brake, extra wide anti-slip deck, front basket for toys, and an additional platform where toddlers can rest both feet while sitting.Like a balance bike, the scooter’s sturdy design and lean-to-turn wheels support little ones as they hone their coordination and control. Watch as they rip up the pavement and gain confidence on the road to adolescence! Parents also save a bundle with a toy that conveniently collapses and converts as kids get older. So give a gift that actually grows with them—add a sit-or-stand Kick Scooter to your cart today!

Promising review: " This is a awesome little scooter. My so t had played with it everyday since it arrived. Quality built and. It cheap as I was afraid it may have been. I’m super impressed."--J Guthrie Get it from Amazon for $49.99 Best Stocking Stuffers for Toddlers 2019 18. Colored Clip in Hair Extensions 20 inch Rainbow Heat-Resistant Straight Highlight Hairpieces Cospaly Fashion Party Christmas Gift For Kids Girls 12 Color in 24 pcs Colored hair extension are affordable ,lightweight,and easy to apply,these color extension snap into your hair and can be taken out in a matter of seconds.High quality synthetic fiber,DIY your look you want ,and instant highlight without any chemical dye to damage your hair ,it is a perfect accessory for special occasions which can make you stand out from the crowed.Color:Bright red, lilac purple, pink, yellow, orange yellow, sapphire blue, fruity green, rose red, beige, violet, purple, vanilla green.

Promising review: " Sometimes I want to dye my hair a crazy color but I realize it would be expensive because my hair is long and dark. So I got this extensions pack to just try out colors. That way I have the fun hair colors without the commitment. It’s a good value for the amount of extensions that come in the pack. The clips are easy to put on and there are a lot of color options. I had more than enough colors so I gave some to my 6yr old niece and she had a lot of fun trying on the different hair colors."--Abbie Get it from Amazon for $14.99 19. Giant Beach Ball 6 ft Soccer Ball Diameter Extra Large Inflatable Beach Ball Pool Toy Jumbo Beach Ball 6 Feet Tall Beach Ball Inflatable Soccerball 12FT Pole-to-Pole Inflatable Beach Ball Pool Party BallsIntroduction:A huge size version of a classic sports ball! Kids and adults will have a blast chasing, kicking, and watching the ball soar. Add a unique touch of fun to any party, cookout, or beach day!Item Specification&Features:Material：Made of thick, durable 30mil vinyl with reinforced seamsSize: 6 Feet Tall/12FT from pole-to-poleLarge, secure airtight valve keeps air in and won't tear or detach from the vinylNew rapid valve allows for the fastest inflation and deflation compared to traditional valvesFun eye catching colors inspired by the classic beachball design, great for adults and kids of all agesThis is a great ball for kicking, punching, throwing, and climbing on top of .

Promising review : " This item is the size and style I expected when ordered. It arrived in the time frame that was given. It inflates and deflates great, no holes. I would order this again"--Lyndsi Donner Get it from Amazon for $49.99 20.Remote Control Car Boat Truck 4WD 6CH 2.4Ghz Land Water 2 in 1 RC Toy 360 Degree Spins and Flips- This is a multi-functional stunt rc car, unique design let it easy to complete 360 degree spins around, best gift for boy and girls.Waterproof Design- Equipped with waterproof rubber ring to protect inner accessory of the car which makes it possible to even drive on the water, amazing fun land & water rc toys.

Promising review: " I bought 2 of these are they were way more fun than I anticipated. My 5 year old daughter and I were driving them in and out of the surf for a good 20 minutes. They're not super fast, which was perfect. They're quick enough to be fun, but not so fast that my kids couldn't control it. I highly recommend this toy. I bought spare batteries too (all blue). and used my spare batteries first and they lasted over 20 min of near continuous use. Next I put in the batteries that came with them (one blue and one green). The blue one performed the same, but the green battery died after 5 minutes. I think I got a bad one since I charged again over night and it died quickly the next day."--Rory Get it from Amazon for $37.98 21. Water Balloon Launcher Water Balloons Slingshot Cannon 3 Persona Balloon Launcher 250 Yard Wheter you're having a party or looking for a wet and wild sort of battle, Whizbuilders balloon slingshot has you covered. Out water balloon launcher is the perfect choice for anyone that wants to rain down balloon filled with water on their friends and family to enjoy the surprise look on their faces. This 3 persons water balloon sling is designed to launch balloons further and faster. Our 3-person water balloon launcher can shoot a balloon up to 250 yards to surprise friends and family at backyard parties, pools and more.

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[argonapricot]

when you REBLOG IT do ALL OF THEM

1: Name - Julia

2: Age - the number of protons in an argon atom! My favorite element! That didn’t even occur to me until just now and I am delighted.

3: 3 Fears -

1. Plane crashes

2. Dementia

3. Bad things happening to pets

4: 3 things I love -

1. elves

2. Dvorak

3. making fun of you

5: 4 turns on

1. Linguistics

2. The end credit music from Attack of the Clones

3. Girls

4. Chord resolutions

6: 4 turns off

1. Sex

2. Existentialism

3. Depression

4. Logistical complications

7: My best friend - three of alex in a trenchcoat

8: Sexual orientation - homosexualism

9: My best first date - I’ve only had one! Unless you count Mackenzie Week which wow I sure don’t yikes

But yeah, the actual first date was cute af we were adorable and drenched

10: How tall am I - not tall enough

11: What do I miss - so much all the time, god. Having it be a normal and socially accessible activity to play pretend when you hang out with friends. Having a girlfriend, lol. Playing outside in the yard, my brother being a tiny little puffball. Being an impressive child. So many childhood things actually I’m an enormous sap. Not being depressed?

12: What time was I born - 7:02 in the evening, I think

13: Favorite color - poorple

14: Do I have a crush - um i have like 7 I’m bad at getting over people

15: Favorite quote - “the answer is six” - alex, that one time the answer wasn’t six

16: Favorite place - it’s a secret!

17: Favorite food - academic vigor

18: Do I use sarcasm - no of course not

19: What am I listening to right now - the clock trying to guilt me from across the room

20: First thing I notice in new person - whether or not they are painted green 

21: Shoe size - 9/12

22: Eye color - Brown! Maybe like ¼ hazel

23: Hair color - also brown! It gets lighter in the summer, the sun bleaches it a bit.

24: Favorite style of clothing - gay

25: Ever done a prank call? - I used to prank call Clarissa every time I called her in like middle school, but it was always super obvious that it was me I think

27: Meaning behind my URL - my favorite element, paired with a handy dandy alliteration fruit that I enjoy

28: Favorite movie - Alex making a fool of herself

jk it’s I guess Lord of the Rings but I’m honestly so bad with favorites especially movies

29: Favorite song - I’ve been listening to Hurt by Johnny Cash a LOT lately, for fictional angst purposes and also it’s just a really good song

30: Favorite band - the Grady Knights Philharmonic

31: How I feel right now - sad that I’m only on number 31

32: Someone I love - Lee Pope

33: My current relationship status - so single you don’t even know

34: My relationship with my parents - good! I have great parents they are great!

35: Favorite holiday - I’ve only actually been to a Tu b’shvat seder once, but it was so incredibly rad and it’s a good holiday I approve of it.

36: Tattoos and piercing i have - none

37: Tattoos and piercing i want - none?

38: The reason I joined Tumblr - to get in on that sweet pjo fandom action

39: Do I and my last ex hate each other? nah bro @alphaj8de hi five

40: Do I ever get “good morning” or “good night ” texts? - I exchange “goodnights” with someone if we end a conversation by going to bed?

41: Have I ever kissed the last person you texted? - quite possibly!

42: When did I last hold hands? - I hold hands with Tolkien every day of my life

43: How long does it take me to get ready in the morning? - Depends on how slowly I get out of bed

44: Have I shaved your legs in the past three days? - yeah

45: Where am I right now? - on a couch

46: If I were drunk & can’t stand, who’s taking care of me? - fanfiction, probably, since all of my good caring friends are Leaving me to go to Party College, or alternatively Very Far Away And Stupidly Cold Stupid College

47: Do I like my music loud or at a reasonable level? - I like my music neurotically soft

48: Do I live with my Mom and Dad? - for the next like two months

49: Am I excited for anything? - college! Hannah’s lake house! garbage on the internet! 

50: Do I have someone of the opposite sex I can tell everything to? - I rarely tell Everything to anyone

51: How often do I wear a fake smile? - I suck at fake smiles, and can only maintain them (when called for) in three-second bursts

52: When was the last time I hugged someone? - I hugged Benjamin earlier today

53: What if the last person I kissed was kissing someone else right in front of me? - I would stand there like a tool.

54: Is there anyone I trust even though I should not? - YEAH @cognitivelyagitated I can’t believe you took advantage of my eighth grade self like that and I can’t believe my eighth grade self was that stupid.

55: What is something I disliked about today? - Discord crashed and my online friend was not online.

56: If I could meet anyone on this earth, who would it be? - *mumblemumble*

57: What do I think about most? - characters doing Things

58: What’s my strangest talent? - I have the power to make sleeping possums knit

59: Do I have any strange phobias? - macaroni and cheese, also certain noises that make me flip out and cringe

60: Do I prefer to be behind the camera or in front of it? - I can go both ways!

61: What was the last lie I told? - the answer to that sarcasm question

62: Do I prefer talking on the phone or video chatting online? - what is communication

63: Do I believe in ghosts? How about aliens? - I don’t devote a lot of energy into having opinions on ghosts or aliens one way or the other.

64: Do I believe in magic? - sometimes

65: Do I believe in luck? - I mean luck is just the concept that sometimes good things happen and sometimes they don’t? So yeah, the experimental probability of good things that happen is a thing.

66: What’s the weather like right now? - hot and humid

67: What was the last book I’ve read? - I’m in the middle of like four books right now, the last one I finished was I think A Conjuring Of Light? In the shades of magic trilogy, which was hype.

68: Do I like the smell of gasoline? - no!

69: Do I have any nicknames? - julesliaia

70: What was the worst injury I’ve ever had? - I broke my arm in seventh grade

71: Do I spend money or save it? - both!

72: Can I touch my nose with a tongue? - no

73: Is there anything pink in 10 feet from me? - there are some pink things visible on the screen where this is being typed?

74: Favorite animal? - I like all kinds of cats

75: What was I doing last night at 12 AM? - watching Episode 3 of IDOL Drama Operation Team

76: What do I think is Satan’s last name is? - why would he have a last name

77: What’s a song that always makes me happy when I hear it? - I can’t think of the best answer right now

78: How can you win my heart? - elf appreciation

79: What would I want to be written on my tombstone? - my name would be nice

80: What is my favorite word? - right now, sepulchral

81: My top 5 blogs on tumblr - I don’t really rate tumblrs!

82:  If the whole world were listening to me right now, what would I say? - stop! being stupid! stop being mean! Help the planet and also other people! I don’t know

83: Do I have any relatives in jail? - no

84: I accidentally eat some radioactive vegetables. They were good, and what’s even cooler is that they endow me with the super-power of my choice! What is that power? - being able to sing well would be nice

85: What would be a question I’d be afraid to tell the truth on? - are you spending your time responsibly?

86: What is my current desktop picture? - Yosemite

87: Had sex? - y

88: Bought condoms? - n

89: Gotten pregnant? - n

90: Failed a class? - n

91: Kissed a boy? - n

92: Kissed a girl? - y

93: Have I ever kissed somebody in the rain? - I think so, yeah

94: Had job? - y

95: Left the house without my wallet? - y

96: Bullied someone on the internet? - n

97: Had sex in public? - nah that’s your gig

98: Played on a sports team? - I was a part of the Lucky Clovers soccer team in like 1st and 2nd grade

99: Smoked weed? - n

100: Did drugs? - n

101: Smoked cigarettes? - n

102: Drank alcohol? - some! on special occasions

103: Am I a vegetarian/vegan? - n

104: Been overweight? - n

105: Been underweight? - n

106: Been to a wedding? - Yeah, a couple!

107: Been on the computer for 5 hours straight? - ………..probably on some late nights, but that’s terrible and I feel ashamed and sad

108: Watched TV for 5 hours straight? - n

109: Been outside my home country? - twice! Once to Spain and once to Mexico

110: Gotten my heart broken? - There have been a couple instances of vague heart breakage idk

111: Been to a professional sports game? - during TIP camps, yes

112: Broken a bone? - y

114: Been to prom? - I was busy Killing It at Carnegie Hall

115: Been in airplane? - y

116: Fly by helicopter? - n

117: What concerts have I been to? - @queer-sighted took me to a Fall Out Boy concert two summers ago, which was lots of fun! I’ve been to a lot of ASO concerts that Mom gets tickets to for producing the show, and a bunch of other classical music occasions, and some concerts that I’ve played!

118: Had a crush on someone of the same sex? - yeah. like. a Lot.

119: Learned another language? - I learned some okay French

120: Wore make up? - y

121: Lost my virginity before I was 18? - y but virginity is dumb

122: Had oral sex? - y

123: Dyed my hair? - n

124: Voted in a presidential election? - I was too young!

125: Rode in an ambulance? - n

126: Had a surgery? - yeah, on my foot in second grade

127: Met someone famous? - my crush met Selena Gomez does that count

128: Stalked someone on a social network? - only a tiny bit

129: Peed outside? - of course

130: Been fishing? - I’ve stood near some people who were fishing sometimes

131: Helped with charity? - I’ve worked on a lot of tikkun olam projects? And volunteered places? And donated tzeddakah? I don’t know what specifically constitutes charity.

132: Been rejected by a crush? - only very indirectly I have the forthcoming romantic initiative of a slug

133: Broken a mirror? - no

134: What do I want for birthday? - ummmm books and mamamoo I guess? Maybe a new tablet

[theillustratorscourt-blog]

Here I am! A day before June 2017 and frantically getting in several projects and written documents that needed tending to! I cannot even believe that it’s almost half way through this year already..

I’ve made a few new art pieces for my portfolio but still struggle with finding the creative energy to attack some of my narrative pieces, which I know I need. I also stare endlessly at my website and cannot see a solid style. My friends say they can tell, but to me, every art piece looks like it’s by a different artist. I’ve been trying to loosen up and create subject matter (and in my own way), that I actually want to create. Yes it’s important to look a the market you’re trying to break into and what the current trends and subjects are, but I create more fluidly and better when I just breathe and think about whatever it is I feel like drawing.

It feels impossible sometimes to be an artist. I have good days and bad days and they do NOT work with deadlines. I say to myself, “How can you create on days you have zero drive ?!”

Other days I’m bursting with creative energy and spend the entire day at my tablet. I just can’t seem to force this energy where it really needs to be. I do what I can, when I can and hope with all my might that in the days prior to a deadline, I can spew out good work, last minute, after having spent days just staring at the screen in a dark funk. I wouldn’t want to be anything else but it must be really nice to have jobs and careers that just require you to go through the motions and labor. I’ve yearned for a solid, reliable paycheck and consistent work that always had an intuitive map to lead me through from start to finish. That is just not how being an artist is, at least not how I have experienced it.

As a work from home mom, it’s awesome but is also difficult on the creative process. The current situation of not being able to close a door behind me to do computer work (since I have roommates and the computer is in the living room), is a challenge to say the least. My eldest son is out of school the end of this week and then it’s OFFICIALLY summer! I’m searching for jobs in the area that I could bring my kids too, since daycare is financially out of the question. So far…unlicensed childcares seems to be my only option. I’ve been interviewing around.

Being a young mother is a perk when interviewing since you’re inherently ahead of the 18-19 year old’s fresh out of high school, when it comes to the responsibility role. (If my 18 year old self could see me now, her jaw would drop haha) I FEEL that I am struggling to adult properly but really, I’m a far cry from where I was. Living expenses may be hard but my kids have made me such a better person; more patient, understanding and caring. I literally interact with people differently and view the world with a totally distinct perspective. I even think being a mom lends to creativity in a way, since watching how a child thinks, feels and deals with day to day life is excellent fodder for children’s illustrations.

I’ve still been nervously eyeing a few illustration agencies and then eyeing my portfolio, not sure whether I am ready to apply. A browse for ages through their represented artists and most have an obvious style. The art comes in all styles, from very realistic and polished to cartoony and simple, but 95% are chocked full of complete, pretty images that have narrative. How do I compare? Will I be turned down and never looked at again if I reapply? Can I get ANY advice from agencies or professionals on what to add? This is why I follow the SVSLearn team closely, and other resources, consistently reminding myself to add, add, add to my portfolio.

“Don’t put in what you don’t want to end up drawing for clients” is a hard one because, I want to show that I can draw a wide variety of stuff but I don’t want to get stuck drawing one of the things I hated drawing but someone happened to like. So many anxieties.

I am trying to create a sort of “This year’s style index,” based on Julia Patton’s, “Style Bible,” ideas. I’ve written in a notebook A-Z over several pages and filled each letter with things, animals, objects, foods etc. to draw and fill a bound side-portfolio (since I digitally create, I’d just be indexing these images on my computer and then, if I want to show them, print and stick them in a binder. It’s pure genius: a prospective client wants to know how you draw bids, cars, trees, fruit, water, men, women, expressions, seashells…The ideas are endless but the core ones are invaluable, especially for a children’s book artist. You’re supposed to update at least every year or when you think your style has changed. This is helpful for someone like me who feels they have several possible styles. I could just fill a page with different ways I’d draw dogs or aliens or unicorns or toasters, or maybe I only draw toasters one way; so I’d only draw one toaster.

This is a work in progress, as I have more ideas than I have had time to commit to the screen. Anyhow, this brings me back to wondering how I compare to currently represented illustrators. I know I lack some technical skills but I make up for that with the bizarre, nonsensical “style” I often dabble with when it comes to furniture, perspective and occasionally people. There’s thousands of artists who make a living with art that doesn’t represent perspective or anatomy but I’d like still like to improve my knowledge of how to create working anatomy, color theory, light and basic perspective, so that I can create better around those fundamentals. There is so much more I wanted to do in art college, as I learn better with an in-person instructor. I’ll need to make use of the online resources and instructors soon if I cannot go back to school next year.

I need to commit to some self-initiated projects. Other than overtly children-related illustration, I was considering labels and food packaging like wine, beer and baking, as I love so many of the labels I see but don’t have the faintest clue how you get hired for labeling. Art licensing maybe? I have a lot more to learn. My other idea is to create an illustrated commission infographic for my protentional freelance clients, since many do not have any prior knowledge about hiring illustrators freelance, cost or standard timelines etc. Basically, it’ll be an FAQ to all my most frequently received questions for hiring projects, but fun, colorful and illustrated!

So my sort of to-do’s are:

·         still try to apply to some agencies,

·         keep my eyes out for agents, work on the style index,

·         Style Index

·         start more self-initiated projects

·         create some illustrated client-related commission info-graphs,

·         create mailers and send

·         work on the technical skills: anatomy, color theory, light, perspective

·         set aside some savings (somehow) for moving, new computer/tablet etc.

·         casually look for art related work in OR and prepare for the impending move.

·         Continue being health conscious and take care of myself

Oh, I almost forgot (irony for what I am about to write), I was fortunate enough to be able to receive a full learning disability testing. I met for a month with a special doctor and did all kinds of tests, reading, writing, building with blocks, picture-finding: I felt like a chimp. All this was done to pinpoint what it was that has been hindering my entire life when it comes to mathematics and memory. Well, turns out, it is my “working memory,” and this issue is exactly what prevents me from being able to solve more than EXTREMELY basic mathematics, remembering phone numbers (or a variety of things), use any kind of formulas, and even remember what I am reading without re-reading and processing. I cannot explain how awesome and awful it is to know this. I am relieved that I finally have proper documentation for this most annoying detriment that has literally plagued me as far back in academics and jobs my entire existence. It’s also frustrating to really sit back and wonder about all the things I could have maybe accomplished without it. (I had wanted to be a pathologist once, lol.) At least now I know my learning style and have tips and reminders on how to process information better (most of which I was already doing- I practically live between my wall calendar, phone calendar and book planner. If I don’t write it down- I’m not remembering it.)

I expect to write back by end of july-early august? There’s lots of summer tasks to take care of. I lost 15lbs and have been doing very well with eating less calories, going on walks, light weight lifting and drinking lots of water (that one is the hardest). Here’s to toning up my butt! Haha

 Sincerely,

An illustrator

[wandashifflett]

What you need to know about the COVID-19 vaccine | Bill Gates

What you need to know about the COVID-19 vaccine

Humankind has never had a more urgent task than creating broad immunity for coronavirus.

By Bill Gates

One of the questions I get asked the most these days is when the world will be able to go back to the way things were in December before the coronavirus pandemic. My answer is always the same: when we have an almost perfect drug to treat COVID-19, or when almost every person on the planet has been vaccinated against coronavirus.

The former is unlikely to happen anytime soon. We’d need a miracle treatment that was at least 95 percent effective to stop the outbreak. Most of the drug candidates right now are nowhere near that powerful. They could save a lot of lives, but they aren’t enough to get us back to normal.

Which leaves us with a vaccine.

Humankind has never had a more urgent task than creating broad immunity for coronavirus. Realistically, if we’re going to return to normal, we need to develop a safe, effective vaccine. We need to make billions of doses, we need to get them out to every part of the world, and we need all of this to happen as quickly as possible.

That sounds daunting, because it is. Our foundation is the biggest funder of vaccines in the world, and this effort dwarfs anything we’ve ever worked on before. It’s going to require a global cooperative effort like the world has never seen. But I know it’ll get done. There’s simply no alternative.

Here’s what you need to know about the race to create a COVID-19 vaccine.

The world is creating this vaccine on a historically fast timeline.

Dr. Anthony Fauci has said he thinks it’ll take around eighteen months to develop a coronavirus vaccine. I agree with him, though it could be as little as 9 months or as long as two years.

Although eighteen months might sound like a long time, this would be the fastest scientists have created a new vaccine. Development usually takes around five years. Once you pick a disease to target, you have to create the vaccine and test it on animals. Then you begin testing for safety and efficacy in humans.

Safety and efficacy are the two most important goals for every vaccine. Safety is exactly what it sounds like: is the vaccine safe to give to people? Some minor side effects (like a mild fever or injection site pain) can be acceptable, but you don’t want to inoculate people with something that makes them sick.

Efficacy measures how well the vaccine protects you from getting sick. Although you’d ideally want a vaccine to have 100 percent efficacy, many don’t. For example, this year’s flu vaccine is around 45 percent effective.

To test for safety and efficacy, every vaccine goes through three phases of trials:

Phase one is the safety trial. A small group of healthy volunteers gets the vaccine candidate. You try out different dosages to create the strongest immune response at the lowest effective dose without serious side effects.

Once you’ve settled on a formula, you move onto phase two, which tells you how well the vaccine works in the people who are intended to get it. This time, hundreds of people get the vaccine. This cohort should include people of different ages and health statuses.

Then, in phase three, you give it to thousands of people. This is usually the longest phase, because it occurs in what’s called “natural disease conditions.” You introduce it to a large group of people who are likely already at the risk of infection by the target pathogen, and then wait and see if the vaccine reduces how many people get sick.

After the vaccine passes all three trial phases, you start building the factories to manufacture it, and it gets submitted to the WHO and various government agencies for approval.

This process works well for most vaccines, but the normal development timeline isn’t good enough right now. Every day we can cut from this process will make a huge difference to the world in terms of saving lives and reducing trillions of dollars in economic damage.

So, to speed up the process, vaccine developers are compressing the timeline. This graphic shows how:

In the traditional process, the steps are sequential to address key questions and unknowns. This can help mitigate financial risk, since creating a new vaccine is expensive. Many candidates fail, which is why companies wait to invest in the next step until they know the previous step was successful.

For COVID-19, financing development is not an issue. Governments and other organizations (including our foundation and an amazing alliance called the Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations) have made it clear they will support whatever it takes to find a vaccine. So, scientists are able to save time by doing several of the development steps at once. For example, the private sector, governments, and our foundation are going to start identifying facilities to manufacture different potential vaccines. If some of those facilities end up going unused, that’s okay. It’s a small price to pay for getting ahead on production.

Fortunately, compressing the trial timeline isn’t the only way to take a process that usually takes five years and get it done in 18 months. Another way we’re going to do that is by testing lots of different approaches at the same time.

There are dozens of candidates in the pipeline.

As of April 9, there are 115 different COVID-19 vaccine candidates in the development pipeline. I think that eight to ten of those look particularly promising. (Our foundation is going to keep an eye on all the others to see if we missed any that have some positive characteristics, though.)

The most promising candidates take a variety of approaches to protecting the body against COVID-19. To understand what exactly that means, it’s helpful to remember how the human immune system works.

When a disease pathogen gets into your system, your immune system responds by producing antibodies. These antibodies attach themselves to substances called antigens on the surface of the microbe, which sends a signal to your body to attack. Your immune system keeps a record of every microbe it has ever defeated, so that it can quickly recognize and destroy invaders before they make you ill.

Vaccines circumvent this whole process by teaching your body how to defeat a pathogen without ever getting sick. The two most common types—and the ones you’re probably most familiar with—are inactivated and livevaccines. Inactivated vaccines contain pathogens that have been killed. Live vaccines, on the other hand, are made of living pathogens that have been weakened (or “attenuated”). They’re highly effective but more prone to side effects than their inactivated counterparts.

Inactivated and live vaccines are what we consider “traditional” approaches. There are a number of COVID-19 vaccine candidates of both types, and for good reason: they’re well-established. We know how to test and manufacture them.

The downside is that they’re time-consuming to make. There’s a ton of material in each dose of a vaccine. Most of that material is biological, which means you have to grow it. That takes time, unfortunately.

That’s why I’m particularly excited by two new approaches that some of the candidates are taking: RNA and DNA vaccines. If one of these new approaches pans out, we’ll likely be able to get vaccines out to the whole world much faster. (For the sake of simplicity, I’m only going to explain RNA vaccines. DNA vaccines are similar, just with a different type of genetic material and method of administration.)

Our foundation—both through our own funding and through CEPI—has been supporting the development of an RNA vaccine platform for nearly a decade. We were planning to use it to make vaccines for diseases that affect the poor like malaria, but now it’s looking like one of the most promising options for COVID. The first candidate to start human trials was an RNA vaccine created by a company called Moderna.

Here’s how an RNA vaccine works: rather than injecting a pathogen’s antigen into your body, you instead give the body the genetic code needed to produce that antigen itself. When the antigens appear on the outside of your cells, your immune system attacks them—and learns how to defeat future intruders in the process. You essentially turn your body into its own vaccine manufacturing unit.

Because RNA vaccines let your body do most of the work, they don’t require much material. That makes them much faster to manufacture. There’s a catch, though: we don’t know for sure yet if RNA is a viable platform for vaccines. Since COVID would be the first RNA vaccine out of the gate, we have to prove both that the platform itself works and that it creates immunity. It’s a bit like building your computer system and your first piece of software at the same time.

Even if an RNA vaccine continues to show promise, we still must continue pursuing the other options. We don’t know yet what the COVID-19 vaccine will look like. Until we do, we have to go full steam ahead on as many approaches as possible.

It might not be a perfect vaccine yet—and that’s okay.

The smallpox vaccine is the only vaccine that’s wiped an entire disease off the face of the earth, but it’s also pretty brutal to receive. It left a scar on the arm of anyone who got it. One out of every three people had side effects bad enough to keep them home from school or work. A small—but not insignificant—number developed more serious reactions.

The smallpox vaccine was far from perfect, but it got the job done. The COVID-19 vaccine might be similar.

If we were designing the perfect vaccine, we’d want it to be completely safe and 100 percent effective. It should be a single dose that gives you lifelong protection, and it should be easy to store and transport. I hope the COVID-19 vaccine has all of those qualities, but given the timeline we’re on, it may not.

The two priorities, as I mentioned earlier, are safety and efficacy. Since we might not have time to do multi-year studies, we will have to conduct robust phase 1 safety trials and make sure we have good real-world evidence that the vaccine is completely safe to use.

We have a bit more wiggle room with efficacy. I suspect a vaccine that is at least 70 percent effective will be enough to stop the outbreak. A 60 percent effective vaccine is useable, but we might still see some localized outbreaks. Anything under 60 percent is unlikely to create enough herd immunity to stop the virus.

The big challenge will be making sure the vaccine works well in older people. The older you are, the less effective vaccines are. Your immune system—like the rest of your body—ages and is slower to recognize and attack invaders. That’s a big issue for a COVID-19 vaccine, since older people are the most vulnerable. We need to make sure they’re protected.

The shingles vaccine—which is also targeted to older people—combats this by amping up the strength of the vaccine. It’s possible we do something similar for COVID, although it might come with more side effects. Health authorities could also ask people over a certain age to get an additional dose.

Beyond safety and efficacy, there are a couple other factors to consider:

How many doses will it be? A vaccine you only get once is easier and quicker to deliver. But we may need a multi-dose vaccine to get enough efficacy.

How long does it last? Ideally, the vaccine will give you long-lasting protection. But we might end up with one that only stops you from getting sick for a couple months (like the seasonal flu vaccine, which protects you for about six months). If that happens, the short-term vaccine might be used while we work on a more durable one.

How do you store it? Many common vaccines are kept at 4 degrees C. That’s around the temperature of your average refrigerator, so storage and transportation is easy. But RNA vaccines need to be stored at much colder temperature—as low as -80 degrees C—which will make reaching certain parts of the world more difficult.

My hope is that the vaccine we have 18 months from now is as close to “perfect” as possible. Even if it isn’t, we will continue working to improve it. After that happens, I suspect the COVID-19 vaccine will become part of the routine newborn immunization schedule.

Once we have a vaccine, though, we still have huge problems to solve. That’s because…

We need to manufacture and distribute at least 7 billion doses of the vaccine.

In order to stop the pandemic, we need to make the vaccine available to almost every person on the planet. We’ve never delivered something to every corner of the world before. And, as I mentioned earlier, vaccines are particularly difficult to make and store.

There’s a lot we can’t figure out about manufacturing and distributing the vaccine until we know what exactly we’re working with. For example, will we be able to use existing vaccine factories to make the COVID-19 vaccine?

What we can do now is build different kinds of vaccine factories to prepare. Each vaccine type requires a different kind of factory. We need to be ready with facilities that can make each type, so that we can start manufacturing the final vaccine (or vaccines) as soon as we can. This will cost billions of dollars. Governments need to quickly find a mechanism for making the funding for this available. Our foundation is currently working with CEPI, the WHO, and governments to figure out the financing.

Part of those discussions center on who will get the vaccine when. The reality is that not everyone will be able to get the vaccine at the same time. It’ll take months—or even years—to create 7 billion doses (or possibly 14 billion, if it’s a multi-dose vaccine), and we should start distributing them as soon as the first batch is ready to go.

Most people agree that health workers should get the vaccine first. But who gets it next? Older people? Teachers? Workers in essential jobs?

I think that low-income countries should be some of the first to receive it, because people will be at a much higher risk of dying in those places. COVID-19 will spread much quicker in poor countries because measures like physical distancing are harder to enact. More people have poor underlying health that makes them more vulnerable to complications, and weak health systems will make it harder for them to receive the care they need. Getting the vaccine out in low-income countries could save millions of lives. The good news is we already have an organization with expertise about how to do this in Gavi, the Vaccine Alliance.

With most vaccines, manufacturers sign a deal with the country where their factories are located, so that country gets first crack at the vaccines. It’s unclear if that’s what will happen here. I hope we find a way to get it out on an equitable basis to the whole world. The WHO and national health authorities will need to develop a distribution plan once we have a better understanding of what we’re working with.

Eventually, though, we’re going to scale this thing up so that the vaccine is available to everyone. And then, we’ll be able to get back to normal—and to hopefully make decisions that prevent us from being in this situation ever again.

It might be a bit hard to see right now, but there is a light at the end of the tunnel. We’re doing the right things to get a vaccine as quickly as possible. In the meantime, I urge you to continue following the guidelines set by your local authorities. Our ability to get through this outbreak will depend on everyone doing their part to keep each other safe.

from Rayfield Review News https://therayfield.com/what-you-need-to-know-about-the-covid-19-vaccine-bill-gates from The Ray Field https://therayfieldreview.tumblr.com/post/623551958821797888

[therayfieldreview]

What you need to know about the COVID-19 vaccine | Bill Gates

What you need to know about the COVID-19 vaccine

Humankind has never had a more urgent task than creating broad immunity for coronavirus.

By Bill Gates

One of the questions I get asked the most these days is when the world will be able to go back to the way things were in December before the coronavirus pandemic. My answer is always the same: when we have an almost perfect drug to treat COVID-19, or when almost every person on the planet has been vaccinated against coronavirus.

The former is unlikely to happen anytime soon. We’d need a miracle treatment that was at least 95 percent effective to stop the outbreak. Most of the drug candidates right now are nowhere near that powerful. They could save a lot of lives, but they aren’t enough to get us back to normal.

Which leaves us with a vaccine.

Humankind has never had a more urgent task than creating broad immunity for coronavirus. Realistically, if we’re going to return to normal, we need to develop a safe, effective vaccine. We need to make billions of doses, we need to get them out to every part of the world, and we need all of this to happen as quickly as possible.

That sounds daunting, because it is. Our foundation is the biggest funder of vaccines in the world, and this effort dwarfs anything we’ve ever worked on before. It’s going to require a global cooperative effort like the world has never seen. But I know it’ll get done. There’s simply no alternative.

Here’s what you need to know about the race to create a COVID-19 vaccine.

The world is creating this vaccine on a historically fast timeline.

Dr. Anthony Fauci has said he thinks it’ll take around eighteen months to develop a coronavirus vaccine. I agree with him, though it could be as little as 9 months or as long as two years.

Although eighteen months might sound like a long time, this would be the fastest scientists have created a new vaccine. Development usually takes around five years. Once you pick a disease to target, you have to create the vaccine and test it on animals. Then you begin testing for safety and efficacy in humans.

Safety and efficacy are the two most important goals for every vaccine. Safety is exactly what it sounds like: is the vaccine safe to give to people? Some minor side effects (like a mild fever or injection site pain) can be acceptable, but you don’t want to inoculate people with something that makes them sick.

Efficacy measures how well the vaccine protects you from getting sick. Although you’d ideally want a vaccine to have 100 percent efficacy, many don’t. For example, this year’s flu vaccine is around 45 percent effective.

To test for safety and efficacy, every vaccine goes through three phases of trials:

Phase one is the safety trial. A small group of healthy volunteers gets the vaccine candidate. You try out different dosages to create the strongest immune response at the lowest effective dose without serious side effects.

Once you’ve settled on a formula, you move onto phase two, which tells you how well the vaccine works in the people who are intended to get it. This time, hundreds of people get the vaccine. This cohort should include people of different ages and health statuses.

Then, in phase three, you give it to thousands of people. This is usually the longest phase, because it occurs in what’s called “natural disease conditions.” You introduce it to a large group of people who are likely already at the risk of infection by the target pathogen, and then wait and see if the vaccine reduces how many people get sick.

After the vaccine passes all three trial phases, you start building the factories to manufacture it, and it gets submitted to the WHO and various government agencies for approval.

This process works well for most vaccines, but the normal development timeline isn’t good enough right now. Every day we can cut from this process will make a huge difference to the world in terms of saving lives and reducing trillions of dollars in economic damage.

So, to speed up the process, vaccine developers are compressing the timeline. This graphic shows how:

In the traditional process, the steps are sequential to address key questions and unknowns. This can help mitigate financial risk, since creating a new vaccine is expensive. Many candidates fail, which is why companies wait to invest in the next step until they know the previous step was successful.

For COVID-19, financing development is not an issue. Governments and other organizations (including our foundation and an amazing alliance called the Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations) have made it clear they will support whatever it takes to find a vaccine. So, scientists are able to save time by doing several of the development steps at once. For example, the private sector, governments, and our foundation are going to start identifying facilities to manufacture different potential vaccines. If some of those facilities end up going unused, that’s okay. It’s a small price to pay for getting ahead on production.

Fortunately, compressing the trial timeline isn’t the only way to take a process that usually takes five years and get it done in 18 months. Another way we’re going to do that is by testing lots of different approaches at the same time.

There are dozens of candidates in the pipeline.

As of April 9, there are 115 different COVID-19 vaccine candidates in the development pipeline. I think that eight to ten of those look particularly promising. (Our foundation is going to keep an eye on all the others to see if we missed any that have some positive characteristics, though.)

The most promising candidates take a variety of approaches to protecting the body against COVID-19. To understand what exactly that means, it’s helpful to remember how the human immune system works.

When a disease pathogen gets into your system, your immune system responds by producing antibodies. These antibodies attach themselves to substances called antigens on the surface of the microbe, which sends a signal to your body to attack. Your immune system keeps a record of every microbe it has ever defeated, so that it can quickly recognize and destroy invaders before they make you ill.

Vaccines circumvent this whole process by teaching your body how to defeat a pathogen without ever getting sick. The two most common types—and the ones you’re probably most familiar with—are inactivated and live vaccines. Inactivated vaccines contain pathogens that have been killed. Live vaccines, on the other hand, are made of living pathogens that have been weakened (or “attenuated”). They’re highly effective but more prone to side effects than their inactivated counterparts.

Inactivated and live vaccines are what we consider “traditional” approaches. There are a number of COVID-19 vaccine candidates of both types, and for good reason: they’re well-established. We know how to test and manufacture them.

The downside is that they’re time-consuming to make. There’s a ton of material in each dose of a vaccine. Most of that material is biological, which means you have to grow it. That takes time, unfortunately.

That’s why I’m particularly excited by two new approaches that some of the candidates are taking: RNA and DNA vaccines. If one of these new approaches pans out, we’ll likely be able to get vaccines out to the whole world much faster. (For the sake of simplicity, I’m only going to explain RNA vaccines. DNA vaccines are similar, just with a different type of genetic material and method of administration.)

Our foundation—both through our own funding and through CEPI—has been supporting the development of an RNA vaccine platform for nearly a decade. We were planning to use it to make vaccines for diseases that affect the poor like malaria, but now it’s looking like one of the most promising options for COVID. The first candidate to start human trials was an RNA vaccine created by a company called Moderna.

Here’s how an RNA vaccine works: rather than injecting a pathogen’s antigen into your body, you instead give the body the genetic code needed to produce that antigen itself. When the antigens appear on the outside of your cells, your immune system attacks them—and learns how to defeat future intruders in the process. You essentially turn your body into its own vaccine manufacturing unit.

Because RNA vaccines let your body do most of the work, they don’t require much material. That makes them much faster to manufacture. There’s a catch, though: we don’t know for sure yet if RNA is a viable platform for vaccines. Since COVID would be the first RNA vaccine out of the gate, we have to prove both that the platform itself works and that it creates immunity. It’s a bit like building your computer system and your first piece of software at the same time.

Even if an RNA vaccine continues to show promise, we still must continue pursuing the other options. We don’t know yet what the COVID-19 vaccine will look like. Until we do, we have to go full steam ahead on as many approaches as possible.

It might not be a perfect vaccine yet—and that’s okay.

The smallpox vaccine is the only vaccine that’s wiped an entire disease off the face of the earth, but it’s also pretty brutal to receive. It left a scar on the arm of anyone who got it. One out of every three people had side effects bad enough to keep them home from school or work. A small—but not insignificant—number developed more serious reactions.

The smallpox vaccine was far from perfect, but it got the job done. The COVID-19 vaccine might be similar.

If we were designing the perfect vaccine, we’d want it to be completely safe and 100 percent effective. It should be a single dose that gives you lifelong protection, and it should be easy to store and transport. I hope the COVID-19 vaccine has all of those qualities, but given the timeline we’re on, it may not.

The two priorities, as I mentioned earlier, are safety and efficacy. Since we might not have time to do multi-year studies, we will have to conduct robust phase 1 safety trials and make sure we have good real-world evidence that the vaccine is completely safe to use.

We have a bit more wiggle room with efficacy. I suspect a vaccine that is at least 70 percent effective will be enough to stop the outbreak. A 60 percent effective vaccine is useable, but we might still see some localized outbreaks. Anything under 60 percent is unlikely to create enough herd immunity to stop the virus.

The big challenge will be making sure the vaccine works well in older people. The older you are, the less effective vaccines are. Your immune system—like the rest of your body—ages and is slower to recognize and attack invaders. That’s a big issue for a COVID-19 vaccine, since older people are the most vulnerable. We need to make sure they’re protected.

The shingles vaccine—which is also targeted to older people—combats this by amping up the strength of the vaccine. It’s possible we do something similar for COVID, although it might come with more side effects. Health authorities could also ask people over a certain age to get an additional dose.

Beyond safety and efficacy, there are a couple other factors to consider:

How many doses will it be? A vaccine you only get once is easier and quicker to deliver. But we may need a multi-dose vaccine to get enough efficacy.

How long does it last? Ideally, the vaccine will give you long-lasting protection. But we might end up with one that only stops you from getting sick for a couple months (like the seasonal flu vaccine, which protects you for about six months). If that happens, the short-term vaccine might be used while we work on a more durable one.

How do you store it? Many common vaccines are kept at 4 degrees C. That’s around the temperature of your average refrigerator, so storage and transportation is easy. But RNA vaccines need to be stored at much colder temperature—as low as -80 degrees C—which will make reaching certain parts of the world more difficult.

My hope is that the vaccine we have 18 months from now is as close to “perfect” as possible. Even if it isn’t, we will continue working to improve it. After that happens, I suspect the COVID-19 vaccine will become part of the routine newborn immunization schedule.

Once we have a vaccine, though, we still have huge problems to solve. That’s because…

We need to manufacture and distribute at least 7 billion doses of the vaccine.

In order to stop the pandemic, we need to make the vaccine available to almost every person on the planet. We’ve never delivered something to every corner of the world before. And, as I mentioned earlier, vaccines are particularly difficult to make and store.

There’s a lot we can’t figure out about manufacturing and distributing the vaccine until we know what exactly we’re working with. For example, will we be able to use existing vaccine factories to make the COVID-19 vaccine?

What we can do now is build different kinds of vaccine factories to prepare. Each vaccine type requires a different kind of factory. We need to be ready with facilities that can make each type, so that we can start manufacturing the final vaccine (or vaccines) as soon as we can. This will cost billions of dollars. Governments need to quickly find a mechanism for making the funding for this available. Our foundation is currently working with CEPI, the WHO, and governments to figure out the financing.

Part of those discussions center on who will get the vaccine when. The reality is that not everyone will be able to get the vaccine at the same time. It’ll take months—or even years—to create 7 billion doses (or possibly 14 billion, if it’s a multi-dose vaccine), and we should start distributing them as soon as the first batch is ready to go.

Most people agree that health workers should get the vaccine first. But who gets it next? Older people? Teachers? Workers in essential jobs?

I think that low-income countries should be some of the first to receive it, because people will be at a much higher risk of dying in those places. COVID-19 will spread much quicker in poor countries because measures like physical distancing are harder to enact. More people have poor underlying health that makes them more vulnerable to complications, and weak health systems will make it harder for them to receive the care they need. Getting the vaccine out in low-income countries could save millions of lives. The good news is we already have an organization with expertise about how to do this in Gavi, the Vaccine Alliance.

With most vaccines, manufacturers sign a deal with the country where their factories are located, so that country gets first crack at the vaccines. It’s unclear if that’s what will happen here. I hope we find a way to get it out on an equitable basis to the whole world. The WHO and national health authorities will need to develop a distribution plan once we have a better understanding of what we’re working with.

Eventually, though, we’re going to scale this thing up so that the vaccine is available to everyone. And then, we’ll be able to get back to normal—and to hopefully make decisions that prevent us from being in this situation ever again.

It might be a bit hard to see right now, but there is a light at the end of the tunnel. We’re doing the right things to get a vaccine as quickly as possible. In the meantime, I urge you to continue following the guidelines set by your local authorities. Our ability to get through this outbreak will depend on everyone doing their part to keep each other safe.

from Rayfield Review News https://therayfield.com/what-you-need-to-know-about-the-covid-19-vaccine-bill-gates

[enacclimatechangethings]

Alex François 18/03

What I actually do on my daily scale:

Composting.

-How? By sorting food each time I cook. I put fruit and vegetables remains, eggshells, fish, grains into a separate bin that I’ll bring later to the composting area at the ENAC.

-Why? To avoid creating food waste. I hate wasting any kind of food, so I’ll do anything to save those I can’t eat and let them be useful. Therefore I also help the ENAC BDS to have a better compost.

-What if we do it perfectly? We could save money if the compost is used for personnal planting, no need to buy chemical fertilizers, and as it does help to retain soil moisture, we have to water less. Not to mention the improvement of the soil, that receinves multiple nutrients. Also resources are saved, more than 40% of residential waste is compostable materials. We thus create cycles to plant durably. Finally, the impact of CO2 emissions is reduced by doing so : less vehicules are required to transport waste and organics do not produce any C02 emission by being composted.

-What if we don’t? Ironically, not composting actually isn’t neutral for the environment, but rather bad. Indeed, organics in landfills break down without oxygen to produce methane gas, which is 20 times more harmful than CO2. Buried organics can also react with metals in the landfill to produce toxic leachate, a potential source of groundwater pollution. "Why should I compost?", Justin Quigley

Every day, 1.3 billion tonnes of food is wasted globally each year (1/3 for human consumption) according to the FAO. Among them, food that could have been eaten even if expired, others that could have been composted.

If you’ve been conviced and want to try composting, here are some advices to begin: Composting - Guide.

Not eating meat.

-How? By neither consumming nor buying any king of meat, and a very few fishes. Being cautious when buying on the supermarket or eating at the canteen not to take those.

-Why? The main reasons that prompted this decision were the ethical point of view. I knew that one day I would stop eating meat. But besides the ethical, healthy and cheap sides of being vegetarian, not eating meat has numerous environnemental benefits, which are nowadays beyond question.

-What if we do it perfectly? Being vegetarian (or vegan) will ward off disease, keep your weight down, build stronger bones, reduce your risk of food-borne illnesses, and let you live longer for instance! For an environmental point of view, you’ll avoid toxic chemicals. According to the US Environmental Protection Agency, nearly 95% of the pesticide residue in the typical American diet comes from meat, fish and dairy products! That would also greatly help reduce pollution:  chemical and animal waste runoff from factory farms are responsible for more than 173 000 miles of pulluted rivers and streams. Without getting into all the details: the United Nations said in a report that only livestock generate more greenhouse gases than all the cars and trucks in the world combined! Not to mention all the water and the lands needed to farm them!

-What if we don’t? You’re now aware. Consuming meat has a lot of environmental impacts: deforestation, huge greenhouse gases emissions, gigantic use of water, use of chemical products. If you tell yourself that the greenhouse gas effects of eating 1 burger amounts to drive an average European car for 320km (and 3000L of water), maybe you’ll reconsider buying a brand new electrical car to go to the restaurant. Emissions of eating one burger

 I’d have much more to say about the actions I daily do for the environmental issues. Here are briefly other things I’ve also decided to do:

-Waste sorting. I sort papers, metal and glass from plastic for example.

-Carpooling/public transportation/bike. If possible, I always use my bike to move from place to place (which is also convenient). Otherwise, I use the public transports or the carpooling if I need to go on another city in France, not too far away.

-Buying carefully packaging. As far as possible, I try not to buy plastic packaging food/tools. Sometimes that is more expensive or hard to find, but when I’m looking at all the waste I can do at the months passed, that gives me courage to search.

-Saving water. I try to save water during the showers (turn off the water when useless) and when I do the dishes, by improving my skills.

-Reducing energy consumption. I turn off the lights and the heating when not needed. I think that kind of actions could make a difference. However I somethimes consumes lots of energy by using my computer through video games or cooking in the oven...

Nevertheless, all these actions are little things compared to the exponential growth of life comfort we are facing! There are so many things we should do either to compensate other’s actions, or to compensate ours that we do not necessarily perceive!

Buying an apartment/house, a new phone/computer, solar panels, clothes, food, books; as many things that pollute, are (non-renewable) energy-consuming, or that consume non-recyclable materials! Just look at how many plastic tools/equipment there are around you. We’ve reached a point where the energy and rare materials aren’t just used to improve our lives. But to maintain it the way it is.

Everything we own has been – to some extent - produced with nuclear or fossil fuel. Everywhere you want to go, you have to take airplanes, cars, buses or trains. Every time you practice an activity, you may use items that created pollution. As the computer I’m using right now to write those sentances.

That is difficult and expensive to put into practice – a clean zero pollution lifestyle – which wouldn’t pollute nor cost our planet sacrifices. If we all want to keep on this planet though, as well as our next generations, we should surely tackle this problem together seriously… Together, we can make a difference.

[douglassmiith]

How to Save Your Consulting Business by Shifting Online

Leverage technology and processes to maintain your consulting business online.

March 17, 2020 11 min read

Opinions expressed by Entrepreneur contributors are their own.

With an increasing number of people working from home or practicing other forms of social distancing, it can be challenging to maintain a consulting business. All the plans and projections you’ve established can easily change on a day-to-day basis, leaving you concerned about how you’ll be able to sustain your business. 

Although this situation is globally challenging, the solution for many consultants is clear: offer remote services.

I’ve worked as a business consultant for the past five years, 95 percent of my business is done remotely. Initially, this was done out of necessity, it was too challenging to consult onsite in Manhattan and make it back home to Brooklyn so I could pick up my children from daycare. Over time, I discovered it was much more efficient, and allowed me to grow my business by working with clients in other regions. I could also stack more meetings back to back — no commuting between appointments — allowing me to generate more revenue in a shorter period of time. This same skill (knowing how to effectively share knowledge remotely) proved useful as I started speaking at online conferences, some of them such at SEM Rush’s Global Marketing Day and Teachable’s Reach Summit draw more than 50,000 attendees. 

My initial disadvantage, the need to work remotely, eventually became an extremely valuable skill. During my upcoming webinar How and Why to Shift Your Consulting or Speaking Business Online. I’ll teach you how to do the same. It’s free to attend and takes place on April 1st at 3 pm EST. Assuming you can’t wait until then to start transitioning your business, I’ve provided some immediate advice below. I should note, there are several “how to work remotely” articles going around these days. Check them out, I’m sure you’ll gain valuable insights. My goal with this article is to solely focus on the immediate needs of consultants. 

Getting client buy-in for remote consulting

The first hurdle you’ll need to get over is making your clients feel comfortable with the value you can deliver remotely. In some cases, your impact may be diminished, acknowledge it. However, the value you’re still able to offer is most likely better than nothing at all. Be sure to stress the benefit of doing something as opposed to waiting for weeks, possibly months, for in-person meetings to occur. This may not be the ideal situation for many clients, but it’s not something we can avoid either. Or, as my dad would say, “It is what it is, now what are you going to do about it.” Don’t say that, but you get my point. You can also ease these concerns by being prepared with a plan of how you’ll move forward. 

“I know this is a challenging situation but I have a solution that will help. We’re going to hold all meetings through a video conferencing platform, which I’ll record in case some of your team members are unavailable to attend. I’ve also created a Slack channel to make it easier for you and your team to ask one-off questions while you’re juggling additional responsibilities. My working hours will remain the same, but I understand you may have to ask questions based on your availability. I’ll do my best to accommodate.”   

Related: 5 Questions Every Consultant Must Ask During a Sales Call

Leverage the right apps and gear

Set yourself up for success by leveraging the right apps and gear from the start. Below are a few of my favorites, you can see a complete list by checking out the Consultant Toolkit on my website. 

Zoom

This tool is designed for hosting webinars, teaching online courses, conducting online training and video conferences. With the majority of my consulting taking place remotely, I use it almost daily. I’m also leveraging it for all my in-person speaking opportunities that have shifted to online. Although Google Hangouts offers some of the same features, Zoom allows you to record meetings. This is extremely helpful since it reduces the amount of notes your clients have to take. This will help them better focus on you, and the value you’re delivering. Beyond that, not everyone will be able to attend meetings live for one reason or another. Recording meetings makes the content accessible to everyone and simplifies the scheduling process. 

Pro tip: Download the app as opposed to using the browser version. You’ll be less likely to experience lag, especially if you’re on a slower connection. 

Yondo

Yondo allows anyone to sell live online consultations and videos on their own website. As previously mentioned, this is the tool used for Entrepreneur’s Ask an Expert platform. One of my favorite features is the ability to set your availability for consulting sessions, which syncs with your Google Calendar. No need to go back and forth coordinating, the client just selects a time and then pays immediately upon booking. No need to invoice! 

Pro tip: Next time someone asks to “pick your brain”, send them a link to your Yondo account so they can pay you for your knowledge!

Again, I recommend recording these sessions. You should also consider adding a link to your Yondo account in the main navigation of your website. Over time, you’ll discover people booking paid sessions with you that you’ve never directly interacted with. Maybe they read an insightful blog you wrote or heard you speak on a podcast. In order to make the best use of everyone’s time, I also suggest providing a pre-call questionnaire. You can use this to collect some basic information and avoid saying things like “So, what’s your website? Is that .com or .co?”

As you can see, there’s some overlap between Zoom and Yondo. I use Zoom for long-term consulting engagements since these clients usually pay on a monthly basis. I leverage Yondo for hourly consulting. Again, there’s no need to invoice and your calendar is always up to date. I also include a link to Yondo in my signature to make it easier for people to immediately book a paid consultation with me. 

HoneyBook

HoneyBook is an integrated project management, proposal, billing and invoicing software designed to help you automate various operational processes. Since you may be juggling other responsibilities while working remotely, this is a great way to get some time back. The ability to quickly send proposals and invoices is one of my favorite features. Once you have these setup, it takes about 5 minutes to send them out. Your clients can sign contracts online, which is beneficial since many of them may not have access to a scanner or printer. 

HoneyBook also has a great mobile app, allowing you to keep track of all your invoices and upcoming payments without hopping on your laptop. 

Pro tip: During times of uncertainty, it’s beneficial to bill clients on a retainer or project basis as opposed to hourly. This will make it much easier for you to forecast revenue, which will reduce stress.

Audio/visual gear

You may be working from a noisier environment than you’re used to, investing in a pair of noise-canceling headphones can be rather clutch. You’ll be able to hear better during meetings and lock in more while working. I’ve been wearing Bose for years and depend on them so much that I have one pair at home and one at my office. That said, you may be able to get away with the earphones that came with your phone. Either way, please don’t use the mic from your computer! It doesn’t work, even if you awkwardly lean towards it. 

In regards to a camera, the one on your computer should be fine, but you can obviously get a webcam as well. That said, now isn’t the time to buy stuff just to buy stuff. See how things go with your built-in camera before investing in an external one. Depending on your working environment — and the clients you work with — you may also want to get a backdrop so you have a more professional looking background. You can purchase something for less than $100 on Amazon but this also falls into the category of not buying stuff just to buy it. My new “office” has been my daughter’s bedroom for the past four years so clients shouldn’t be shocked to see PJ Masks toys in the background. My hope and expectation is that everyone acknowledges we’re all doing the best we can these days.

Regardless of your background, the wrong lighting can take away from the experience you’re delivering, a $20 selfie light can help you avoid this issue. Many of them also come with a cell phone holder which makes it way easier to create video content for Social. 

Pro tip: Now is the time for you to start creating and/or releasing valuable content. If you’re stuck, think of 10 questions your audience has, then answer them with content. 

Related: How to Start a Consulting Business: Get Ready to Launch

Internet connection

If possible, use an Ethernet cable. Nothing ruins an online meeting faster than someone losing connection or — even worse — getting frozen with a silly look on their face. It makes the meeting go longer and interrupts the flow. Beyond that, if someone is paying you by the hour, you’re literally wasting their time and money. You can also get a signal booster or invest in a solution like Nest Wifi from Google. According to their website “Nest Wifi blankets your whole home in fast, reliable Wi‑Fi and keeps buffering at bay in every room.”

A steady internet connection is critical, invest money into solving for this if needed and available. 

Related: 10 Golden Rules for Digital Entrepreneurs of This Decade

Emotional intelligence and soft skills

Working remotely may be new to the clients you interact with. Acknowledge this from the start and provide guidance to make them — and yourself — more comfortable.  As a general rule, I prefer everyone to have their cameras on. It makes for a more personal experience and you can pick up a lot from non-verbal gestures. If someone has their camera off, I usually make a joke of it by saying “I’m going to assume you’re not catfishing me, but it would be great if you could turn your camera on”. Feel free to steal that one. This usually gets most people to turn their cameras on (or at least laugh) but you also want to respect boundaries. The person you’re talking to might be caring for a child, or may not want to be on camera for various other reasons. Although talking to a blank screen can be a bit of drag, you can maintain a high level of energy and just by standing up.

You should also expect technology hiccups to occur, your response will be crucial as to how your audience responds. Years ago, Adi Hanash taught me how to lead online classes through my role at General Assembly, a school that teaches the job skills of tomorrow. He shares a piece of advice “Smile through the problems. As the online host, people will be looking to you to make sure things are perfectly normal. So if problems come up, smiling as you handle them gives the audience confidence that you have things under control and will buy you some leeway as you handle any issues that have come up.” 

To paraphrase, “Don’t freak out”. These days, not freaking out is probably good advice for all of us, regardless of the context. 

Do you need help shifting your services online, or have other questions related to growing your business? Book at 1:1 session with me through Entrepreneur’s Ask an Expert platform. 

 Website Design & SEO Delray Beach by DBL07.co

Delray Beach SEO

Via http://www.scpie.org/how-to-save-your-consulting-business-by-shifting-online/

source https://scpie.weebly.com/blog/how-to-save-your-consulting-business-by-shifting-online

[laurelkrugerr]

How to Save Your Consulting Business by Shifting Online

Leverage technology and processes to maintain your consulting business online.

March 17, 2020 11 min read

Opinions expressed by Entrepreneur contributors are their own.

With an increasing number of people working from home or practicing other forms of social distancing, it can be challenging to maintain a consulting business. All the plans and projections you’ve established can easily change on a day-to-day basis, leaving you concerned about how you’ll be able to sustain your business. 

Although this situation is globally challenging, the solution for many consultants is clear: offer remote services.

I’ve worked as a business consultant for the past five years, 95 percent of my business is done remotely. Initially, this was done out of necessity, it was too challenging to consult onsite in Manhattan and make it back home to Brooklyn so I could pick up my children from daycare. Over time, I discovered it was much more efficient, and allowed me to grow my business by working with clients in other regions. I could also stack more meetings back to back — no commuting between appointments — allowing me to generate more revenue in a shorter period of time. This same skill (knowing how to effectively share knowledge remotely) proved useful as I started speaking at online conferences, some of them such at SEM Rush’s Global Marketing Day and Teachable’s Reach Summit draw more than 50,000 attendees. 

My initial disadvantage, the need to work remotely, eventually became an extremely valuable skill. During my upcoming webinar How and Why to Shift Your Consulting or Speaking Business Online. I’ll teach you how to do the same. It’s free to attend and takes place on April 1st at 3 pm EST. Assuming you can’t wait until then to start transitioning your business, I’ve provided some immediate advice below. I should note, there are several “how to work remotely” articles going around these days. Check them out, I’m sure you’ll gain valuable insights. My goal with this article is to solely focus on the immediate needs of consultants. 

Getting client buy-in for remote consulting

The first hurdle you’ll need to get over is making your clients feel comfortable with the value you can deliver remotely. In some cases, your impact may be diminished, acknowledge it. However, the value you’re still able to offer is most likely better than nothing at all. Be sure to stress the benefit of doing something as opposed to waiting for weeks, possibly months, for in-person meetings to occur. This may not be the ideal situation for many clients, but it’s not something we can avoid either. Or, as my dad would say, “It is what it is, now what are you going to do about it.” Don’t say that, but you get my point. You can also ease these concerns by being prepared with a plan of how you’ll move forward. 

“I know this is a challenging situation but I have a solution that will help. We’re going to hold all meetings through a video conferencing platform, which I’ll record in case some of your team members are unavailable to attend. I’ve also created a Slack channel to make it easier for you and your team to ask one-off questions while you’re juggling additional responsibilities. My working hours will remain the same, but I understand you may have to ask questions based on your availability. I’ll do my best to accommodate.”   

Related: 5 Questions Every Consultant Must Ask During a Sales Call

Leverage the right apps and gear

Set yourself up for success by leveraging the right apps and gear from the start. Below are a few of my favorites, you can see a complete list by checking out the Consultant Toolkit on my website. 

Zoom

This tool is designed for hosting webinars, teaching online courses, conducting online training and video conferences. With the majority of my consulting taking place remotely, I use it almost daily. I’m also leveraging it for all my in-person speaking opportunities that have shifted to online. Although Google Hangouts offers some of the same features, Zoom allows you to record meetings. This is extremely helpful since it reduces the amount of notes your clients have to take. This will help them better focus on you, and the value you’re delivering. Beyond that, not everyone will be able to attend meetings live for one reason or another. Recording meetings makes the content accessible to everyone and simplifies the scheduling process. 

Pro tip: Download the app as opposed to using the browser version. You’ll be less likely to experience lag, especially if you’re on a slower connection. 

Yondo

Yondo allows anyone to sell live online consultations and videos on their own website. As previously mentioned, this is the tool used for Entrepreneur’s Ask an Expert platform. One of my favorite features is the ability to set your availability for consulting sessions, which syncs with your Google Calendar. No need to go back and forth coordinating, the client just selects a time and then pays immediately upon booking. No need to invoice! 

Pro tip: Next time someone asks to “pick your brain”, send them a link to your Yondo account so they can pay you for your knowledge!

Again, I recommend recording these sessions. You should also consider adding a link to your Yondo account in the main navigation of your website. Over time, you’ll discover people booking paid sessions with you that you’ve never directly interacted with. Maybe they read an insightful blog you wrote or heard you speak on a podcast. In order to make the best use of everyone’s time, I also suggest providing a pre-call questionnaire. You can use this to collect some basic information and avoid saying things like “So, what’s your website? Is that .com or .co?”

As you can see, there’s some overlap between Zoom and Yondo. I use Zoom for long-term consulting engagements since these clients usually pay on a monthly basis. I leverage Yondo for hourly consulting. Again, there’s no need to invoice and your calendar is always up to date. I also include a link to Yondo in my signature to make it easier for people to immediately book a paid consultation with me. 

HoneyBook

HoneyBook is an integrated project management, proposal, billing and invoicing software designed to help you automate various operational processes. Since you may be juggling other responsibilities while working remotely, this is a great way to get some time back. The ability to quickly send proposals and invoices is one of my favorite features. Once you have these setup, it takes about 5 minutes to send them out. Your clients can sign contracts online, which is beneficial since many of them may not have access to a scanner or printer. 

HoneyBook also has a great mobile app, allowing you to keep track of all your invoices and upcoming payments without hopping on your laptop. 

Pro tip: During times of uncertainty, it’s beneficial to bill clients on a retainer or project basis as opposed to hourly. This will make it much easier for you to forecast revenue, which will reduce stress.

Audio/visual gear

You may be working from a noisier environment than you’re used to, investing in a pair of noise-canceling headphones can be rather clutch. You’ll be able to hear better during meetings and lock in more while working. I’ve been wearing Bose for years and depend on them so much that I have one pair at home and one at my office. That said, you may be able to get away with the earphones that came with your phone. Either way, please don’t use the mic from your computer! It doesn’t work, even if you awkwardly lean towards it. 

In regards to a camera, the one on your computer should be fine, but you can obviously get a webcam as well. That said, now isn’t the time to buy stuff just to buy stuff. See how things go with your built-in camera before investing in an external one. Depending on your working environment — and the clients you work with — you may also want to get a backdrop so you have a more professional looking background. You can purchase something for less than $100 on Amazon but this also falls into the category of not buying stuff just to buy it. My new “office” has been my daughter’s bedroom for the past four years so clients shouldn’t be shocked to see PJ Masks toys in the background. My hope and expectation is that everyone acknowledges we’re all doing the best we can these days.

Regardless of your background, the wrong lighting can take away from the experience you’re delivering, a $20 selfie light can help you avoid this issue. Many of them also come with a cell phone holder which makes it way easier to create video content for Social. 

Pro tip: Now is the time for you to start creating and/or releasing valuable content. If you’re stuck, think of 10 questions your audience has, then answer them with content. 

Related: How to Start a Consulting Business: Get Ready to Launch

Internet connection

If possible, use an Ethernet cable. Nothing ruins an online meeting faster than someone losing connection or — even worse — getting frozen with a silly look on their face. It makes the meeting go longer and interrupts the flow. Beyond that, if someone is paying you by the hour, you’re literally wasting their time and money. You can also get a signal booster or invest in a solution like Nest Wifi from Google. According to their website “Nest Wifi blankets your whole home in fast, reliable Wi‑Fi and keeps buffering at bay in every room.”

A steady internet connection is critical, invest money into solving for this if needed and available. 

Related: 10 Golden Rules for Digital Entrepreneurs of This Decade

Emotional intelligence and soft skills

Working remotely may be new to the clients you interact with. Acknowledge this from the start and provide guidance to make them — and yourself — more comfortable.  As a general rule, I prefer everyone to have their cameras on. It makes for a more personal experience and you can pick up a lot from non-verbal gestures. If someone has their camera off, I usually make a joke of it by saying “I’m going to assume you’re not catfishing me, but it would be great if you could turn your camera on”. Feel free to steal that one. This usually gets most people to turn their cameras on (or at least laugh) but you also want to respect boundaries. The person you’re talking to might be caring for a child, or may not want to be on camera for various other reasons. Although talking to a blank screen can be a bit of drag, you can maintain a high level of energy and just by standing up.

You should also expect technology hiccups to occur, your response will be crucial as to how your audience responds. Years ago, Adi Hanash taught me how to lead online classes through my role at General Assembly, a school that teaches the job skills of tomorrow. He shares a piece of advice “Smile through the problems. As the online host, people will be looking to you to make sure things are perfectly normal. So if problems come up, smiling as you handle them gives the audience confidence that you have things under control and will buy you some leeway as you handle any issues that have come up.” 

To paraphrase, “Don’t freak out”. These days, not freaking out is probably good advice for all of us, regardless of the context. 

Do you need help shifting your services online, or have other questions related to growing your business? Book at 1:1 session with me through Entrepreneur’s Ask an Expert platform. 

 Website Design & SEO Delray Beach by DBL07.co

Delray Beach SEO

source http://www.scpie.org/how-to-save-your-consulting-business-by-shifting-online/ source https://scpie1.blogspot.com/2020/03/how-to-save-your-consulting-business-by.html

[riichardwilson]

How to Save Your Consulting Business by Shifting Online

Leverage technology and processes to maintain your consulting business online.

March 17, 2020 11 min read

Opinions expressed by Entrepreneur contributors are their own.

With an increasing number of people working from home or practicing other forms of social distancing, it can be challenging to maintain a consulting business. All the plans and projections you’ve established can easily change on a day-to-day basis, leaving you concerned about how you’ll be able to sustain your business. 

Although this situation is globally challenging, the solution for many consultants is clear: offer remote services.

I’ve worked as a business consultant for the past five years, 95 percent of my business is done remotely. Initially, this was done out of necessity, it was too challenging to consult onsite in Manhattan and make it back home to Brooklyn so I could pick up my children from daycare. Over time, I discovered it was much more efficient, and allowed me to grow my business by working with clients in other regions. I could also stack more meetings back to back — no commuting between appointments — allowing me to generate more revenue in a shorter period of time. This same skill (knowing how to effectively share knowledge remotely) proved useful as I started speaking at online conferences, some of them such at SEM Rush’s Global Marketing Day and Teachable’s Reach Summit draw more than 50,000 attendees. 

My initial disadvantage, the need to work remotely, eventually became an extremely valuable skill. During my upcoming webinar How and Why to Shift Your Consulting or Speaking Business Online. I’ll teach you how to do the same. It’s free to attend and takes place on April 1st at 3 pm EST. Assuming you can’t wait until then to start transitioning your business, I’ve provided some immediate advice below. I should note, there are several “how to work remotely” articles going around these days. Check them out, I’m sure you’ll gain valuable insights. My goal with this article is to solely focus on the immediate needs of consultants. 

Getting client buy-in for remote consulting

The first hurdle you’ll need to get over is making your clients feel comfortable with the value you can deliver remotely. In some cases, your impact may be diminished, acknowledge it. However, the value you’re still able to offer is most likely better than nothing at all. Be sure to stress the benefit of doing something as opposed to waiting for weeks, possibly months, for in-person meetings to occur. This may not be the ideal situation for many clients, but it’s not something we can avoid either. Or, as my dad would say, “It is what it is, now what are you going to do about it.” Don’t say that, but you get my point. You can also ease these concerns by being prepared with a plan of how you’ll move forward. 

“I know this is a challenging situation but I have a solution that will help. We’re going to hold all meetings through a video conferencing platform, which I’ll record in case some of your team members are unavailable to attend. I’ve also created a Slack channel to make it easier for you and your team to ask one-off questions while you’re juggling additional responsibilities. My working hours will remain the same, but I understand you may have to ask questions based on your availability. I’ll do my best to accommodate.”   

Related: 5 Questions Every Consultant Must Ask During a Sales Call

Leverage the right apps and gear

Set yourself up for success by leveraging the right apps and gear from the start. Below are a few of my favorites, you can see a complete list by checking out the Consultant Toolkit on my website. 

Zoom

This tool is designed for hosting webinars, teaching online courses, conducting online training and video conferences. With the majority of my consulting taking place remotely, I use it almost daily. I’m also leveraging it for all my in-person speaking opportunities that have shifted to online. Although Google Hangouts offers some of the same features, Zoom allows you to record meetings. This is extremely helpful since it reduces the amount of notes your clients have to take. This will help them better focus on you, and the value you’re delivering. Beyond that, not everyone will be able to attend meetings live for one reason or another. Recording meetings makes the content accessible to everyone and simplifies the scheduling process. 

Pro tip: Download the app as opposed to using the browser version. You’ll be less likely to experience lag, especially if you’re on a slower connection. 

Yondo

Yondo allows anyone to sell live online consultations and videos on their own website. As previously mentioned, this is the tool used for Entrepreneur’s Ask an Expert platform. One of my favorite features is the ability to set your availability for consulting sessions, which syncs with your Google Calendar. No need to go back and forth coordinating, the client just selects a time and then pays immediately upon booking. No need to invoice! 

Pro tip: Next time someone asks to “pick your brain”, send them a link to your Yondo account so they can pay you for your knowledge!

Again, I recommend recording these sessions. You should also consider adding a link to your Yondo account in the main navigation of your website. Over time, you’ll discover people booking paid sessions with you that you’ve never directly interacted with. Maybe they read an insightful blog you wrote or heard you speak on a podcast. In order to make the best use of everyone’s time, I also suggest providing a pre-call questionnaire. You can use this to collect some basic information and avoid saying things like “So, what’s your website? Is that .com or .co?”

As you can see, there’s some overlap between Zoom and Yondo. I use Zoom for long-term consulting engagements since these clients usually pay on a monthly basis. I leverage Yondo for hourly consulting. Again, there’s no need to invoice and your calendar is always up to date. I also include a link to Yondo in my signature to make it easier for people to immediately book a paid consultation with me. 

HoneyBook

HoneyBook is an integrated project management, proposal, billing and invoicing software designed to help you automate various operational processes. Since you may be juggling other responsibilities while working remotely, this is a great way to get some time back. The ability to quickly send proposals and invoices is one of my favorite features. Once you have these setup, it takes about 5 minutes to send them out. Your clients can sign contracts online, which is beneficial since many of them may not have access to a scanner or printer. 

HoneyBook also has a great mobile app, allowing you to keep track of all your invoices and upcoming payments without hopping on your laptop. 

Pro tip: During times of uncertainty, it’s beneficial to bill clients on a retainer or project basis as opposed to hourly. This will make it much easier for you to forecast revenue, which will reduce stress.

Audio/visual gear

You may be working from a noisier environment than you’re used to, investing in a pair of noise-canceling headphones can be rather clutch. You’ll be able to hear better during meetings and lock in more while working. I’ve been wearing Bose for years and depend on them so much that I have one pair at home and one at my office. That said, you may be able to get away with the earphones that came with your phone. Either way, please don’t use the mic from your computer! It doesn’t work, even if you awkwardly lean towards it. 

In regards to a camera, the one on your computer should be fine, but you can obviously get a webcam as well. That said, now isn’t the time to buy stuff just to buy stuff. See how things go with your built-in camera before investing in an external one. Depending on your working environment — and the clients you work with — you may also want to get a backdrop so you have a more professional looking background. You can purchase something for less than $100 on Amazon but this also falls into the category of not buying stuff just to buy it. My new “office” has been my daughter’s bedroom for the past four years so clients shouldn’t be shocked to see PJ Masks toys in the background. My hope and expectation is that everyone acknowledges we’re all doing the best we can these days.

Regardless of your background, the wrong lighting can take away from the experience you’re delivering, a $20 selfie light can help you avoid this issue. Many of them also come with a cell phone holder which makes it way easier to create video content for Social. 

Pro tip: Now is the time for you to start creating and/or releasing valuable content. If you’re stuck, think of 10 questions your audience has, then answer them with content. 

Related: How to Start a Consulting Business: Get Ready to Launch

Internet connection

If possible, use an Ethernet cable. Nothing ruins an online meeting faster than someone losing connection or — even worse — getting frozen with a silly look on their face. It makes the meeting go longer and interrupts the flow. Beyond that, if someone is paying you by the hour, you’re literally wasting their time and money. You can also get a signal booster or invest in a solution like Nest Wifi from Google. According to their website “Nest Wifi blankets your whole home in fast, reliable Wi‑Fi and keeps buffering at bay in every room.”

A steady internet connection is critical, invest money into solving for this if needed and available. 

Related: 10 Golden Rules for Digital Entrepreneurs of This Decade

Emotional intelligence and soft skills

Working remotely may be new to the clients you interact with. Acknowledge this from the start and provide guidance to make them — and yourself — more comfortable.  As a general rule, I prefer everyone to have their cameras on. It makes for a more personal experience and you can pick up a lot from non-verbal gestures. If someone has their camera off, I usually make a joke of it by saying “I’m going to assume you’re not catfishing me, but it would be great if you could turn your camera on”. Feel free to steal that one. This usually gets most people to turn their cameras on (or at least laugh) but you also want to respect boundaries. The person you’re talking to might be caring for a child, or may not want to be on camera for various other reasons. Although talking to a blank screen can be a bit of drag, you can maintain a high level of energy and just by standing up.

You should also expect technology hiccups to occur, your response will be crucial as to how your audience responds. Years ago, Adi Hanash taught me how to lead online classes through my role at General Assembly, a school that teaches the job skills of tomorrow. He shares a piece of advice “Smile through the problems. As the online host, people will be looking to you to make sure things are perfectly normal. So if problems come up, smiling as you handle them gives the audience confidence that you have things under control and will buy you some leeway as you handle any issues that have come up.” 

To paraphrase, “Don’t freak out”. These days, not freaking out is probably good advice for all of us, regardless of the context. 

Do you need help shifting your services online, or have other questions related to growing your business? Book at 1:1 session with me through Entrepreneur’s Ask an Expert platform. 

Website Design & SEO Delray Beach by DBL07.co

Delray Beach SEO

source http://www.scpie.org/how-to-save-your-consulting-business-by-shifting-online/ source https://scpie.tumblr.com/post/612855296773226496

[scpie]

How to Save Your Consulting Business by Shifting Online

Leverage technology and processes to maintain your consulting business online.

March 17, 2020 11 min read

Opinions expressed by Entrepreneur contributors are their own.

With an increasing number of people working from home or practicing other forms of social distancing, it can be challenging to maintain a consulting business. All the plans and projections you’ve established can easily change on a day-to-day basis, leaving you concerned about how you’ll be able to sustain your business. 

Although this situation is globally challenging, the solution for many consultants is clear: offer remote services.

I’ve worked as a business consultant for the past five years, 95 percent of my business is done remotely. Initially, this was done out of necessity, it was too challenging to consult onsite in Manhattan and make it back home to Brooklyn so I could pick up my children from daycare. Over time, I discovered it was much more efficient, and allowed me to grow my business by working with clients in other regions. I could also stack more meetings back to back — no commuting between appointments — allowing me to generate more revenue in a shorter period of time. This same skill (knowing how to effectively share knowledge remotely) proved useful as I started speaking at online conferences, some of them such at SEM Rush’s Global Marketing Day and Teachable’s Reach Summit draw more than 50,000 attendees. 

My initial disadvantage, the need to work remotely, eventually became an extremely valuable skill. During my upcoming webinar How and Why to Shift Your Consulting or Speaking Business Online. I’ll teach you how to do the same. It’s free to attend and takes place on April 1st at 3 pm EST. Assuming you can’t wait until then to start transitioning your business, I’ve provided some immediate advice below. I should note, there are several “how to work remotely” articles going around these days. Check them out, I’m sure you’ll gain valuable insights. My goal with this article is to solely focus on the immediate needs of consultants. 

Getting client buy-in for remote consulting

The first hurdle you’ll need to get over is making your clients feel comfortable with the value you can deliver remotely. In some cases, your impact may be diminished, acknowledge it. However, the value you’re still able to offer is most likely better than nothing at all. Be sure to stress the benefit of doing something as opposed to waiting for weeks, possibly months, for in-person meetings to occur. This may not be the ideal situation for many clients, but it’s not something we can avoid either. Or, as my dad would say, “It is what it is, now what are you going to do about it.” Don’t say that, but you get my point. You can also ease these concerns by being prepared with a plan of how you’ll move forward. 

“I know this is a challenging situation but I have a solution that will help. We’re going to hold all meetings through a video conferencing platform, which I’ll record in case some of your team members are unavailable to attend. I’ve also created a Slack channel to make it easier for you and your team to ask one-off questions while you’re juggling additional responsibilities. My working hours will remain the same, but I understand you may have to ask questions based on your availability. I’ll do my best to accommodate.”   

Related: 5 Questions Every Consultant Must Ask During a Sales Call

Leverage the right apps and gear

Set yourself up for success by leveraging the right apps and gear from the start. Below are a few of my favorites, you can see a complete list by checking out the Consultant Toolkit on my website. 

Zoom

This tool is designed for hosting webinars, teaching online courses, conducting online training and video conferences. With the majority of my consulting taking place remotely, I use it almost daily. I’m also leveraging it for all my in-person speaking opportunities that have shifted to online. Although Google Hangouts offers some of the same features, Zoom allows you to record meetings. This is extremely helpful since it reduces the amount of notes your clients have to take. This will help them better focus on you, and the value you’re delivering. Beyond that, not everyone will be able to attend meetings live for one reason or another. Recording meetings makes the content accessible to everyone and simplifies the scheduling process. 

Pro tip: Download the app as opposed to using the browser version. You’ll be less likely to experience lag, especially if you’re on a slower connection. 

Yondo

Yondo allows anyone to sell live online consultations and videos on their own website. As previously mentioned, this is the tool used for Entrepreneur’s Ask an Expert platform. One of my favorite features is the ability to set your availability for consulting sessions, which syncs with your Google Calendar. No need to go back and forth coordinating, the client just selects a time and then pays immediately upon booking. No need to invoice! 

Pro tip: Next time someone asks to “pick your brain”, send them a link to your Yondo account so they can pay you for your knowledge!

Again, I recommend recording these sessions. You should also consider adding a link to your Yondo account in the main navigation of your website. Over time, you’ll discover people booking paid sessions with you that you’ve never directly interacted with. Maybe they read an insightful blog you wrote or heard you speak on a podcast. In order to make the best use of everyone’s time, I also suggest providing a pre-call questionnaire. You can use this to collect some basic information and avoid saying things like “So, what’s your website? Is that .com or .co?”

As you can see, there’s some overlap between Zoom and Yondo. I use Zoom for long-term consulting engagements since these clients usually pay on a monthly basis. I leverage Yondo for hourly consulting. Again, there’s no need to invoice and your calendar is always up to date. I also include a link to Yondo in my signature to make it easier for people to immediately book a paid consultation with me. 

HoneyBook

HoneyBook is an integrated project management, proposal, billing and invoicing software designed to help you automate various operational processes. Since you may be juggling other responsibilities while working remotely, this is a great way to get some time back. The ability to quickly send proposals and invoices is one of my favorite features. Once you have these setup, it takes about 5 minutes to send them out. Your clients can sign contracts online, which is beneficial since many of them may not have access to a scanner or printer. 

HoneyBook also has a great mobile app, allowing you to keep track of all your invoices and upcoming payments without hopping on your laptop. 

Pro tip: During times of uncertainty, it’s beneficial to bill clients on a retainer or project basis as opposed to hourly. This will make it much easier for you to forecast revenue, which will reduce stress.

Audio/visual gear

You may be working from a noisier environment than you’re used to, investing in a pair of noise-canceling headphones can be rather clutch. You’ll be able to hear better during meetings and lock in more while working. I’ve been wearing Bose for years and depend on them so much that I have one pair at home and one at my office. That said, you may be able to get away with the earphones that came with your phone. Either way, please don’t use the mic from your computer! It doesn’t work, even if you awkwardly lean towards it. 

In regards to a camera, the one on your computer should be fine, but you can obviously get a webcam as well. That said, now isn’t the time to buy stuff just to buy stuff. See how things go with your built-in camera before investing in an external one. Depending on your working environment — and the clients you work with — you may also want to get a backdrop so you have a more professional looking background. You can purchase something for less than $100 on Amazon but this also falls into the category of not buying stuff just to buy it. My new “office” has been my daughter’s bedroom for the past four years so clients shouldn’t be shocked to see PJ Masks toys in the background. My hope and expectation is that everyone acknowledges we’re all doing the best we can these days.

Regardless of your background, the wrong lighting can take away from the experience you’re delivering, a $20 selfie light can help you avoid this issue. Many of them also come with a cell phone holder which makes it way easier to create video content for Social. 

Pro tip: Now is the time for you to start creating and/or releasing valuable content. If you’re stuck, think of 10 questions your audience has, then answer them with content. 

Related: How to Start a Consulting Business: Get Ready to Launch

Internet connection

If possible, use an Ethernet cable. Nothing ruins an online meeting faster than someone losing connection or — even worse — getting frozen with a silly look on their face. It makes the meeting go longer and interrupts the flow. Beyond that, if someone is paying you by the hour, you’re literally wasting their time and money. You can also get a signal booster or invest in a solution like Nest Wifi from Google. According to their website “Nest Wifi blankets your whole home in fast, reliable Wi‑Fi and keeps buffering at bay in every room.”

A steady internet connection is critical, invest money into solving for this if needed and available. 

Related: 10 Golden Rules for Digital Entrepreneurs of This Decade

Emotional intelligence and soft skills

Working remotely may be new to the clients you interact with. Acknowledge this from the start and provide guidance to make them — and yourself — more comfortable.  As a general rule, I prefer everyone to have their cameras on. It makes for a more personal experience and you can pick up a lot from non-verbal gestures. If someone has their camera off, I usually make a joke of it by saying “I’m going to assume you’re not catfishing me, but it would be great if you could turn your camera on”. Feel free to steal that one. This usually gets most people to turn their cameras on (or at least laugh) but you also want to respect boundaries. The person you’re talking to might be caring for a child, or may not want to be on camera for various other reasons. Although talking to a blank screen can be a bit of drag, you can maintain a high level of energy and just by standing up.

You should also expect technology hiccups to occur, your response will be crucial as to how your audience responds. Years ago, Adi Hanash taught me how to lead online classes through my role at General Assembly, a school that teaches the job skills of tomorrow. He shares a piece of advice “Smile through the problems. As the online host, people will be looking to you to make sure things are perfectly normal. So if problems come up, smiling as you handle them gives the audience confidence that you have things under control and will buy you some leeway as you handle any issues that have come up.” 

To paraphrase, “Don’t freak out”. These days, not freaking out is probably good advice for all of us, regardless of the context. 

Do you need help shifting your services online, or have other questions related to growing your business? Book at 1:1 session with me through Entrepreneur’s Ask an Expert platform. 

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source http://www.scpie.org/how-to-save-your-consulting-business-by-shifting-online/