#It’s you controlling almost all facets of the media while still trying to claim that you’re the most oppressed people ever

[kinddivinity]

Unhinged, hateful Trans Rights Activists have done more damage to their own movement than anything JK Rowling has done or will ever do.

[limelocked]

i still think that the israeli reps statement in the security council was absolutly wilding so im gonna try to sum up the wild parts, i recommend watching the first 42 minutes of statements, i cant recommend watching the next however many minutes where the israeli rep is speaking for Fun but watching it for education is of value

this is mr israel. i will be calling him mr israel because i legitimatly dont know any of these representatives names. also; the israeli holocaust memorial has said that the yellow star of david was a bad call when they made a show of putting it on last meeting okay thats the context

"while hamas must be held fully accountable, there is another body, sadly, that is complicit: the UN"

it is at this time where the wack shit starts, at around 50 minutes in and after 10 minutes of already absolute bullshit, its almost amazing

mr israel says that for years hes warned the council of the briefings they receive, such as from the director general of WHO who opened this meeting, the commissioner general of UNRWA, the under-secretary-general of OCHA, and the UN secretary general, calling them libellous organizations

mr israel claims that these people and/or organizations are lying

"the WHO is the organization that supplies the UN with these so called facts, excuse me, WHO is it that supplies them with these so called facts?"

mr israel claims that the UN doesnt receive information from unbiast third party sources and that all information concerning this situation is coming from hamas and not "international UN employees" on the ground in gaza

the camera cuts to the director general of the world health organization who does not seem particularly happy. this note was included because i think the camera person is the funniest person on earth

mr israel reiterates that all facets of gaza is controlled by hamas*, saying; "every number from the so called ministry of health" is hamas

mr israel continues "many UNRWA workers are themselves members of hamas" and that; "the time has come to bust the myth of UN supplied facts" while putting quotation marks on "facts"

"many ambulance drivers are hamas members, local contributors to international media are hamas members." he then implies that the new york times and reuters photojournalists who reported on the initial october 7th attack were in fact a part of the attack and on hamas' side, something both publications have denied

mr israel puts doubt upon the two briefers of the meeting (the director general of WHO and the director general of the palestinian red crescent), arguing that Dr Tedros of the WHO should have spoken about hamas using hospitals and bases and saying that it is bias that there is no israeli representative from the israeli red cross

"mr jilani why dont you tell the council about the ambulances that hamas abuses for transporting terrorists and weapons, or is this an inconvenient truth that you choose to stay silent about?" note: the camera cuts to the screen mr jilani the director general of the palestinian red crescent is on, he is shaking his head

his statement continues for 10 more minutes but this is the most interesting part and frankly i cant stand listening to the rest of it a second time

* hamas is the government in gaza, this is true, however the health ministry has never contributed false numbers according to several third party enquiries as confirmed when us president joe biden put doubt on the health ministry last month

[loquaciousquark]

Talks Machina Highlights - Critical Role C2E111 (Redux! Oct. 13, 2020)

Gooooood evening good evening good evening, all! I started the VOD late for this recap and somehow the first four or so minutes of the show have a Twitch audio copyright claim, so I am reduced to only reading Brian's lips when he asks if we're on the internet. Hilariously, Marisha's background room is a comfy-looking blue/gold fabric wall with a ceramic colorful abstract lamp and a yellow silk scarf over the lampshade, and Taliesin's is an industrial looking games room in grey and black with multiple monitors, overhead speakers, and mysterious metal fixtures behind him. What a treasure this group is, honestly.

Tonight's guests: Marisha Ray & Taliesin Jaffe, discussing episodes 110 and 111 again. I wildly speculate once more about what might have caused their absence: jury duty? Sam appearing on The Masked Singer? Something to do with the animated show? One day, we’ll know, one day... (One day this “copyrighted audio” section will come back from the wars, too. Ugh!) Finally! The audio comes back to reveal Brian discussing the endless reality of digital meetings and Marisha talking about (I think) her glare-reducing glasses she’s wearing. Welcome to the New Age (welcome to the New Age, to the New Age).

Announcements: Marisha suggests checking out Dimension20, another live tabletop gaming group, which premieres live on Wednesdays at 4pm (CollegeHumor). 

Brian immediately wants to know how they feel about the revelation that Molly is alive. Taliesin’s personal reaction: he “knows some things” he can’t talk about and is aware of several possibilities that might be going on, but had a sneaking suspicion that there would not be a body for them to find. He says it’s almost all there for anyone to see in past material. Marisha’s personal reaction: she just wants to know how she’s doing with her theories, & was trying to block Tal’s face out deliberately as she was going off on her theories in the last episode. Taliesin says he thought her ideas were pretty good!

Cad has no clue what to think - it’s like listening to your friends talk about Buffy. Marisha thought it was a 50/50 Molly would still be there, but Beau had no idea. Not that it mattered, because as soon as Matt went through with it the reveal still blew their minds. Tal laid out his plans for the character with Matt during Campaign One (towards the end) after they all got their VM tattoos.

It is a “horrifying and gross” thing to dig up a body, and Beau was pretty reluctant to do it. Tal, as Cad: “Sometimes dead’s better.” The moral quandary of trying to speak with a dead friend was very different here than the frequent occasions they used the spell in C1.

Taliesin says his poker face is very bad, so it’s easier for him to over-react and let it all play out. The only other player he can see very easily from his place in their current setup is Travis, and because he knows Travis doesn’t watch TM, tweet, or participate in social media, he admits he thoroughly enjoyed watching Travis freak out at his freaking out. He says he only knew about 20% of what Matt described at the end of that episode. He was picking things to mug to increase Travis’s surprise. I love this so much.

Taliesin provided the table left leg shake; Travis provided table right. Ha!

Beau is really accepting her role in the Cobalt Soul. It’s good when “as a person, you feel like you can settle into your calling. Sometimes you can do more from the inside than fighting from the outside.” It’s a mirrored but opposite path of Keyleth from C1; Beau felt like she was too good for her duty, while Keyleth thought she wasn’t good enough.

Caduceus is not a big believer in jumping to conclusions. He does have an idea/notion of the “city of the undead” and thinks all this necrotic energy must come from somewhere, and wonders if this is the “capital of anti-death.” He’s willing to believe whatever he sees. This is one of the few things that trigger a bit of loathing and disgust in him. It was terrifying that the Wildmother didn’t know anything.

Beau is pretty confident in her Charlie Day impression laying-out-the-research last episode. She enjoyed taking the things that were known & extrapolating around them; this is a huge facet of Marisha’s own personality and she really enjoys it, so she built a character this time that would allow that kind of puzzle-solving. It’s also why she repeatedly notes when Beau journals, so she can avoid metagaming. Trent’s mention of Vess Durogna’s tomb raiding was completely circumstantial, and the only reason she’d made the connection to the Tombtakers was because she’d recently reviewed those notes for a separate unannounced project. Sometimes she tries to make connections and Matt is like, “It was...just descriptive. Just flavor. The curtains were red...” and she has to discard a paragraph of notes. She feels like it’s still something they have to do because of “look at what he does! Look! It’s totally valid!”

Cosplay of the Week: @kitsunstudios with a gorgeous Caduceus with a very intricate silk vest.

Caduceus’s takedown of Trent! One of my favorite moments in the entirety of C2. Taliesin felt Trent was an asshole; Caduceus felt sorry for him because of how dumb he thought he was. Caduceus’s response was "this is the dumbest man I’ve ever met in my life. He’s so dumb! Is nobody going to tell this guy how dumb he is? Oh, they’re all freaked out. Somebody needs to tell this guy he’s an idiot before somebody gets hurt.” (Marisha: “Before?”) Tal says it was the product of several years of therapy and many drunk conversations with Whitney Moore. It was from a genuine place of concern from Caduceus. “How are you allowed to have this much power and be that dumb?”

Brian loved how funny it was to watch everyone tiptoe around Trent and then Caduceus bulldoze through the end of the meal.

Taliesin: “Damage doesn’t make you interesting or better. It’s not what makes you good. Character isn’t found in damage. Just recovery.”

Brian & Marisha commiserate going through the stage where believing surviving something automatically made you a stronger person, better for the pain; instead it just meant you had to pick up the pieces after. Marisha talks about how strength through survival may be true for some people, but it shouldn’t be considered a necessity. Taliesin talks about how he used to think he had to be miserable to write. Brian talks about how believing he liked reading and writing miserable things only limited him for years.

Marisha feels it’s a C2 theme that almost all the PCs have someone trying to handwave or take credit for their accomplishments or explain their pain as being for their own good (Trent, Beau’s dad, Obann). She thinks it’s interesting to see all the various ways people try to take credit for your work/delegitimize you as a person. She loves that RPGs allow you to explore these odd moralities in interesting ways. The only way to fight it is to have a sense of your own self-worth, which is a problem a lot of the M9 started with.

Caduceus likes everyone, and really likes people who appear to need role models (Eodwulf). “With the right friends and the right bar and the right attitude, I think he’d be okay. Come over here where it’s so much better. That seems like an exhausting friendship that you have there.”

Marisha loves the mix of personalities in the M9; Veth, Cad, & Jester were all “we kind of like them!” after the dinner, and she immediately made eye contact with Travis and they both shook their heads. She knows Beau has to go along with it for Caleb’s sake for now, but she & Fjord are pretty sus of Trent’s proteges.

Beau is less concerned about Artagan’s relationship to Jester because “he showed his ass--she’s less worried about Jester now because a little of the magic is gone.” It’s a little like becoming an adult and realizing your parents are also just adults & human. Caduceus wasn’t suspicious of the Traveler for a long time until they got to the island. Aside: Taliesin loves the pantheon in D&D. “The notion of attempting to apply common Western conceptions of religion to a world where you have a pantheon of interventionist gods as baseline makes no sense to me. Everyone admits that every other god is there and doing shit; it has more in common with ancient Rome than anything else.” Now that he knows it was a con, he feels the wind had been taken out of it. He does have a sense that Jester’s gotten back together with an ex: “I hope that I’m really happy for you.” They’re both interested to see how Jester navigates the new relationship.

My internet goes out, of course. I panic for a second, thinking I’ve lost everything above, but all is well! Thanks, Form History Control addon!

Marisha loved punching Artagan, but regretting rolling so poorly. “I miss violence.” Dani lets us know it’s been about four episodes since the last battle.

There’s no way the Cobalt Reserve doesn’t have a single document on the Eyes of Nine. Beau believes “there are no real secrets” because people are just bad at not writing things down. For there to be no information at all seems really suspicious for her.

Fanart of the Week: @oddalchemist on twitter with some awesome Beau conspiracy red-thread boards overlaid a distant shadowy Molly walking away.

Caduceus feels a little guilty for really enjoying his time right now with the M9 and not wanting to go home. He’s starting to suspect that he’s going to go home very different than when he left. “He has the softest problems. I don’t know if I want to move back in with Mom & Dad.”

Beau is trying to get comfortable with the idea of being happy. Jester is probably Beau’s first real best friend & one of the first healthy female friendships she’s ever had. As long as she still has Jester in her life, she doesn’t care. For Yasha... “At the end of the day, Beau is a lonely person and has always been a lonely person. And I think you kinda reach this point where once you’re not lonely anymore, you can kind of come out of the fog and realize that was horrible! And terrifying! And is even more terrifying now that I know what I could have, and I don’t want to go back to that. At the end of the day Beau doesn’t want to be lonely anymore. There’s always been that flirtation with Yasha, but everyone had to figure their own shit out. And now it feels like it’s coming out a little bit of that haze, maybe this actually could be...” There are a lot of ways they complement each other & are good-different from each other. Marisha believes people can be attracted to more than person at once.

Caduceus doesn’t think nature turned against him on Rumblecusp, it was just a reality of nature being dangerous and violent. “He has a complex relationship with nature.” He doesn’t expect special treatment.

Thoughts on the mansion: “Man, it’s nice to be seen.” Marisha: “I don’t know how I ended up becoming the Scanlan of this campaign, but I’m living for it.” It felt like an echo of “I’m better for having known you.” They compare Marisha taking specific notes on the campaign to Liam taking specific notes on people’s favorite tapestries, comics, etc.

They talk about missing theme parks and daydream a park version of the mansion in CritRoleLand. It’s lovely.

Taliesin never expected Divine Intervention to work; he just wanted to roll some dice. He’s still processing what he saw/heard. They all agree it was very useful in the Vokodo fight.

Vilya! Marisha: “Ah! Ah! Ah!” As a player, Marisha was so deep in Beau’s eyes she didn’t pick up it was Vilya at first (especially since Matt really emphasized they should not be looking for C1 NPCs). Marisha’s brain melted. She bawled her eyes out on the ride home after that episode. Right after it ended, Laura told Marisha “Keyleth finally gets her happy ending,” and it makes Marisha emotional again since Keyleth’s story ended so bittersweetly. She talks about the very real feelings of “just wanting them to be happy, though!” She went back and listened to all her old Keyleth playlists. Everyone was teary after the episode. “Everyone has these 100% real memories of being these characters and having these good times.”

And that’s that for that! Thanks for your patience, all, and is it Thursday yet?

[thevividgreenmoss]

After a 78-day NATO war on Yugoslavia failed to achieve regime change, the U.S. and Western European governments turned to other means to overthrow the Socialist Party government in Yugoslavia led by Milošević. The election provided an opportunity for the U.S., which had spent years cultivating cadres of student protesters and forming the ideologically fractured anti-Milošević political parties under the banner of “Democratic Opposition Of Serbia,” or DOS.

“US diplomats knocked their heads together until they formed a cohesive and united coalition,” Christian Science Monitor correspondent Peter Ford wrote in a piece titled “How the Balkan strongman was toppled.”

A 2019 publication of the U.S. military’s Joint Special Operations University titled “Support to Resistance: Strategic Purpose and Effectiveness” explains the multi-faceted strategy to ensure the victory of Vojislav Kostunica, who is described as the favored “anti-communist candidate.”

The strategy included a psychological operations component known as “Ring around Serbia,” which used radio broadcasts of U.S.-government propaganda arms Worldnet, Voice of America, and Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty’s Serbian service to “[wean] public support away from Milošević. The U.S. also ran its “MATRIX project,” which sought to weaken Milošević’s inner circle, compelling some of his closest confidantes to flee the country.

But most important, according to then-ambassador James Dobbins, was a student activist group cultivated by the United States named Otpor – what he hailed as “the most effective element of the Serbian opposition.” Otpor is Serbian for “resistance” and operated under the slogan “Gotov je” Serbian for “he is finished.

In neighboring Hungary, William Montgomery – who would go on to be named U.S. ambassador to Belgrade – had set up an office in 1998 to train Otpor opposition activists in how to bring down a government. Gene Sharp, nicknamed the “Machiavelli of nonviolence” who pioneered the field of “nonviolent revolution” dispatched retired U.S. Army Colonel Robert L. Helvey to run a weekend workshop for Otpor leaders. “In many ways, the framework that Helvey proposed to Otpor was a mirror image of the principles of strategy and process for formulating strategy taught at various U.S. military schools,” military theorist Richard H. Shultz wrote in another Joint Special Operations University book titled “Resistance Views.”

Otpor’s internal structure resembled a secretive intelligence agency more than a democratic student movement. Helvey wrote that “Otpor developed a leadership that was unknown to most of its members. The leadership never met as a group but only briefly with one another as was required.”

Ambassador James Dobbins wrote in his 2017 memoir ‘Frontlines: Fives Decades of Service on the American Frontline of Diplomacy’ that Otpor organized “increasingly massive rallies, often in the guise of rock concerts, and possessed a clear strategy to force regime change.”

While Otpor sought to portray itself as an independent movement, one member confessed that it was almost entirely bankrolled by Washington’s regime change apparatus. “‘Eighty-five percent of our funding came from the United States, ’through bodies such as the National Endowment for Democracy, the International Republican Institute and the National Democratic Institute, as well as USAID.”

One of the United States’ key tactics was to have its trainees closely monitor the fateful fall 2000 general election. “We brought one of Otpor’s young leaders to Washington, arranged meetings throughout the administration, and sent him back with enough funding to train and deploy 30,000 election monitors,” Dobbins explains. Former U.S. Army Special Forces officer and military analyst Will Irwin identifies that young leader as Otpor co-founder Srdja Popovic.

The Clinton administration calculated that by using Otpor and the “pro-democracy” opposition groups as a proxy, the toxic cloak-and-dagger image long associated with coups carried out by U.S. intelligence agencies would be avoided. “Political risk for the USG was mitigated by openly describing the support to Otpor and other opposition elements as a democracy promotion project, although it was intended from the beginning as a means to facilitate regime change,” Irwin wrote.

As the Otpor-led demonstrations went on, the Milosevic government sought to undermine the opposition by clamping down on media and communications. But according to “Resistance Views,” the U.S. and European Union had long prepared for that possibility and supplied funds slated for media technology including “copy machines, phones, postage and printing, computers, and Internet services.”

“When the regime took control of Belgrade’s largest newspapers and television and radio stations in May, Otpor was ready for that, as well. It had established its own communication and information systems and continued to communicate with the population.”

This extensive communication and information system is what prompted WIRED journalist David S. Bennahum to dub the anti-Milosevic movement the “Internet Revolution” in 1997.

...In 2003, veteran Otpor leader Srjda Popovic went on to found the Center for Applied Nonviolent Strategies, commonly referred to by its acronym, CANVAS. The group has trained opposition activists in several dozen countries across the world including Ukraine, Georgia, Russia, Egypt, Tunisia, Venezuela, Iran, Zimbabwe, Lebanon, and China – all targets of its progenitor and funding source, the U.S. empire. Juan Guaidó, the self-declared “interim president” of Venezuela and frontman for the U.S.-orchestrated coup attempts reportedly participated in a CANVAS training session in Mexico.

The private intelligence outfit Stratfor, known as the “Shadow CIA” described CANVAS succinctly in a leaked email. After running Milošević out of power, “the kids who ran OTPOR grew up, got suits and designed CANVAS… or in other words a ‘export-a-revolution’ group that sowed the seeds for a NUMBER of color revolutions. They are still hooked into U.S. funding and basically go around the world trying to topple dictators and autocratic governments (ones that U.S. does not like ;).”

Savic’s November 2020 video titled “STEP BY STEP PROCEDURE, HOW WE WON WHEN MILOSEVIC STOLE OUR ELECTIONS“ was reuploaded to a Youtube account called Mrgunsngear B Channel run by U.S. Air Force and Army veteran Mike Plouff where it has received more than 250,000 views. The popular U.S.-based channel contains hundreds of instructional videos on weapons and ammunition, analysis of protests, and even a warning from Venezuelan Olympic sport shooter Gabby Franco warning that outlawing gun ownership would be the first step towards a socialist takeover by Senator Bernie Sanders and Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez “that will destroy the United States if implemented.”

As Savic’s polemic into the right-wing mediasphere went viral, top Republican politicians. organizers of so-called “Stop the Steal” rallies around the country and QAnon conspiracy theorists began to disseminate the video as a warning of what failure to prevent a Biden presidency would mean for future generations.

Tracey Beanz, a well-known figure among Arizona’s conservative movement, tweeted a link to the viral Youtube video, which Arizona Republican Party Chairwoman Kelli Ward then retweeted, adding Savic’s warning.

...Dozens of supporters of the insurrection thanked Savic in comments on the original Bitchute version. “Since President Trump called us to the capitol on January 6th your video has been spreading all around and brought me here,” reads one ominous comment. “I hope we can do something because I’ve been trying to make people see how much trouble we are in and they will not listen. There are people willing to defend our country but enemies in media and big tech are making things difficult. But we have been called to our capitol on the 6th and patriots know we must be there. Pray for us, brother.”

...As the FBI arrests participants in the insurrections, its armchair spiritual leader Aleksander Savic has relocated to Texas where he claims to be writing a “dictionary” to “help the American society understand the choices they are making.” Meanwhile, he continues to upload videos to his Bitchute channel. A January 24 edition analyzes the coup’s failure and advises his followers on how they should proceed into the future.

Addressing the participants as if he were their leader, Savic laments the events at the capitol as “a complete mess,” He blames the failure on a lack of organization among the insurrectionists “because going to the protest without clear aim, without clear duration of that protest and without the logistics, it was pretty much impossible.”

While Savic lauds the individual efforts, he complains that the insurrectionists did not have a strong enough presence in the Republican party – a claim bolstered by a YouGov poll showing 45% of Republican voters disapprove of the storming of the capitol.  “You lost on a tactical level last month because your party was not able to make organization,” Savic explains. “It was incredible to see all the rallies that you spontaneously organized with grassroots movements. However, you didn’t have the organization inside the party.” He disparages the events in the Capitol as insufficiently destructive, saying “People entered the capitol, which was, I don’t know, a tourist attraction I guess… I have never seen such riots, if we can call it [a] riot.”

BLOWBACK AT THE CAPITOL: How a US-Backed Coup in Serbia Inspired the DC Insurrection 

[elexuscal]

Good Omens’ God: a book and series comparison

God. The head honcho. The one who’s orchestrating everything. (Maybe). 

With Good Omens being in part a commentary and philosophical discussion on Christianity,  He/She/They are obviously a central figure in both the original book and the television adaptation. But something I noticed is that there’s... quite a lot different about Them. Or, well, not them. But how the text approaches Them.

What first got me thinking about it was this Stuff You Like video by Jill Bearup. I’ve enjoyed her videos for a long time now- they’re really positive but still nuanced analysis of media, and she’s still willing to discuss what parts Don’t Work for her. She had one particular critique of the GO adaptation that made me pause: She didn’t like the inclusion of Jesus. 

Jesus isn’t in the novel. As far as I recall, the closest to a mention is a description of Adam as the ‘anti-Christ’.  Even then, it’s pretty easy to forget that there must have been an original Christ for Adam to be the antithesis of. 

Which should be this huge, gaping absence, considering the subject material... but really, it isn’t. Because the themes of Good Omens is how Heaven is, in its own way, just as bad as Hell. That neither side really understands, or even cares that much about, the humans that they manipulate and control. That humans’ free will gives them the ability to be both far more terrible and more wonderful than anything Divine or Hellish.

And then you have Jesus. Who was Divine, but also human, and cared for them very very much. That would kind of... undermines the rest of book’s themes.

So, yeah. I think slapping the Jesus scene into the book wouldn't’ have worked. but yet, I thought it fit really well in the TV adaptation. Why? Because it handles God as a whole differently.

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“God does not play dice with the universe; He plays an ineffable game of His own devising, which might be compared, from the perspective of any of the other players [i.e. everybody], to being involved in an obscure and complex variant of poker in a pitch-dark room, with blank cards, for infinite stakes, with a Dealer who won't tell you the rules, and who smiles all the time.”

This is part of the opening narration in both of the book and the series. There’s a couple of differences. One’s the gender, yes. But more crucially here: it went from third person to first.

The narrator in the novel is very much a Narrator. They aren’t explicitly anyone in particular. While they’re apparently omniscient, they aren’t God. Or, well, you could probably make the theory they are, but it’s just that. There’s no real evidence for or against it in-text, and looked at in the broader scope of the authors’ works, it particularly reads like Pratchett’s typical Narrator from Discworld or some of his other novels.

But in the series, God is the Narrator. Explicitly. And that fundamentally changes the text’s relationship with her. 

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God isn’t present in the book.

Oh, there’s a lot of references to Him. Lots of people speculate on what His plans are. Lots of people claim to be speaking for him. But taking the poker analogy, not only can you not see Him, but the only reason you even know He’s there is by the sound of Him dealing the cards.

There’s a lot more mystery to God there. And beyond that, he’s portrayed a lot more... hmm. Not ‘negatively’, I don’t think , exactly. At the end of the day, GO is still about the value of humanity, and humanity couldn’t have existed without God. But the text seems more critical of Him, and all the awful stuff it took to get us here. I think this is particularly well illustrated in one of my favourite passages from the novel:

Aziraphale had tried to explain it to [Crowley] once… the whole point was a human could be as good or bad as they wanted to be. Whereas people like Crowley, and himself, of course, were set in their ways from the start. People couldn’t be truly holy, he said, unless they had the opportunity to be definitively wicked.

Crowley thought about this for some time, and around 1023, had said, Hang on, that only works if everyone is equal, OK? You can’t start somebody off in a muddy shack in the middle of a war zone and expect them to do as well as somebody born in a castle.

Ah, Aziraphale had said, that’s the good bit. The lower you start, the more opportunities you have.

Crowley had said, That’s lunatic.

No, said Aziraphale, that’s ineffable.

Sure, God has this great big ineffable plan, and maybe it really Is for the Greater Good and going to work out wonderfully in the end. But until then, there’s going to be a lot of very unfair suffering for the people who just had the misfortune of being born in bad situations. 

The TV show has some commentary on this (I think the bit pointing out the unfairness of the Flood and Noah’s ark is the clearest). But while we still have space to wonder what God’s whole ineffable plan really is, there’s a lot less mystery. 

Because God is there, in every episode, talking to us, as the Narrator. She offers commentary on the angels and devils and humanity and everything in between. You have Aziraphale trying to reach God, only to be rebuffed by The Metatron. You have Crowley, praying, pleading for God not to test humanity to destruction. 

In this moment, they’re all even wondering; what’s the point? Is She even listening? Does She even care? 

But here we have the answer: Yes. Yes She is.

Even the idea that God’s Plan will be humanity vs the Forces of Heaven and Hell is more clear her. While it’s certainly implied in the book, there’s more wiggle room, more space for doubt. In the show, Crowley just says it, and it’s very much framed that he’s probably right.

That’s why I don’t find Jesus’s inclusion jarring at all. I’m not an expert on Christian theology, but Jesus is God, or some facet of Them. So when the show focuses on the more loving, understanding, and human aspects of God, then it makes sense to spotlight Her literally human form.

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Which Is Better?

Neither. They’re different takes, certainly, but I can’t say one is better than the other.

Personally, I enjoy the book version. It feels like it puts you closer to the characters’ mindset, and certainly mirrors my own relationship with the concept of God. Is God there? How can we know? And based on all the evil baked into the world, if God does exist, why should I trust Their plan? That anger and confusion and doubt resonates with me, personally.

But... there’s a lot to love in the show’s Narrator God, too. For a start, I think it almost makes a lot of the jokes funnier. It’s no longer just a nameless voice discussing divine dancing styles and pranks pulled on paleontologists. It’s literally God!

But also- this God is personable and warm, and embodies the idea that even if you can’t sense Her presence, she’s always there, looking out for us. That’s a really appealing idea. Isn’t it one of the reasons that so many people believe at all?

Maybe the show’s God is still a dealer for a poker game in a pitch black room. And even if she won’t tell you the rules, she’ll at least tell you some jokes instead.

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TL;DR

Book Good Omens’ God is more mysterious, and His portrayal (or lack thereof) focuses more explicitly on themes of religious doubt and uncertainty. 

Show Good Omens’ God is more present, comedic, and ‘human’, and embodies the idea of God as a benevolent force who’s watching over Her charges. 

Both are interesting in different ways!

[edge-lorde]

original vampire bullshit 3

got really far with this one. almost got to the orcs but its already 10 and idk if ill have time to write more tomorrow.

part 1 here   PART 2 HERE    part 4 here

First, it's time for another VAMPIRE FAST FACT that I forgot to put in before: while vampires in this setting do not have super strength or agility in the classical sense, the existence of “oxygen doping” means that they do have increased energy for sports after replenishing their blood supply. Oxygen doping is a real thing that olympic athletes sometimes do where they artificially get more oxygen in their blood because more oxygen = more energy and stamina. No I will not look that up to give you a better explanation of how that works but its real. Science is amazing.

To skip ahead a few thousand years, now rule by vampires is considered a legitimate form of government like monarchy and democracy. Or rather, rule in conjunction with vampires is considered a real thing. Many inhabited areas are claimed by particular vampire clans, but because vampires steadfastly do not care one bit about human affairs these boundary lines may or may not fall into how the humans living there organize themselves. For this reason there are several different kinds of vampire controlled human settlements, with varying levels of vampiric control. 

Vampires pride themselves on being self-sufficient. Despite believing themselves to be an elite class no longer privy to the follies man, they still need all of the same resources that humans do in order to live. For this reason it would make sense for them to be able to trade with humans as equals. Some individual vampires may do this easily with no regret, but as a conglomerate vampire clans like the idea that at any moment they could close the gates to their ivory towers and live apart from humans for ever and ever. In their minds, it is only by pure grace and civic duty that a clan should continue to do business with humans. Most large organised clans strive to meet this ideal on paper, but of course, vampires are not actually above “real life” and contact with uninfected humans never really stops. Not least because vampires do need human blood to live, which I will get to in a bit. They would also find their ivory tower ideal being described as a quarantine away from the healthy people extremely offensive. 

Though they may grit their teeth and try to deny this, all vampires recognize that they need humans for their blood at the very least. In the olden times vampires met this need and the ideal of self-sufficiency through three main ways: 

1. Stealing. As I said in my previous update, some vampire clans operated as marauders stealing everything they needed from established human groups via attacks. 

2. Trading. An established trading relationship with a large human settlement where the humans get some benefit from the vampires in their midst and the vampires get blood and food in return. 

3. Full control. This only works in small populations, but some vampires seeking idealistic purity would live in monastery-like compounds and do work growing their food themselves, with a human family, perhaps blood related to one or more of the vampires there to help them and provide blood. Vampires make up the full decision making group in this type.

In current times, the stealing subtype is the least common form of clan organization. In fact, most vampires who practice this style are not part of a recognized clan. They are usually made up of unaffiliated vampires-- that is to say, vampires that were never inducted into a clan.  In today's world, the creation of a new vampire is a highly bureaucratized process that involves committees, applications, work programs, and background checks. All clan vampires must take precautionary steps against creating a new vampire if feeding directly from a human or avoid it altogether by only drinking donated blood. If this doesn’t happen, and a new vampire fledgling is created without having gone through the various legal channels, the sire vampire may choose to abandon them rather than face penalty from their clanmates. Should this happen, what you are left with is a person who feels no connection to their old human way of life and has no new worldview to cling to. In effect, what you have is a person with no reason to regard anyone else’s well being over their own and a reason to hurt others. 

Vampires never go ‘feral’ as they might in other media, unaffiliated vampires retain all the knowledge they had as humans and do not become mindless or animalistic in any sense. What they do become are wildcards. Without a vampire community to guide their new sense of self, one can only guess how much of their humanity they retain and what their full motivations are. Fresh blood would be one of them, yes, but no vampire needs to feed all the time. Clan vampires have a cultural buffer in between them and the humans they interact with plus the concept of vampire affairs that shifts their attention away from everyday humans. Unaffiliated vampires may not have this buffer, but they may know of it and be able to exploit it. Additionally, if one unaffiliated vampire begins to sire more vampires they may try to establish a new clan that breaks the existing clan’s carefully placed treaties and they don’t like that one bit. 

Unaffiliated vampires and their new start-up clans are the bane of the ruling clans existence. Not only do they endanger their human populations and poison the well between human and vampire relations, they prove something that most vampires would like very much to forget. They prove that vampires are not this incorruptible ideal above human frailty. All unaffiliated vampires have to come from somewhere after all. Through DNA testing it is possible to identify the strain of vampirism that someone has, and sometimes who their direct sire was but its not 100% fool proof. When a vampire is turned they receive a very small amount of their sire’s DNA, but they also may receive a small amount from their sire’s sire, and so on. This can sometimes lead to false positives pointing to someone further back in the lineage. The creation of an unaffiliated vampire is usually very illegal, and most clans say that the people that make them need to be punished by the full extent of vampire law but no one wants to think that it was someone high up in their own clan that would do such a thing. If a DNA test is done and it points to someone from another clan, you can bet there will be some police mobilization. If the results say it's someone from their own clan, there's more likely to be cover-up. Also the existence of unaffiliated vampires necessitates the existence of vampire hunters! And yes it is possible to be both a vampire and vampire hunter, but that person would more likely be called an assassin. Or a SWAT team member equivalent. 

The second type of vampire survival strategy is the most wide spread. Individual towns, cities, regions, or even large countries can be claimed by a particular vampire clan or clans. The vampires consider themselves the upper or ruling class of these places, but they will also have local human governments that take care of all facets of human life that the vampires don’t care about, meaning most. In this kind of set up the vampires have positioned themselves in a place in human society where they provide some service to the human population that they then don’t have to worry about. Some examples would be military, law enforcement, medicine, and science. Sometimes all of these things and more. I currently imagine them as like academia. The vampires are in charge of lots of long term projects that require lots of planning and research. In this way human researchers would begin working on projects directed by the vampiric class or the human governing board and be able to eventually apply to become a vampire so they can continue the work long term. I think of it a bit like a graduate student trying to find a professor. 

I also have the idea that vampires don’t use money, but the humans do. So vampires don’t need money in order to fund a project, but their approval causes the people involved to have everything that they need to do it. I'm still thinking through this one. 

Here are some examples of how this might work. In some places perhaps vampires are in charge of housing and medicine, and so would provide free places for people to live as long as they gave blood on a schedule. In others maybe vampires are in charge of the law system because they are considered unbiased judges, and they would get all their blood from the prisoners in the next county over in order to remain so.   

The people of this world accept this as a reasonable means of governance even if it's not the best one or the most efficient. Most of what the vampires do is done completely above ground. Vampires are a natural part of this world and even uninformed people have some kind of idea of how they do things in this type of government. They see the unaffiliated as dangerous criminals and the ruling clans as aloof politician types that are a bit out of touch. But this leaves the final kind of vampire survival strategy: full control.

Vampires not having much to do with human affairs only bothers them when it backfires. When humans go to war with another human group or try to move out/in of a vampire claimed territory they bring with them a few dilemmas for the vampires. Vampires like to know that all of the humans in their territory belong to them. Should a vampire take blood from a human simply visiting from another settlement, their human kin might get angry and cause a ruckus. Or if they were from a settlement claimed by another vampire clan that could cause a bigger ruckus. Vampires don’t like that. They don’t like having to think about what humans might do and they don’t like having to change their orders of business to account for them. 

The logical next step for them and their self sufficiency ideal is to have a captive human population that won’t go anywhere.  What started out as simple blood farms would eventually turn into much more....

[zanytimetravelenthusiast-blog]

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[reyintherain]

(This is kind of part 3 of my Vanity Fair related post-gate thoughts)

Naturally and unfortunately, these recent news stirred some fandom drama, and while much has been said about some fans being overly eager to defend and present their views and interpretations, to put it mildly, I wanted to share my two cents too on this story and a larger picture. As I was writing the previous bit on the Vanity Fair coverage, that post gradually grew into something larger, and to keep things clear I moved it to a separate post. Not that anyone would probably care, but here it is, thoughts and lessons from my experience and observations in this fandom so far, Reylo fandom in particular.

Having been first a passive observer since c. February 2016, and later a modest contributor (and still much of an observer, go-with-the-flow-discover-artwork-and-gifs type of blogger), one of the first things I noticed was the ways some fans were treating and plainly attacking other fans for what they disagreed with them. That was the first instance of learning about antis and what they do, and seeing the consequences of their actions, up to the point that some people felt the need to deactivate their blogs and presumably leave this site (for good or for a while, doesn’t matter). Literally almost every blog that I visited and followed that created or reblogged Reylo related content, be it art, thoughts, meta, or fanfiction seemed to have been under attack. Sadly, that wasn’t a big surprise as the Internet is notorious for many examples of cyber-bullying, gatekeeping, and a place to be an asshole under a comfy blanket of anonymity and lack of societal norms that act as guidelines for what’s okay and what’s not when it comes to interactions with others in real life.

Taking obsession with a fictitious fairy-tale to the extreme and making it life is nothing wrong with, as well as liking or disliking some aspects of it and its interpretation. If only some fans were a bit more sensitive, mature, and respectful when it comes to discussion around everyone’s favourite saga and characters. Seeing people getting attacked for their views and interpretations based on what is clearly given in the photos/articles, as well as media’s poor choice of words when it comes to shipping - e.g. recent Vanity Fair’s article referring to Reylo and Stormpilot as fantasies, fanfiction, imagined things - is unfortunate and shows less pleasant corners of the fandom and geek culture, big or small: ugly and toxic when it comes to fans attacking and bullying other fans or dismissive and even condescending attitude when it comes to talking about shipping culture and a phenomena of engaging in characters’ dynamics and relationships.

These past couple days are probably the first time since I’ve been actively (following) in the fandom on Tumblr that I saw the drama and, not one, but whole two gates unfold right before my eyes as the hell broke loose (thanks, Vanity Fair) (I remember watching things like #ashgate but it seemed to stir controversy among Reylo shippers, rather than send them tons of ants love, but I might be wrong). While I wasn’t personally attacked, I felt no better for seeing other blogs and posts get dragged down. It’s ridiculous to think some people take time in shaming and attacking others while claiming they despise the topic at hand themselves, yet actively post about it, send messages and stuff. Really, what’s their fucking problem, and why the fuck they feel entitled to push their opinions and preferences on others, seek them out and attack them, because they are not.

Since starting this blog, I got some ant* love letters too. No really, I was like, wow, I’m being recognized in this community haha. But really it’s not funny at all. I did engage once into conversation which led to nowhere and just got me more insults. And - confession time - I regret the way it sounded when I said how can they accuse me of supporting abuse because I like Reylo (which isn’t an abusive ship) when they themselves like Anakin who is canonically abusive and a murderer. It’s not what I said about that person liking Anakin that bothers me, but rather how I said that, as if getting back at them. The thing is I myself consider Anakin’s tragic fall as one of my favourite parts about the prequels, and I really like Revenge of the Sith. Not that I support Anakin’s murderous acts, but I understand where they come from, and enjoy the tragedy of the story which is quite beautiful. While I was upset and frustrated at them attacking me, and I was trying to have a sensible conversation, and was trying to point out incoherence and hypocrisy in the argument of that person, that part about Anakin came a bit off. Not my proudest moment, though I may overthink about it and make a bigger deal out if it than it really is, but in all honesty, I could’ve phrased it better. I’ve learned my lesson to be better than that and not to get back to someone. Some people might say, well that’s simply self defense, and I heard some people saying that the the best way to put some back into their place when they’re being aggressive to you is to reply in their language i.e. in their way. I don’t agree with that, and believe there are other, more civil and polite ways to deal with those kind of things. Because replying by getting back to someone is being no better than them, and can actually achieve the opposite, and let the fire rage on (unless that’s what you want, but that’s another story).

Another lesson from that interaction was that, unfortunately, sometimes there is no point in engaging in one-sided conversations when the other side is doing nothing but insulting and attacking, not listening, and not willing to have an intelligent discussion. It’s not even a conversation but rather a full-on verbal attack where one side - the attacking side - is speaking to attack only, and listening only to pick words out of context, manipulate and twist their meaning, and then reply using your own twisted out-of-context words as further proof how dumb and disgusting you are. That's disrespectful, immature, and toxic, and I have no further wish to ever engage in such conversations. Hence, the last, but not least lesson - block them all.

Now, no one should be attacking and getting attacked like that to begin with, but the reality is that those things happen, unfortunately, and yes it’s unfair that the burden of keeping oneself safe and one’s well-being sane falls onto them, but fortunately, an option to block exists, and can really help. It’s not a solution that addresses the root of the problem, and might not be applicable in all cases, but it’s quite an effective tool which can help rid of ants and make overall fandom experience happier. Because if not for fun, why else do this? It’s about taking control into your hands (when possible), and saying no I don’t want to engage into that, I want my fandom/shipping experience what I want it to be - fun and enjoyable.

As for those who feel the urge to jump and acutely disagree with anything and anyone that differ from them and their reading, there are polite and respectful ways to engage in discussion. Being open, listening, doing some introspective work, considering others, and considering why we all are in this fandom - for our love of the same thing - should be really a routine. The ways we engage might be different, what we take away, who we identify with, how we interpret canon material - all of that can and should be approached from different angles, and shouldn’t be a problem at all. Instead of ripping the fandom apart - embracing multiple facets of it, having fun - but not at the expense of others, - and celebrating (analyzing, and over-analyzing, and criticizing) all things Star Wars is the way to be.

[ryoukenkogami]

Mental Health Awareness Month

May is Mental Health Awareness Month, and as I’ve always considered myself as someone who wants to advocate for the community, I only see it fit to participate this year - especially given this year’s theme: Risky Business. This includes such things as substance abuse, unsafe sex, impulsive buying, etc...

 All three of these are things that I’ve dealt with to extremes thanks to bipolar II disorder and borderline personality disorder, and genuinely have only decided to work towards recovery in the past week and a half or so; for that reason, this is a very important month and message to me. Many people seem to have misconceptions about what these disorders are, so I’ll do my best to explain them as well as I can (and I don’t intend to say these are the experiences of everyone with these disorders, just based on my own personal experiences).

 Being “bipolar” has a very different connotation in media than in actuality. In media, bipolar disorder is broadly described as someone who is overly moody, or else someone who is extremely unsafe all of the time, engaging in such behaviors as unsafe sex/promiscuity, abusing hardcore drugs, etc..., both of which are solely negative and inaccurate portrayals of someone with bipolar disorder.

 The begin with, there are two different bipolar disorders: bipolar I disorder and bipolar II disorder. Both have similar features, but at the same time are very different.

 Bipolar I is the general image people have of the “wild” bipolar shown in media. People with bipolar I are characterized by experiencing episodes of mania and depression.

 Mania is an experience where the individual affected suffers from many symptoms, including: excessive/quick speaking, extremely high levels of energy, grandiose beliefs (such as believing one is a god, or that they could easily climb to a position of immense status), increased irritability (both positively and negatively), and, in line with this year’s theme for Mental Health Awareness Month, risky behavior. Bipolar II experiences similar symptoms in the form of hypomania: hypomania is very similar as far as symptoms go, but is not so severe as to affect the individual’s day to day life most of the time; the excessive energy is not seen as “off-the-walls” so to speak, but rather what may be a positive sort of energy that allows an individual to accomplish tasks they otherwise would not, and grandiose beliefs may be viewed as setting high goals for oneself as they are not as “severe”. One notable difference between the disorders is that you cannot be diagnosed with bipolar II if you have experienced a manic episode (without the influence of some sort of drug) or if you have experienced psychosis unrelated to comorbid mental illness. Episodes of mania can be so extreme that hospitalization may be required for the individual’s safety.

 The other facet of bipolar disorder is depression: while individuals with bipolar I experience depressive episodes, those with bipolar II experience major depressive episodes. Similar to how manic and hypomanic episodes are similar except in severity, so too is it with depressive and major depressive episodes. An individual suffering with depressive episodes may experience feelings of hopelessness, anxiety, guilt, emptiness, insomnia, and a general lack of interest or pleasure in everyday activities; an individual suffering from a major depressive episode experience these symptoms as well, but to the point that it impacts their ability to function in day to day life, with many feeling incapable of leaving their own beds, let alone houses, sometimes.

 Both bipolar I and bipolar II share many traits, including their symptoms, particularly (hypo)mania but also depression, and as such both are inherently at a higher risk for engaging in risky behaviors. As far as depression goes, many choose to self-medicate which can lead to substance abuse - (hypo)mania shares a similar issue, in that the want to indulge in drugs can lead to substance abuse and dependence issues at a shocking rate, usually unbeknownst to the individual experiencing it (speaking from experience). Those suffering from depression may experience issues with self-harm, or experiencing suicidal thoughts and actions during periods of intense depression. (Hypo)manic individuals may experience an increased interest in sex which, along with generally lowered inhibitions during an episode, can lead to unsafe sex and what many view as “promiscuity” - to call someone experiencing these symptoms as promiscuous is, to me, degrading; a large number of those affected by (hypo)mania are genuinely unable to control the innate urge regarding these feelings, even if they do not act on them. It seems to me that this is another, unfortunately very common, example of a time where mental illnesses are not treated with the same dignity as other illnesses - would one criticize a person with dementia for their memory loss? It seems at the very least to be an example of ableism all too accepted in our current society. A pair of “risky” behaviors exhibited by those experiencing (hypo)mania are excessive spending and shoplifting; which some may view going out to eat a few times a week excessive, or buying that new TV with your bonus excessive, the (hypo)manic experience is much different. The need to purchase objects is a compulsion, an itch that can only be scratched by doing so. And so it goes with stealing as well: even if an individual would be fully capable of purchasing the items themselves, acting on the compulsion to shoplift brings a sense of relief to the individual; often times during an episode, one will not even acknowledge the consequences that could come from performing the action.

 With that out of the way, the other disorder I experience that impacts my life strongly in regards to “risky behaviors” is borderline personality disorder (BPD). Personality disorders don’t get as much attention from the media as mood disorders do, but when someone with BPD is shown in some form of media, it is almost always as an abusive, manipulative and objectively “bad” person. I have a penchant for wanting to learn more about mental illnesses, including those I suffer from myself, and have tried to find materials about BPD on more than one occasion on trips to the book store - every one I’ve found to date has been aimed at the loved ones of someone with BPD, and focused on how they should cope with it, not offering any sort of sympathy or help for the one actually affected by the disorder. For BPD to be so openly demonized is hurtful not just to myself, but to countless others who are affected. Most are diagnosed as young adults (which is the same in regards to bipolar disorder, as this is the age when symptoms general first begin to appear), and with the lack of resources that portray them as anything other than inherently manipulative and abusive, it can be all too easy for someone with BPD to allow themself to believe that as true, which can often times lead to depression and a very unstable sense of identity: the latter of which is a defining characteristic of the disorder in and of itself. Individuals with BPD already have a difficult time maintaining an image of their “self” so to speak, and tend to imprint, or project, onto other individuals, whether it be figures in their life, celebrities, or fictional characters. For those who are afflicted with BPD, there are a number of comorbid disorders as well: 96% of those diagnosed with BPD have been diagnosed with a mood disorder as well, and a further 88% with an anxiety disorder.  

 The origin of many high risk behaviors in those with BPD is not entirely understood, although the disorder shares traits of bipolar disorder, such as bouts of hypomania and depressive episodes. Because of this, individuals with BPD are inclined towards most of the same risky behaviors, including: self-harm, suicidal thoughts and actions, unsafe sex, excessive spending, and a grandiose sense of self. The notable difference between the two is the tendency in individuals with BPD to have an unstable sense of self, and in many cases they may use these behaviors as a way to feel that they have an identity.

 While my experience is solely my own, I recognize that as someone afflicted with mental illnesses that result in an inherent disposition to risky behavior it is in part my duty to push towards a better understanding these behaviors in the society we live in. No, it should not be anyone’s job, let alone the mentally ill themselves, to educate the public in a manner that would be easily available if one took the time to try and inform themselves; nonetheless, I’ve always felt a strong drive to work to dispel incorrect and harmful beliefs many people hold towards those with mental illnesses. Such thoughts can, in many cases, become a source of prejudice - something that in this day and age, so many people claim that we’ve moved passed. While the representation and understanding of mental illnesses is only one thing on the long list of prejudices that still exist in our society, it is one that must be tackled alongside the others, not put on a shelf to wait it’s turn. If today is the first day you’ve learnt something about these illnesses and behaviors - good for you! I mean it, genuinely and sincerely. If this has been the first experience you have had learning about the symptoms and behaviors of these two illnesses, then you have already begun the journey of educating yourself. However, in my opinion it is a journey that does not end, as each individual’s experiences are a precious story that cannot be shoved in a box with every other experience. It is often stated that learning is a lifelong process, from the day you are born until the day you die; this is no different. Take time to not just speak with, but listen with compassion to those around you. Many, many more people suffer from mental illness at some point in their life than most realize, and you never know what those closest to you may be going through.

 Thank you for reading this, and I hope, at the very least, I have helped you begin your own journey.

[technicaldr]

7 Ways to Improve Your Brand Perception with Reputation Management

Reputation management is a lot like the airbag in your vehicle — you hope you’ll never need it, and if you do, you’ll be thankful you have it and pray that it works in time to minimize damage.

This is an often misunderstood facet of digital marketing because the fact that someone needs to change what shows up in the search results for either their personal or business brand doesn’t always mean that they are unethical, dishonest, or trying to hide something.

More often than not, it’s a single upset customer, or in some cases, even a shady competitor causing a problem. Unfortunately, either case can result in tremendous loss of revenue and opportunity.

In other words, it’s an essential part of modern digital marketing.

Act Before a Problem Arises

Because it relies on SEO, reputation management tends not to be a fast process. That’s why it’s critical to be proactive.

If you can take over the first page, or better yet, the first few pages of the search results ahead of time, you’ll be in a much stronger position if and when a crisis does strike.

The importance of controlling how you are perceived online is obvious. The only real question is whether you should handle it yourself or hire a firm.

DIY vs. Hiring a Reputation Management Firm

You can take a DIY approach, especially if you have a fair understanding of SEO and aren’t already in the middle of a crisis.

You’ll just need to be prepared to invest the appropriate amount of time, and in some cases, money, to get the results you’re looking for. Sometimes this can be significant.

On the other hand, if you don’t understand SEO and/or are already facing a crisis, then you may be better off hiring a reputation management firm.

Even if you do choose to hire a firm, it’s still important to have an understanding of the process so you can effectively evaluate potential vendors.

Hiring a firm, however, opens up a different set of challenges.

The industry has earned a bad reputation, both because of the type of clientele they frequently work with and because of how they sometimes behave.

I’ll give you a couple of examples:

Solvera Group was hired by Texas Realtor, Tom Grisak, to remove a negative review posted about him.

Solvera then paid someone to post a second negative comment on that post, and hired a Texas attorney to file a defamation lawsuit against the poster, whom they claimed they had identified — even though it was the wrong person.

The firm then presented the courts with a falsified settlement agreement, and the judge signed a final judgment based on this misinformation, which ordered Google to deindex the post from their search results.

Throughout the process, all of the lawyers, clients, and judges involved were misled. Eventually, Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton caught on and helped shut the operation down.

Managers of Status Labs, Darius Fisher and Jesse Boskoff, were sued for the equivalent of embezzlement of more than $1.5 million by one of their partners.

Rather than comply with the court order to stop stealing, Fisher and Boskoff instead set up a shell company, Blue Land Partners, moved the firm’s clients over and used their reputation management prowess to hide this fact from their new potential clients and their partner.

Fisher and Boskoff’s actions in plundering Status Labs were so egregious that the federal judge quoted John Wayne from the iconic movie, “The Sands of Iwo Jima”, saying: “Life is hard, but it’s even harder when you’re stupid.”

Fisher and Boskoff were later held in contempt for violating the judge’s order and were forced to return some of the stolen money to avoid jail time.

My point here is that if you do choose to hire a firm, you need to go into the relationship with your eyes wide open and do plenty of research to make sure you’re hiring a reputable firm.

Whether you’ve chosen the DIY approach or have decided to hire a firm, it’s important to understand exactly what goes into it.

This ensures that you have a solid action plan in the event that you’re doing the work yourself, or, if you’re hiring a firm, it helps you to better evaluate which ones are competent and trustworthy.

1. Optimize Your Own Website

Reputation managements starts with your own website because you have complete control over it.

Obviously, you’ll want to pay close attention to the technical SEO, especially semantic markup and internal links, but don’t stop there.

It’s equally important to publish content and earn links that will make Google view your website as an authoritative result for your name.

The most logical way to do this is to publish articles on your website. Lots of articles.

But it’s important not to put quantity over quality. As you build a library of useful content, your author pages on your website will become significantly more authoritative for your name.

From here, it’s also wise to build quality links to your author page. Unless you share a name with someone famous, it usually won’t take very many.

In most cases, if you have at least a few dozen quality posts on your website, then you can probably get by with less than a dozen quality links. That’s easily achievable by guest posting on other relevant, high-quality websites.

2. Contribute to Industry Publications

Major industry publications tend to be authoritative because they publish a large volume of high-quality content, and that content, relative to similar content on other websites, tends to earn more links.

This makes these publications incredibly powerful assets.

As with publishing content on your own website, the goal here is to rank your author page on industry publications on the first page of the search results.

What you want to do is contact the editors of two or three major publications in your industry to pitch the idea of you submitting an article.

If you have any contacts in common with the editors, it would be a smart move to ask for an introduction, but let’s not put the cart before the horse.

First, make sure you can answer these questions so you can pitch in a way that presents maximum value:

Who Is Their Typical Audience?

Is their audience mainly other people in your industry or to the end consumer? That will usually make a big difference in the type of content will resonate well with them.

You would write a completely different article when writing for an audience of your peers compared to writing for potential customers.

You can look at my writing as an example. When I write for publications like Search Engine Journal, I tend to write at a far deeper technical level because the readers here usually understand it.

On the other hand, when I write about digital marketing for publications in the construction industry, I try to simplify my writing because my audience there doesn’t typically have the same level of knowledge on these topics.

Why Does Your Opinion Matter?

If the internet has taught us anything, it’s that everyone has an opinion about almost everything, and most of these opinions are worthless.

So why should they listen to you?

What knowledge and experience do you have that qualifies you to share your opinion m on a particular topic?

This is an essential part of pitching an editor on your idea for an article.

What Will the Reader Gain From Your Article?

Your article needs to provide tremendous value, in the form of:

Unique and original insight.

Detailed instructions on how to do something.

A comprehensive resource that is unavailable elsewhere.

Skip the shameless self-promotion.

The publisher wants to provide value to their readers in order to ensure that they will return, and they’ll only do that if they gain something from the content on that website.

3. Optimize Your Social Profiles

Social profiles such as LinkedIn, Twitter, and Facebook are relatively easy to rank, which makes them another valuable asset.

Your profiles on social networks should include all relevant information, including your:

Hours of operation.

Phone number.

Address.

URL.

Etc.

Your social profiles should also be properly branded with your logo, brand colors, and appropriate header images.

The information included makes it more relevant to search engines, helping the profile to rank higher, while the branding increases engagement with real people.

Some of the social networks you should consider might include:

Facebook.

Twitter.

Google My Business.

Instagram.

YouTube.

Pinterest.

LinkedIn.

You don’t have to do everything all at once. In fact, you can’t do everything well all at once unless you have a massive budget and enough employees to perform the work.

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I recommend starting with between one to three social networks and create a following there before branching out into others.

While I don’t suggest trying to use every social network at once, you should secure your profile on every network so it’s available when you’re ready to use it.

4. Leverage Public Relations

As an experienced expert in your field, I’ll assume you probably have something valuable to say.

If you can leverage your insight into positive media coverage, you can create a valuable asset in your reputation management efforts. And the beauty is that it’s infinitely repeatable.

Large publications like Entrepreneur, Inc., and Fast Company are authoritative and tend to rank more easily. Especially for your own name.

  It’s essential to approach PR with the intent to add tremendous value to the editor, contributor, and audience. The mistake most people fall into is trying to make it all about themselves. This is a surefire way to get ignored.

  Unless you’ve done something truly monumental, like launching a car into space, no large publication is going to write a feature story about you. It just isn’t going to happen.

  Instead, figure out what the audience wants, and find a way to deliver that in a way that includes you, and pitch that to the editor or contributor.

  The editor wants more eyeballs on their content. The contributor does too, but they also want to simplify their job of writing the article. Especially when you consider that most contributors aren’t paid for their work.

An effective way to do this is to leverage newsworthy topics. You can see examples of this in articles where I was quoted on the gun control debate in The Business Journal, and on Ja Rule’s failed event in Forbes.

  “The key to maximizing reputation in PR is to provide remarks or content that provides high value in terms of being something the readers didn’t know and wouldn’t likely have guessed, such as a surprising insight, backed by data (with the data properly linked and sourced), and perhaps some color and complexion around an example of how that surprising finding plays out in real life,” according to thought leadership and crisis PR expert Cheryl Snapp Conner, of SnappConner PR.

  “Include your characterization as an expert and whatever link is best for people to use to find out more about you. That leads people to the right association with you, as opposed to, perhaps being linked for contributing a ‘sky is blue’ quote to an article on something unrelated to your expertise, such as tips for closing a deal on a golf course,” she said.

  You won’t have a lot of control over how a contributor writes their article, so it probably won’t be optimized specifically to rank for your name. That’s OK, though.

  It may rank on its own without any additional work, but if not, simply earn a few quality links to it and it should easily land on the first page.

5. Earn Positive Reviews

If you’ve been in business for any length of time, you probably already realize that trying to please everyone all the time is about as difficult as trying to make a pile of water.

This sometimes results in negative reviews. One way to combat that, however, is a large volume of legitimate positive reviews.

Earning those reviews is simple, but not easy. Let me explain what I mean by that.

  It’s simple because you just need to ask your satisfied customers to post a review on websites where your new potential customers may see them. That’s simple.

But it’s not easy because you must provide an exceptional product or service. Not average, not pretty good — but exceptional. That is difficult. Especially in today’s highly competitive market.

I can’t help you provide an exceptional product or service. That’s all on you.

  I can, however, help you to earn those reviews once you have. I’ll do that by sharing the email script that we use, along with our follow-up process.

  That process is critical because while these reviews are monumentally important to you, they aren’t to your customers. I’m sorry, but they just aren’t.

  Your customer is busy running their business, and they’ll only help you if you can make it easy for them, and even then, you’ll probably still have to remind them a few times.

  OK, for the email, it’s simple:

I’d like to ask you to do a favor for me…positive reviews help us to build trust and bring on new clients. Would you mind posting a quick review about your experience working with us? If you want, I’ll even draft something that you can edit as you see fit. Just let me know if you want me to do that to make it easier and faster for you.

  The links for Google and Facebook are below

Google: [Link to your Google My Business listing]

Facebook: [Link to the reviews tab of your Facebook business page]

The follow up is simple, too. My agency uses a tool called Boomerang for Gmail because we run on G Suite. We will set a reminder for one week, and if we haven’t received a review by then, we will send a reminder email that simply says:

  Just sending a reminder in case this got buried.

We usually give it another week and send another email with the same message. If that still doesn’t produce a review, then it’s time to pick up the phone.

  But before asking them for a review this time, first ask something along the lines of this:

  Hey, I know you’ve probably been really busy lately, but since you haven’t posted a review yet, I just wanted to make sure do anything wrong or leave anything hanging. Was there anything we should talk about?

  Usually, they will apologize and explain that they’ve just been busy. In most cases, they will post it shortly after this call. But in the rare cases where something was wrong, you’ve just bought yourself the perfect opportunity to fix it.

One quick note on this — I highly recommend placing positive reviews on your website as well, and where applicable, including Schema markup.

6. Launch a Podcast

Your podcast page on Apple’s website will generally be viewed as authoritative just based on the domain it resides on. This makes it an effective tool in your reputation management efforts.

Add some quality links into the mix and it can rise to the first page rather quickly.

This tactic isn’t a band-aid though, because maintaining a podcast requires a tremendous amount of effort. I recently learned this when I launched my own podcast.

I point this out because I want to emphasize that if you’re not prepared to invest the ongoing time, effort, and expense of creating a worthwhile podcast, it isn’t something you should start in the first place.

If you’re going to do this, I suggest committing to at least one year of weekly episodes. Anything short of that and you’re wasting your time.

7. Buy Relevant Domains

If you’re facing or anticipating particularly aggressive attacks, buying relevant domains is a wise tactic.

You probably have already registered the .com for your name and/or company name, but what about the almost countless other extensions available today?

At the very least, you should register the .net and .org, but I would also consider other domain extensions that may make sense for your company.

There are more than 1,000 extensions available, so be thorough but try not to go overboard. The idea here is just to prevent others from posing as you and/or your company.

Next, look at domains that could be used against you. For example:

CompanyNameSucks.com

CompanyNameComplaints.com

CompanyNameReviews.com

I would especially make it a point to include a few non-standard extensions, like .online, .club, or .reviews because they tend to outrank comparable websites with traditional extensions.

This can come in handy if there is significant search volume for complaints or reviews for a name, whether it’s a company or a person.

  You don’t need a website for each domain. In fact, in most cases, you won’t need a website for any of them unless things get really nasty. This may happen if you run into a particularly vindictive former customer or competitor.

  Only once in nearly two decades have I personally run into a situation where creating additional websites to target visitors searching for reviews or complaints was necessary.

Technical Dr. Inc.'s insight:

Contact Details :

inquiry@technicaldr.com or 877-910-0004 www.technicaldr.com

[fashiontrendin-blog]

Everything You Need To Know Before Buying A Fitness Watch

http://fashion-trendin.com/everything-you-need-to-know-before-buying-a-fitness-watch/

Everything You Need To Know Before Buying A Fitness Watch

Few things are tracked as fastidiously as fitness. From beats-per-minute to miles-per-minute, winning, it seems, is all in metrics these days. But you needn’t be a mathlete to compete with the fitness hipsters. Thanks to technological leaps and fashion bounds, it’s now easy to muscle in on a numerical advantage yourself.

And thank the tech gods for that. Gone is that weird guy in the gym with a heart rate monitor strapped to his chest like some sort of disco Terminator. Now all you need to view almost every marker of exertion is a cursory glance at the wrist. But the question that boggles runners and gym bros alike remains: what to watch out for when buying a fitness watch?

Simple, says Kerry McCarthy, gear editor at Runner’s World magazine. There are some fundamental requirements that make for a good fitness timepiece; you need those and nothing else. Here’s his list of essential tracking metrics, with tips on putting the stats to use.

The Stats You Need To Know

Stride Length

“Mo Farah gobbles up around 2m of ground with every stride thanks to his long legs and super-flexible hips. Yours is likely to be less than half of that, but you should be aiming for between 1-1.3m with each stride. Shorter and it means you’re scuttling (and thus wasting energy); longer and it means unless you’re also a yogi you’re probably over-reaching, which can lead to injury.”

Cadence

“Here’s one elite habit you can aspire to. All the top runners take around 180 strides per minutes, which is seen as optimal. If you’ve never paid any attention to it, it’s more likely yours is currently around 160. Work on turning your feet over a little quicker to make yourself the most efficient runner you can be.”

Heart Rate

“There are numerous online algorithms to help you work out your own target maximum heart rate but the old formula of 220 minus your age is still a more than adequate guide for beginners. So if you’re 45 years old your maximum heart rate should be 175. And that’s when you’re eyeballs out. For easy to steady runs you should be somewhere around 50-60 per cent of your maximum.”

Pace vs Average Pace

“If you struggle to keep each kilometre consistent, switch your watch from ‘average pace’ (which smooths out the spikes and troughs and can give a false sense of control) to ‘current pace’. This can then be calibrated to give a reading once every second on most devices, which means if you’re all over the place like Phoebe from Friends but have never noticed, you’ll now see the pace reading veering around wildly as you do. Work on calming this down.”

Which Watch?

Now you know what a tracker can do for you, it’s time to upgrade your timepiece. Reticence here is understandable, of course: the decision presents something of a sartorial quandary to the fashion cognoscenti.

Do you go all in, like a devil-may-care maverick, throw your watch to the wind and buy a utilitarian, 100 per cent fitness-focused product to let the world know you might bash out some burpees at any moment? Or should you stick to your traditionalist sensibilities and try one of the established watch brands’ forays into fitness fashion?

Luckily, it’s fine to do both depending on your goals. Fashion and fitness are meeting in the middle. Many of the proper trackers now look good enough to work within most outfits – black tie aside – and even the most Swiss of Swiss watchmakers are adding tracking technology weighty enough to challenge Fitbit to a foot race.

The Best Brands For Dedicated Fitness Watches

Fitbit

Fitbit has been doing its midrange product thing for a while and as a result has honed its trackers into excellent, affordable watches that are ideal for the everyman. While it’s unlikely you’ll see one on an elite athlete, that doesn’t mean a Fitbit won’t keep pace with your designs on elite fitness.

The recent addition of heart-rate monitoring tech makes the brand’s Alta HR a solid contender for your wrist. Packing it into such a slim chassis – the slimmest around, they claim – means it’s an unobtrusive accessory, especially given the mostly muted colour options.

On a seven-day battery span, you can expect feedback on calories burned, heart rate, distance and steps covered plus how much activity you’ve undergone that day. Fitbit devices also report back on your sleep, if you’re into that kind of thing.

Buy Now: £103.79

Polar

Polar has been making heart-rate monitors since 1977, long before your mum got interested in getting her 10,000 steps a day. Its innovative products are used by elite coaches to track the performance of pros in practically every sport imaginable so it’s more than capable of helping you track down a new PB.

While the company does entry-level units, its premium trackers are the reason it’s successful. Think sport-specific training schedules, recovery advice and built-in fitness tests.

Add to that world-beating GPS technology, which means higher accuracy and no bothering with your phone to track distances and routes. But if you do pair it with the app on your phone, you can use Polar’s customised training plans for middle- to long-distance running, which come via instructions on your watch.

You also get the standard features you’d want from a smartwatch: alerts for calls, messages and even social media notifications. So if you often enter race events and want to be able to stay up to date with your messages during your training, this is your device.

Buy Now: £173.95

Suunto Spartan Ultra

Now things get serious. Serious tracking. Serious functionality. Serious price. Suunto has been making instruments designed for outdoor performance since the thirties. The firm uses a one-second GPS fix rate, which makes for the most accurate tracking around.

The Suunto Spartan range is up there with the most expensive, but with good reason. The sheer magnitude of tracking options makes it the go-to choice for weekend warriors and serious athletes alike.

There’s a nod to the aesthete as well. The Ultra, protected by its titanium bezel, comes in a range of colours – or you can customise it yourself – and has a colour touchscreen, which is why it’s picked up design trophies to match all its outdoor gear awards. The USP of this watch is the multi-faceted discipline functions – it packs 80 different sport modes with metrics specific to each.

With that, you can store and beat your PBs, map and discover new routes, find other people’s well-trodden paths using heatmaps and then let the watch’s built-in navigation system guide you wherever you’re going.

Buy Now: £435.00

Samsung

One of the few areas where Samsung has given Apple a real run for its money, the Korean tech giant’s smartwatches have gone from strength to strength with its Tizen operating system – and, most importantly, created a model for almost every need, from hardcore fitness fanatics to casual smartwatch wearers.

The flagship model is still the Gear S3, which tracks anything you could possibly want tracking – acceleration, heart rate, altitude, speed – though its Gear Fit 2, which also has built-in GPS, will more than suffice for guys who just want enough data to keep them motivated.

Buy Now: £199.95

Garmin

Though Garmin produces smartwatch trackers for all sporty types – from beginners to serious athletes – this is a brand for runners, cyclists and swimmers who know their stuff. It has influenced other smartwatch makers with its VO2 Max feature, which measures oxygen consumed per minute per kilo of bodyweight (sounds complicated but an it’s an excellent way of measuring athletic performance).

Garmin’s standard bearer, the Vivoactive 3, is also one of the very best models around, and especially good for heart-rate monitoring and its GPS. Between the Vivoactive and other watches, Garmin caters for almost every sporting activity, including skiing, rowing, triathlons and even golf.

Buy Now: £139.99

Apple

Apple smartwatches aren’t solely dedicated to fitness – fitness tracking is one of several features – but they do work for anyone who is dedicated to getting fit. The Apple Watch, now on Series 3, splits its fitness features across two apps: the Activity app for everyday movement and the Workout app for, well, working out.

As with most Apple products, it’s very user friendly. The Activity app gives a basic quota of movement, standing and calories to burn – various ways to get you off your backside, in other words – and the Workout app measures stats for duration of exercise, distance and pace in real time.

Buy Now: £359.00

The Best Brands For Fashion-Fitness Watches

Tissot

If you want to invest in a solid timepiece without breaking the bank, Tissot is always a safe entry point. With all the trappings of watchmaking craftsmanship, the brand’s T Sport range adds athletic functionality to otherwise classic-looking timepieces.

The PRC 200 is an update on the successful Tradition Chronograph. Where the latter looks much more like a fashion watch with a chronograph built in, the former has a much more sporty aspect when viewed closely, but with an understated enough design to work with the sharpest of suits.

This choice offers a watch for all occasions. Be that a work function or when putting the Swiss reliability to the test with its 60-second, 30-minute and 1/10 of a second chronograph, complete with a split function if you need it.

Buy Now: £380.00

Mondaine Helvetica 1 Smartwatch

This is ostensibly just a regular watch, but with brains running in the background. The minimalist display offers a what looks like a traditional chronograph subdial, and no one would know it was packing smart features were it not for the words ‘Smart Swiss Made’ smack bang in the centre of the face.

The functionality comes in the form of an app. The Helvetica 1 may be 90 per cent watch, but it’s no less smart for it. Connect it to the app and use the buttons on the watch to begin activity tracking, sleep tracking and to show your activity progress.

In the app itself you’ll see breakdowns of your individual profile and progress towards your sleep and activity goals. It would never stand toe-to-toe with something like a Suunto Spartan, but if you’re looking for a snazzy timepiece with some additional features, you won’t find better.

Buy Now: £452.49

Tag Heuer Connected

Essentially the caped crusader of watches: the Tag Heuer Connected is both as sauve and inconspicuous as Bruce Wayne and as action-ready and gadget-packed as Batman. And no other watch hides its heroic alter ego quite so well – you can customise yours to look exactly like a regular watch and the OLED touch screen can even be set to display the classic, analogue appearance you’d expect of a Tag.

And on that customisation, go modular and you can either have the watch strapped with metal, leather or, if you’re serious about putting its fitness functionalities to the test, rubber (Batman would approve, too). As for the inner workings, Tag is a proper contender thanks to its Intel processor, making it far faster than your average luxury smartwatch.

When you’re on the go, it packs an accelerometer, gyroscope, tilt detector and haptics engine, as well as an in-built GPS to track your activity. There’s even contactless payment functionality, should you need to grab a post-workout feed en route home. Plus seeing Google Maps on your wrist via such a high-quality screen feels like something from the future.

Buy Now: £1,500.00

Skagen

Smart wearables from this lesser-known Danish watchmaker are among the most aesthetically-pleasing fitness models out there. In fact, you’d be forgiven for thinking its hybrid smartwatches were just attractive-looking standard timepieces.

In truth, they have limited activity tracking features – just steps, distance and calories – while the fully smart Falster watch looks more techy with its digital screen, and has Google Fit already built in, so you can track fitness within various sporting activities.

But without the GPS and heart-rate monitors that make other brands’ smartwatches such vital exercise tools, the Skagen models are best for casual (good-looking) exercise.

Buy Now: £299.00

Montblanc

The classic German watchmaker has entered the luxury smartwatch game, debuting its aptly named Summit in 2017 (though the brand also released a smart e-strap in 2015 – an interchangeable strap that can pair with phones and track activities).

The idea behind Summit is a high-end smartwatch – its design harks back to a classic, vintage look that makes it feel like an old-school mechanical watch on your wrist – but with some trendsetting features, including the Runtastic heart-monitoring app. It also helps you monitor fitness goals, with daily progress measured by a mountain-shaped tracker.

Buy Now: £765.00

Swatch

It’s one of the biggest watch brands in the world, but Swatch didn’t want to follow everyone else with its first fitness wearable. Instead, it created the colourful Touch Zero One, which is made with specific features for measuring activity in volleyball… yes, that’s right, volleyball (the Swiss watch brand does sponsor volleyball, so it’s not entirely left field).

It also measures steps, calories, distance and even, erm, claps. It later followed up with the Touch Zero Two. Credit goes to Swatch for doing its own thing, but this isn’t necessarily the smartwatch series for you if you’re thinking about your next Iron Man.

Buy Now: £89.00

[coma-witch]

Design Own T Shirt Online

You wear shirts all the time. You've got some amazing ideas about how to create your own clothing line. We recommend getting your feet wet by using a third party website that allow you to open your own clothing store. It's fast, it's easy, and you can make money any time. They do most of the work, so you can concentrate on the foundation of your amazing T-Shirt graphics, cause that's what sells.

Anyone can put words on t-shirts, but putting your own creative spin on those cool designs, is what T-Shirt lovers value. Some 3rd party websites that allow you to make custom T-Shirts, and other products are CafePress, Zazzle or Spreadshirt to name a few. You can create your designs on your computer. You will need a graphic design program such as Microsoft paint, Photoshop, CS3-PSD-125x125 or Adobe Illustrator. The reason is you will have to create some form of design, whether it's a simple text design T-Shirt, or a more artistic graphic design T-Shirt, you need to create Vector images, or images that have a transparent background. This will allow you to create and design whatever you like, and with CafePress support for example, you can directly load your design onto the products of your choosing. They even have a great design tutorial and Beginners Image Workshop that explains the correct way to design for their products. They will take you step by step learning how to create and design your images to put on clothing and merchandise. Starting with a third party website is perfect for low budget starting companies looking to have someone handle the printing and shipping of the products, as well as the merchant services, and customer services. You wont have to charge one credit card yourself, or handle any returns or problems. Most third party custom clothing sites allow you to personalize your shop's page and colorize and customize your layout. Granted you know a little bit about HTML, and web design, you can take your shop to the next level with flash design, and custom banners and logos. You are in control of what you sell, how much you sell, and what you want to sell. If you love dogs and dolphins, and there's a market for dog owners and aquatic adventurers, make a T-Shirt for dogs that has some artwork of dolphins on it. If you're a mother, and want to sell cute adorable clothing for moms and their kids, design some cute stuff. Anything goes, except for explicit content, explained by each website. If you take some time designing your products, those products will be on auto pilot, so to speak. As long as you pay any small monthly fees, your products can sell while you sleep. That's right, your funny hilarious t-shirts, and cool awesome products, will make you money 24 hours a day. Sounds easy, right? It is, and we've joined thousands of shop owners, making money off their creativity. Diving into the t-shirt Pool and Making your t-shirts Store, Stand Out. Climbing to the top of the CafePress shop top money makers. When creating designs try to brainstorm ideas that haven't been done. It's hard, but think of things that you appreciate and try to ask people around you, such as co-workers, or people who will not be biased towards your designs. You can even go as far as talking to other shop owners to find what niche works best for your style. If you have experience in market research, by all means, study market trends, on what your target market is, and design for those consumers. This way you can grab an understanding of what the consumer might like. Try a new spin on a common saying by throwing in a pun in there to make it something funny and interesting of your own. Design a graphic all your own, and illustrate your funny phrase, deep emotional connection, or random information, to give the consumer more value for their product. Your shirts don't have to be hilarious funny t-shirts, but they can be artistic, or political, or even educational/spiritual. Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/2195370Fashions come and go by meaning, yet there are a few articles of clothes that never head out of https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/10Dy_hZ9wNwMcidfFKlWEiQ7NI3A3uiv6L4SunI4HVzw/ fashion completely. Often a development occurs, or a peripheral trend drags them back into the general public eye. For instance, I'm thinking about denim jeans that have been a dominating and item that is iconic of for decades, yet which appear to are available and away from vogue based on other facets such as for example celebrity endorsement or innovation in styles of cuts. Another fashion classic could be the music or band t-shirt. Are musical organization t-shirts dead? Whenever they be consigned to your fashion space 101 along side stapress slacks and cardigans that are chunky leather-based patches regarding the elbows? No, claims this music t-shirt fan. Band and music t-shirts remain rocking on. Where t-shirts began T-shirts was previously undergarments. Nondescript items of nothing and clothing to shout about. That all changed when James Dean famously wore their classic t-shirt that is white Rebel with no Cause. Instantly tees just because a youth item, a rebellious product of clothing that defied the shirt that is formal connect using older generation. Nevertheless, the tops were plain. Mainly white in reality. In the belated 1950's nevertheless, things were planning to alter with all the invention of a new material called plastisol ink which made it feasible to printing durable designs onto clothes. Tees stayed the clothing associated with rebellious through the sixties, whenever connect dying along with other procedures provided them a surge that is further popularity. Bands additionally started to use t-shirts as a method of promotion, as did concerts where these people were offered as souvenirs. Music tees hit the mainstream Hence, t-shirts relocated into the mainstream as gown styles shifted away from the formal suit and ties regarding the early sixties to the more casual look. Iron on transfers arrived in the 1970s which enabled t-shirt stores to open up atlanta divorce attorneys city and shopping centre publishing t-shirt that is almost unlimited. No day at the seaside ended up being complete with no acquisition of the cool t-shirt that is new printed to order. The punk explosion regarding the mid 1970's then offered t-shirts a whole new life with designers such as for example Vivienne Westwood adapting and producing outrageous t-shirt that is new using pop music art images, safety pins and shocking prints. Yet again, they became a potentially edgy and crucial fashion declaration. Through the nineties, t-shirts became less of the fashion declaration and much more of a center associated with the road clothing staple that is safe. All bands now promote themselves, their trips, and their albums using t-shirts alongside other media. In reality, t-shirt sales continue to be a source that is major of from band tours, and many tours are associated with exclusive gig only t-shirts that can't be bought somewhere else. They remain associated strongly with music, but additionally with just about any form of popular culture. Where teens might show their allegiances to values, bands or television shows by wearing switch badges, most adults now do the exact same t-shirts that are using as switch badges are considered less acceptable for the older generation. Because musical organization and music tees have already been around since the 60's, nowadays there are 50+ several years of designs for music t-shirt companies to plunder and reissue, and there are lots of classic t-shirt designs today that is still available. Major bands such as The Beatles and Pink Floyd have dozens or even a huge selection of officially certified tees for sale from the range that is wide of. Shows like Southpark, The Simpsons and Family man will also be popular t-shirt targets and grown ups of any age can proudly, and subtly (roughly they wish!) show their hipness by sporting a specific t-shirt when on an outing. Dress down Fridays at workplaces (where formal clothes are normally used between Monday to Thursday) are really a great chance of those considered stuffy and away from touch to fix what they might think about to be a misconception. Within the UK, tees are far more popular than ever right now with thin fit tees being especially appealing to skinny young ones, while the wider folk amongst us still take the Large to XXL. Most of the hippest bands whether old or young, or fresh or founded have actually t-shirts available. Lady Ga Ga, The Killers, Lily Allen, Snow Patrol, Morrissey, The Gallows etc. For fans of heavy metal and rock, tees, frequently black colored, have been a staple considering that the mid 70's onwards and there are some fantastic metal tees available for fans of bands like Iron Maiden, Metallica, Slipknot, Slayer, Motorhead etc. while the visual designs on these shirts are renowned and unique amongst the music t-shirt industry as most other genres have a tendency to consider musical organization pictures or album covers.