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advisorportal · 2 years ago

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Six Benefits Of Onboarding Employees The Proper Way

Employee onboarding at most of companies focuses on finishing brand-new hire documents as well as clarifying procedures. It's management, serving the requirements of the company and also making sure compliance. But this is a mistake. Doing too little during this crucial change period can result in higher turn over, reduced engagement, as well as bad performance, to name a few points.

On the other hand, ingenious organizations are locating many advantages of onboarding staff members a lot more strategically, including:

1. Stronger employee experience

Task openings are at an all-time high, and your workers have no shortage of opportunities available to them. If they don't enjoy the worker experience at your organization, they can conveniently discover one more chance that much better suits them.

A fantastic onboarding process sets the tone for the whole worker experience. Concentrating on things like company culture, employee development, and frequent check-ins show new hires that you respect their experience at your firm. Expanding these emphasis areas past your onboarding period then continues that solid staff member experience, from hire to retire.

2. Greater employee interaction

Involved employees go above as well as beyond in their job, causing things like greater efficiency and earnings, and also lower absence and turn over. The trouble is, just 33 per cent of employees are engaged.

Onboarding the proper way can aid employees really feel even more connected to your company, as well as it's mission, vision, and also values. Establish your brand-new works with up with a friend, and also help them learn about the business in a fascinating means-- maybe over morning meal with the chief executive officer. Supply early acknowledgment for a job well done, and gather and also apply staff member feedback. Including these activities in your worker onboarding program can assist you build employee involvement from day one.

3. Better worker retention

Worker retention is top of mind for numerous companies this year, and for good reason. Staff member turn over is expensive once you consider things like the expense to backfill the position as well as the price of vacancy. While some turn over is always anticipated, you still intend to maximize your employee lifetime worth. Replacing a new hire within 90 days is more inefficient than changing an extra tenured employee who has provided your organization with years of productivity.

Organizations with a solid employee onboarding process boost new hire retention by 82 percent. This must begin with worker preboarding the minute a deal letter is signed, as 11 per cent of candidates have changed their minds on an offer after signing. Prolong a warm welcome to build off the enjoyment of your recruitment process and also deal, as well as provide a smooth transition from prospect to a new hire. Obtain the paperwork off the beaten track so your employee's very first day can be filled with event, introductions, and also early understanding. After that proceed your onboarding procedure for at least 90 days to make certain brand-new hires correctly accustom and assimilate to their brand-new duties-- and also remain lasting.

4. Simpler ability destination

Twenty percent of new hires are unlikely to suggest an employer to a close friend of a family member after their brand-new hire onboarding experience. This is bothersome, as discontented staff members can make their opinions publicly recognized, and also taint your employer brand while doing so, on evaluation sites like Glassdoor or InHerSight.

An interesting onboarding program that gives an outstanding staff member experience can go a long way in assisting you not only keep talent-- it can help you attract strong candidates, as well. As soon as you have actually supplied a first-rate onboarding experience, ask your brand-new hires to compose you a preliminary testimonial on Glassdoor. Likewise, make sure to loophole new hires in on your worker reference program, so they can easily suggest terrific ability from within their networks. Staff member recommendations are known to be quicker and also more economical to employ, onboard much faster, and also remain longer, making this a crucial channel for sourcing prospects.

5. More powerful business culture

It's not enough to bring in as well as maintain talent-- you need to draw in and keep the best skill. For instance, a person who's an excellent suitable for Amazon.com's culture of high standards probably isn't going to be the best suitable for Zappo's zany culture. Constructing a strong, intentional firm society as well as sharing it throughout your recruitment and also onboarding procedures can aid you attract and preserve the right people.

Sixty 9 percent of firms that buy employee onboarding record easier assimilation into the business society. Share details concerning your company's goal, vision, as well as worths early-- and also frequently-- in the worker lifecycle. Use things like onboarding products and all-hands meetings to highlight worker tales and company wins that reinforce your worths as well as make sure social placement.

6. Enhanced productivity

New employs generally need the better part of a year to ramp to full performance. Between things like being familiar with your organization as well as structure relationships to build cross-functional teams, it takes time to clear up right into a new role.

Onboarding staff members the proper way can quicken this procedure, lowering time to proficiency and also boosting efficiency by over 70 per cent. A wonderful employee onboarding process helps the new hire ended up being accommodated to the organization, and helps with relationship-building between workers. It likewise consists of personal goal setting, frequent manager check-ins, as well as employee development so workers understand what's anticipated of them, where they stand as well as have a plan to enhance. Only 21 per cent of workers highly agree that their performance is taken care of in a way that encourages them to do exceptional work, making this an impactful focus area for several organizations.

Last ideas

A strategic worker onboarding procedure includes greater than publishing out documents and creating a PowerPoint deck with firm procedures-- however it pays off. There are numerous advantages of onboarding staff members extra strategically. Some, such as boosted productivity, impact your top line. Others, such as improved retention, can make a considerable effect on your bottom line. Consider your onboarding program a work in progression, executing new ideas as you're able, and gathering comments to enhance. With time, you'll undoubtedly see even more advantages of onboarding workers the proper way.

#positive workplace culture #company culture #employee onboarding process

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yourkeeperoftherunners · 6 years ago

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A Brief Commentary on Clothing Construction

I’ve seen a lot of people on here and other social media platforms discuss fashion, especially why things cost so much and why our favorite celebrities spend so much money on expensive brands or goods. I know for many people it’s shocking to see someone wearing something that can cost a month’s rent or even the down payment on a property or car for a single item, but keep in mind the following factors:

Your favorite celebrity was probably borrowing/renting the clothes for free. Luxury brands are striving to get likeable role models wearing their clothes, which in turn spurs their fans and other individuals in that age group to buy or consider their brand.

A stylist probably chose that clothing item or brand so the celebrity looks modern and pulled together. These people are paid to make celebrities look good and photo-worthy – while they may take input from their clients, they’re dressing the celebrity to fit an image.

Based on the celebrity’s profession and net worth, they may have been purchased with their funds based on their personal taste.

Regardless of the reasons, I know many balk at the price tags of things and wonder why spend so much when you can get something cheaper. Below the cut, I delve into some of my learnings from sewing and clothing construction courses I’ve taken, plus general observations I’ve made as I’ve done my own projects and information I’ve read. Please note I am not an expert in this field – these are my personal thoughts.

Back in the olden days, people either made their clothes at home (sewing was a practical skill taught at a young age) or if you had money, you paid a tailor to make you clothes based on your measurements. It wasn’t until the 20th Century when clothing that was made and ready to purchase and wear was sold in designated clothing shops and boutiques. (Ready-to-wear)

Sewing as a skill has evolved throughout the recent years – before the invention of the sewing machine, you sewed by hand, which is a tedious act that requires focus and patience. Modern sewing machines nowadays can create beautiful rows of even stitches that will stay in place with every tug, pull, and stretch that the garment goes through. (Also it requires less time to assemble pieces of fabric into something wearable.)

Rundown of Sewing Methods/Machines

Hand sewing: Takes the longest, requires a steady hand, and a lot of patience and practice to achieve. Ideal for small fixes (Ex. Loose buttons, small holes in clothes, etc.) in a pinch. Often fashions houses will employ this technique when applying a decoration or design treatment to highlight the craftsmanship. (The latter may contribute to a higher price as this cannot be achieved by a machine – often an individual or artisan is doing this one by one.)

Basic Sewing Machine: Good for the home sewer, pre-programed with basic stitches and sewing functions. Anyone from a beginner to an expert can use one. Most of the models are digital and have screens where you tap to adjust the stitch size, width, and type before using a foot pedal to make the machine start sewing. Typically these are suited for lightweight and medium fabrics – exercise caution and care if sewing with heavier duty fabrics like furniture upholstery and leather. (The latter will require special needles.)

Industrial Sewing Machine: Like the name indicates, these are for factories who produce tons of clothing on a regular basis. They are robust machines that can sew any type of garment with any fabric with few errors or issues. There are a few available for regular home sewing purposes, but keep in mind these are going to be bigger and may require more space.

Serger: If you’ve ever seen the hem on a t-shirt and turned it up to see a complex network of threads intertwined in the back, while 2 parallel lines are visible on top, this was done on a serger machine. Often these are in factories and they create finished seams in garments, creating a cleaner look inside the garment. (Also they reinforce the areas where pieces were sewed together – the complex network of threads helps to keep those areas sewed together.) There are home versions of these machines, but smaller.

Reasons for Higher Cost

Where was this made? Every garment has a tag that states where your clothing was made. If your clothes were made in a first or second world country, chances are the costs are higher to produce that garment, based on wages for the workers, conditions, etc. Third world countries have different labor laws and it’s cheaper to outsource goods – this is why many people will see Made in China/Vietnam/Thailand/etc. on cheaper clothing.

What materials were used to make this? Synthetics like polyester, nylon, and some viscose blends are manmade and they’re cheaper to manufacture. Natural fibers like cotton, silk, and wool came from plants and animals – depending on a variety of factors including weather and conditions where the fiber was produced, the cost of natural fibers can fluctuate based on demand and availability of raw materials.

How was it constructed? Study the seams and the decoration application. One of the basic things they taught me in clothing construction was a variety of seams, from zigzag to French seams. Flat fell seams and French seams require more time to complete and finish than a zigzag seam. The high end designers tend to use these last two seams, along with serger finishing for a clean look. If you’re a woman/identify as one, you may notice some rounded seams in the chest areas of dresses, blouses, and other fitted apparel – these are called princess seams and they’re added to help the fabric lie/drape around your chest in a flattering way. (They can be tricky to construct but they can elevate and improve the fit in a garment – another detail you may find in designer clothing.) If you notice that something is lined (inside of a jacket, inside of an evening dress, etc.), that may be a contributing factor to the cost. Essentially, you’re making a thinner/lighter “shell” of the item to put inside the main garment to give it a more professional finish and feel. In many cases for jackets, linings hide seams and the person wearing it will have something softer against their skin. (Ex. Sports letterman jackets are usually made of wool/wool blend , but the main body of the jacket is lined with a satin or silk fabric so it’s gentler on the wearer’s body and makes it easier for them to slip their arms into it.)

Misc

Leather can be difficult to work with. Based on the animal your hide came from, how old it is, and the treatment done to the leather, prices can vary on leather goods. Those who work in the material tend to make a draft version in a cheaper fabric (a muslin) before they start sewing because once you put a hole in leather, it cannot be removed/disappear like a knit or a woven. No two hides are the same and every single one will have imperfections, unless the designer cuts or treats the leather in a way that hides those imperfections. The trade off with this material is that it is very durable and with proper TLC can last for a long time. (You’ll often see it for motorcycle and biker apparel because it will protect the wearer if they fell from their bike and not rip open.) Doc Martens are known for being made of very stiff leather that requires patience (and pain in many cases) to break in and mold to your feet – the original intention of these shoes was a practical, long-lasting utilitarian shoe for the worker that would protect their feet while working.

Modern clothes are colored with synthetic dyes, which is how you can achieve vibrant colors in a broad spectrum of shades. Anything made with a natural dye (from plants) will have a less vibrant shade, unless the garment has been dyed multiple times to get a deeper/richer hue. Often the natural dyes will be in more neutral colors and the dye job may look uneven, depending on the treatment/process. (Ex. BTS’s RM wears a lot of clothing from Visvim, many of which were dyed using veggie and plant-based dyes, which are gentler on the earth.)

Denim has changed, due to material availability and a broad range of body types in consumers. Previously denim was 100% cotton and was stiff – often it required many wears to soften the denim and mold it to fit your body well. With people being different shapes and sizes, majority of denim seen in regular retailers will have higher percentages of elastic and synthetic fibers that are stretchy to accommodate different wearers. The elastic and synthetics are more forgiving to those with curvier figures and they won’t be as stiff to wear off the rack. (Most Western brands utilize this material composition as it allows them to sell their pairs to a wide range of consumers.) In contrast, Japanese selvage denim is constructed with a higher cotton content and minimal elastic/stretch and in some cases is dyed with real indigo plant dyes. (Western brands are rarely utilizing true indigo dye and rely on a manmade version to achieve the denim blue color.) Japanese selvage denim will have a stiffer feel and will take time to break in, but the pairs may last you longer as there’s less elastic fiber content. (Over time, elastic stretches out and with frequent washing and drying at high temperatures, fibers snap and break, often resulting in the jeans losing their shape and looking baggy.)

#clothing construction #sewing #clothing 101 #fashion #high end fashion #reference #yourkeeperoftherunners original #These are a few things beyond the whole name brand reason for high pricing.#number 2598

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burnedbyshoto · 4 years ago

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hawks_littledove.mp3

— You’re an avid listener to NSFW ASMR artist Hawks. It’s just your luck that he’s offered to have phone sex with you.

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pairing: takami keigo (hawks) x fem!reader

warnings: smut, 18+, slight abuse of power/influence, phone sex, masturbation, degradation, praise, nsfw asmr artist!hawks

word count: 5,018

a/n: my keyboard is broken and i could actually cry. but hey, hawks do be sexy even tho I would never trust him with my life. also LOL this might be a call out to a lot of us, do not be offended or I will cry.

kinktober day 14 main kink: phone sex | kinktober masterlist

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Fantasizing about being in relationships with fictional characters was entirely healthy and normal.

That was something you believed to the core. It was fictional; thus, no one but you were to be hurt at the end of the day. The character, being fake, could never have an opinion because you must be real in order to have an opinion. So when you were between boyfriends, you discovered a new anime, and before you could stop yourself, you fell hard for a character.

It started as a mild obsession.

You had looked up fanart via google images, your heart warming when you saw the plethora of different fanart. The anime itself had been in circulation for a few years now, the manga for much longer, so the content was endless. Then google images wasn’t enough, and you began crossing into Twitter and Tumblr.

The fanart became better, more engrossing, and definitely much more NSFW. And then, one night during your endless rabbit hole down Tumblr after your daily search on Twitter, you stilled when seeing a new type of content.

⇒ grey fullbuster x reader

The obsession grew worse.

So much so that you had followed nearly five hundred self insert writers and artists on Tumblr, and maybe seven hundred artists, meta writers, and thread makers on twitter. But three months into consuming all the content you could find, you came across a new name that made you tilt your head.

Hawks Fierce Wings

It was a name that was being repeated and heavily talked about on both sites. It was an ASMR artist, apparently, and you frowned at the thought. You didn’t have anything against ASMR videos, but you weren’t exactly sure how to handle an anime ASMR artist. Were they cosplaying while making all those weird ASMR sounds? You really didn’t have any idea, but due to the immense boredom of your lazy day in, you decided to hell with it and tried out his most popular video.

It was simply entitled: Hawks is Jealous.

Did you have any idea as to who Hawks was? God, no, you didn’t. But if it was just some random cosplay he was going to do, you didn’t think it was going to matter. So as the only slightly educated ASMR listener, you never truly became invested when it was a thing; you slipped on your earbuds and pressed play.

The introduction screen faded into an illustrated picture of a slightly handsome man, and some calming yet tense music played in the background. You shifted, eyebrows drew as you waited for the ASMR session to begin, and when it did, you were not ready.

“I saw you walking around with that asshole today,” a voice practically growled in your ear, and you froze.

Oh, no.

Oh, no!

For almost an entire hour, you sat glued to your sofa, your fingers digging into your lap as the jealous, spiteful words of this man named Hawks poured bitterly in your ear. His words were a near aggravated assault on you and definitely something you were beyond uncomfortable hearing from a stranger, but there was something about his voice that kept you there. Maybe it was the tenor of his tone or the way there was this sly, cunning scent to his words that he seemed to hide deep within his throat, but there was something that kept you there.

The second the passionate, heated kissing noises and heavy moans began to spill from his lips, you screeched, slamming your laptop closed as your cheeks pounded heavily.

Oh my god?!

It took a bit, but eventually, you were able to finish the audio and quickly figured out why he was an NSFW artist. You had never, ever heard a man eat a pussy fake or real as eagerly or vigorously as he did. Your hands were gripping the pants of your leggings, and your chest heaved.

Oh, motherfucking shit.

Finding out there were almost seventy other videos for you to still experience sent you scrambling for more, and eventually, you had to confess you were obsessed. Despite the anime fandoms you had discovered him for, Hawks seemed to be more famous for the content he created as himself. His real name was unknown by the looks of it, and he was only addressed as Hawks by his audience, something you caught on to quickly. So only after creating a new profile for his Youtube account, you made quick work of liking and commenting on every single of his already published seventy-eight nearly one hour and thirty-minute videos.

Each one was different.

Each one filled with various roadmaps on how Hawks' scenarios would play out for you — the listener. When he used his own persona, he called the listener his little dove or his chicken nugget, sometimes his KFC thigh, or his shish kabob.

You were glad at the very least he didn’t call you by any of those nicknames when pretending to fuck you at a speed only a “porn-is-my-only-education-on-porn” virgin teenage boy. You knew it wasn’t ideal, usually, but for some reason, it just worked. You commented on everything, read his summaries and thoughts on each video. Eventually, when you found yourself on his final, most recent video, you were ready to go a step further.

The Patreon app on your phone seemed jarringly out of place as you opened the app and subscribed yourself to Hawks' highest tiered option for the price of twenty USD.

And when you got your access to his page, you were immersed in more heavier, better content.

It was a goldmine in a sea of fools gold, and you absolutely went insane.

You weren’t sure if you were insane, needy, or just straight-up idiotic for scrolling to the very first Patreon post and indulging in the content Hawks created.

There was a stark difference between the warnings alone between the Youtube videos and the Patreon posts. While the porn was readily accessible on Youtube, the kinkiest thing that ever happened in a video was a slight implication that Hawks had left the listener on a vibrator and fuckmachine as he went to go talk to the visiting neighbors.

It was a slight, tiny zone out and miss a detail, but one you had clung onto like an obsessed psycho and even commented on in your comment on the post. Of course, Hawks hadn’t responded, not that you had ever expected him to because all things considered, a video that was eight months old and hadn’t done that well, to begin with, didn’t seem like anything he would remember: notifications and all.

But Patreon? Oh good, sweet, ravishing Patreon.

The very first video was of the following:

Stepbrother!Hawks fucks Stepsister!Listener in the stairwell during Christmas Dinner.

After praying and swearing to all the deities of the world that you were merely a person with a voice kink for this man and not, in fact, a perverted pseudo-incest worshiper, you clicked on it and began. It was downright sinful.

There were active voices whispered in the background as Hawks laughed about how fucking slutty you were for letting your brother fuck you like this. In the hallway, like a dog, where anyone in your joint family could walk out into. He laughed that you probably wanted it, how your wet ass pussy was greedily sucking him in, so how could you even begin to deny your lust for your brother.

You had to take a break five times during that audio.

Eventually, you do end up catching up.

Each video he had ever posted to your disposal, and most likely due to the different tier levels, you always commented on the videos. Even if it made you feel awkward for lusting over things months old, even if there were no other comments on the videos, which was much more common than you thought, you always commented and liked. It wasn’t anything ever crazy, you had seen the rarest comments bring a whole essay of analysis on why they loved it or the hating words, but you kept it simple.

Just something to keep Hawks spirits high without draining you even further of energy.

A simple: holy shit, that was hot as fucking hell!!!! you never disappoint me!!!

You never expected anything out of it; as a matter of fact, you had merely thought that you were doing the least by merely appreciating his creations when, one night, a few hours after you had gotten home. Your phone chimed with an alert.

Your mouth formed an ‘o’ in surprise; you hadn’t realized there was going to be a new release after he had just updated four days ago. Still, you popped in your earbuds and began the audio with a simple title.

i fuk ur stupid lil pus until u cri

He wasn’t precisely putting much effort into his titles these days, but his tags were definitely accurate and entirely explicit in what was to come. And in this newest video, the prominent tag was degradation.

You weren’t entirely into degradation, but still, you did what you had to do because you weren’t turned off by it. With the beginning sounds of the music playing in the background, you warped into the situation Hawks carefully carved.

But, oh?

Your face simmered with heat as Hawks dirty words dripped from the earbuds, the wet, squelching noise of your cunt and throat being fucked like some inanimate object made you soak through your panties as his disparaging words burned against your spine like a hot brand. After the thirty-minute audio was finished. Your body trembling with the aftershocks of an orgasm that had come despite the lack of actual stimulation of your clit, and you panted on your bed.

Opening your phone once again, you quickly liked the new audio and typed out your comment.

listen, i know i always comment about how fucking hot this shit is, but i have /never/ fucking soaked through my panties… you just did that and i expect a full refund for these panties 💦

You pressed send and, without so much of a second thought, continued your night. You had dinner, talked with friends, and ended the night curled back on the couch with a wine glass in your hand and a simple sit-com playing on the TV. The familiar sound of the Patreon alert rang in your ear, and you frowned, confused.

Grabbing your phone, you opened up the device and nearly shrieked at the sight of the information the notification that said:

Hawks F.W.: lets see those panties before i refund anything

A chill ran down your spine as you quickly put together the indications of this message, and you smirked, despite your quivering hands.

Me: I have a seven inch dick requirement before seeing any of the goods — yes, that includes my panties

And from that very moment, you began a strange arrangement between you and the NSFW ASMR artist Hawks.

Working was the worst part of your life, you would say.

At work, you would sit in your small 4x4 cubicle, your shelves stacked with plenty of papers and items you needed, not to mention the computer that took up the majority of your desk. You weren’t quite sure what your job here was, you sort of sat at your desk and did meaningless assignments when assigned, but you did nothing for the most part.

Before becoming an active Hawks stan, you would spend your time doing nothing playing video games. You had somehow managed to install a VPN onto your hard drive so that your employers wouldn’t be able to see what was on your screen outside of the home screen. They couldn’t trace what you did all day, but they could care less, given you got all your work completed on time and done in an over exceptional way.

But lately, since you had dropped into this… engrossed whore like relationship with Hawks, things changed.

To be honest, it still shocks you to no end when he tells you that he had always been aware of you. Well, with your consistent, ever appearing comments on his posts and overall enthusiasm for everything he posted, it was hard to not be aware. The mental image of your soaked through panties after a long day at his own work had sent him over the edge, and he finally messaged you.

Through the DM’s in Patreon, the two of you grew to become quite the friends with benefits. He would send you countless personalized audio files because you had quickly confessed to your voice kink and how his voice sent your stomach into hormonal knots. In return, you’d send the picture of an occasional soaked panty, and if he was lucky, an audio clip of your pathetic whines back to his audios.

You couldn’t complain about this arrangement.

But as the number of his patrons doubled, and he wanted to entice his subscribers with paying him even more money, Hawks began to offer a bimonthly personalized five minute audios for his $20 tier. The fans poured into that spot, and Hawks and proudly sent you the new number of adoring fans he was getting. On account of growing platforms such as Tiktok, the number of new listeners he got was nearly exponential, as he currently passed one million followers last week.

The cheeky bastard was also making enough money to stop working his regular work hours anymore. Choosing to transition slowly into his Patreon career while recording.

Hawks, however, seemed to have other ideas for your eventual personalized voice audio.

Hawks had simply asked if, by any chance, you were going to be working tomorrow the night before. Groaning loudly in recognition of your work schedule, you had texted him back that you were going to be working. Snidely including the fact that you weren’t rich like him, you needed the tedious old nine to five job.

Hawks: how utterly boring anyway u can b free around 2?

Me: Eh… probably not. Busy girl w busy schedule, ill be back from lunch so no break Why?

Hawks: well, u knw tht uve been amzing & th bst follower so i wanted 2 give u smthing better then the personalized audio

Me: Oh? Well, what is it?’

Hawks: pick up tmrw n find out

He had changed the subject immediately afterward by dodging all of your questions with ease. So you dropped it, and the two of you resumed a night of flirting. But now, sitting in your small cubicle, your eyes flashing to the clock that read 1:57 p.m., sweat began to build on your palm.

You peered down to your phone as you waited for something, anything from Hawks to show up. The fucker was too cheeky, evasive, and quick for his own good. You felt like pouting as you glared at the phone, waiting for the screen to light up.

And you stilled when finally, at precisely 1:59 p.m., your phone gleamed with light. You couldn’t abandon your computer mouse quicker than you did as you grabbed your phone, unlocking it, and reading the message from Hawks.

Hawks: do u have earbuds?

Me: Yes?

Hawks: good put them on n pick up

The moment you had read the first message, you were already pulling out your earbuds, synching them up to your phone, and placing them into your ear. But your jaw dropped when, for the first time, the call feature highlighted onto the screen, the time immediately changing to that of 2:00 p.m. The decline or accept button had never looked as daunting as it did right now.

Despite the call trying to go through, you still saw his follow up.

Hawks: if u dont pick up u wont get shit

[Accept]

You felt your heart hammering in your chest as both fear, apprehension, and excitement boiled through your veins, the hammering blood pounding in your ears as you waited for some sort of noise on the opposite side of the line.

“Little dove?” Hawks' voices filled your ears, and despite yourself, you smiled softly. The naturalness of his voice sends warm thumps down your spine.

“Hi, Hawks,” you whisper breathlessly, your head already checking to make sure your neighboring cubicle mates didn’t try to look over the divisions to stare at you. For the most part, the office building was quiet except for the phone calls, the clanking of computer keys, and the monotonous music playing softly on the speaker's head.

“Whatcha doing?” he drawled, and you felt your skin heat up when you heard the all too familiar sound of his shoes hitting the top of his desk, the soft whine of his chair as he leaned back onto it. “Are you really at work?”

“What do you mean, am I really at work?” you squeaked, half horrified at the way the lazy, warm heat of lust was infiltrating your body at the sound of his voice, and the annoyance that he thought you had been lying? “Of course I am; it’s two p.m. on a Wednesday!”

“Ah, so little dove-chan is a raging pervert who engages in phone sex to bypass her long hours at work?” Hawks sighed his tone that of understanding and dismissal. You splutter. “You never fail to surprise me.”

“I do not do… that!” you stammer, your face feeling like hot cinders, your fingers and eyes double-checking to make sure that the audio was going to your earbuds and your earbuds only. You also couldn’t help the way your eyes swept around you, trying to make sure you hadn’t accidentally invited unwanted attention. “I said I was busy!”

“But, you picked up my call?”

“You said, or else!”

“Mmm, okay, I think I see,” Hawks tutted, and although you had never seen what you supposed to be his handsome face, you could imagine a lazy, toothy smirk on his face. “Don’t worry, I don’t mind using your little cubicle to talk you into fucking yourself good for me.”

Your jaw drops.

It hits the desk, and the muffled shriek of utter humiliation is only silenced because you bit onto your tongue like a rabid animal.

“Aw, you sound so excited for me already, little dove. I bet you want to know what I’m going to do to you, don’t you? I just know that I’m going to make you feel so... good…”

“Hawks!” you plea in a hushed whisper, your heart hammering where you sat frozen like a deer in headlights. Sure, you had definitely played his audios before to pass the time, but never before in your existence had you had actual phone sex. This was riskier than just listening to his audios; his audios always had a pattern, a way to escape from the madness of his voice when people were closer than you’d like. But this? No, there was no escape. “I’m at work! I c-can’t!”

“But, fuck, I want you so bad,” Hawks' voice dipped into a gravely tone, his voice just perfectly scratchy enough that your shoulders trembled in unspoken, untouched want. “I want to feel your cunt around my cock, baby, your pussy is so hot and I want to be the fucking lucky bastard that gets to fuck you through your bed.”

“O-Oh my god…”

“I’ve been thinking of what your tits look like,” Hawks continues on, his voice continuing in the style you liked the most. It was raw, heavy, and deep. No character impersonations, just him, pure Hawks. “I hope they bounce the way they do when I imagine you riding me. I want to see you moan when I kiss the underside of your tit, I want to see your face when you realize that you’re my girl, nobody's else's, but mine.”

Heat floods your panties at his words, your shallow breaths making him chuckle on the other end.

“You’d be so lucky to be just mine, wouldn’t you, little dove?” Hawks snaps, his voice demanding a response, and you heave.

You look around, no one is near, and you croak out: “I’d be so lucky.”

“Louder.”

“I’d be so lucky.”

“Mm, there we go,” Hawks laughs, and your ears prickle for any noise that may indicate that someone was listening in. “What? Are you getting nervous that your needy ass will be heard by your coworkers right now? Answer me.”

“Mhmm,” you hum loudly, your cunt pulsing with more incredible heat and your hands shaking with a slight fear of being caught.

“Aww, don’t worry, little dove. I’m sure your boss will understand that you’re my newest fucktoy and will let me continue. Maybe they’ll want to join in?”

You whimper softly, shifting in your seat at that thought. You didn’t really want your boss coming anywhere near you, he was old and gross for one, and nothing could take the place of this beautiful man's voice in your ear right now.

“Oh, was that a no? You don’t want other people fucking you, do you, y/n? I bet you only want to have my cock in your tight little pussy, bet you want to watch the way that greedy little thing sucks me in, begging for my seed. Would you want me to cum deep inside you? You would like that little dove; you’d like to be full of my cum.”

“H-Hawks,” you keen as quietly as you can, your hips shifting uncomfortably in your seat, your heart hammering in your throat. The pressing heat in your cunt is growing, your panties growing with wet slick as Hawks' voice whispers down your ear, filling every empty and void space in your brain until you were having trouble focusing on the very much public spot you were in.

Hawks let out a soft, guttural moan, and you froze, face entirely combusting into an inferno as the familiar slick slapping of his fapping cock filled your ear. Immediately, you forgot everything.

“A-Are you—?!” you splutter, unable to find the words or the energy to come up with a way to ask if he was masturbating right now. Your eyes spun, your mind in a complete haze as soft, raunchy moans spilled from his lips, striking against your nerves and soul with each successive sound.

“I’m only trying to help you out here, dove,” Hawks growled, undoubtedly in effect to a rather loud smack of his fist colliding with his thrusting hip. “You’re the little office slut who picked up a phone call to entice in phone sex. I bet you knew exactly what I was going to do, and your pathetic, needy whore self caved to my instructions.”

Your fingers curled into the armrest of your chair.

“I bet this makes your boring ass job tolerable, the perfect distraction to a shit job, then imagining a few minutes of fucking yourself against my hard cock.”

“That’s not true!”

“No?” Hawks laughed, not believing you any more than you did. “So you wouldn’t hate it if I showed up and fucked you into the wall of your cubicle? You wouldn’t mind if I claimed your sweet-smelling pussy against your desk for everyone to hear? I know you can scream like a bitch in heat. I know that pretty little cunt of yours would milk my cock dry. Oh, I just know you would look so fucking sexy with your back arched, eyes closed, and you begging for hours just to cum. You wouldn’t cum without my permission, right?”

You gasped, heart fluttering, hammering in your chest as you shook your head, not trusting yourself to speak.

“I need a verbal answer, little dove.”

The heat in your core was blistering, your thighs shaking with your unadulterated lust and need as you ground into the cushion of your chair. All logic and moral long gone as he snarled and moaned your name in your ear, the slick of his fapping cock echoing like a great bell in your ear. You wanted to hear him cum, wanted to listen to the pithering sound of his echoing moans as he spilled the contents of his balls onto his hand — and how you wished it was your womb.

“I won’t cum w-without your permission!” you whispered, your skin shivering with your fear of being caught.

“God, you sound like such a dirty fucking bitch. I bet your pussy is fucking soaked already. Bet you really want to run that slutty embarrassed finger against your clit but don’t want to be caught by your perverted coworkers,” Hawks hissed, his breaths turning into steady, heavy hot pants. You mewl softly, confirming his spoken thoughts, and he huffs out a laugh. “How many fingers do you normally shove up that pretty cunt of yours, little dove?”

“T-Three!” you gasp, your forehead pressing to the cool of your desk, your eyes glazed over and looking at the entrance of your cubicle, fervently wishing that no one tries to check on you as you grind against your stable chair. “O-Only three fit.”

“Fuck, you really do have a tight cunt, don’t you,” Hawks snaps, the wet sounds of his fisting hand around his cock a beautiful melody in your ear that makes you whine at the back of your throat. “Bet you can’t even fit cocks up your cunt without lube, huh. You gotta stay on top, or else you’ll get hurt with how thick and long my cock will be up that baby pussy of yours.”

“H-Hawks!” you grit out, the friction of grinding on the seat no longer working.

“Go to the bathroom, now,” Hawks commands, the small gasps on his voice from his approaching orgasm more than enough ammo for you to do as told.

You sprint to the bathroom, the slick of your cunt hot, and evident to you as you sped to the bathroom. Your phone clenched in your hand as you locked the door behind you, glad the room was empty. Barely managing to get yourself into the stall, the toilet paper placed on the seat as you raised your legs up, already prepared. The skirt you wore was bunched above your ass, and the panties you wore, stretching out around your knees.

“Sounds like you’re ready to start fucking that pussy for me,” Hawks laughs, but there's no humor, just bite. “Put in three fingers, now.”

Without even arguing or caring, three fingers slip into your cunt, and you cry at the feeling of your fingers completely stretching you out. The smell of sex and slick filling your nose as your fingers slick up, fucking your tight cunt as you moan louder and louder for Hawks.

“God, your fucking pussy is so fucking wet, I can hear it from here!” Hawks moans, the frantic sound of his drilling hips gaining speed and momentum.

“I want it to be you!” you moan, your face burning in your humiliation. “I want it to be you fucking my pussy, claiming me in this bathroom. I need you, Hawks, I want your cock so badly!”

“Fuck,” Hawks gasps, something tumbling in the background. “Such sweet words for a fucking dirty ass cumslut,” he growls, and your legs shake, your clit and cunt thrumming with your increasing arousal and pit of tightness in your core.

“HAWKS, FUCK!” you sob as your hips try to start a merciless speed against your fingers, your body trying to match the speed in which Hawks was fucking his own hand.

“Keep screaming my name, whore.” Hawks gasps, his noises of pleasure beginning to grow louder and louder, your eyes crossing in satisfaction. “Screaming my name like the fucking slutty mess you are. All this shit just to get me to fuck you? God, you’re so fucking pathetic y/n. Begging for me, begging for more? I think you’re my favorite little dove ever, gonna make you mine whenever I get to fuck that pussy.”

“Hawks!” you wail his name again, your arms and pussy throbbing with the energy it takes to keep up with his inhumane speeds. Your vision seeing stars as you tremble more and more, your legs slipping from the toilet seat, yet. “I am your whore, your little dove. Please let me come, please! You fuck me so well, fucking hell, please, I needa cum, I needa cum!”

“Cum with me,” he snaps, his voice so deep, so dangerously smooth. It was precisely what you needed, the voice kink you had for his tenor exactly fulfilled entirely with that simple, last command. And just like that, your jaw slackens, head slamming backward, and pleasurable waves crash through you.

Your fingers still rock at your clit, and your vice gripped walls, your toes curling within your shoes as you soundlessly scream. Hawks, on the other end, is practically snarling, voice deep and altogether dangerous as grunt after grunt leaves him, and you can imagine the milk-white cum splattered all over his chest and hand. A beautiful, perfect sight that you wish you could see for yourself.

Exhaustion settles in your bones as you sit on the toilet, still entirely exhausted as you heave for air.

“I think that was the best fucking orgasm I ever had,” you mumble, your eyes closed, not ready to stand up and move. “Thank you.”

“I’m good at what I… at what I do,” Hawks stumbles, husky exhaustion ringing in his own voice. “Now, little dove, finish up work, and I promise there’ll be a surprise waiting for you when you’re done.”

Not entirely agreeing, but not disagreeing with his command to go finish you last… two and a half hours at work, you begrudgingly said goodbye to Hawks before washing your hands and exiting the bathroom.

When five o’clock came, you watched as your phone screen lit up, and your face flushed as you read the DM from Hawks.

Hawks: this is my fav audio now ↳ hawks_littledove.mp3 but you surprised me today, so in case u ever want to have more fun sometime call me 03-9183-2495 ;)

#hawks smut #hawks x reader #bnha #bnha x reader #mha #bbs kinktober 2020

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feverinfeveroutfic · 3 years ago

Text

chapter three: take this longing

“your body like a searchlight, my poverty revealed. i would like to try your charity until you cry, ‘now you must try my greed’. and everything depends upon how near you sleep to me.” -“take this longing”, leonard cohen

The sun had dipped behind the Los Angeles skyline and in turn, the entire area was bathed in a blanket of bluish violet darkness. It was moments like that there in the northeastern side of the city that Sam realized she had missed it all. She peered out the windshield at the winding dim lit freeway before them: all the jacaranda and oleander trees tucked behind the brick walls that lined the road around them. Somewhere near there was the old neighborhood in Alhambra where her parents used to live at before she was born.

Chuck took the next exit to one of the side streets down below, past a small row of low palm trees off to the right. Beyond the trees stood a mural painted upon a wall of pale bricks. Sam couldn't exactly tell what the mural bore but she made out the sight of a series of bright colors there in passing.

“Did you see that?” Greg asked her.

“I did, yeah,” she said.

They rolled up to a stoplight and Sam glanced about the intersection before them. The darkening freeway to the left, the stretch of road right in front of them and all the mission style houses up that way as well, and to the right, the four lane parkway that took them into the heart of town and closer to that old neighborhood. The faintest of memories in mind and yet a memory nonetheless.

“Oh, god, the memories that are coming back right now,” she admitted.

“That's right, this is your neck of the woods, isn't it?” Chuck said as he raised his attention to the rear view mirror; even in the dim light, Sam made out the sight of the little glimmer in his eye.

“All of Elsinore and this side of L.A. in particular,” she said. “My parents lived around here when they first got married. They also lived closer to the beach, too—down by San Pedro.”

“Love San Pedro,” Tiffany declared.

“Oh, yeah, it's all cool down that way. San Pedro, Long Beach, Rancho Palos Verdes—it's all the real nice part of L.A.”

Sam thought about a walk on the beach at some point. So much she wanted to do while she was back there in California, that is if she could do it. Bill wasn't willing to let her out for any reason whatsoever.

Hell of a time getting back to New York if she so wished to do so.

In the meantime, she thought of her parents. Or at least she thought about Esmé and what she planned on doing following the divorce. The fact that her parents were splitting up left her wondering where it all went wrong when she wasn't looking. Her mother became an author and her father had his own things to deal with and yet she had no idea about either one of them.

Much like with her secret about living with Bill had to be kept away from Joey at all costs, she knew that she need not tell a soul about the divorce as well. As far as she knew, Bill had no idea about it, and he didn't need to know about it, either.

Within time, they reached the center piece of Alhambra, the vast stretch of dark grass nestled in between a series of scraggly but still fully shrouded oak trees. The grass made a little hillside near the middle of it all. And right near the sidewalk stood the dark brown wooden city sign: Sam peered out Alex's window to the stone sidewalk out there as Chuck searched for a place to park.

“We're just gonna be seeing them in a little restaurant,” he announced to them. “It’s another little baby thrash band, too, so it’s a humble restaurant rather than the sunset strip.”

“They’re not Poison or Ratt, anyway,” Alex noted in a low voice.

“Don't really wanna walk too far, though,” Chuck continued, “you know?”

“Right, right,” Tiffany said.

“Especially after all of the running we just did,” Sam pointed out. “And the fact I fell on top of Greg.”

Alex laughed out loud at that and Greg bowed his head at that.

“I saw that!” Chuck declared. “That was actually pretty funny—no offense, Greg.”

“Greggy,” Sam said in recollection of Zelda's nickname of him.

“Greggy!” Tiffany chimed in.

Chuck then swerved towards the curb and they took the spot closest to the corner, right across the street from a small bar in a brick building with a pink and blue neon sign in the window.

“We're seeing them in there?” Sam wondered aloud.

“Nah, next door,” Chuck told her as he unbuckled his seat belt. “Mr. Skolnick here isn't twenty one yet—neither are they.”

“Really?” Sam muttered but Chuck never replied as he climbed out first, followed by Tiffany, and they leaned the seats forward so she, Alex, and Greg could climb out into the impending darkness.

Chuck and Tiffany led the way to the warmly lit restaurant next door: on the far side of the room stood a doorway into a separate floor for a band to play. Behind them stood a long table with Death Angel shirts.

“Here just in time,” Greg remarked right as the lights turned low. The five of them were only a select few in a small crowd but it didn't seem to bother either of them up on stage. All five of them had that smooth Pacific Islander skin that seemed to glow with a halo under the dingy lights. All five of them were slender and svelte and their instruments seemed far too big for them.

“Band of cousins,” Chuck told Sam. “Each and every one of them.”

“I was just gonna say,” she started, “they all look related to one another. Like they're brothers.”

“All literal kids when they started out a few years back,” he continued. “About around the same time as us, but kids, though. Literally kids—you think Alex is still just a baby when you first saw him and also right now. I think Andy, the drummer, was fourteen when they dropped their first album. That was like a month after we officially changed our name to Testament.”

“Wow!”

“Hello, Alhambra!” the bassist declared into the microphone with a bit of a high pitch squeak of a voice. “We are Death Angel.” Indeed, they struck Sam as a five piece band out of a high school up there on the stage. But she knew they carried with them a bit of prowess from her secondhand experience with Mark. He then ran up to the stage with a portable microphone in one hand, and those long black dreads streamed behind his head. His slender little body was wrapped up in a big black Slayer shirt and baggy black jeans that appeared to be falling off of his hips.

To think Aurora had an encounter with him right before her wedding. The more Sam thought about it, the more she wished for Aurora to have gone with him rather than that harebrained Emile. But as far as she knew, Aurora never touched him once and she only did it to rile her up, especially after her behavior in recent months. He gave those dreads a little toss back with a flick of his head and he showed a big beaming smile out to the audience.

“This is from our brand new album—it's the kind of album you listen to in the City of Angels, too,” Mark said into the microphone head. “It's called Frolic in the Park.”

“What a name,” Sam joked, to which Greg and Alex burst out laughing at that.

“Exactly!” Chuck declared.

“Hit it—”

For a band of kids, they reminded Sam of the Cherry Suicides, just by their relentless nature, their tightness, and the high scratchy shriek that Mark sang in. They weren't nearly as akin to punk rock and they lacked that gory aspect as well, but they were definitely up there; his thick black dreads reminded her of Joey. She needed to call him at some point.

“Man, they just pull, don't they!” Sam shouted.

“They do!” Greg shouted back.

Mark lashed his tongue and threw his dread locks back so that he resembled to a sea monster up there. Andy kicked his drum so hard in order to get the crowd clapping: given it wasn't a very big room, Sam could feel the thumping right through the floor. Chuck and Greg also stomped along with them.

“Let me hear you guys!” Mark bellowed into the microphone. “I wanna hear this room come alive! Make the Philippines proud, Alhambra!”

He raised his hands up over his head as they plunged into a good long guitar solo. Sam thought of the Cherry Suicides in Boston, when they became a thrash band themselves for a few moments. The whole series of claps lasted about five minutes before they returned to the original flow of the song.

Death Angel played one more before they parted the stage, and Sam, Alex, and Greg treated them to applause.

“Hey, kids, you want a shirt?” Tiffany offered the three of them.

“Can get a whole bunch of shirts, actually, Tiff,” Chuck told her from behind them, “they’re all like a buck-fifty.”

Sam couldn’t help but laugh at Bill’s complaint about a bag of crackers. Cheese crackers that were the same price as a handful of T-shirts she could sleep in that night and the one afterwards. But at the same time, she still shook her head at the very notion. And he was about to lose what income he had left; but Marla had the right idea to pressure him into finding a better solution for himself. Sam thought back to what her mother had said about things growing treacherous and sticky when kids were involved.

Greg bowed into the men’s room in the restaurant while Chuck and Tiffany strode outside into the night. Sam turned to Alex.

“You want something to eat?” she volunteered as she tucked her small bag of shirts under her arm while she put her change away.

“Nah, I’m not very hungry believe it or not,” he said, “Chuck also told me that he and Tiffany are going next door to bar for a drink.” To which he then eyed her juggling her things only to put her wallet away. “Here, let me help you—“

He took the shirts so she could put the change inside her wallet, and then her wallet back into her purse. Once she had it back against her body, he handed the shirts back to her.

“Thank you,” she told him.

“Wanna take a walk outside?” he offered her.

“Take a walk on the wild side?” she retorted, and Alex laughed, a big hearty bout of laughter. But he led her out to the front door of the restaurant, where the night had fallen upon Los Angeles: a hazy orange glow emerged from the downtown area, such that Sam could only see the stars in the sky if she turned her attention to the north, over the mountains.

Alex led her to the corner next to the bar, and they both peeked inside: Chuck and Tiffany were in fact in there and at the bar in anticipation of their drinks.

“Did Greg say anything about being in there?” Sam asked him.

“Nah, he just said he was using the bathroom and then he’d meet us outside.” Alex took a glimpse over his shoulder right then.

“I’m not seeing him, though.” He stood there at the corner of the sidewalk and she awaited right next to him there. Once they glanced about both ways first, he took a step off of the curb and she walked side by side with him to the opposite sidewalk, right near the car. But Alex himself kept on going into the darkness: the sole light came from the glow of the city, the neon lights behind them, and the sole street lamps on the corners up ahead.

“Would you believe that before I joined Testament,” he started at one point, “I never really had been to the L.A. area?”

“Really?” She was stunned by that, to which he nodded his head, even in the darkness.

“Born and raised in the San Francisco Bay Area my whole life,” he told her. “Never really felt the need to leave until I decided I wanted to be in a band. Sometimes I made visits to New York City or out to Vegas, but never the City of Angels. It was weird telling Chuck that, too, because he was born in L.A.”

They reached the street corner and he ran his fingers through his hair once more. Even in the nondescript light, Sam made out the sight of his deep eyes as they glanced off to their right. She was once again alone with Alex, and what better place than an area she called home for such a long time.

“I will say this,” he began again as he strolled along the sidewalk with her right next to him.

“What's that?”

“I'm glad that you're out this way,” he admitted: whenever he looked over at her, the ambient glow of everything made him resemble to a little porcelain doll. “Ever since we got together on New Year's over in Ithaca, I went home thinking, 'I was really wrong about Samantha.'”

“I feel bad about you overhearing at that conversation I had had with Aurora, though,” she confessed. Meanwhile, the sidewalk deviated away from the grass and gave way to pillars of pure concrete.

“Why?” he asked her as he stepped down in the barren storm drain.

“You saw a side to me that I didn't really want you to see.” She followed his lead into the storm drain, away from the concrete and almost into the street.

“Why? She was your best friend and she pretty much left you behind at this point.”

“And she made your day all about her,” she added.

“And she made my birthday all about her, right,” he echoed her.

They kept on walking around the concrete until they reached the next edge of the sidewalk. Beyond that something dark emerged from behind the pillars.

“Bit of grass here,” he pointed out.

“Grass, the trees, and the hill,” Sam added, and she turned to him. No moon out that night but there was in fact plenty of ambient light from the city near there and the very town of Alhambra; despite the dim light, however, she could make out the sight of that gradual hill side not too far from the concrete's edge.

“Remember during Kirk and Rebecca's wedding when you and Zelda rolled down that one hillside together?” he recalled.

“Oh yeah!” Sam snapped her fingers at that. “And you and Joey ran down it together with your shirts off like you were a couple of athletic boys.”

“I dunno about him but my suit was getting a little heavy at that point,” he pointed out with a shrug of his shoulders and a lopsided little grin. Through the darkness, she noticed his eyes pointed towards the other side of the grass. “Hey, there's the car.”

“Where?”

“Due north of us from here. Right over there.”

“Shall we frolic in the park?” she joked.

“At this time of night?” he pointed out.

“Yes.”

“There's no light, though, Samantha. We can't see the creatures and things that crawl about the grass beneath us.”

“Well, if we frolic about in the park, we gotta get closer at some point, though. So you can protect me from all the bad things that linger about down in the grass.”

“Well—you're technically married now,” he pointed out as they continued onward to the next corner. One more corner, and they were back at the restaurant and the bar, and of course the safety of the car.

“Yeah... but I don't have a ring, though,” Sam pointed out. “Sure, Bill made me sign some things but we don't have the things that make a marriage a marriage. Or at least so I think.”

“But you are technically married to Bill, though,” Alex insisted. “That means we can't fool around or do anything like that or anything that involves any kind of frolicking. Or at least that's what the Jew in me tells me.”

Sam giggled at that.

“Mr. Wandering Jew,” she joked.

“The Wandering Jew!” he recalled with a chuckle. “I think we gotta put a name on that at some point.”

“Who, you and me or you and Testament?”

“Testament! That could be a track for an album in the future. When I get back to my guitar, I'll throw around some licks and see what comes out of it at some point.”

“You are just—you are fascinating, Alex,” Sam remarked.

“You think so?”

“Yeah. There’s so much more to you than meets the eye, and I feel like I’ve just scratched the surface with you.”

“You really have, Samantha,” he told her, “you like barely made an etching on the surface of the little Skol-man.”

“By the way,” she began and a part of her shuddered at the phrase given she knew Bill likes to employ that onto her, “I know you're a guitarist for a heavy metal band—but are there any other genres you play?”

“Not really,” he answered with a shake of his head. “Most of my influences tend to be rock n' roll based. Most anyways. I saw Miles Davis in a concert on TV a while back, and ever since then, that's piqued my interest for the jazz world. I was raised by older parents compared to my peers. Where they grew up to things like Grateful Dead, I was exposed to like Sinatra and Dean Martin when I was growing up.”

“Who do you tend to be influenced by?”

“Well, my favorite band ever is the Beatles. I think anyone who knows what they're talking about when it comes to music they mention the Beatles at some point. They have to mention them, too, otherwise they have no credibility. The thing that got me into heavy metal was Kiss—I remember being eleven years old and literally begging my parents to take me to see Kiss. I actually cried to convince them.”

“Aw!”

“Yeah, my older brother Nate was like 'okay, Alex, if we can't get Mom and Dad to say yes, turn on the water works' and I did! So the Beatles got me into guitar, Kiss was what convinced me to go into metal—and then I found Van Halen and Eddie Van Halen, whom I think genuinely inspired me to be a lead guitarist. And then I started finding more and more guitar players like Randy Rhoads and Stevie Ray Vaughn. I also found a movie—you might find it the next time you go to a video store like near here or over in New York—that came out when I was nine years old, I think? I was nine going on ten. It's called 'American Hot Wax'—got people like Chuck Berry, Jerry Lee Lewis, and Screamin' Jay Hawkins playing themselves!”

“'American Hot Wax',” she repeated, “I'm writing that down.”

“Please do! The last time I threw out that movie name to someone they forgot it in like three minutes and then I never saw them again.”

Sam stopped right on the sidewalk in search of that one piece of paper, the one with Chuck's and management's phone number written on one side, and a pen down inside of her purse. Alex stopped right before her with his head bowed a little bit before her. The neon from the bar across the street from there provided enough light for her to find it but she had to squint her eyes in order for her to adjust to the sight of the ink on the paper.

“Can you see?”

“Sort of.” She held the paper within the pink and blue glow of the neon and that proved to be enough for her.

“'American Hot Wax',” he repeated. “The story of Alan Freed, the disc jockey who introduced rock n' roll to the masses and even coined the term, too. It's a little obscure, though, I remember one of Nate's friends had a copy of it and I happened to watch along with them. So you might have to look around for it.”

“A little late movie night the next time I see Marla and Bel,” she said as she carefully wrote the words down.

“Do they still live in New York, by the way?” he asked her.

“Marla does—Belinda went up to Albany to work in a shop that specializes in stained glass.”

“Oh, wow, that's badass.”

“She tried to get me to take stained glass when we were in school but it went through twice.”

“Damn, that would've been awesome.”

“She showed me a few little tips and tricks on the whole world of glass. There’s just… so much I want to do. You know?”

“Absolutely,” he replied. “Absolutely.”

Alex then turned his attention to the sidewalk before them, to the car still parked there. Chuck and Tiffany were in that bar there while Greg appeared to be still in the restaurant.

“What shall we do next?” he asked her. “We kinda walked around in a big circle just now.”

Sam tucked the piece of paper and the pen both back into her purse, and she glanced up at the grass before them. They were close to the car and the sole light came from the neon across the street: he was too young to go inside there and she needn’t drink lest Bill ask her about it by the time she came back. As far as she knew no one would see them out there.

“We can lie here, though,” she suggested, and he giggled at that.

“Just lay on the grass?”

“Yeah, like star gaze. Just walking around here, I can tell that the sprinklers haven't come out yet, either. We're a ways out from the very center of L.A., so the light pollution isn't so bad out here in Alhambra.”

“Yeah, guess we sure can,” he replied with a shrug of his shoulders. “Just don't get too close to me, though.”

“Why not?” Sam laughed.

“Because when you get too close to me,” he started with a little gyration of his head, “it warrants a kiss from you.”

“I won't kiss you,” she assured him. Alex sighed through his nose and he ran his fingers through the piece of black hair on the right side of his head. That little glimmer of gray atop the crown of his head appeared even lighter against the soft neon glow near there.

Sam tucked her new Death Angel shirt underneath her arm, and then she led him onto the soft dry grass in the midst of the trees. It wasn't in fact entirely dry: a light dew already began to fall over their heads. She guided Alex towards a spot on the grass, the driest spot as far as she could tell there. He had rolled up that single bag of T-shirts into a tight bundle and, once Sam stopped right in place, he dropped down to the ground and he set the bundle down on the grass behind him.

“Oh, I see what you're doing,” she declared as he lay down flat on the grass and his shirt lifted a little bit up his body. Even in the darkness, Sam made out the sight of that little sliver of pale skin between the bottom hem of his shirt and his jeans, about the width of her thumbnail, but a sweet little sliver of his tummy nonetheless. She bunched up the shirts in her bag as well, and she followed his suit and lay down next to him there on the grass. A couple of inches separated them from the other.

“I won't kiss you,” she assured him for the third time in a row.

He shifted his weight there on the grass and folded his hands upon his stomach, which in turn made the sliver between his shirt and his jeans a little bit bigger. He swallowed and his neck appeared much more shapely than before. She thought of drawing that shapely neck at some point. It was a fleeting thought, but that thought in fact swam right through her mind at that point. The shape of his side profile and the soft appearance of his black hair as it sprawled over his shoulders even down there on the ground.

Sam then cleared her throat and he rolled his head over the makeshift pillow for a glance over at her.

“So if you write a song called 'The Wandering Jew',” she said, “will you credit me for inspiration?”

“Of course,” he replied with a slight chuckle. “I mean it only makes sense to do just that.” He showed her a sweet little smile and then he rolled his head back to where he lay flat on the bundle of the other shirts. “The Perseids are coming up here soon. At least I think they are.”

“Perseid meteor shower?” she asked him.

“Yeah. They're right in the middle of August—at least I think they are. That's my memory of them from when I learned about them in school.”

He fetched up a big yawn and then he stretched his arms up over his head. Sam rolled her head over her makeshift pillow for a look at the side of his face: the way in which his side profile had such a fineness to it. The prominent but gentle point of his nose. The full sensual shape of his lips. The smoothness of his skin and his chin.

She never thought of Alex as being so lovely, but laying there next to her, she recognized another side to him that she hadn't seen before there. She inched closer to the side of his face, much to his surprise. He gaped at her and raised his eyebrows at her.

His little body enticed her and she wanted him, and she wanted to kiss that little pearl of gray upon his head, now a little tuft the size of her index finger. She set a hand on the side of his face and she lunged in closer to his face.

“Samantha!” he gasped. “What're you doing?”

“I want to kiss you,” she whispered into his face; she showed him her tongue.

“Don't,” Alex begged her in a soft whisper and with a shake of his head.

“I want to kiss you,” she insisted as she gazed into those deep eyes and at those sweet smooth lips, as smooth as butter.

“Samantha—Samantha, please—you're legally married and you have a boyfriend, too.”

“So?”

Alex froze right in place at that.

“So?” she repeated, and he cracked her a smile and he laughed at that. He brought a hand to his mouth in order to stifle his laughter given they lay together there outside of the bar. She lifted herself up and then rolled over him: she suspended herself over him. He was right underneath her; Sam brought her face closer to his so she could smell the soft cologne on the side of his neck.

Decadent, like a little treat for her and all for her, all for being such a bad girl.

A bad girl with a good boy.

His chest heaved from her being right above him. The tips of her dark hair dangled down towards his chest and she ran her tongue around her lips to get him going as well.

“Samantha, I—” He could hardly talk. “—I—” She pressed a finger to those lips.

“You're just—you're so sweet and intelligent and funny and refined and just—everything totally different from what I'm used to.”

Alex swallowed but he never moved a muscle.

“I want to come closer to you,” she begged him as she touched his chest. With that free hand, she unfastened the bottom lip there at the top of his shirt. “I want to come closer to you, Alex Skolnick.”

Or at least that was what she thought would happen had she inched even closer to him. Instead she fluttered her eyelashes to rid of the daydream, and she just lay there on her back next to him and every so often, she peered over at him and the soft and smooth side of his face.

“I should tell you,” she began for real that time, “you have the cutest little lips.”

He snickered at that.

“You do! They're really cute and shapely, and I like how they kind of peel back whenever you talk, too.”

“I'm a mishmash,” he confessed with a shrug of his shoulders.

“Like one of those rag dolls,” she added.

“One of those rag dolls they piece together of all the scraps they scrape up from like the bottom of the barrel.”

“Nonsense,” she insisted.

“These lips under this schnoz and with these eyes and with the little tuft on my head? Yeah, it's bottom of the barrel, Samantha.”

“You are not from the bottom of the barrel, Alex,” she persisted. “I assure you.”

“I'm like something that the world likes to keep a secret, and by the time it comes out, it's already been said and done.”

He sighed through his nose and Sam frowned at that. And then it hit her, especially with Joey and Marla not around, and neither of her parents knowing about Alex himself.

“Speaking of secrets,” she began, to which he rolled his head back over the roll of shirts on the ground. “Can you keep another one?”

“I'll lock secrets up in a vault and never let them out,” he said in a single breath, “especially after Louie told Marla about your living situation. Can't believe he did that.”

“My parents are getting divorced,” she told him straight up.

“Aw, really?” He gaped at her.

“Yeah.”

“Well, why am I sworn to secrecy about it?”

“My mom doesn't want me talking about it with anyone. But she doesn't know about you, though.”

He raised his eyebrows at that.

“Really?” he said in a low voice.

“Yeah. So—could you?”

He ran his tongue along the edge of his teeth.

“I'll put them in the proverbial vault, Samantha. Don't you worry about a thing.”

“Hey, kids!” Chuck called from across the street.

“I want you to be my secret, too,” she blurted out to him.

“Me?” He raised his eyebrows at her.

“Yes. From my parents, from Joey, from everyone. I want you to be my best kept secret.”

“Sam?” Tiffany called from across the street. “Alex?”

“I’ll explain later,” she vowed, and he nodded his head and they both clambered up to their feet. Alex fixed his black hair and Sam straightened her top.

“Oh there they are, babe,” Tiffany pointed out from the shadow under the neon lights.

“Had a little fun on the grass?” Chuck joked as they headed closer to them.

“That’s for us to know and for you to find out,” Sam retorted, and Chuck erupted into laughter. She glanced over at Alex and the shadow cast over his face.

“Gonna be hell of a time getting you back home,” he said in a low voice. “I just think about how that man treats you, too.”

“That’s an understatement. I don’t even want to go back there.”

“You wanna hang out with us!” he exclaimed with a chuckle. “Next time we’re down this way, I’ll make sure you get a spot with us in the hotel room. I’d hate for you to go back to him.”

“Aw, Alex, that’s so sweet of you,” Sam said with a smile on her face.

“There’s Mr. Christian,” Chuck declared.

“Looks like he’s got some food, too,” Alex added. Indeed, Greg returned to the car with a brown cardboard box in one hand. The two of them awaited Chuck’s unlocking the doors as well as the folding back of the seats.

“Still not hungry?” Sam asked him as she took a whiff of whatever was inside there as Greg walked past.

“That might change,” Alex confessed to her before he climbed into the back seat behind Tiffany first.

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chronicle-21 · 4 years ago

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My first tumblr post.

I want to discuss something that has been on my mind recently. It has bothered me deep down for many years, and the feeling of not saying anything is painful. I hope that by writing this, others are able to relate.

My high school friends were never my true friends. There. I said it. Years of never saying anything that I wanted to say to them because I was young and too nice. I was afraid of having no friends. If I ever said anything, I made the mistake of pouring my heart out on social media. Dumb mistake, but I was desperate for someone to understand.

I think part of the issue was that our families were way different raising us. My family was lower middle class, and sometimes my father did not have a job. We did not always have much money, but we got by okay. We never took true vacations or went out of state for anything. My parents scrounged at every penny to save up to send us to Disney for marching band in high school. One of my favorite memories. As teenagers, my siblings and I learned the value of money. When I turned 16, my parents made me get a job. I have worked ever since then (I’m almost 30). It was from then on that I bought everything (for the most part) myself. I felt the pain of buying things with my measly minimum wage jobs, whereas my friends had their parents pay for everything. I won’t lie, growing up I’d be a bit jealous. I never spoke of it. It was deep down. I wished that my parents would pay for everything. As an adult, I know and understand my parents situation, and I believe that it has humbled me and taught me empathy for others. My friends didn’t understand this at all. I’m glad their families had the ability to afford their lives, but I also think they did them a disservice.

Once we all graduated high school, we all went our separate ways and went to different universities. People grow and change, and that’s okay! When we first met back up on school holiday breaks, I noticed that they became, I don’t know, egotistical? Narcissistic? Full of themselves? They were all in a similar major dealing with med school, while I was getting my degree in education. I sensed that they didn’t take my major seriously. I understand that they had similar stories and class information that they were excited to share with each other, but it was all they talked about. I could never get a word in edge-wise. I felt like a third wheel. It became so that EVERYTIME we hung out, they would only talk about themselves and their classes. I just couldn’t relate. None of my classes were science or math related (or at least not on that level). It got to the point where I met them a restaurant after not seeing them for six months or more and they never talked to me or asked how I was doing. They greeted and acted like they liked seeing me, but I don’t think they cared much beyond that. I just sat there and listened. I could have interjected, but that would be rude. I could have tried to put my two cents in, but I just could not relate. It was one of the first real breaking points in our friendship that I realized that they didn’t care about me. I was beneath them.

I was sent on this downward spiral of realizing over all these years that I was: 1) Not going to fit in with them, ever. 2) Always be viewed as beneath them. And 3) They didn’t care about me truly. Let me explain. Please. I beg. I’ve been thinking about this for a long time. Here’s some examples that stick out to me.

-Growing up, we would give gifts to each other and like I had mentioned, we didn’t have much money. My parents would sometimes give $20 to split between three friends for Christmas or birthdays. Sometimes it would be my paycheck money. I would often find gifts at Walmart (for example, cheap jewelry, shirts, cute accessories, etc) or places like Big Lots, or sometimes things at the mall if something was priced right. I can remember one of the friends saying, “Oh, did you get this at the dollar store?” I remember feeling embarrassed. Trying to find a gift on a budget, and I felt like a fool. It gets worse.

-I used to buy jewelry candles back when they were a craze. I loved the surprise of not knowing if you’ll get a real piece of jewelry or not. I remember I found several rings that were real stones and real silver. Not diamonds but I felt excited to have real silver and real gemstones. I wore them out to eat and one of my friends commented that they liked my rings. I explained jewelry candles. My other friend spoke up and said, “Yeah, they look like something you get from a ring candle.” I’m not here to impress you people. I was wearing it because it made me happy. Similarly, they would look at what brand purse or jacket I was wearing and comment on it. Sometimes almost implying I got it thrifting like I couldn’t just buy it full price. (I was an adult at this point and working full time).

-My high school graduation party, none of my friends came. They were all supposedly on vacation. Fine. I can’t do anything about that. Let it be known that I went to all of theirs and bought them all gifts. Better gifts than I had ever gotten them before (had a better job with more hours in school). Never got any gifts from them.

-Was a bridesmaid, in one friend’s wedding. I probably shouldn’t have agreed to do it, but I was. My others friends were bridesmaids, as well plus some of her friends from college. The bride was the one I was closest to. The whole thing with the other bridesmaids was beyond stressful. The bride had no maid of honor but one acted like they were. She was one of the friends from high school. She had us do all these super extra unnecessary things last minute. I found out later that these extra things were part of her gift! I spent hundreds on this wedding that wasn’t mine and she had the nerve to do everything free and play our hard work off as her gift because she was cheap. We had all made that gift ourselves and she had the nerve to make it her gift since it was her idea. She had her masters at that point and was working a good job. I worked at a grocery store going to school part time. I had went and took a painting class for one of my gifts that was customized. I paid $280 for a bridesmaid dress and had it fitted and seamed, plus shoes and nails. The dinner for the bachelorette party at a vineyard. -The bride may have been trying to have been nice to me when she offered to pay for my dress and then I could pay her back. I had been making payments on it since I also had my car bill, phone, and other things. It felt like a slap in the face. I guess the others girls paid theirs off in one payment and she found that out. I splurged and paid the rest of the money on it because I was embarrassed. It wasn’t like it was too outrageous to afford, but I just had other things to pay at the time. All her bridesmaids were in the medical field and came from good money. The one girl’s family owned a lake. That same girl also wouldn’t talk to me the entire time. The night of the bachelorette party, the one girl’s mom paid for our room and all the other girls got a bed. I had to sleep on the pullout couch. It was super lumpy and uncomfortable. Once again, embarrassing. I left the hotel in the middle of the night and drove home. I didn’t live far. I drove back in the morning and got brunch with them. Acted like nothing happened.

-Mid 20s: My friends were all back in town. We decided to meet back up. They decided to meet at bar in downtown. I go and they all have their significant others with them. I would have brought my boyfriend at the time if I had known. I felt like a third wheel. The bar was loud and cramped. Live music was playing. After we greeted each other, no one talked to me. I was sitting on the end and tried to conversate over the music at the bar. I had weird feelings and thought about leaving. The live music ended after a few hours. My one friend got up and went out to her car to get something. She came back in with two pretty boxes with my two other friends’ names on them. They opened them up in front of me. They had been invited to be her bridesmaids. I awkwardly sat there trying not to cry and feeling confused. These were my childhood-high school friends. I played it off like it didn’t bother me. I thought to myself, “Why invite me then?”. Stupid me stayed friends with them for several more years. I went to said friends bridal shower and wedding, like a fool. I got her nice gifts, like a fool.

-One friend has a weird thing about comparing herself to other people. I think it’s insecurity mixed with ego? I’ll explain. She always has to have the best things. A new car, a half million dollar house, private universities, the fact she’s been with her high school sweetheart who is a douchebag, honestly. They have an unhealthy relationship for various reasons. They are mostly together for (what the kids these days call) “clout”. They both have good jobs. She’s in the medical field and he was selling medical equipment last I knew. They like to bring up bad things each other did to each other in front of guests. For example, he tried to cheat on her in college, and she’ll bring it up to guilt him in front of people. “Remember when you tried to cheat on me...”. In public. They do it to each other. He lied about his political party because he was working for a politician and was trying to schmooze his way up. He later admitted he just lied to everyone and didn’t share the same the beliefs. Amongst many other things. They are married now. He wants kids, she doesn’t last I knew. They get on Facebook and use the hashtag #powercouple. Point is, she always wants to know what I’m up to. I’ve had to watch what I put on social media. I used to be more open and now I realize that people use that to judge or compare themselves to you. I don’t put where I work or where I live on there. I realized it’s nobody’s business. When I bought a house with my husband, she was wanted to know where exactly I lived so she could look up how much we bought our house for. I know this because I remembered her saying she loves to creep on people and find out things. We bought a home that we felt was affordable and had character. In high school, her and husband lived off of the high of being our grades most well-known couple. Everyone knew them together. They went to France together. They had their engagement photos done in London. She gets on Facebook for their anniversaries (how long they have been together and their wedding anniversary date) and says something like, “Can’t believe I’ve been stuck with you for 12 years. You gets on my nerves, but you’re a good cat dad to our cats. And you can cook. Haha. I love you. Or maybe I love the cats more”. Cringey.

An ending to this long story? Yes, for the most part. I want to mention that I made my own mistakes with them. I’m not perfect. I also know that I never said anything mean or degrading either. I realize that I never really spoke up to them. When I did it was because I was upset or frustrated with them. I was too worried about being alone. I was friends with these toxic people, and I eventually stopped seeing them. The last straw was seeing them on Instagram all hanging out without me. It’s fine. That’s their choice, and I wish they would have done it sooner instead of stringing me along. I’m not angry. It was my sign that we weren’t friends anymore. I deleted them off of social media. Nothing has been said to each ever since.

I want people to know that it’s okay to grow and change. It’s not okay to make others feel bad. It’s not healthy to compare and feel above others. Please don’t be afraid to speak up like I was. The fear of having no one scared me badly. Sometimes having just one good friend is better than having a group of friends. I ended up find my best friend after all of this! We’ve been best friends for six years now. It’s the most healthy and rewarding friendship I’ve ever had. We build each other up and can talk for hours! We don’t judge each at all. We love the simplicity in our lives.

I really just wanted to vent. I hope other people have similar stories to me. Feel free to share.

#narcissistic behavior #egotistic #better than you #bad friends #egotism #not friends

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arpan-chaudhary · 4 years ago

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GetResponse Review & Pricing(2021)

GetResponse

Review & Pricing (2021) – Complete Email Marketing Solution

EMAIL MARKETING, PRODUCT REVIEWS

What’s the first thing that comes to mind when you hear the word “email marketing software”?

Most people think of a tool that could help them manage email contacts, send email campaigns, and create autoresponders to keep their audience engaged.

But what if a tool goes beyond traditional email marketing and becomes your complete marketing automation suite?

What if you could track user activity, design event-based automation sequences, build landing pages, host webinars, and serve customized content that convinces your subscribers to take action – all with one tool?

Well, that’s GetResponse for you.

It’s not as often discussed as ActiveCampaign, Drip, or even MailChimp, but it is one of the most feature-rich and powerful email marketing and automation tools available at a very reasonable price.

You can try its free 30-day trial (no credit card required) to explore its features in detail and determine whether it’s the right choice for you.

But to make your decision easier, this GetResponse review will dissect the product in detail, discuss its most powerful features, share its pros and cons, and analyze its pricing structure so that you know exactly what it offers.

Let’s dive in.

What Is GetResponse?

GetResponse, in operation since 1998, is one of the oldest and most well-known email marketing companies in the world.

But old doesn’t mean outdated.

GetResponse has continued to evolve over the years and offers a visually appealing and user-friendly interface along with advanced email marketing and automation features that are at par with any of its competitors.

It’s a versatile tool that, in effect, is a combination of several different tools under one name. For example, you can host and run webinars in it, create landing pages, design opt-in forms, and set up complete off-site automation sequences.

For many of those features, you’d need separate tools.

In GetResponse, however, you get all of them together.

It was also one of the first email marketing tools to introduce advanced A/B testing features that help you determine which email version is likely to perform better with your audience.

This is why it’s trusted by more than 35000 customers around the world including brands like IKEA and Hilton, and marketers like Neil Patel, Leslie Samuels, and Marcus Taylor.

Let’s dissect the tool further to see what it offers.

The Key Features and Benefits of GetResponse

The real strength of any email marketing software is determined by how much control it gives you in terms of audience personalization, targeting, and, email deliverability.

GetResponse excels in all those areas (plus many other great features)

Manage Your Contacts With Tags and Custom Fields

GetResponse lets you manage your contacts using tags and custom fields.

Custom fields let you collect additional information about your subscribers and use it in creating more personalized campaigns. For example, in addition to the standard “First Name” and “Email Fields”, you can add fields like Gender, City, Currency, Favorite Movie or whatever information you want.

This information goes right into your contact database and you can use it when creating an email campaign. For example, you can use the “City” or “Gender” fields to make your emails sound more relevant to your subscribers.

Tags, on the other hand, are keywords you assign to your contacts to identify them for certain behaviors or actions. For example, you can assign a “Likes Me” tag to any subscriber who regularly opens your emails and clicks on your links.

How does this help?

Instead of launching email campaigns targeting complete subscriber lists, you can create campaigns that are targeted towards the subscribers with certain behaviors (identified by tags).

You can also automatically assign tags to your existing contacts or new leads and add them automatically to different automation sequences.

It all sounds very complex but it really isn’t once you start using it.

Use Advanced Segmentation for Better Targeting

Segmented marketing campaigns are proven to deliver more targeted messaging and better results.

According to WordStream, segmented email marketing campaigns drive a 101% higher click- rate as compared to non-segmented campaigns.

Thankfully, GetResponse gives you detailed segmentation features using which you can create campaigns tailored to the specific needs of your audience.

You can create segments based on email open rate, last opened date, last clicked, location, completion of an email sequence, pages visited on your site, tags assigned, etc.

To create a segment, simply run an advanced search in your contact list and save it as a segment.

For example, you can create a segment of subscribers who signed up to your list but never opened your Welcome Email. Or the ones that opened your Welcome Email but didn’t click on the link inside.

You can also use a combination of different conditions to come up with more refined audience segments that can be targeted for different campaigns.

Create Complex Automation Sequences With Ease

Automation is among the key features of any email marketing tool these days. Companies like Drip, ActiveCampaign, Infusionsoft, etc. have grown tremendously over the years on the back of their advanced automation features.

GetResponse isn’t far behind either.

It offers you all the tools you need to send fixed scheduled or activity-based autoresponders to your audience which are triggered by different actions/inaction.

For example, you can set up a simple sequence of emails that is sent to your subscribers automatically when they sign up to your list, download a content upgrade, or do not open a certain email.

You can use this feature to create complete email courses that are automatically delivered to your subscribers or create autoresponder series to promote different affiliate products.

Use Advanced User Tracking To Maximize Engagement and Revenue

This is where GetResponse truly shines.

Apart from traditional email marketing, it gives you powerful user tracking capabilities that allow you to target your subscribers based on their activities on your website.

To start tracking, all you need to do is to copy/paste a simple script to your site’s HTML code that works in the same way as Facebook Pixel. It’ll track your website visitors and allow you to engage them based on their behavior.

For example, if a subscriber visits your product page but goes away without purchasing the product, you can immediately send a follow-up email asking them to buy the product.

Or you could trigger a complete automation sequence if a subscriber reads a certain blog post on your site or downloads a lead magnet.

You can also assign tags and segments based on the subscriber’s activity on your website.

This feature gives you much deeper access to your subscribers and allows you to engage with them at exactly the right time.

Create Complete Marketing and Sales Funnels With AutoFunnels

AutoFunnels is a recent but powerful new feature in Getresponse that has turned it into a marketing automation powerhouse.

With AutoFunnels you can create complete sales funnels, lead generation funnels, and webinar funnels in just a few simple steps.

What is a funnel?

In sales & marketing terminology, a funnel is a sequence of different steps using which strangers are converted into subscribers, subscribers are turned into leads, and leads are turned into customers and brand advocates.

Source: ZeroGravityMarketing

With AutoFunnels you can create optimized sales funnels that carefully nurture your leads at every step by sending them targeted messaging and ultimately converting them into customers.

These are fully automated sequences that are based on advanced If-Then-Else conditions and respond to the different actions of your audience.

You can build these automation sequences using the simple drag & drop sequence builder that makes it really easy to visualize complex funnel sequences.

In the right panel on the image above, you can see the different elements that trigger various funnel stages, for example, “Subscribed via URL”, “Link Clicked” etc.

You can drag & drop these triggers and add them to your sequences. Using Yes/No conditions you can determine different steps that the funnel campaign would follow.

It really simplifies the whole process of condition-based automation.

AutoFunnels comes with a complete range of design templates and predesigned scenarios.

Each scenario comes with optimized copy scripts written by expert copywriters and tested for maximum audience engagement.

You only need to activate the scenarios depending on your business needs, and tailor them to your campaign.

Design High Converting Landing Pages Within Minutes

Apart from email marketing, you can use GetResponse as a really useful landing page designer as well.

Landing pages come really useful when you’re launching new products, trying to build your email list, promoting special offers, or holding an event like a webinar or a live video session.

It offers a complete landing page design library that has dozens of beautifully designed and fully responsive templates you can use to create, host, and launch high converting landing pages.

The thing I love about this is the drag & drop landing page designer you can use to either edit the predesigned templates or create one completely from scratch.

You can host your landing pages for free on GetResponse with a subdomain or configure them on your own website URL.

The tool also comes with extensive split testing capabilities that help you improve your designs and use the most optimized version of your landing page for your campaigns.

Additionally, you can integrate the landing pages with PayPal, Stripe and other major payment gateways to collect customer payments seamlessly.

Create, Host, and Manage Large Scale Webinars

Webinars are rated among the most effective ways to generate leads and acquire customers. B2B companies, in particular, use webinars frequently for different marketing campaigns.

With GetRepsonse, you get a complete webinar management system that allows you to create host, track, and manage high-performance webinars with ease.

With Getresponse, you can broadcast your webinars live on YouTube or Facebook without any additional plugins.

It also gives you the ability to share files with your audience, send/receive chat messages, use different calls to action during the broadcast, use interactive whiteboards, run split-screen webinars, or partially share your screen with the attendees.

Once the webinar is over, you can allow replays, direct downloads, or sell them as paid products on a landing page.

All of this comes with detailed analytics and audience insights that you can use afterward to further improve your marketing strategy.

Grow Your Email List With Smart Opt-In Forms

You can’t use email marketing unless you have subscribers.

The more engaged and relevant your subscribers are, the more effective your email marketing campaigns will be.

With GetResponse, you have the ability to create attractive opt-in forms on various locations of your website to turn visitors into subscribers.

Its form builder has several predesigned form templates that you can customize and use on your website.

The pop-ups can be activated on fixed time intervals or when a visitor is about to close the browser tab.

Forms can be connected with your email lists from where you can apply different automation sequences, add them to a funnel or send them to an autoresponder series.

Manage The Complete Customer Lifecycle With GetResponse CRM

For enterprise users, GetResponse also offers a complete CRM that seamlessly integrates with your email marketing system and makes it much easier to manage customer communication.

The system lets you manage all your leads in one place, gives you the complete communication timeline, simplifies customer lifecycle management, and gives you a holistic view of your client base.

These were just some of the key features that GetReponse offers in its different pricing plans.

But what exactly are those plans?

Let’s explore the pricing structure in the next section.

GetResponse Pricing & Free Trial – How Much Does It Cost?

With the number of features GetResponse offers, it’s pricing structure seems quite reasonable. The lowest plan starts from $15/month for 1000 subscribers. The rate goes up as your subscriber base increases which means you can increase spending as your business grows.

And here’s the best part.

There are no email sending limits in any of the pricing plans which is great for small businesses in particular.

Here’s a quick look at the pricing structure.

You can save 18% on the total price if you follow an annual billing cycle and 30% if you pay for 2 years upfront.

But things get even better.

To get a taste of what each plan offers, you can sign up for a Free 30-Day Trial without any credit card or payment information. Play with the features, explore the tool, and see if it’s the right choice for you.

In all the plans, you get access to basic automation, contact tagging, automated followups, 200+ email templates, 150+ landing page designs, and 5000 stock photos.

However, advanced features like AutoFunnels, Webinar Funnels, Website Tracking, CRM, etc. are available only to the higher paid plans.

Considering that any beginner level marketer would rarely need advanced automation and CRM this isn’t a major issue.

Overall, you could call the pricing structure of GetResponse, affordable and scalable.

GetResponse Advantages – The Things I Love About It

There’s a lot to like about GetResponse in terms of features, support, and accessibility.

Here are some of our favorite things about it.

A Wide Range of Third-Party App Integrations

GetResponse gives you more than 150 third party integrations with different payment gateways, eCommerce plugins, content management systems, inventory management apps, and many other useful services.

All the apps are divided into different categories can be easily linked/unlinked from your account.

The payment and CMS integrations, like PayPal, Stripe, and Shopify, etc. are useful in particular since almost every marketer needs them.

Awesome Customer Support and Knowledgebase

GetResponse has one of the best customer support functions in the email marketing industry. For the Basic, Plus, and Professional pricing plans, you get 24/7 chat and email support. For Enterprise customers, there’s a dedicated relationship manager as well.

But you’d rarely need support because GetResponse has a detailed customer training program and knowledgebase that covers almost everything you need to know.

You can also enroll for free in a detailed video course on how to use GetResponse to grow your email list and make the best use of it.

On top of that, GetResponse has an awesome blog that regularly publishes detailed articles and tutorials about content marketing, email marketing, conversion optimization, customer success, and many other related topics.

So there’s certainly no shortage of support for you as a GetResponse customer

Great A/B Testing Features

GetResponse was one of the pioneers of split testing features in the email marketing industry. And it’s clearly still one of the market leaders in it.

Whether it’s a one-time campaign or different automation sequences, you can run A/B tests to find out the best converting options.

You can test everything from your subject lines, headlines, and body text to the design template, sending times, and custom fields.

Split testing features also available for opt-in boxes, forms, and landing pages.

Ideal for Affiliate Marketers

Unlike MailChimp and some of the other leading email marketing tools, GetResponse is a lot friendlier towards affiliate marketers.

Several leading email marketing tools strictly prohibit affiliate product promotions and suspend user accounts in case of any violation.

GetResponse is different.

You can easily promote products from ClickBank, JVZoo, CJ, and other leading affiliate platforms to your email list using GetResponse and build a complete affiliate marketing business on it.

You can also configure autoresponder sequences for different affiliate products, run contests, promotions, etc.

This is why it’s an ideal platform for anyone involved in the affiliate marketing business.

A Flexible and Rewarding Affiliate Program

GetResponse itself has a pretty attractive and rewarding affiliate program for anyone who wants to promote it as an affiliate.

It offers two kinds of commission structures – One Time Commission and Recurring Commissions

If you opt for the one-time commission program, you’ll get a flat $100 commission every time your referral becomes a customer.

But if you choose the recurring commission program, you’ll keep receiving 33%, of the pricing plan your referral chooses, every month as long as they’re using GetResponse.

Signing up as an affiliate is also simple and takes just a few steps.

As an affiliate, you’ll also get access to detailed marketing material that you can use to create high converting affiliate campaigns.

GetResponse Disadvantages – The Things They Need To Improve

GetResponse is a great tool but it has some flaws and potential improvement areas.

No Community Groups

It was somewhat surprising to find that GetResponse doesn’t have any active official community groups on Facebook or any other platform where their customers can interact, share ideas, and resolve complaints.

Considering the quality of their customer support (which is great) this is a slight let down since community groups are a really useful way to exchange ideas and understand new ways to use a product.

Design and Functionality Limitations in Forms

Some of the opt-in form template designs look a bit dated. In fact, since GetResponse has been around for so long, many of their form designs are so common you can easily tell if a site is using GetResponse.

Plus, they currently do not offer Welcome Mats and Sliding Opt-In boxes which is a big let down.

No Refunds

GetResponse comes with a 30-Day Free Trial for all its plans.

But once you sign up and pay, there’s no refund in case you quit the service a few days after signing up.

Who Is GetResponse For?

GetResponse is a complete marketing automation suite that is ideal for a number of objectives. Typically it is best for.

Affiliate marketers

Bloggers

Small business websites

eCommerce companies

Online course creators

Marketers who frequently use landing pages and webinars

Non-profit organizations

Complete beginners in online marketing

Who Is GetResponse Not For?

There are a few things GetResponse is not meant for. You should stay away if you’re into any of the following

Mass emailing campaigns to unverified contact lists

Buying email lists and sending spam regularly

Affiliates promoting adult or gambling products

Anyone looking for advanced funnel creation options (ClickFunnels is a better option. Read our complete review here)

GetResponse – Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs)

Below are the most common questions people have about GetResponse.

– What is email marketing?

Email marketing is one of the most effective online marketing techniques in which targeted marketing messages are sent via email to well-defined audience segments.

– What is marketing automation?

In online marketing terminology, marketing automation is the process of attracting targeted leads to an email funnel, sending them conditional messages based on their actions and preferences, retargeting them on third-party platforms, and qualifying the leads based on their conversion probability.

– What is Get Response?

GetResponse is a leading email marketing automation software that gives you all the tools and features to build, grow, and engage a highly targeted email subscriber base and turn it into lifelong customers.

– Is

GetResponse

free?

GetResponse offers a 30-Day free trial during which you can use and explore the tool.

– How much does

GetResponse

cost?

GetResponse offers different pricing slabs based on the number of subscribers and product features. You can check out the detailed pricing structure here.

– What are the top

GetResponse

alternatives?

The most popular alternatives to GetResponse are Aweber, ActiveCampaign, and Mailchimp.

– Does

GetResponse

integrate with ClickFunnels?

Yes, GetResponse can be integrated with ClickFunnels.

– Does

GetResponse

have an affiliate program?

Yes, GetResponse offers an attractive affiliate program in which you can either opt for $100 per sale (one-time) or 33% recurring commission for every sale.

– Is

GetResponse

better than MailChimp?

Both GetResponse and Mailchimp are popular tools with their own sets of pros and cons. However, most marketers seem to believe GetResponse has more powerful and diverse email marketing features.

– Is

GetResponse

better than Aweber?

Aweber is a leading email marketing tool that has been around for years. However, GetResponse appears to be the more user-friendly tool with a modern look and better automation features.

The Verdict – GetResponse Is an Email Marketing Powerhouse

Despite being one of the oldest tools in the market, GetResponse is still a strong competitor in the email marketing industry.

It offers all the mainstream email marketing options plus several advanced marketing automation features as well.

Its webinar and landing page builders, in particular, make it an enticing option for internet marketers. And the fact that it encourages affiliate product promotions is another attraction for most online businesses.

Overall, you can call it a complete package for any business that’s looking to grow its subscriber base.

Plus, its affordable pricing and 30-Day Free trial make it a product worth trying. Because in case you don’t like it (which is unlikely) you can simply close your account without paying anything.

So go ahead and sign up for your free GetResponse trial now.

If you have any other questions, feel free to ask in the comments section

#digital marketing #email marketing #digital marketing tool #get response #digital marketing strategy #email marketing tools #email management #online make money #online marketing

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evoqliving19 · 4 years ago

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Free Move Apartment Locating Companies - Know the Truth!

55+ apartments johns creek

Many of us are attracted to the term "free", as well as the proven fact that we have been getting something absolutely free. There are many legitimate free offerings available to consumers inside a wide selection of settings. For example, Apartment Locators truly offer a valuable want to all renters that are looking for a flat, and also the services are free on the renter, saving them a lot of time driving around visiting a large number of properties, and intensely probably passing up on the best deals and also the best apartments.

55+ living johns creek

However, there's also many companies who use the word "free" to entice customers, and then they might actually provide you with the service or product that they can initially promised. They get past this deception by writing countless loopholes in to the fine print of these advertisement that they can always excuse the absence of delivery. So caution is obviously as a way when you find yourself trusting service repair shop who plans to give you something important for free.

Moving is a very stressful here we are at many. Often you can find deadlines to get from your current apartment by a certain time. You can find what to sort and boxes to pack it, also to pack carefully in order to avoid anything from being broken. Then there is the careful loading and also the careful unloading and also the unpacking and placing and sorting. You need to allow time and energy to clean the previous apartment before you submit the keys, and you've got to make sure you happen to be stopping by the new apartment during business hours to help you receive the keys to your brand-new home. You've utilities to disconnect and new utilities for connecting. A whole lot is taking place at once, high always is the concern that you might have forgotten something important. You already arranged your schedule to offer the day free for moving. You have all your affairs so as, so you are just looking forward to the movers to come. The LAST thing that you'll require is really a glitch over some small detail in terms and conditions that causes your moving company never to arrive and deliver that "free" move which you were depending on and getting yourself ready.

That is just what became of a buddy of mine very recently. She used some of those apartment locating companies from the Dallas, TX area that supposedly offered a "free" move. I wont mention names here, but it's a common company. Anyway, she gets home from work and it has all of her items packed capable to go. It is a Friday evening, and he or she has had the move scheduled using the movers for weeks. She has to become Away from her apartment by midnight THAT night. They may be suppose in the future at 7:00 pm, so there is a little a period crunch but that's the sole time the movers had available. They finally arrive, take a look at her small 1 bedroom apartment and tell her "The free move only covers 2 hours price of free moving. It appears as though you've more items than we are able to move around in 2 hours" (fine print), and so they leave!!!! My buddy is panicking. Jane is one particular lady who lives through herself and it has to become from her apartment in just a few hours. If she resides in a small 1 bedroom and had too many items so they can move, it can make me wonder just who they COULD move?? Anyway, my good friend calls me at 8:00 desperate and crying. I rally up our other friends and that we manage to find a U Haul place that's still open and rent a truck. All of us go over and move her that very same evening. She got out of her apartment in time, and she got a free move alright, nevertheless it wasn't from the company who promised her the move. She did everything she was suppose to do, wrote their name for the Leasing Application because Locating Company who referred her on the new apartments, plus they GOT Taken care of THE REFERRAL, yet they didn't provide you with the move that they can promised.

Apparently a number of these "free move" companies have small print that limits just how long they are going to offer you to the move. And just what happens in the event the move goes wrong with go over that point. Can they just leave? Evidently. Or, when they look over your items and feel the job will take beyond the allowed time, they could not START the move. One more thing to watch out for within the small print....not merely may there be limits to the time they will allow, but they often limit like items and the amount of items they'll move. For instance, when you have a 1 bedroom, they often have a very specific report on the only real items they are going to move. For example: 1 couch, 1 table, one dinning table, 4 dining chairs, a bed, a dresser, a nightstand, 2 lamps, a few boxes (they frequently will still only accept move a small amount of boxes) and a lot of times that is certainly it!! In case you have a couple bedroom, they may increase the list with the help of another bed and dresser. But what if however, you have an item that's not on the list.....like a desk, or possibly a curio cabinet, or even a piano, or perhaps an aquarium, or a dresser or an extra table or a loveseat, or a recliner, or even a number of boxes compared to they allow? Don't be surprised whenever they leave all items behind that aren't on the restrictive list, and you really are just stuck determining how to deal with them yourself. If it is enough items, or things that are just right, you might end up needing to rent a truck or UHaul anyway, or call friends who are able to come help you.

Another friend recently told me that something similar became of him that happened to my first friend. He was using one of people apartment locating firms that provide a "free" move. He said they were calling him daily when he was ready for the apartment, trying difficult to convince him to maneuver into one of the few places that they recommended. Each day they called to find out if he picked a place yet if he placed their name about the Leasing Using any apartments yet. Finally he did choose a place, anf the husband did put there name there because Locator who referred him. And then, a fascinating thing happened. He could never get ahold of anyone in the apartment locating company again! Once they found he picked a spot and wrote them down (their check was guaranteed), they never called him after that. They would not return his calls anf the husband couldn't discover a real live human from the company to talk with as a way to schedule his free move. He finished up the need to hire another mover in the long run. The "free" move locating company got paid their cash and they never delivered the disposable move.

How would be the "free move" locating companies not the same as all the other Apartment Locating Companies? Well, there are several definite differences that you should know about. First of all, let's establish the fact that most Apartment Locating companies do not need to give you a "free move" to entice customers. Many experts have shown their superb customer satisfaction along with the expertise they offer will save you the average renter $500-$700.....which is considerably more valuable as opposed to price of a couple hour move. Plus, they truly be useful for finding the top and quite a few awesome apartment home. Another clear difference is that this: Not all of the apartment communities out there work with the "free move" locating companies. In fact, some of them won't. This is because of a combination of reasons.

For one, some "free move" companies do not have the most effective reputation. Secondly, many of the apartments tend not to believe that they actually earned the commission that they are wanting the apartments to spend them. Among those free move companies just have an online site where you sign on and check on your own. They only will show you information on the small selection of of properties which will actually work using them and pay them back. Once you look for a place, you go online again on the website and inform them which you picked and therefore the computer is suppose to schedule the move. Not every nokia's are similar, however this is the process for some. A true human isn't even actively involved in assisting you using your search in many cases. Many of the apartments believe just putting a website online alone does not merit earning a commission. Now you may have an online prescence. The truth is, the apartments already have their own website. While there is no problem using a Locating Company creating a website (in fact, every one of them do), the challenge arises if the locator ONLY communicates through the website and therefore are predominantly a dot.com business.

The apartment complexes don't wish to pay a dot.com for establishing a website and then only delivering what you promises the main time. They would like to pay Apartment Locators that have a brick and mortar office, who've actual live Agents who work there and who deal one-on-one together with the potential renters, assisting them to find their new rental home with customized, individual lists of apartment information. Often times these Locators even escort their customers to the properties. In the event the client carries a unique situation, the Locator can identify them which properties are in all likelihood to be effective their their own circumstances. They know who may have the very best specials on the market, or who may have the particular amenities how the renter is seeking. The renter can actually call their Locator and meet with them and get questions and create a working relationship.

What is the disadvantage for you personally, the objective renter, when they are not all of the apartments works using the "move free" locating companies? The situation arises in that the "move free" information mill only planning to recommend for you the particular apartments that occur to utilize them. Which means that you may not find out about the property that's actually the the one which matches precisely what you would like and possesses the top special. They are going to only display information for the properties who covers the cost them. Once you make use of a traditional Apartment Locator who works with All of the properties within the City, you can depend on that you will be receiving the whole picture and can honestly be known about every one of the properties that have the most effective specials. This is the distinct advantage that real local Apartment Locators have on the so-called "free move" locators. Most traditional Apartment Locators work with All the reputable apartment and townhome communities. No matter to them what one you pick in the end as long as you are satisfied, because These pays the Locator and assist the Agent. They have no need to try to steer that you one particular property over another. Their job is usually to recommend who has the best selection and appears to be the best match for you.

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websitedevelpmnt · 4 years ago

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How to Choose a Web Development Company

The challenge of selecting the proper organization to broaden your internet site is as essential as any you’ll make towards the destiny of your enterprise, proper up there with logo, management crew, and style of techno to apply in your preserve music. No organization is a success these days with a lackluster internet site, and locating the proper improvement crew to fulfill then exceed all of your desires has a superb effect for your typical backside line.

There are some of key elements to don't forget while attempting to find the proper net developer, a lot of which regularly pass forgotten via way of means of even the maximum knowledgeable enterprise owner. From technical talent and coding prowess to beyond enjoy and verified fulfillment, no issue must be taken too lightly. Here are 10 regions to preserve in thoughts at some point of your seek to make sure you come to be with the proper crew and the brightest destiny in your enterprise.

Coding geniuses

Coding is the middle talent and language on the coronary heart of the entirety to do with web sites. Your developer must have a hyper-fluent information of coding and be capable of construct your webweb page from the floor up efficaciously and accurately. Your clients wouldn’t accept some thing much less than an enterprise expert. Neither must you. Any dream you've got got in your webweb page may be performed via way of means of the proper developer with an automated hold close of all code. Seriously, they must be waking up at night time screaming semantics into the ether. It shouldn’t be their 2d language, it must be language 1B.

Proven music record

There’s a cause Clooney in no way has to audition. Past fulfillment is a positive indicator of whether or not or now no longer a developer could be capable of nicely meet all of the needs of your webweb page. Take a examine their improvement portfolio or request to peer samples in their beyond paintings. An organization happy with its expertise could be satisfied to oblige. If they’ve correctly crafted useful and modern web sites withinside the beyond, there’s an amazing risk they’ll do an amazing task on yours, too. This additionally indicates they have got enjoy participating with customers and speaking at some point of the procedure to attain the high-satisfactory feasible stop result.

Responsive support

The proper developer will function a collaborative accomplice thru each step of the webweb page-constructing procedure. It’s essential they pay attention and apprehend the dreams of your enterprise and the way the ones can high-satisfactory be met thru a useful and exquisite internet site. There will probable be troubles that stand up each at some point of and after the introduction of your webweb page, so it’s additionally essential they’re capable of roll with the ones punches and deal with any issues in a pleasant and cooperative manner. Think of them because the Robin in your Batman, minus the spandex.

Integration experts

The capacity to combine all of your 0.33 celebration structures into your new web page isn't only a perk – it’s a important element to search for in a developer. Whether it’s Salesforce, MailChimp, or some thing greater enterprise-specific, the proper crew could be capable of make sure seamless integration throughout all platforms. Your new webweb page must be constructed round your current structures, now no longer the alternative manner round. We’d in no way tear down the Eiffel Tower simply to plant a few grass in its shadow. In a few instances your 0.33 celebration structures may also want an improve to align with enterprise standards, and the proper developer could be capable of understand that.

An astonishing improvement crew could have sure privileges others don’t, normally received thru long-status fulfillment within side the enterprise and a pleasant frame of paintings (and now and again magic). For example, if you’re constructing an ecommerce internet site, you’re going to choose the organization that boasts more than one Certified Magento Developers over the only that has a part-time developer who dabbles in ecommerce. Partnerships or certifications from organizations like Google, Adobe, Rackspace, and Amazon Web Services provide organizations a leg up at the opposition and a greater superior variety of capabilities. Think Swiss Army Knife vs. butter knife. These partnerships are key to don't forget while seeking out a developer, because it additionally presentations a relevance withinside the enterprise and precedence from a number of the largest names at the net.

Ability to paintings with designers

We understand improvement is essential, and so is layout. The must intertwine and paintings along each other to create the high-satisfactory feasible enjoy each time every person visits your webweb page. Some organizations provide each improvement and layout services, which shows fluid verbal exchange and collaboration as they paintings with you to construct your internet site. This guarantees the entirety appears and features the manner you need and that there aren't anyt any delays in both introduction and ongoing maintenance. They must be capable of bake the cake, enhance it, and restore it while it flies off the flatbed.

Variety of revel in

It allows to understand your developer has revel in constructing webweb sites for a extensive kind of industries and audiences. Can they deal with the whole thing from marshmallows to machetes? If so, there’s a very good risk your web website development online could be no problem. Agencies with revel in in each B2B and B2C web sites are certain to have a corporation grip on tailoring the code and layout in your needs. It additionally suggests revel in excelling in loads of circumstances, irrespective of the customer or intention of the internet site. You is probably tempted to select the developer who simplest builds web sites for dentists, however that’s in the end going to bring about you getting a one-size-fits-all internet site that doesn’t come up with the capability you truly need.

They care as an awful lot approximately the backend as they do the frontend

A a success internet site doesn’t simply appearance first rate, it additionally capabilities seamlessly to your clients and to your team. It ought to be simply as clean to your clients to locate what they want or make a buy as it's miles that allows you to replace content material or layout. A exact developer will make the backend so user-pleasant that you’ll surprise what you used to do at paintings all day.

Keeping up with the enterprise

The internet site enterprise adjustments rapidly, and the developer you select ought to be capable of develop proper along that trend. This will hold your enterprise working alongside the slicing fringe of your respective enterprise and take away any threat of turning into obsolete (gasp). Look for a person continually making use of progressive and new thoughts into their paintings and seeking to push the envelope of net improvement. These corporations will regularly have a number of the formerly noted enterprise privileges and an stock of a success and sundry clients. An bold spirit is an indication of a wholesome agency, and they’ll make a dependancy of making use of that equal mentality in your internet site.

They’re now no longer dust reasonably-priced

Effective net improvement isn't reasonably-priced. It charges cash to attain a internet site that appears exact, operates well, and converts traffic into earnings to your brand. You can’t take shortcuts on your improvement or you’ll become regretting it down the road. What if Airbnb or Netflix had skimped on their net budget? We’d all be dozing in hammocks and looking Baby Geniuses 2 on VHS. You get what you pay for on this respect, and also you need a first rate internet site. Hiring a reasonably-priced net developer constantly ends with hiring a totally high-priced net developer to position out all of the raging fires.

#website development

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juniper-tree · 5 years ago

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writing life, 2: ghosts

(long post warning)

In a previous post wherein I talked about my NaNo failure and my writing process, I mentioned there were other things I hoped to do with my writing this year (and beyond). I’m an ambitious, driven person and have always had Big Plans.

All those plans have been hugely influenced by a project I took on earlier this year, and what I learned from it.

I became a romance ghostwriter. And then I quit.

Way back in the winter, I alluded to a writing project I was in the middle of, with an established author. Well, this was it. I was her ghostwriter.

I’m abiding by the NDA we agreed upon, though even if we had not, naming names in this context is tacky. So no titles, no links—just my experience and what I went through.

I submitted writing samples through a site, then had a few back and forth emails with the author to see if I would be a good fit. I was, and she hired me to write a novella for her second author brand.

I didn’t know either of her pen names, or her real name. It made sense to me she wouldn’t want to divulge her professional name and possibly be outed for hiring a ghostwriter until she knew it would work out.

Her main brand/name, she said, had a very specific theme. The second brand would be more contemporary, allow her to experiment with different styles and tropes. That made sense to me, too. I imagined her established brand as a Tessa Dare-style historical with all the expectations that would carry. Perhaps she wanted to publish contemporary stories with a little more spice, under a new name?

My assumptions were very wrong. But I’ll get to that.

Problem was, the demand for her content was so high that she could not fulfill it all. She needed a ghost to give her more to publish. I would come up with the idea, she would ok it, I would write it, she would tweak it, I would be paid, her readers would be happy. Decent arrangement.

And it really was. I don’t have a moral problem with ghostwriting, clearly. Some people do, and that’s fair. It is a lie, in a way. It upends the expected contract between reader and author of authenticity (though that’s questionable much of the time, regardless).

There is a lot of abuse in it—plagiarism, for one; absolutely terrible pay for the work, for another.

Of course, it doesn’t have to be like that. This wasn’t. I went in with my eyes open about the system. I asked for what I felt was a fair price for my level of skill and what my time was worth. It was far above the dismal average that ghostwriters typically get.

I got it, without any experience or history, on the strength of my writing. She also made it very clear she did not want to perpetuate the content factory mentality of so many self-published, ghostwritten romances. This had to be good, original work, and I would be compensated fairly.

She was generous with money and with time, and very helpful in shaping my work into what she needed for her brand. No complaints about her as a person or from a work perspective.

When the work was finished, she was happy, and so was I, despite it being pretty far outside my area of interest. It was a decent story, it had feels, it had sexy times, it had a nice HEA.

I made a fairly strong attempt to subvert some of the more odious aspects of many mainstream, contemporary, heterosexual romances—iffy consent, power imbalances, misogyny, conservative ideas about money.

That was probably my first mistake.

A lot of my subversions were changed or edited out.

To give a minor example, I specifically noted many times that the male hero was pale. This was for situational character reasons—as well as the fact that I grow weary of tan, toned beefcakes as default in romance.

The author changed every “pale” to “tan.” Heaven forbid the sexy man not have a tan. (I think she put more muscles on him, too, but I don’t specifically recall.)

This sounds petty. Perhaps it is. But it’s also emblematic of other, larger changes that were made to fit the romance mold, as opposed to allowing anything slightly left of center.

There are many reasons romance is so popular, and one is, obviously, the comfort: of falling into repeated patterns and conventions, of reading your favorite tropes endlessly, of not having to think too hard about how things fit together. I appreciate all of that.

We find it in fanfiction, too—we revel in it.

But there’s a reason why overturning even minor subversions bothers me. I’ll get to that, too.

Like I said, the author was happy. She wanted to continue working with me on a long-term basis, give me a co-writing credit for future works, help grow my own audience in the genre, etc. All very generous and great.

Problem was, when I saw the published work, I finally found out her pen names, so I could see her other books.

Not only were they nothing like what I had written (some of the reviews said it was “so different” for this author, which was hilarious), they made me very uncomfortable.

Again, under an NDA, so I can’t list specific details. There were just endless dominant, alpha-male, ultra-rich men who have disturbingly obsessive and coercive relationships with vulnerable young women. Money is involved in the relationship in some way. The heroines are nobody, the heroes are Somebody. Aren’t these women lucky to snag these guys?

The fact that I can say all that and have it be completely non-specific to any particular romance author is extremely telling of the problems of the genre. I could literally be talking about EL James (I’m not - her bad writing appears to be her own).

I read/skimmed a couple of them, and I could see an attempt was made to “sweeten” the heroes so they were vulnerable (or pitiable, really). But the tropes themselves are toxic.

The author herself was great? We even had an early discussion on what were complete no-gos for romance, and judging by that I thought we were on the same page regarding what’s creepy and what’s romantic. Apparently not.

Who wants to read this? Who wants to write it? Lots of people, that’s who.

This is a chicken and egg thing, though, isn’t it? Someone wrote it first, way back when.

Romance fans (and I count myself among them!) like to say that a lot of the worst, most “rapey” novels are way out of fashion, that the terrible misogyny is gone, that there’s a new kind of romance that people want to read today.

And that is definitely true for a certain percentage of traditionally published romance novels. There are lots of good ones, unproblematic ones, progressive ones.

Please go read those—they are so fun and enjoyable and will make you feel good.

But what of the rest? The romance readers read and buy these toxic tropes. The authors keep putting them out, because that’s what readers want. The readers keeping buying it. The cycle continues.

(I want to go into this further with fanfiction, but that’s for another post.)

The fact that even the most minor of my attempts at subversion were squashed was really disheartening. It wasn’t that my writing was changed—I couldn’t care less about that. It was that the slightest diversion from the carved-in-stone Alpha Male Romance Idea was clearly unacceptable. Not to mention the larger diversions—I did make those, too.

I made my hero perfectly successful at what he did for a living, though not excessively so—but I also made my heroine perfectly successful and doing just fine, thanks. In the final work? He’s secretly a billionaire. He can just take care of her without all that pesky work. That depressed me.

I was cringing at the idea that I’d have to keep stuffing in worse and worse tropes, toxic relationships, misogynistic overtones, conservative philosophies, and scary power imbalances just to make some money.

This isn’t an audience I want.

The thought of reinforcing these ideas in any way threw me into a major crisis of conscience. I just couldn’t do it.

Like I said, it was a great and generous deal—for someone else. For someone who likes this kind of thing, or is a bit more mercenary than I am. I’m not willing to go there.

So that’s basically the end of ghostwriting for me. I have lots of my own ideas that are non-toxic, fun, and maybe people will even want to read them. But if they would rather read the stuff I hate, that’s their business. I won’t be a part of it.

Personally, I like lots of things in romance and fanfiction that are fantasies, that are not the ways in which I want to live my life—bad heroes and troubled women, relationships that make you go “hmmm,” problematic-ness and intense, dark passions, and all that stuff that’s over the top. I get it!

It’s just that I want subtlety and shades (not of Grey) and all the real dirt and grime and the beauty and joy that make your heart race and your mind wander. Not just the stamped, approved, here’s-what-you-get dosage of unexamined clichés. (Examined clichés are often very good.)

I learned so much from this process. Not only what my own limits are, but what I really want to do, by seeing up close what I do not. So I am grateful for the whole episode, but happy to be past it.

On to greener pastures, and work which makes me proud.

#personal #ok to reblog :)#if you read all this you are a champ #on writing

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passionate-baker · 6 years ago

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Italian Adventures Part I: Florence

Friends, welcome to Part I of our Italian Adventures: Florence!

I’m so excited to share this travel guide with you! It has been such a long time in the making and I’m dying to tell you about all of our favourite places in the Tuscan capital.

Let me just start with this statement: we adore Italy. If Italophile is a word - which google has led me to believe it could be - then Boyfriend & I would definitely be described as such. We love the vibe, the food, the wine, the museums, the language, the atmosphere, the gelato, everything. This is the case for Italy as a whole, yes - but Florence in particular has something that other Italian cities just can’t compare with.. and I’m not just talking about the world’s best cheesecake - but there’s more on that below.

There’s a huge amount of recommendations in this post. I’ve streamlined the recs into six sections: Stay / Coffee / Eat / Drink / Museums + Attractions / Places to See. The first four are self-explanatory, but the difference between the last two sections is an entry fee; Museums + Attractions are all paid entrance, while the Places to See are free. If you have any doubts about any of the places listed below, just know that we’ve been to each & every single place a whole bunch of times (some an embarrassingly large amount of times), so you know you can actually trust us when we say they’re reliable.

Happy travelling, friends!

STAY

Leonardo House // we’ve stayed at Leonardo House on our last two visits to the city, and - unless we win the lottery and splurge on a fancy hotel - we’ll definitely be returning again! It has an amazing location, it’s extremely budget friendly, and the manager is so so lovely. It’s more of a hostel than anything else, so it’s more pared back than what you might be looking for, but the private rooms are clean and quiet. Honestly, it’s the location that has us returning time after time - it is literally less than a three minute walk straight into the centre of the Duomo complex - what more could you ask for?

COFFEE

Caffe Gilli // we have a copy of Ruth Orkin’s fabulous American Girl in Italy photograph & I’d wanted to visit the spot it was taken in since the first moment I saw it. That place is Caffe Gilli. We were so far from disappointed upon walking in the doors that we went back for our morning hit every. single. day. and then some. Pro tip: drink your coffee & eat your pastry at the bar, it costs much less! .. and before you ask: yes, we tried to capture our own take of the iconic photo, and also: no, you cannot see it. A must-visit.

La Rinascente // to be honest, I can’t actually remember what the coffee is like in Rinascente - but that isn’t why you should go there anyway. The cafe boasts a rooftop terrace - La Terrazza - that has a breathtaking view over the Duomo complex. It is the ultimate place for a romantic coffee date. Shout-out to Boyfriend’s parents for recommending!

EAT

4Leoni // we are obsessed with 4Leoni. It is hands down our favourite restaurant in Florence, and we have been back an embarrassing amount of times. The food is always impeccable, the location is stunning, the staff are extremely friendly, it doesn’t cost an arm and a leg, and it’s home to the best baked cheesecake the world has ever seen. I’m not even exaggerating a little bit. A definite must-visit.

Il Santo Bevitore // okay fine, we are also mildly obsessed with IlSB, and have returned a few times now. The food is always exceptional, and there is a level of perfection & professionalism about the place that 4Leoni can’t quite compare with. The menu is inventive, unusual - on our last visit there was a strong Japanese influence to the meals - and leaves us wowed every time. Our most recent culinary highlights included: an n’duja pasta starter that left Boyfriend drooling, & a mouth-wateringly thick steak that was cooked to absolute perfection. Another must-visit.

Trattoria Giovanni // I can’t remember exactly what led us to this restaurant, but we had an unexpectedly fantastic meal. The atmosphere wasn’t as comfortable as either 4Leoni or Il Santo Bevitore, but the place can’t be faulted on the food. We shared a delicious cheese board to start, and had two absolutely perfect pasta dishes for mains - braised beef cheek for him, and wild boar for me. Overall, a surprisingly good find.

O’Munaciello // pizzeria in the Oltrarno. A large, quirky room decorated with fairy lights, candles, and puppets. A real no frills place, but the pizza is reliably good and not too expensive.

La Carraia Gelato // our favourite gelato in city, and arguably the best of the bunch. We are repeat visitors and are forever opting for our fave flavours: nocciola & pistacchio - so. good.

DRINK

Il Santino // extra chic wine bar connected to Il Santo Bevitore. An amazingly tiny space with a small handful of tables clustered together & stools lining the bar. The room is dark & moody, the vibe casual & hipster. The menu is minuscule and sans prices, but after a brief chat with our extremely knowledgeable waitress, we were brought the custom made charcuterie & cheese board of our dreams. We lingered over our tiny table with our various glasses of wine - which were paired with our food by our waitress - for as long as was socially acceptable. If you read our Edinburgh Guide, the place has the same kind of feel as Smith & Gertrude (but so much nicer and friendlier). We loved every single second, a definite must-visit.

La Ménagere // I’ll be honest, I only wanted to visit LM because of the powers of Instagram. I saw it on my feed, I loved the style, & I had to see it for myself. The space itself is beautiful, and it melted my insta-eyes as soon as we reached the door. Initially, I had to drag Boyfriend inside - he isn’t as easily influenced as I - but once we spied the cocktail list, peace was restored. An ice cold margarita served in a silver chalice for me, an old fashioned garnished with shavings of chocolate for him. They were, honestly, the best cocktails of our entire lives. Win-win!

5 e Cinque // one night, after dinner in 4Leoni - which is literally a stone’s throw away - we wandered in here for a glass of wine. We enjoyed two glasses of the most delicious Sangiovese ever, for an incredibly reasonable price. Although we had just eaten, everything on the dinner menu sounded so enticing that we vowed to return.

Bulli & Balene // the perfect spot for an Aperol Spritz. I think we went to B&B every single day we were in Florence. Both as a pre- & post-dinner at 4Leoni drink, as an afternoon pick-me-up, as a “hey, that place was nice!” stop-off on a wander around town, as a perfect spot to people-watch over a glass or two, you name it. Added bonus: drinks are excellent value!

Archea Brewery // we love wine & all - don’t get us wrong - but sometimes you just need a good beer, and this is the place for that. We visit every time we’re in the city & have yet to leave disappointed. Think dark cavernous room with a cozy atmosphere and a relaxed vibe. Pro tip: go for the own brand lager, it’s delicious! A beer lover’s must-visit.

Antica Sosta degle Aldobrandini // a perfect people-watching spot. Small bar, cheap food, located across the road from the Medici Chapel, with cold Becks in fridge. We’ll take two, thanks.

MUSEUMS + ATTRACTIONS

Santa Maria del Fiore Complex // obviously, everyone visits the complex for one reason: the Duomo. The Cathedral itself is breathtakingly beautiful & probably worth some of your precious time, but definitely don’t miss the chance to climb the Duomo. If you’re an art history nerd like me, be sure to check out the Duomo Museum at the back of the complex - amongst other things, they have Michelangelo’s Florentine Pieta (!), and an exact replica of Ghiberti’s Gates of Paradise that you can actually look at without being hassled by hundreds of tourists. Pro tip: buy your ticket for the complex (you have to by an all-in-one ticket) the day before you plan to climb the Duomo; that way you can beat the majority of the queues by getting there before the ticket office opens for the day. For sure, a must-visit.

Uffizi // like the Louvre, this is one of those museums that you just can’t miss. It’s home to some wonderful pieces of art by the greats: Botticelli, Da Vinci, Caravaggio etc, the list is endless. It always takes longer to work through the circuitous layout than expected, so be sure to allow extra time.

Accademia // obviously, when in Florence, you have to visit Michelangelo’s masterpiece: David... or more specifically speaking, you have to go marvel at that perfectly sculpted specimen of man. I made several return trips around the pedestal just to fully appreciate how beautiful he is. And to check out his butt, of course. Wowza.

Boboli Gardens // although undeniably beautiful in their own right, we only bought tickets into the gardens for one reason: the Buontalenti Grotto. The grotto is at the end of the Vasari Corridor - which I’ve never had the opportunity to visit but would absolutely love to - & is honestly like something straight out of my imagination. We stood outside the gates staring in for an embarrassing amount of time - the sculptures inside are beyond amazing.

PLACES TO SEE

Loggia dei Lanzi // my favourite sculpture in the entire world - The Rape of the Sabine Women by Giambologna - is located in the Loggia, not a stone’s throw from the Uffizi. Basically, the Loggia is a free, open-air sculpture gallery filled with unmissable pieces of art. Whenever we visit, I stand mesmerized under Giambologna’s masterpiece before moving on to gawp at Cellini’s selfie in the back of Perseus’s helmet. For me, this is a total must-visit.

Palazzo Michelangelo // everyone recommends walking up here and it is easy to see why: you get to see beautiful Firenze from on high! The bridges spanning the width of the winding Arno, the red rooftops capping the city, the Duomo. Pro tip: head up there super early to avoid the crowds... or brave the crowds & go for that magical time right before the sun sets.

Fiesole // we actually have Boyfriend’s mom to thank for telling us all about the small hilltop village of Fiesole, about a 20-minute bus ride out of the city. The bus ticket was super cheap (like, €1.50), and the journey alone was worth it - it takes these winding roads out of the city going up, up, up, leaving you gaping out the window at the views of Florence below. The village is adorable, and very quiet in comparison to the busy streets of Firenze. We hiked up towards the Monastery of San Francesco to get that view over Florence. Perfection!

Palazzo Stozzi // a breathtakingly beautiful space in the heart of the city. Used largely as an exhibition space - when we visited they were just about to start a Marina Ambrovic show - but open to the public to walk around.

Bremen, Germany // Paris, France // Amsterdam, Holland // Copenhagen, Denmark // Cork, Ireland // Edinburgh, Scotland // Westport, Ireland // Barcelona, Spain // Munich, Germany // Vienna, Austria // London, UK i - ii - iii

#florence #italy #travel

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recentanimenews · 6 years ago

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Some Of The Best Anime Scenes Ever Are Only A Few Seconds Long

By the time you get to the end of this sentence, another brand-new anime will have come out. True, it might be another unfinished, hilarious mess like My Sister, My Writer, but you won’t know that until you actually watch it. Before you know it, you’ll be spending your entire free time catching up on new releases instead of doing what’s really important, like re-watching Cowboy Bebop. Why don’t anime series include one short scene that could tell you instantly what the whole show is about in just a few short seconds? Well, surprise--they do, and here are the four best of them.

*SPOILERS AHEAD*

4. Eren’s Mother Losing Her Resolve (Attack on Titan)

The terrifying power of Attack on Titan is that it strips its characters of their dignity. The anime is gory, true, but every death in it is made so much worse because it comes at the hands (or, more commonly, the mouths) of naked, human-eating giants that move like drunk toddlers. This way, the anime can torture its characters with primal, humiliating fear. You see this perfectly in Episode 1.

That’s when Carla Jaeger is trapped underneath her house while a nightmare-inducing Smiling Titan approaches her. Ordering her son Eren to run and save himself, Carla tells him for the last time that she loves him, accepting her fate because she knew that at least her child was safe. Well... for like a second. She then flashes back to her family life and, through tears and desperately gagging herself with her hand, she whispers: “Don’t leave me…”

When I got to that scene, I wanted to scream: “MA’AM! THIS WASN’T PART OF THE DEAL!” Carla was supposed to die her quiet, traumatizing death as part of Eren’s standard-issue tragic backstory. With her silent and cowardly (but very human) pleas, though, everything became so much more real. On some level, we know that characters facing death must feel fear, but we don’t like to think about it to preserve the magic of escapism. But this is precisely what Attack on Titan does.

It doesn’t make bad stuff “cool” for us. It makes us confront every ugly aspect of it. I’m convinced that if Hajime Isayama had directed a Batman movie, he’d have made the Waynes’ last words: “I don’t want to die...” And then they’d crap their pants. Because that’s the true face of tragedy and fear, encapsulated perfectly by Carla’s three words.

3. Whitebeard Embracing His Foolish “Son” (One Piece)

The flashy, supersonic fights in One Piece have always been one of the anime’s biggest selling points, like the Luffy vs. Katakuri punch-up. I use it as an example mainly because, whether you read this article when it’s first published or years later, chances are that fight will probably still be going on. But, for all its action, that’s not what One Piece is ultimately about. To find out what that is, we have to look at episode 472.

The episode takes place during Whitebeard’s attempt to rescue Ace from the Navy. It was an epic arc full of action, excitement, and plot twists, the biggest one being when Whitebeard’s subordinate Squard was tricked into betraying everyone and turned his boss into an entrée at a Brazilian steakhouse.

After that happened, you sort of expected Whitebeard to literally break Squard in half. But then… he just hugged him. Not only that, he told him that he forgave his foolish “son” and still loved him. The Whitebeard Pirates always had this thing where the captain was called “father” and everyone else were his “sons” but you never thought it was so… literal.

When you think about it, though, this is what One Piece has been getting at from the get-go: the power of non-biological family. Literally every major character on the show was raised by people they weren’t related to. Luffy and Ace had Dadan. Sanji had Zeff. Nami had Bell-mère and Nojiko, Tony had Dr. Hiriluk, Robin had the archeologists at the Tree of Knowledge, Franky had Tom, etc.

Still, the message about the importance of family works best with Whitebeard and Squard. See, it’s easy to love your non-biological family members when everyone gets along and, in the case of the Straw Hats, sacrifices their life for you. It’s harder and therefore more powerful when one person unwittingly screws up, but can still know that they’re forgiven and loved. That’s just beautiful. That's One Piece.

2. The Humanoid Typhoon’s Wounds (Trigun)

There aren’t many western anime out there. One might almost think that Japan never had a Wild West or cowboys. But that’s just one reason to appreciate Trigun (or, to call it by its proper name: Gun Gun Gun.) The other reason, of course, is the show’s main character, Vash the Stampede, the Humanoid Typhoon, The Sixty Billion Double-Dollar Man, a gunslinger who can level entire towns… without actually killing anyone there. It’s actually nice to have an action character out there who believes in pacifism, even if it comes easy to them on account of being one of the most powerful people on the planet.

Hey, apropos of nothing, let’s check out a random scene from Episode 13 when Meryl and Milly see Vash getting out of the shower because why not?

Oh… dear. That is… that is just unfortunate. I mean, he sorta looks like a Ken doll that was operated on by Sid from Toy Story while he was going through a Cronenberg phase. Even Frankenstein’s monster is recoiling at the sight of Vash’s body, from the gigantic scars to the missing arm and metal literally bolted to his flesh. But the thing is, every wound tells the story about the high price of pacifism.

Every scar is a reminder of the time when Vash could easily have killed but ended up saving the day with his wits and acting like an idiot. Every mark is a reminder that choosing life will often carry with it a great cost. A cost that Vash paid gladly because, to him, pacifism isn’t just something he believes in when things are easy. Even in the darkest of times, he is going to be himself and stick to his principles. But he doesn’t want to bum everyone out so he ultimately diffuses the situation in a way only he can:

THAT is Trigun.

1. Tsuyu Befriending Habuko (My Hero Academia)

I’ve gone on record saying that I think the world of My Hero Academia is horrifying, but I mainly think so because their world is so young. Their society has accepted people with superpowers (sorry, Quirks) only very recently and although over 80% of the global population has a Quirk, it doesn’t mean they eliminated all prejudice. Just look at My Hero Academia - Training of the Dead, the second OVA that introduced the character of schoolgirl Habuko Mongoose, who has a snake head. And people are afraid of her.

Yeah, she was a bit awkward and she could paralyze you by looking at you, but her awkwardness came from her loneliness caused by social isolation. She was so lonely that she actually started stalking one student, Tsuyu Asui, to be closer to another human. Then one day, while being followed by Habuko, Tsuyu simply turned to Voldermorticia and asked: “Do you want to be friends?”

That’s all it took to completely change the life of this lonely girl while quickly summarizing what My Hero Academia stands for. Their world is at peace thanks to All Might, whose catchphrase is “Plus Ultra”–“Go Beyond.” This doesn’t just apply to going beyond your physical abilities and punching the villains just a little harder. It’s a philosophy that implores us to do more, to be our best selves especially in our everyday lives. That is precisely what Tsuyu did.

She did more. She saw past Habuko’s appearance and gave her a chance. If the world of MHA is to survive, it will be thanks to people like Tsuyu, always going that extra step not just as a superhero but also as a civilian. She is the true embodiment of All Might’s words and, as such, the true heart of My Hero Academia. Let’s hear it for the show’s best girl.

Are there any other scenes that you think sum up your favorite anime? Let us know about them in the comments!

---

Cezary writes words on the internet. Follow him on Twitter or check out his two comedy websites.

By: [email protected]

#Anime #News #Latest in Anime News by Crunchyroll!

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hollowsentinel · 6 years ago

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Willow Schnee’s Good Day

Have fic derived from a fic derived from a fic that only exists in chat logs. Though now that I think about it, there aren't a hell of a lot of nods in that direction…

Oh well, it's based on @faunusrights's Cam!Frapp AU that I don't think has any content on Tumblr. Also conversations on Velvserver. Mostly conversations on Velvserver really. Thanks for the idea. I'm gonna shut up now.

NOTE: contains implied sexual abuse

In Willow's opinion, waking up was the second worst repeating event of her life. Either soberiety or a hangover gripped her when dawn arrived. If the world felt particularly cruel, she woke up in Jacques' bed, having mistaken it for her own. Or worse, thinking him to be the man he tricked her into seeing. She thanked her lucky stars that his desire for her company weakened with her descent into alcoholism. The nights when he would call for her "companionship" were few and far between, and Jacques never desired her presence beyond their carnal acts. Thankfully, she didn't require the bottle to forget the loveless affairs. Jacques' selfishness and lack of skill handled that nicely. Not that she wouldn't help her mind in forgetting anyway.

Sadly, that lack of memory appeared to have made an unwanted expansion. Wine was absent from Willow's bedside and so too was the reason for it. She supposed one of the servants could have cleaned up or thought to "help" her. Klein knew better than to deprive her without reason, and the others should have been briefed. Perhaps it was one of her children's birthdays. No, she hadn't completely lost track of the date. Not yet. Winter's twenty-second was due in the coming month with Whitley's fifteenth to follow two months later (though Jacques would no doubt delay any celebration to consolidate it with his own fifty-fifth two weeks later). Weiss' eighteenth had passed earlier that year. Wait, was it her own?

A check of her calendar confirmed it. It was her fiftieth birthday

Joy.

Willow took a breath, exhaling gently, not sighing. She wondered if her wish of the last twenty years had finally been fulfilled. A few taps sent her scroll crawling through the obituaries for two names, leaving her to work through a miserably sober morning.

Routine carved into Willow's body deep enough that she could manage it blackout drunk carried her through the morning, making her presentable in the event someone surprised her with a visit. It kept her nourished and fit enough to outlive Jacques and his parents, and it permitted her pleasant surprises such as untouched mail left for Jacques while he was off running her father's company into the ground. Notably, there was a credit card bill that she knew was due shortly. Perhaps this day wouldn't be so bad.

Hiding behind the excuse of ensuring Jacques wouldn't squander the Schnee fortune over interest charges, Willow opened up the bill and began to puruse his purchase history. It was short, a sign that it was for his personal card rather than the business card he so loved to abuse, but that only served to damn him more. Statues and busts of himself, books that he only wished to possess in a show of superiority, porn, a car he didn't even know how to drive, a new computer with specifications far beyond his needs—

Wait.

Willow scanned the document again. There, between the books and car: a subscription to a porn network. Her jaw went slack. Had the world finally seen fit to gift her with the start of clear justification to divorce Jacques? No, no, she couldn't be so hopeful, not after everything she had been through. There were other possibilities weren't there?

Jacques… would never buy a subscription for himself, and even if he did, he wouldn't do it in a way that so directly traced back to him. It was beneath him at best and unfit for a man of his status at worst. The timeframe felt suspicious as well. Hadn't he called her to his bed that week? It certainly happened within the month. While far from clockwork, it had felt the way it had before and there had been no unnatural distance between then and the last time he took her to bed.

So… what? Willow furrowed her brow as she pondered the mystery. While Jacques was unloving, he wasn't unfaithful. At least, not in word or action. Any hint of infidelity could ruin him, and he guarded his status with the kind of fervor one would expect a decent person to use for their family. It was next to impossible for Jacques to make such a foolish mistake.

If it was a theft, it a was a brief one. Something that Jacques wouldn't notice on first blush. Perhaps Weiss? She certainly hated Jacques, having grown close to Willow's father before he passed and learning of what the SDC had once been. Even so, Willow was sure Weiss was more interested in usurping Jacques' position and restoring the SDC rather than poisoning his image and potentially dragging the company down in the process. She didn't have much time as Whitley grew closer to adulthood, but there wasn't enough pressure to stoop to this. If she simply wanted a subscription, she would have used her own funds squirrelled away from prying eyes. Wait, she opted to stay in Vale over the summer. She couldn't have even if she wanted to.

Winter was absent, busy in the military. Though she too disliked Jacques, she was too law-abiding to try this sort of underhanded tactic. Never mind the fact that she hadn't visited in months and likely wouldn't for several more at soonest.

Whitley was too young… wait, no, he was fourteen and was raised in Atlas. She hadn't given him the talk. Had Jacques even given him the talk? Was it the same abstinence-only drivel that dominated the whole of Solitas? Whitley had the opportunity and means to do it. Jacques was in and out of the manor, and her son had been left behind several times, deemed too young, inexperienced, or in some cases a hindrance for several outings. Online purchases only required information. If Whitley had copied it down at some point, he could have used the credit card with no one the wiser. The miniscule price of the subscription would hide in the shadow of the other purchases. It would make enough sense for someone Whitley's age, wouldn't it?

Were there any other possibilities? Klein would never, and woe to any other in their employ to make the attempt. Such a minor purchase would be unthinkable when weighed against ongoing employment.

Willow took a breath and gathered her resolve. She forced herself to accept it: Whitley purchased a porn subscription with Jacques' credit card. Something had to be done. She was his mother, and Jacques would be furious beyond all reason. If he could scar Weiss and threaten her with blindness over something as meaningless as a lost duel, then who was to say what would happen to Whitley. Even so, there was no ignoring one fact: this would be awkward.

"Whitley," Willow addressed. Her son froze, unused to hearing her voice, much less sober. The steel in it, something she hoped would mask her discomfort, seemed to strike her son into blank obedience. What had Jacques done while she drowned herself? No, that was a matter for another time. The past could not be changed, and if she didn't act, he might not have a future. "Would you like to explain to Jacques what you used his credit card for?"

"I— I have no idea what you're talking about, mother," Whitley stuttered. He clasped his hands behind his back, wringing them if Willow read his elbows correctly. "I'm sure that I've done not— er, no such thing."

"Really," Willow deadpanned as she shook the itemized bill that she collected, encouraging it to unfold, taking the seconds it resisted to calm her nerves. "So then it was Jacques who paid for a subscription to the—" She checked the bill to confirm the name. Who named this? "Sex Centre?"

Whitley gasped, playing the fool even as a cherry red blush spread from ear to ear. "Father did what now?" He paused, expecting Willow to repeat herself. To his credit, her son held firm even as the silence passed from 'contemplating a synonymous phrase' to 'waiting for her disbelief to sink into him.' That he could resist Willow's flat stare at all deserved a trophy. Or maybe she had become soft. It had been years since she showed her spine. His act dissolved slowly, but before long he hung his head and asked, "What will be done with me?"

"If I have my way, nothing," Willow answered. "That's not to say you won't be punished," she added before Whitley could gawk at her response. "You will be giving up the credentials you used and losing your scroll, but Jacques won't hear of it."

"Why?"

"I know you have enough of a grasp of him to realize that it won't end well," Willow stated. Whitley must have noticed the undercurrent of disappointment in her expression— a different brand from Jacques, but bearing the same message: you are better than this. She hoped it was true. Sometimes she saw Jacques in him. At other times, she saw a boy clinging desperately for any sense of control he could manage to take. He had none of Jacques' ambition, the defiance Winter used to escape, or the independence that Weiss used to straddle the line between rebellion and obedience. In lieu of that, she saw an imagination that surpassed her daughters'.

And it showed Whitley something terrible. Whatever he came up with made him as pale as a corpse, embarrassment giving way to raw terror. He cleared his throat. "May I— May I clear my history first?" he requested, his breath hitching.

"You may." While not something Willow ranked high on her known desires, avoiding learning of her son's kinks suddenly shot onto the list, somewhere above divorcing Jacques and below avoiding sobriety.

Whitley hurried, tapping out the commands before presenting Willow with his scroll. "The username is father's separated with underscores and fully capitalized," he noted. "The password is 'Sch3esAreTehBe5t' sans spaces, with the first letter of every word capitalized, 'the' misspelled to T-E-H, the first E in our name replaced with a three, and the S in 'best' replaced with a five."

For a moment, the information stunned Willow. "You used Jacques' name?" she confirmed, checking the interface and finding JACQUES_SCHNEE displayed proudly on the user profile. "You used his name." On a porn network, she left unsaid.

"Is that a problem?" Whitley asked meekly.

"How much have you used this account?"

"Um… I've… watched several videos."

Willow picked a video at random, checking for what she could do. "No comments? No ratings? Downloads?"

"No! None of that!"

Whitley yelped when Willow pulled him into a tight hug. "Thank you for this gift." It was the best she ever received. She would give Remnant a Jacques né Gelé that they would hate for years to come. Even if it was derided as a phony account, if she could convey even half of how vile he was through fake comments, even as a parody, then it would be her victory. She hoped that screenshots were still a thing. The company's public relations department and legal would do anything in their power to strike the source from the networks and web servers, but screenshots on personal computers and circulated on forums were forever. Four Seasons would eat it up.

"You're… welcome?" Whitley ventured. He remained stiff in Willow's arms, unsure of how to handle her sudden physical affection. In the end, he settled on patting her on the back. "Am… am I still in trouble?"

"You're being deprived of your personal link to the internet until I erase every track you've left for Jacques to trace back to you," Willow reminded her son, even as she kept him in her arms. It felt good to hug someone that wasn't composed entirely of garbage now that she actually felt the urge. "You'll be a step away from any messages or calls you receive for a short while too." At last, she released her son. "Though I suppose that's a good excuse for you to join me and learn your mistakes."

"Um…"

"No child of mine is going to be so easily caught," Willow said.

For the first time since her marriage, Willow went to bed satisfied. Spending time teaching Whitley the basics of hiding his data trails had been exhausting. It had taken a while for her son to stop thinking of the experience as a punishment and look at it as a learning experience, but once he had, it had been nothing but questions and confusion. Some of it was her fault having forgotten what it was like to not have ingrained security habits.

In spite of that, she and Whitley enjoyed the experience. It was almost as if they were family. A call from Jacques cut the dream short, but Whitley resolved to ask for the promise of more lessons before he rushed away with a new scroll in lieu of the one Willow had taken.

By the end of the day, he even wished her a happy birthday and sent along notice of a gift he acquired with the skills she imparted.

The rest of Willow's day had flown by as she dusted off her skills and severed the trail leading between the porn account and Jacques' credit card. That his finances were handled by the Schnee Dust Company made it both easier and harder, though not as much of the latter as she had initially feared. It sparked some concern in her. She hadn't lifted a finger in nearly twenty years and she could break through SDC network security from home on unoptimized hardware and tools she cobbled together from memory? Something wasn't right. She set her concern aside. She had bigger, more immediate plans, and they required the account to remain open and disconnected from the Schnee family, even if it bore the name.

Better still, when Willow's scan of the obituaries finished, she found one Gaspar né Gelé dead. Happy birthday to her indeed. One down, one to go.

Satisfied, Willow curled up in her bed sober. Tomorrow, she would play.

#writing #rwby #willow schnee #whitley schnee #should i really include whitley when he's barely there?#what is quality control and what do you mean i should get an editor?#what are ages and should i have said whitley is older than i did?#what is weird and should willow be less of that?#tech savvy willow is here to stay though #let remnant tremble in fear of the hacker they thought they were rid of #historical note it originally said that jacques ordered willow to his bed instead of called when she debunks the option of him #also why is editing posts without fucking them up so difficult?

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johnboothus · 3 years ago

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Wine 101: The Points System

This episode of “Wine 101” is sponsored by E & J Gallo Winery. At Gallo, we exist to serve enjoyment in moments that matter. The hallmark of our company has always been an unwavering commitment to making quality wine and spirits. Whether it’s getting Barefoot and having a great time, making every day sparkle with La Marca Prosecco, or continuing our legacy with Louis Martini in Napa, we want to welcome new friends to wine and share in all of life’s moments.

Interested in trying some of the wine brands discussed on “Wine 101”? Follow the link in each episode description to purchase featured wines or browse our full portfolio at TheBarrelRoom.com. Cheers, and all the best.

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In this episode of “Wine 101,” VinePair tastings director Keith Beavers discusses the 100-point wine scoring system, which has long influenced American wine culture. Beavers details the history of the system, and how famed wine critic Robert Parker popularized it in the late 1960s — using the United States’ high school grading system as a model.

Beavers also explains why other publications — including VinePair — have since adopted Parker’s points system, and why these wine scores have continued to influence the market and American palate even after Parker’s retirement.

Tune in to learn more about the hundred-point system.

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Keith Beavers: My name is Keith Beavers, and sometimes, I just think to myself, “Keith, why can’t you get into Wes Anderson films?”

What’s going on, wine lovers? Welcome to Episode 28 of VinePair’s “Wine 101” podcast. My name is Keith Beavers. It’s Season 2, and how are you? Wow, that rhymed. I don’t know if you guys are familiar with the 100-point wine scoring system, but we have to talk about it.

Wow. Scoring wine. What’s that about? People make wine, and scores are applied to those wines by random people. Then, you go out into the world, and you look at the scores. Now, not all, but some of us buy wine based on scores. That’s crazy, right? The thing is, buying anything with scores today is what we do. When we want to go to a restaurant, we look for at least four and a half stars, right, guys? What are we doing with three and a half? What are we doing with that?

When you’re on Amazon and you’re looking up something you want to buy — especially with something a little more expensive — you’re reading the reviews. You’re hoping that item is at least four and a half stars so we’re used to this whole scoring thing. When we read online, there are a lot of roundups. We have them on VinePair with “the best of this, the best of that.” We rank things. It’s easy, it’s fun. It’s shorthand. You say, “Cool, just help me figure this out so I can go and do this. I’ll get into it more in-depth later, but right now, I just need a score.”

This is how our world works. In the wine world, the literature of wine has been going on since antiquity. Back in the day, all the way up until the 19th century, it was really mostly about agriculture. People writing about wine when they weren’t really scoring wine. They were talking about wines they may have liked. Even Pliny the Elder, in the ancient Roman era, would write about wines that he liked from different parts of Italy. Yet, a lot of the work being done in literature back in the day was more about the vine, the vineyard, maybe even viticulture. Of course, all that was mostly in Europe.

For the United States, though, from colonization all the way through to Prohibition, there was a lot of wine literature being pumped out. It was chaotic, disorganized, and people trying to figure out how to make wine in the United States was an absolute nightmare. That was based on which wines work. It wasn’t until the 1960s when the United States started realizing, “Oh, wine that’s not sweet like we had in Prohibition is actually good. We like dry red wine with a little bit of acidity and structure.”

As we started learning how to drink wine again, a lot of literature would come out to help us enjoy wine. Books on wine etiquette and how to throw wine parties and this misunderstood science of how to understand aromas and flavors. As we saw Napa rise before the Judgment of Paris and before it became its own American viticultural area, there were great things happening in Napa. It’s one of the reasons why the Judgment of Paris happened.

In Napa and Sonoma, there were people there helping the people who lived there enjoy wine. One of the most well known is Robert Finnegan. He was in the story I told last week in the Judgment of Paris. There were people out there helping Americans enjoy wine but it wasn’t until the hundred-point system was applied to wine in the United States that things got crazy.

That is because of one man: Robert M. Parker Jr. If you’re not familiar with that name, this is one of our premier or first celebrity wine critics who became nationally and internationally famous for his writing about wine and this scoring thing with wine. It got to the point where a score from Robert Parker could define the price of your wine. I’m not sure if his story has a humble beginning, but it’s a very typical American Eastern Seaboard story where he was born and raised outside of Baltimore. He became a lawyer in Baltimore. At the age of 20, he tried his first wine, I believe it was at law school. He fell in love with wine, and this started his whole love for wine, as we all do. When you taste wine for the first time, you say “Oh, my gosh.” Then, you start working your way through wine trying to understand it, listening to “Wine 101,” you know how it goes.

As he practiced law, he was able to explore wines. He actually went to Europe at one point and enjoyed Bordeaux and Burgundy wines. This is so fascinating because Robert Parker was around at the right time doing what he was doing. As we’ve talked about in the past few episodes, when it comes to American wine history, this moment in the late ‘60s and early ‘70s was a catalyst moment for us. The timing here is crazy. He was falling more in love with wine, but still practicing law. However, he was getting very frustrated with the lack of independent and reliable criticism about wine. He wanted to read more tasting notes than guides to where to go. There’s a story I read in the mid-’70s when he was at dinner with one of his friends and he was a lawyer friend, I’m not really sure. This friend was fascinated with the fact or Robert Parker’s ability to assess wine and said, “Hey, you should be doing this full-time instead of law.”.

I don’t know if that was the conversation that made it happen, but Robert Parker was thinking about launching his own buyer’s guide. He said, “If people can’t do it, I’m going to do it right.” He decides to launch this newsletter bi-monthly called The Wine Advocate. It was his way of dissecting wines. This guy wrote very copious tasting notes. He went down to some serious detail.

In 1978, the first newsletter went out. What happened here is I guess nobody really knew how hungry Americans were to understand wine. By 1984, The Wine Advocate was doing well enough that he could retire from law and have this be his full-time gig. Now, it was time to really make a name for himself. I don’t know if he planned this or not, but he did an extremely detailed breakdown and description of the 1982 vintage of Bordeaux, to the point where it really got the attention of the French. It prompted him to actually release a Wine Advocate in French, and that blew up.

By 1998, The Wine Advocate had 45,000 subscribers from all over the world, mainly the U.S. and France, but I think it was 30-plus other countries. People were subscribing to this. People wanted to know about wine. At that point, he was the only voice doing it. Now, Robert Parker wasn’t the only one with a newsletter in the United States. There were hundreds of them, I’m sure, and there were some that were probably very influential to their communities, but Robert Parker was on an international level at this point. There was something about his newsletter that was different than everybody else’s.

He was the first to apply scores to wines. This is why it became such a big deal. He designed the hundred-point scoring system that he used for wine off of the United States high school grading system, which started from 50 at the lowest, all the way up to 100. Every American could understand that point system.

He would give points to wines, and mostly it was Bordeaux and then some American wines, but he was really fascinated with Bordeaux. The scores he applied to wines, he did not believe these were the major part of the entries of his newsletter. I’ll paraphrase here: He really wanted people to use the point as a supplement to the tasting notes. This guy wrote, again, very detailed tasting notes about wine. He wanted that to be the feature of his newsletter, not the points. However, this is at a time in America when we were, again, very hungry for wine knowledge.

If we’re hungry for wine knowledge and we’re in a modern era where distribution and importation is now a thing, wine reps selling to retail stores and restaurants, started to rely on these points very heavily because the wines that Robert Parker was writing about were not your everyday wines. These were fine wines, or wines built to age.

One of the reasons why The Wine Advocate was so respected, beyond the tasting notes and the scores, was there were no ads. It was just wine information cover to cover with no distractions. As people noticed how successful the scoring thing could be, they started applying it to their own ventures. For example, Marvin Shanken, who created Wine Spectator, which I think started as a newsletter but quickly became a magazine — he started using a hundred-point system for scoring wines their own way. That is a magazine, so there are advertisements there.

That’s where capitalism started churning out. This idea of scores and wine started to really define what people looked for in a wine. They didn’t look for what was inside the bottle so much as they looked for the score. They assumed that the higher the score, the better the wine, which is true. Yet, there was really no indication as to their personal preference in that score, and that’s the capper. That’s the twist with numerical scores to denote the quality of wine, and that led to some controversy.

For example, Hugh Johnson, who’s a very famous wine writer in the U.K. and wine critic, said, “You’re going to apply a score to a wine that’s going to age, so it’s going to change. Are you going to then apply a score later on? How do you correlate that score that you apply later on with the earlier score? It’s a mess. This doesn’t work.” But Robert Parker didn’t see wine that way, specifically.

There’s a quote on the cover of his newsletter that says, “Wine is no different from any consumer product. There are specific standards of quality that full-time wine professionals recognize.” Obviously, he was approaching wine with this very calculated effort, and someone like Hugh Johnson had more of a sense of where a wine was going and that it’s an active thing. It’s not just a snapshot in time wine.

Also, Robert Parker really loved Bordeaux and also really enjoyed deep, dark, fuller-bodied red wines. He was mostly a red wine critic, and he ended up doing a lot of his little literary work in Bordeaux and in the Rhône. It got to the point that his influence was so great that winemakers in France, Italy, the United States, Spain, and beyond would make wines so that he would actually like them and get big scores so those scores could get them sales. Even though Robert Parker wanted the scores to be a supplement to his very detailed notes, this system was just too easy. It was just too good.

This became the standard. A score on wine defined its price, its popularity, and its reputation. Other publications like The Wine Spectator and eventually Wine Enthusiast applied scores as well. That’s what the game became. It was a score thing.

Today, scores are still very popular. They’re not the standard they once were, but they still have influence. I believe The Wine Advocate morphed into robertparker.com, which is his website. In 2012, he sold that entire website to a Singapore ex-wine merchant for $1.5 million. So he retired, but his idea never did. To this day, scores are still applied to wine, so we gotta talk about that. What does it mean when a score is applied to wine? How do you figure that out?

One of the cool reasons why scoring is not as popular as it once was is because these days we, the American drinking culture, are more interested in the stories behind the wines than we are about applying a calculated score to a wine. And tasting notes are also very important to us, but the language of tasting notes is a whole other thing. We go over that in previous episodes, of course, but there’s something nice about a point. It’s a number. It’s quick and easy to understand. It’s very shorthand. If you trust the person who’s giving the score, you trust the score. It’s also something that transcends all languages. It’s a number — everyone knows 93. Everyone knows what a 94 is, but no matter how calculated a point is supposed to be applied to wine, it’s a very arbitrary thing. How do you trust a score applied to a wine, knowing you’re to spend some money on wine? Every 100-point system is very similar, but every one is actually different from one another. Every system is created independently and designed for that particular publication or entity to get its message across.

At VinePair, we’ve actually created our own hundred-point scoring system with our own levels in tiers and how we think a hundred-point system should be applied to when we review wines. Being the tastings director of VinePair, I’m the one that does all the tasting and all the reviewing. Using that system that we developed helps me get my message across to you guys, based on how VinePair sees a certain wine.

That’s where the 100-point system exists today. It’s similar to a movie critic. When you want to see a movie, I don’t know about you, but I have certain movie or film critics that I like to read before I see a movie because I often agree with what they say. This is similar to the 100-point wine scoring system. You go to a wine shop, and you see a point, that point is given to that wine by somebody. If you’re familiar with that somebody, and you like the way that somebody talks about wine, you’re probably going to go ahead look at that number and choose to buy the bottle of wine based on that person’s wine score. If you see a number from another wine critic that you may not know, you may not get the wine or you may get it anyway, but not take into account the score. That is how it works these days, because wine is so much more than one point, but it’s a really good, quick reference point for you if you know who’s actually giving the point and agree with that person’s taste in wine.

Even though these numbers can seem a little bit arbitrary — and they are arbitrary and subjective because it is one person’s palate or a panel of palates making a decision on wine and a score — what’s really cool is every website has its own hundred-point system with its criteria so you can see why they’ve chosen what they’ve chosen. At VinePair, we have our 100-point system in categories and we have it all explained for you. If you look at a wine on VinePair that I reviewed and given a score to, you can go and look at that link to see why where it is in the scale of why I said what I said.

That’s a little bit of history, application, evolution, and where we are today with this 100-point wine scoring system. I don’t think it’s going to go anywhere for a very long time. Even though today, stories and backgrounds are so much more enjoyable today than just a cold, hard score, that score will always help us in a pinch if we trust the person giving the score.

@VinePairKeith is my Insta. Rate and review this podcast wherever you get your podcast from. It really helps get the word out there. And now for some totally awesome credits.

“Wine 101” was produced, recorded, and edited by yours truly, Keith Beavers, at the VinePair headquarters in New York City. I want to give a big ol’ shout-out to co-founders Adam Teeter and Josh Malin for creating VinePair. And I mean, a big shout-out to Danielle Grinberg, the art director of VinePair, for creating the most awesome logo for this podcast. Also, Darbi Cicci for the theme song. Listen to this. And I want to thank the entire VinePair staff for helping me learn something new every day. See you next week.

Ed. note: This episode has been edited for length and clarity.

The article Wine 101: The Points System appeared first on VinePair.

Via https://vinepair.com/articles/wine-101-points-system/

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wineanddinosaur · 3 years ago

Text

Wine 101: The Points System

Tune in to learn more about the hundred-point system.

Listen Online

Listen on Apple Podcasts

Listen on Spotify

Or Check out the Conversation Here

Keith Beavers: My name is Keith Beavers, and sometimes, I just think to myself, “Keith, why can’t you get into Wes Anderson films?”

@VinePairKeith is my Insta. Rate and review this podcast wherever you get your podcast from. It really helps get the word out there. And now for some totally awesome credits.

Ed. note: This episode has been edited for length and clarity.

The article Wine 101: The Points System appeared first on VinePair.

source https://vinepair.com/articles/wine-101-points-system/

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cryptocoinguides · 3 years ago

Text

Ethereum Rallies BEYOND Expectations

After what felt like an eternity of fud coming from all directions, the crypto news cycle appears to have turned a corner and the markets are responding. Bitcoin has reclaimed several supports, levels and Ethereum is doing the same. I’m not saying we’re out of the woods just yet, but the negative sentiment seems to be falling behind.

Just like the Atlanta Falcons, [ Music ] today, we’ll be looking at giving you the lowdown on all the stories affecting Ethereum as well as some of the most exciting developments coming on the blockchain. Let’S get it welcome to bitboy crypto home of the big squad, the largest and greatest crypto community in all the interwebs.

My name is ben every day on this channel. I show you how to make money in crypto. If you like money and crypto, then make sure to hit that subscribes button and smashes the like in this content, I’m covering the latest on what’s happening with Ethereum.

The last few days saw markets rally in anticipation of the long-awaited b-word conference virtual summit between three of the most influential people in business today hand to the king, jack Dorsey, Kathy wood as well as crypto’s, very own court. Jester the muskrat.

The discussion was mostly about bitcoin, but in a surprise, move Elon also revealed that he’s a fan of Devi and personally holds some Etherium as well as a stack of doge, probably worth billions of dollars. Didn’T hear it from me. The news sent crypto twitter into a minor frenzy with its value climbing around 11. In only a few hours. Now don’t get me wrong.

I was as happy as anybody to see some big green candles, but as much as I wish, crypto would truly decouple from Elon’s influence, there’s no denying that he still holds significant sway in the space and that likely will continue for many years to come. Speaking of Twitter, there may just be a new kid on the block, with divi project ave gearing up to launch an Ethereum-based alternative to the social media giants later this year.

While this wouldn’t be the first attempt to build a meaningful decentralized rival to challenge twitter’s monopoly. Ave is a serious player in the device space with over 11 billion dollars, total value locked tom, this recording. Personally, I love ave and I have plenty of it in my portfolio.

This comes in the wake of Jack Dorsey’s plans to create a new division in his payment company square intending to bring device services to bitcoin wow in response ave, founder Stanley, Kulichov tweeted. That ave should build Twitter on Ethereum and it seems that’s exactly what they intend to do.

Citing concerns over censorship and a monetary structure that benefits shareholders over users. Will it work well, those that have tried so far have failed, pretty dismally Justin’s on. Is it possible for a decentralized Ethereum based Twitter alternative to succeed?

Well, you could do a lot worse than having AVI at the helm. Smart money interest in Ethereum also continues. Reports hit the headlines this week. Jp morgan is now allowing all its wealthy clients, exposure to crypto-assets. What noble leaders jp morgan clients can now invest in a series of five trusts, which includes the grayscale, Ethereum trust and the Ethereum classic trust.

Ask yourself if Jamie Dimon still has no interest in crypto, then why is he allowing his clients to get exposure to it? Go figure? Also, in the headlines, was the Rothschild investment corporation with data from the sec, showing they added to their investment in the grace, kill.

Ethereum trust bringing their treasure chests to almost 280 thousand each I’m no ross child, but I do want 280 000 likes on this content, so don’t forget to hit that button and smash the subscribe button. It really helps us out keeps you in the loop on the latest in crypto.

Meanwhile, at the legion of doom, I mean Goldman Sachs. A report has come out indicating that over half of the family offices associated with the firm are already investing or interested in investing in crypto assets. Unsurprisingly, the reason behind this level of interest was a growing concern about higher inflation, prolonged low rates and other macroeconomic developments.

This comes only a few weeks after a Goldman Sachs memo suggested they believed Ethereum could overtake bitcoin as the dominant store of digital value. It seems jp morgan is on the same page on this one, with some analysts at the investment bank predicting staking rewards to hit 40 billion dollars by 2025.

It’S nice having others support my predictions, even if they are wall street scumbags. Look. I’ve said it here before, but if you’re new here listen up, Goldman Sachs and jp morgan are the same institutions that have been spreading fud in the markets in a bid to drive prices down.

What’S important is that we ignore what they say: pay extremely close attention to what they do, while always remembering they call it smart money for a reason and just look. Data from the glass node shows how sharply the interest of eath held on exchanges has dropped.

In recent weeks, that’s crazy low and it’s just accumulation across the board, from both institutions and retail alike. Someone who’s never doubted crypto in Ethereum’s use case is a real vision. Ceo and former Goldman Sachs hotshot Raul Powell. In a recent interview on the defiance, Raul would double down on his belief that Ethereum was the number one crypto asset he put simply if you could only own one asset over the next 12 months. What would it be?

It would be Ethereum because it’s the least risky, with the highest rewards Raul, also expects a big pump coming soon. Signing Ethereum 2.0 transition to proof of stake, as well as the eip1559 upgrade scheduled for August 4th, and it seems he’s put his money where his mouth is revealing.

That 55 of his portfolio is in eth only 25 in bitcoin, and the remaining 20 percent is a range of other ALTs, a well-known advocate of Metcalfe’s law and the network effect. He recently tweeted this interesting graph, showing how much more growth Ethereum has experienced since 2018 than any other network out there.

As far as he’s concerned, though, this is just the beginning, in a recent interview on the defiance podcast, Raul goes all-in on what he believes to be the next big thing coming to Ethereum, bigger than DVI and NFTs combined social tokens. That means tokens for brands. Influencers sports teams, you name it – uses Disney as an example, a global brand, with a legion of fans as big as 3 billion.

I think 3 billion might be a stretch, but hey either way it’s a huge number. But what if there was a Disney token that worked within the Disney ecosystem, not only allowing token holders to spend it benefiting from exclusive deals, discounts and access, but also sharing in the economic prosperity of that community.

According to Raoul Powell, this would represent a whole new value system. Culture is something you can invest in where consumers become aligned with their favourite brands or influencers in a totally unique way. Last but not least, the Rumors of NFT’s deaths are turning out to be a bunch of bunk.

One particularly vocal proponent is entrepreneur, Gary Vaynerchuk, who couldn’t be more bullish, comparing the NFT space of the early days of the internet and social media, hopefully, picked up some space jam NFTs last week, which played a major part in the marketing strategy to go with the film’s Release these non-fungible tokens also served as a vehicle to launch nifties a new NFT marketplace with backers, including our old shark tank bro Mark Cuban and thinking about it. Space jam is the perfect movie to champion the use of NFTs.

The story of a man who goes down the rabbit hole only to find himself transported to a new shiny digital world full of weird characters and high stakes plays sounds like many of our journeys into crypto. So a big-money player is super bullish on Ethereum and the network effect, proving just how versatile the network is it’s hard to believe it will continue to stand in bitcoin shadow much longer if you’ve been following this channel you’ll know, we’ve been calling for.

What’S dubbed the flipping for a long time – and I maintain it is inevitable, if not this year, the next, why well, sometimes it’s all too easy to focus on our portfolios and forget what we’re actually investing in Ethereum isn’t just a number on a chart. It’S a technology that has the power to change the world in ways. We can’t even imagine yet with a use case that extends into almost every aspect of modern life.

Read More: Top 3 Low Cap BSC Launchpad Altcoins

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